That Kind Of Woman

What I know to be true…

1. I know that I would rather have wooden floors than any other.
2. I know netflix has changed my way of watching series/films I would have never watched before.
3. Companionship and camaraderie are essential to my interactions.
4. I enjoy dipping lemon slices into sugar as a late night treat.
5. The spelling of my name was after Katharine Hepburn.
6. I like mattresses that walk the line of soft and oh-too-firm. 
7. I like to dance, or shimmy or shake. I like to move when I can.
8. I am very good at pool, i just need to relax and trust myself. 
9. I make a damn good breakfast.
10. I get scared and lonely sometimes. 

I suppose one of the most important things I have been learning about myself and about love is that perhaps, maybe I am supposed to mess up a couple more times before I get it right.

I am in the place, physical that is, where the men I meet are boys. Honestly, it’s surprising when they aren’t. I think maybe I attract a certain kind of idea about the kinds of love that I can give to people.

I am a nurturer. I like to cook, comfort, and establish a cozy sort of relationship. I like being a touchy feel-y person, I like to hold hands and bump shoulders down store aisles. I like to lay on the couch, all tangled up and watch old movies. Laughing in the car, sharing truths.

I think this hurts me. It wounds me. I become weaker and weaker in the relationship. Or you know, it’s not even a relationship. It’s the honeymoon stage. After the meet. 

I keep myself to myself, but in the moments that can fall into an easiness, I do. I tumble. It’s not until I have space, that realize that my feelings overall, and his feelings, aren’t matching up. I always establish the rules. No casual sex. Friends first. Let’s take this slow.

I repeat these. Over and over. I stick to them. But what about what he feels, what about what he perceives out of our time together? Does he think these are just things I say? Are these just guidelines that can be smudged and moved around? No. They aren’t.

I back up. I need space. I need time to consider what it is that you need from me, and if I can give it. I try and figure out what you think I need from you, and ask myself if you are willing or able to give it.

Alright, alright. I sit here, sipping a shirley temple with an extra cherry, with no pants on. My cat trampling around my apartment. I am single. Just me. I have been trying to see someone. It’s hard to keep things grounded when it’s all smiles, and soft kisses. When we go on “non-dates” that we talked about on the first night we talked.

We are friends. We are. Because I can’t. I can’t run headlong into love. I can’t rush. 

I have always wanted the whirlwind. I want the romance. 

But, honestly it’s not gonna be like that. It can’t honestly be like that for all of us.

I’m learning to be okay with it. I am learning. I am almost sure that as I continue along, the guy I fall for, will understand that. Or at the very least, he will try. 

Here’s hoping, cheers.

(Source: thatkindofwoman)

I write about you, but I would never write you up in a pretty package so that one day you appear and all of those things I wrote suddenly weren’t just things but actual memories.

It scares me sometimes. How much I have this image of a man that will love me as much as I love him. I want a story to tell my kids.

My mom and dad first met when they were kids at a friend of each their family’s farm and they played baseball in a field. McCarty kids, and Keegan kids.

Then my mom was 18 and driving her father’s company car through an intersection about 3 blocks from where I now sit. She spotted my dad, a stranger to her, walking through the gas station parking lot and ended up causing a big accident when she bent the frame of the car. She said she couldn’t look away. 

Then when she was 24 she bought him a drink from across the bar. She remembers him fondly, shying away from hoards of women. Tall, handsome, and quiet.

I was driving with my dad last night, the sky was dark and we were coming back from upstate New York. My dad’s driving had become more relaxed, as it was the middle of the journey. We chatted on and off about this or that, I was reading Pablo Neruda translations and feeling tired and sore.

