Washington, D.C. is not my favorite place. Since the government buildings and monuments are visible from all over the city, I spend my time there in a kind of continual rage brought on by the way these monuments smugly celebrate the pack of lies that passes for American history. There's something about the streets of D.C. that reminds me of a half-full mid-priced hotel. There's not much nightlife, grit or soul. My least favorite thing about Washington D.C., however, is that it's the seat of a government I loathe and distrust.

But there is one way I enjoy visiting Washington. I like to get on a bus at 6:00 a.m., ride down there, spend a total of four hours within city limits screaming my grievances at this government I loathe and distrust at the top of my lungs with several hundred thousand like-minded people, and then get back on the bus and make it back to New York by 11:00, including rest stop in Delaware. This past Sunday I got to take one such ideal jaunt to our nation's capital, where I marched with 1,150,000 other people who care about women's lives, and indulged in such wholesome activities as snarling, "You keep praying, I'll keep screwing!" at the pro-life counter-demonstrators.

All I could think the whole time was "Why are we going home just because we've marched past the White House for four hours, while the Moron Puppet of Evil is probably golfing at Camp David? Why don't we just stay here until they promise not to overturn Roe v. Wade, agree to lift all the sneaky, incremental laws that make abortion effectively illegal for many American women, reverse the Gag Rule, admit there is no such thing as "Partial-Birth Abortion," give more funding to AIDS research and treatment, and fund sex education that really works? Just stay until we get what we want? Why are we going to go home and pretend that registering our friends to vote is going to keep this administration from a) fixing the election again and b) calling us a "focus group" and ignoring the fact that the majority of America is pro-choice?"

The sheer power of numbers was awesome. For a moment, I naively believed that the government couldn't ignore a million people at its doorstep, until I remembered that it ignored 50 million voters, millions of worldwide antiwar demonstrators, and it continually ignores an American majority that is far less conservative that its government.

The March for Women's Lives gave me an opportunity to crystallize some of my thoughts on reproductive rights, and these are ten of them:

1. It infuriates me that what seems to me to be the most private aspect of my autonomy is up for debate in this country. This is a country where the right to drive an SUV--which does affect other people, if "other people" can be taken to mean, "the entire planet and the future of the human species"--is considered God-given and inalienable, but the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, which affects one person (maybe two people, if the man in the situation knows and cares about it), remains continually in question. No one walks up to men and asks them, "Can I help you make some decisions about your penis? Would you like to hear my opinion about what you should do with your penis? Can you please explain to me your complex opinion, complex with legal and theoretical justifications, of why your penis is private, because I'd like to explore the possibility that it belongs to the state." And that really pisses me off.

2. It also pisses me off because I'm kind of a prude. I don't like to go around saying things like, "my coochie." But when I feel like government is trying to get inside it, I get angry and am forced to say things like, "Why do these perverted motherfuckers want to crawl all up inside my coochie?" And then I become violent and say things like, "I am against violence and guns in general but maybe I will get one so I can DEFEND MY COOCHIE." And then I am all embarrassed because I said, "coochie."

3. If Congress belonged in anyone's uterus, then C-Span would depict the government meeting in a dark, wet, pink place. Last I saw, the (largely) rich (largely) white (largely) men entrusted with the job of not representing us and killing people in other countries in the name of our so-called freedom appear to meet in a wood-paneled room decorated to convey the two most important values of our government, having a lot of money and being really old. When Dick Cheney bangs a gavel on a Fallopian tube and Bill Frist is adhering to Robert's Rules while knee-deep uterine lining, they'll have a better argument on that front.

4. The only womb that would be even vaguely appropriate for George W. Bush to want to crawl inside of is Barbara Bush's. (Ew. The only thing sicker than Republicans having sex is Republicans having Oedipal issues. Ewwwww.) They have therapy for that kind of thing. I refuse to see the rights of millions of women around the world restricted because this man would rather be in a prayer circle getting money stuffed down his pants like a stripper than lying on a couch where he belongs.

