{"id":1576,"date":"2009-09-20T20:18:57","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T00:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dailycoyote.net\/index.php\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2015-11-05T14:53:42","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T18:53:42","slug":"untitled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/?p=1576","title":{"rendered":"Untitled"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

photo taken September 2009<\/p>\n

If you’re on the internet, you’re bound to get hate mail.\u00a0 Even my ninety-year-old grandmother, who has an incredibly honest, personal blog, has received nasty commentary!\u00a0 (If you haven’t read svensto<\/strong><\/a>, go, and start at the beginning – it’s an incredible read.)<\/em> When I read said comments on her blog, I immediately thought, “whoever you are, you are lucky you’re anonymous,”<\/em> because I could feel myself getting violent.\u00a0 Grandma, however, was unfazed, and knowing that, the issue left my mind.<\/p>\n

I get hate mail, too, and it, too, rapidly leaves my mind.\u00a0 When I first started getting hate mail, it did affect me, though not for the reason most people would assume.\u00a0 It didn’t make me feel bad about myself – rather, my thoughts were more along the lines of, “this person doesn’t understand the whole picture – they’re jumping to an ill-conceived conclusion, and I must clarify the situation for them because then they’ll understand!”\u00a0 Naive?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 Major time suckage?\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 I have since come to a place in myself where I allow people out there to hold whatever conclusions about me that they do, simply because I have things I’d rather be doing with my time than convincing strangers I’m decent.<\/p>\n

But key in there, which makes this internet-wide obsession with hate mail so perplexing to me, is that I never felt personally taken down by the nasty messages (and, oh, some have been nasty<\/em>).\u00a0 Maybe the black-lipstick-wearing teenager is more alive in me than I realized, because I really DO NOT CARE what people think of me.\u00a0 I seriously don’t.\u00a0 If I did, I would never have gone to photography school.\u00a0 I would never have written Eating Gluten Free<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 I would never have ridden my Vespa<\/strong><\/a> across the country by myself.\u00a0 I would never have raised Charlie.\u00a0 My dreams and my selfhood have been demeaned, to my face, by people I cared about and respected, and after that (and getting over that), a stranger’s thoughts have no effect on how I feel about myself, what I believe myself to be.<\/p>\n

Many people have emailed me asking what my tattoo says and what it means – it’s on the inside of my wrist and is partially visible in the photo on page 36 of my book.\u00a0 It says “FEVER FATALE.”\u00a0 When I was 21 or so, I wanted to get a tattoo because I wanted to know what it felt like.\u00a0 But I didn’t want to get a tattoo of something that meant something to me, because I thought if I did, I would get bored with it.<\/p>\n

So one night, I was sitting in an alley behind a bar at 1 or 2 in the morning, and noticed the words Fever Fatale stenciled with spray paint on the asphalt next to me.\u00a0 “That is what I will get as a tattoo,”<\/em> I thought, “because I have no idea what it means.”<\/em> And I did.\u00a0 I got bored with it anyway.<\/p>\n

But then, years later when I was living in New York City, my tattoo’s meaning revealed itself to me after a profoundly beautiful encounter with a homeless man on the Alphabet Streets.<\/p>\n

Fever Fatale, literally, means fatal fever.\u00a0 Death by burning.\u00a0 Hell.\u00a0 And I saw time as a landscape, as in Slaughterhouse 5.\u00a0 And I saw how we are so often apt, when someone slights us – whether it be an unkind word or cutting us off at an intersection – to snap at the next person we see, and the negativity is perpetuated, on and on, travelling further and gaining momentum.\u00a0 And I decided to do my best, when on the receiving end of meanness or negativity, to keep it at my wrist, to stop it there instead of passing it on to someone else.<\/p>\n

I’m not perfect in this task, but I strive toward this goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

photo taken September 2009 If you’re on the internet, you’re bound to get hate mail.\u00a0 Even my ninety-year-old grandmother, who has an incredibly honest, personal blog, has received nasty commentary!\u00a0 (If you haven’t read svensto, go, and start at the beginning – it’s an incredible read.) When I read said comments on her blog, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7479,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/7479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}