I asked my dad what he remembered about the night my mom bought him a drink. I thought maybe he would just agree that it had happened. Instead, I was brought to tears by his tone and how carefully he recollected details. The way she wore her hair that night, the shirt and shorts she wore, that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and he remembered specifically she covered her mouth when she laughed. Maybe she was self conscious about her teeth, he wondered. At this I interjected that I loved my mother’s bottom teeth slightly crooked and pearly. Beautiful teeth, he agreed. He loves my mother more than I have ever seen a man love a woman, adoration and pure bursting love. They hold hands, and kiss. Wrap their arms around each other in greeting if my father has been gone away on business. 

I ache at times for a grand love, and I read somewhere that the greatest love story you will know is your own. But, god damn, my parent’s story is beautiful, and honest.

I just know that I can write all the fiction I have in my soul, but one day I hope that my great true and real love story will be told, even if it’s just to my kids when they get to be my age. 

(Source: thatkindofwoman)

Five Favorite Things November 11th 2012

1. Space heaters near my feet under my desk.
2. Wide mouth mason jars.
3. Wooden knitting needles.
4. Bobby pins
5. Folding back the first page of a new issue of my favorite magazine. 

(Source: thatkindofwoman)

My beautiful and insanely intelligent cousin writes about beauty from her perspective. 

wolfintheforest:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the conventions of beauty. I think that this thought process is something everyone goes through, in their own way. My art class is doing an interesting project, we’re creating life-sized sculptures…of ourselves. I think that is what triggered me to really think about what beauty is. I mean, I have thought about it before, but I just really really thought hard about it. I have to sit there and sculpt my own face, flaw for flaw, everything that I like and dislike. But…why do I dislike certain features? 

For years I’ve picked out different parts of myself that I dislike. It changes all the time. One month I’ll hate my nose, my lips. The next I’ll hate my teeth, the next I’ll hate the shape of my legs, and the next I’ll hate my feet. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s hard to stop. I have come to terms with my appearance, I do not think I’m unattractive. But I do think there will always be a cycle of bits and pieces of my body that I don’t like, no matter if I’ve accepted my appearance as a whole. This is largely due to the media. Any self-respecting human being understands that the media has an enormous influence on the way we perceive ourselves. “I like the way my eyes look…Oh, but look at the women in these magazines. Their eyes are all very slender, artfully decorated with makeup and filled with energy!”

Who cares?

Well…I guess I do, for one. At least for a few days. Then I realize that my eyes are beautiful, just in a different way than that of the women in that magazine. So…if I am beautiful, even though I look different than the standard “beautiful” woman…what is beauty? 

This is a question that has been battled with by people for ages. It seems to be a more prominent issue among women. I won’t deny that men struggle with similar issues as well, but myself being a woman, pardon me for focusing on women for the moment. 

I don’t know how to define beauty, but I know for certain that it is a socially, culturally, societally established lie. There is no real beauty, only what one culture or another decides is beautiful.Merriam-Webster dictionary defines beauty in several ways, with one definition that particularly stood out to me. It says that beauty is “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit”. If beauty is a quality that “gives pleasure to the senses”, this implies that a whole cannot be beautiful, only the qualities of that whole can be beautiful. I do not believe that this is what the definition meant, but it did cross my mind, leaving me wondering if it was possible for a whole to be beautiful, or if only parts were. I then came to the conclusion that of course a whole can be beautiful. If beauty is what gives pleasure to the senses, then some people may not find a particular quality beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t so. Someone else could find it exceedingly beautiful. There are 7 billion people in the world. Some are too young to comprehend society’s confusing definitions of beauty, (which is how it should stay) some people may not even be able to see it. But I guarantee you that someone finds that feature beautiful. The problem is that society has created this twisted idea that women have to fit a specific mold to be considered “beautiful”. It varies from culture to culture, and in the United States, the typical “beautiful” woman (or at least what I was trained to see as beautiful) is around 5’7”, skinny, large-breasted, with a large, round butt, shiny long hair, all topped with a slender face with almond-shaped eyes, a petite nose, and full lips. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that women like that are not beautiful. They are. What I am saying is that anyone who does not fit these standards is just as beautiful. 