5. I would bet money that one of the Bush twins has had an abortion, or at least taken the morning after pill. Lots of money. I don't like to be judgmental, but those girls look like whores. Not that these measures are for whores, as the fact that practically EVERY WOMAN I KNOW has availed herself of one of these options or another. And I don't think I hang out with whores. Sluts, maybe, but not whores.

6. The Bush Administration claims that one reason they refused to release the file on his military service for so long was that it revealed that he was treated for a hemorrhoid. They felt that this information was private and should not be shared with the American public. Thirty years later, the Attorney General is attempting to get women's confidential medical records. It's kind of an achievement when you can not only be fascists, but fascist hypocrites.

7. Are we actually supposed to believe that the administration who has killed 10,000 Iraqi civilians and going on 800 American soldiers (let alone the victims of the AIDS epidemic--now growing in number in part because of the gag rule, let alone the victims of the war in Afghanistan, let alone the manifold other casualties of the American empire) believes that "all life is sacred"? You want to save children? STOP DROPPING BOMBS ON THEM. You want to save children? FUND THEIR EDUCATION. I really don't buy that it's about the potential life of a tiny embryo. There is a lot of potential life in an Iraqi child, or the 1 in 5 American children who lives in poverty. You believe all life is sacred? Then stop destroying this planet, on which all that sacred life has to live. No one who builds a bomb believes that all life is sacred.

8. If all the anti-abortion people in the world adopted every single orphan in every orphanage, every drug-addicted baby, every AIDS baby, every female child in China, every orphan whose mother died of AIDS, every orphan whose mother died of an illegal abortion, and then they stopped every government in the world from manufacturing guns, bombs, grenades, landmines and other things that kill people, and then they removed all the poisonous gases from the air and contaminants from the drinking water, made and enforced laws that keep power plants from giving people living nearby cancer, removed all the lead paint from all the buildings where little kids get brain damaged and die from it, recalled and fixed every toy that can kill a child, researched and solved the heartbreaking mystery of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), and figured out a way to prevent child abuse from ever occurring, I might listen to them for ONE SECOND. But then I would go do whatever I want because IT'S STILL MY LIFE AND IT'S STILL MY BODY.

9. Also, if life does begin at conception (and for the record, I think life begins whenever the woman whose body the life grows in and depends on parasitically to survive says it does) why stop there? The zygote is an awfully arbitrary point to begin life. Why not begin with the oocytes? The gametes? You know, the good 'ol egg and sperm? Sperm are alive. They swim. They have a will to survive, though sometimes they bump into things and die cruel deaths. It's heartbreaking. One minute the little tiny sperm is swimming around, and the next minute this tiny creature is DEAD. A man doesn't even have to go to a doctor to kill a sperm. He can do it at home, without any input or oversight from the moral authority of his government or God. How come no one stands outside porn shops where men prepare to expel four hundred million potential humans in single ejaculation screaming, "Don't kill your four hundred million babies! All four hundred of them are sacred life!" How come nobody says, "Masturbation stops a swimming sperm!"?

10. We have a word for when one person forcibly invades or penetrates another person's body, or forces a sexual experience upon them against their will and consent. That word is "rape." It is an act of violence and we accept that it affects the victim for the rest of his or her life. I don't see how it matters whether a stranger on the street forces you to have sex with them or your government forces you to carry a pregnancy to term. Both are physical, sexual experiences forced upon you against your will that alter your life forever.

Today yoga was taught to me by an increasingly pregnant woman. Last week she sat on me, but this week she did not. I was disappointed. There is something cosmic about a pregnant woman sitting on you while you do yoga. She has a very soothing, quintessentially yoga-teacher voice. My one complaint would be that she "om"'s too low. She "om"'ed deep into the range of the one male in the class, whereas I "om" comfortably in my own narrow, six-note alto range.

I've been doing yoga for over a year now. I hestiate to even post on this blog (which is read intermittenetly by maybe a dozen people) about yoga. Yoga is instinsically boring, especially to those who do not do yoga. Sometimes I miss the days of not doing yoga, when I would snicker at people who did yoga, and say things like, "I'm just not slow enough to yoga, I just get so bored and restless doing yoga." I lived in the smug knowledge that yoga was for people who did not drink enough coffee.

