Jeremiah 49

Tonight I can not focus: You face appears in my mind, surrounded by shards, the broken cities of the nations that will be destroyed - Ammon and Edom and other names I have been taught to care about. He said to show him the writing, but how can he know me? How can I let him kiss me when my thighs - what about my thighs? They no longer long for your touch, but they are still my thighs, and my body is still my body.

I do not like this sense of ownership, any more than I like the destruction of a nation I can not understand. Words like "revenge" ring hollow, and I can not define terms like "love" or "intimacy". I am told that revenge is the best happiness, or maybe the other way around.

It doesn't really matter. I am here, full of coffee, on a bed, trying to figure out what I want, afraid to know, because then I must claim it - just as I was afraid to let the words of this chapter seep through me, words about swords and orphans, prophecies about nations that exist now only in our imagination, the most powerful place of all.

I once watched a scientist talk about how humans were the only species whose imagination alone could lead them to orgasm, and I wanted to ask how she knew. Had she spoken to the dolphins and the lizzards? Do scientists even know how to measure when other species have orgasms? Perhaps these seem like silly questions, but so was her lecture, I guess.

It was a TED talk - very hit or miss, that website - and I think now I'm supposed to make some sort of joke about cum and cock and white stuff hitting someone's eyebrow, but I really don't want to.

My male friends tell me that sex with a condom is just not the same. Well tough luck. As with so many other things in life, its the woman who carries the burden - and most religious women don't even believe in abortion, so there we are, stuck between the choice of violating our beliefs, marrying men we don't love, or becoming social outcasts.

I have no idea what this has to do with Jeremiah, unless its that this too, is about conquering and violatins, and doesn't the Talmud compare land to a woman's body?

Tractates of thighs waiting to be learned by heart.

Waiting, waiting, waiting -we've already forgotten what we are waiting for. Time to bring in the Becket, only I despise postmodernism, with a - not a real passion, but an ironic passion, because feelings are so passe - almost as passe as prophets.

Please pass the salt. Let me sprinkle it between your eyes. Her face is so cute when she cries.