I am eighteen years old. I am five foot four and a quarter. I am skinny, by medical standards I am just barely on the charts for my weight, having been classified as “underweight” until about a year ago. That being said I weigh 105.5 lbs as of now. I have a pancake where my butt should be, and pancakes where my breasts should be. My hair is long and brown, I rarely do anything to it but wash it and brush it. My eyes are brown, round, and big. When I say big, I mean that most of my life they have been referred to as “cow” or “bug” eyes, something that I have grown accustomed to. 

These are several of the features that make up me. They’re also the features that I was (and sometimes still am) ruthlessly tortured for having. I’ve been skinny my whole life. “You’re anorexic, you’re bulimic. Oh you’re eating? Don’t forget to go throw it up after you’re done, bug eyes.” Somehow, after years of being bullied for my appearance, kids decided that I was a lesbian and began to use that against me. It didn’t really bother me, even though I wasn’t a lesbian, I’ve always believed that being gay is just fine, but it made me curious as to why they felt the need to come up with things that should be considered perfectly fine to bully me about. And I never had an eating disorder. I never had a problem with being skinny. My problem was that kids said these types of things to me, and then went over to the girl that weighed 180 lbs and made fun of her. Then they went to the girl that weighed 110 and made fun of her. They didn’t want the skinny girl, the chubby girl, or the in-between girl. What did they want? Most likely attention, and to fit in. To fit into the molds that were created by..who? Well, who knows? But kids are growing up trying to force themselves into molds that they will never fit into. And when they don’t, they hate themselves. 

Why do we feel the need to hate what we were born with, to change what we never can? I guess I shouldn’t say “never”. Modern medicine means you can look however you want to.  But if you change the shape of your nose, are you still…you? Well, that brings up a whole new theory of consciousness and a philosophy that I won’t get into. My point is that I have finally come to truly understands what it means to think that everyone is beautiful. Literally, every single human being on the planet is beautiful. That girl in your math class that has crooked teeth, a bent nose and small eyes? She’s beautiful. That boy that’s chubby, with short hair and little ears? He’s beautiful. Maybe it’s not what you grew up being told was beautiful, or seeing photos of in magazines and on TV, but it is beautiful. Just sit there, and think. Close your eyes and picture someone that you wouldn’t necessarily call beautiful by the standards set by society. Now tell yourself they’re beautiful. Don’t just think the words, think the meaning. Forget what your friends would think, forget what you saw in your magazine of the “top ten most beautiful people”. Think about what makes that person beautiful. Everyone is beautiful, I really do believe it. 

So I know why I dislike certain features and like others. I’m not proud to say it, but it’s because they fit the standards of beauty that I’ve been taught to like. It’s shameful. We all look the same, really. We all have eyes, ears, noses, skins and skeletons, yet we still manage to single each other out for tiny differences that we pick out. If we were trained from infancy to accept everyone as beautiful, and to disregard the barriers between beautiful and ugly, think about how different the world would be. 

Everyone should accept themselves as beautiful. I know, you hear it every day out of some culturally-standard beautiful celebrity’s mouth. “We’re all beautiful.” But it’s true. We actually are. Stop picking out each other’s differences. Stop making a certain feature beautiful and others not. Just let everyone be happy that they are alive, and enjoy your life. 

Sometimes it hurts. Just growing up. Changing, growing. No longer are you the person you were yesterday because the nights changed you. The days changed you. All the guarantees in life become marks on a timeline instead of moments. We all get broken hearts, nights where the queazy fulfillment of alcohol turns to morning headaches and squinting eyes at the sun. We all punch our pillows until we fall silent, our muscles worked to exhaustion. 

We all wake up and stumble, barefoot to the daylight readying ourselves for our day. We interact with merchants, and sellers. We all see the advertisements that tell us what to be, what to buy. Some of us fall victim, some of us continue on. 