But then I started doing yoga on the day that the United States invaded Iraq. When we sent white light from our third eyes to the rest of the world, I felt that this was really happening. My rage about the war was somehow sublimated into some kind of universal, eternal love, and that hooked me.

Now I am chasing the unachievable but worthy goal of enlightenment via what is, essentially, stretching. I would be embarrassed about this but I so fully believe in the stretching and its potential to lead to me to enlightenment that I am not at all ashamed to talk about it publicly. Not only that, but I believe it might be of beneift to someone else to hear about this enlightened stretching and how it has improved my life.

If this sounds frigtheningly religous to you, it is. I realized recently that yoga is my religion. I was raised by Jewish atheists and now I show up at a place not once, but three times a week, and chant in unison about the oneness and goodness and happiness of all beings. When I leave this place, I feel that I am part of a community based on the shared belief in a certain set of truths, and that due to my belief in these truths, I will be rewarded not only in this life, but in the next one. If that's not religion, then I don't know what is.

Some cool shit has happened because of yoga. I can put myself into positions that are cool. I can stand on my head. That's cool. I am stretchier. I am thinner. When something upsets me or stresses me out, I can breathe evenly. I can inhale more deeply and hold my breath for longer, which is cool, because I'm also a pothead. I have slightly bigger muscles in my arms. I can wait in long lines for longer. When the subway stalls, I would say that my unmitigated rage and anxiety can be staved off for two, if not three minutes longer than the average person. I don't need to eat as much, and therefore spend less money on food. Something about yoga (maybe it's the alignment of the chakras?) sets you up to really get your money's worth out of alcohol and drugs. Though Allen Ginsburg claimed that yoga replaced drugs in his life, I find that a yoga class really amplifies the effects of anything you might consume after said yoga class. Though Ginsburg was onto something; yoga itself is its own drug. It makes you very complacent and dumb afterwards, kind of like sex, but without the sly grin. It makes the colors of the world seem more vivid and yet it makes you seem more interesting to yourself. It makes you think of "energy" as a concrete concept.

And when I see someone I don't like on the street, I just think, "Namaste, motherfucker. Namaste."

We met at the Northeast corner of Central Park. Each of us had a sandwich. We found a patch of grass between some big rocks, high up enough to see the pond. We ate our sandwiches. We smoked the joint. We watched some robins. H. pointed out that the robin is the state bird of Michigan. I pointed out that H., who uses her passport to prove she is over 21, has no state-issued ID. H. became despondent that she is "stateless." I realized that New York City is a city-state. I got out all my different photo IDs and performed a short puppet show, to distract H. from the fact that she is stateless.

We decided that we could be the two characters in a 1970s buddy movie, because one of us is blonde and one is brunette, one is tall and one is short. We decided that if someone knows you well enough that they know you "from the inside out" it might be scary. We decided that we should have bi-weekly conferences at which we give PowerPoint presentations on what we have been doing lately. We decided that we should have ice cream sundaes.

"Let's go watch that duck stick his butt up in the air," said H. We wondered if the duck knew that everyone could see its butt when it dove into the water. Did it feel a unique satisfaction when it caught a fish, like a human does when it dislodges something that is stuck between its rear molars?

We passed a tiny waterfall. Soon we were in the midst of Little League practice. I convinced H. we could walk through the outfield unscathed. We passed the reservoir. We walked through a tunnel of pink flowering trees.

We came upon the statue of Hans Christain Andersen. We sat on his slippery bronze knee and read the two engraved pages of The Ugly Duckling. It didn't take very long so then we read them backwards. While we were doing this a small line of tourists formed, cameras at the ready, to recreate the same photo opportunity.

We passed the zoo. We hate zoos. We don't think polar bears belong in Central Park. We watched the sea lions, trapped on their tiny island in their tiny tank. I heard a man explaining to his girlfriend in French that the sea lions lived in a tiny tank. "My thoughts are being translated into French by this man," I thought, seamlessly melding paranoia with solipsism. Next to us, also observing the sea lions, was a man wearing striped hot pants with a peace sign on the back pocket over white pantyhose, with high-top sneakers and a big floppy hat. The French couple, the man in the hot pants and H. and I all went our separate ways, leaving the sea lions alone in their tiny tank.