We all sigh heavily at the disappointment of the day. Or throw back our heads and laugh at the glory. We all kick off our shoes. Most, if not all, take moments to scroll through captured words, moments and memories that helps us get over the day, or cherish it. 

Sometimes, you get pushed. Beaten. Sometimes you get lifted, celebrated, cherished. 

Most times you just get up and do what you need to do. Even though it hurts. Because one day it’s not going to hurt as bad. One day you will wake up, after all the hard work, and realize the person you changed into isn’t someone different but just more… well you. 

(Source: thatkindofwoman)

I keep a little book. It is a pretty thing, it’s lines are straight and true. The clear pages smell like sweet clean goodness. I started filling it up with memories. Men, boys, ghosts of past suitors. There are many pristine pages. I have been lucky in the fact I just need a few words to sum up most. The few pages that may have their lines marred with black ink,  my handwriting is straight and neat. A quick catalog of a person, his actions, and why he is gone. Other lines, the font of my writing takes on italics and bolds. Losing the clean documentation they once knew. The catalog is now a string of feelings, wrapped up with sweet memories, a rush of emotions through the arm and to the hand hastily scribbled onto once blameless pages. 

Sometimes a declaration of guilt, perhaps on my part. Mostly on his. Half. Incomplete records of interactions. Truth only to me, not to him. The more interactions we had, the more words to describe it. The more feelings I felt, the more lines become blighted.

No more did they have the role of being perfectly clear, willing to take me on. Me, after I caressed their surface with careful fingertips. Now, they hold onto it all. The feelings, sentimental or not. The hearty hurt dripping from the pen tip. I have but a very very select few who have this rush, this heavy hearted hurt. 

Some may ask ”Is this a journal of my encounters with love?” No, it couldn’t be. It is the record of all the times that love was missed. Be it a thick stare, eyes meeting eyes across a busy street. Or maybe phone calls shared from our comfortable beds, never to meet. Maybe it was the fledgling of time built up with trust, and affection finally taken romantic, delayed, fulfilled but only for several months. Maybe it is about the horrifying blind dates, or denials. Rejections. Embarrassing miscommunication. Quick or long. Hefty or light. It is a record. Maybe of my growth. My naivety of love’s decline. Maybe it’s just foolish. Maybe it is necessary.

All I know is I keep a little book. 

-Kat Keegan August 11, 2012

(Source: thatkindofwoman)

Since I got off work…
I cleaned my kitchen, while watching most of 30 Rock season 5.
I made a bed frame out of old shipping palates, I got a softer mattress.
I decided pants were not necessary and made cinnamon oatmeal cookies.  
I made a plan for my day off tomorrow. 
Made a new playlist for driving on back country roads.
Made a new playlist for driving on rural highways.
Found my journals from high school.
I marveled at my 16 year old handwriting. 
Was lazy and laid in bed staring at the fading daylight through my blinds.
Ate crumbling cookies in bed, scrolling through my dashboard.

Wrote this.  

I like men in dark denim jeans, that hang low in a casual way around their hips.
I like the films that make tears spring to my eyes so that I only notice them when the salty taste of them reaches my lips.
I like scrubbing the dirt from under my fingernails when I get home.
I like when the hem of my dress caresses my legs, flirting with me.
I like the way my hands look when I talk excitedly about something.
I like my bottom lip, and how it collects the dewy left overs of a drink I just took.
I like walking through crowds of people on crowded New York Streets, alone not held down to someone ele’s pace.
I like the dip and float of my stomach if I take a hill too fast in my car.
I like the sound my fingers make when I rap them against the counter at work.
I like the soft light of my phone’s screen as I rapidly text my thoughts to a suitor.
I like the fresh burst of the cherry tomatoes that my mother grows, as I greedily pick and plop them into my mouth.  
I like the wonder and ache in my heart when I hear a song that makes me listen harder.
I like the inspirations that seep into my brain, after exhaustion and sadness have haunted it.

(Source: thatkindofwoman)