We ate hot dogs. We ate Mr. Softee ice cream cones with sprinkles. We came to the south end of the park, got on the F train and rode it to the Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side was noticeably different from the Upper East Side. It was now dark out and we were tired and hungry. We went to the nearest version of Fake France. There are cafes all over the city that are faithful renderings of French cafes. We are collecting them in every neighborhood in Manhattan and Brooklyn. When we need to meet up, we try to meet in Fake France, so the waiting will be pleasant. I think it's perfectly all right to refer to Fake France as Fake France, as the proprietors of these cafes are clearly aware that it looks an awful lot like France in their cafes. H. does not agree. The last time we went to Fake France, in Park Slope, H. told me I was not "keeping it together." Apparently I was gesticulating loudly about the fakeness and the Francness. "How would I keep it together?" I asked testily. "Watch me," she hissed, "and do what I do." She was paying the man for the wine at the time. So I got out my wallet and paid the man for the wine. This seemed to placate her.

Fake France on the Lower East Side was in good form. The very friendly waiter was there. He is like an urban wood nymph. He asks what you want to order in such a conspiratorial way that you feel you are about to tell him a marvelous secret instead of just, "Merlot." Over in the corner a man had a small stuffed animal lashed to his flowery hat. "It's a different stuffed animal sometimes," the very friendly waiter whispered conspiratorially, and dashed off. We had merlot. We had carrot-ginger soup. We had espresso. We were no longer tired and hungry, but instead were drunk and caffeinated.

We went to attend the avant-garde dance performance. It was just as we expected. The dancers were wearing noisy green plastic raincoats. They ran around in that dancer way, with their eyebrows raised and their shoulders squared and their feet articulately arched.

The music for the first act was entirely produced by two cellular phones being called and made to ring. We were served wine, grapes, carrots and salami on saltines during the intermission. The man who had served the food then flung several plates to the floor and smashed them, signaling the beginning of the second act. The music for the second act was played on an electrified dinner plate with a magic marker. After that we drank all night with a group of people I had once met on the street and watched television with until dawn, who happened to be at the dance performance. All of their names start with J.

It was a very big day.

To pay my rent, I cash in on my high school nerdiness by tutoring algebra, the SATs and the like to the precocious youth of New York City. The vocabulary-building and infinite patience costs their parents money; the propoganda they get for free.

Last week:

Me: "Okay, so this week we're going to do words that describe other kinds of words. Pseudonym?"
[let's-call-her] Lucy, age 15: "Pen name."
Emily: "Good. Neologism."
Lucy: "A new word that gets added to the dictionary."
Emily. "Good. Euphemism. Do you know what a euphemism is, Lucy?"
"Um…no."
"A euphemism is a word we use to make something nasty sound nicer. So when we call the bathroom a "comfort station," that's a euphemism. There are some great euphemisms here on this vocabulary card. Like, 'collateral damage.' Do you know what that is?
"No."
"Well, collateral damage is when innocent civilians die in a military attack. So when a government official says, there has been some 'collateral damage,' it's a euphemism for 'innocent men, women and children whose guts and brains and parts of limbs are smeared all over their houses or maybe just blown off in front of their families by bombs dropped by the United States Army that are supposedly going to 'liberate' them. But instead of saying 'innocent men, women and children whose guts and brains and parts of limbs are smeared all over their houses or maybe just blown off in front of their families by bombs dropped by the United States Army,' we use the euphemism, 'collateral damage,' because it doesn't sound as gross.
Lucy [wide-eyed]: "Oh."
"Another euphemism on your vocabulary card is 'friendly fire.' Do you know what that is?"
"No, what?"
"'Friendly fire' is when the American military accidentally kills its own soldiers when it's trying to attack the enemy. Shoots them, bombs them, shoots down their helicopters or planes."
"That happens?"
"Oh, yeah, all the time. One in three casualties in the first Gulf War was from friendly fire, did you know that? So 'friendly fire' is a euphemism for one when one terrified, incompetent kid from, say, Ohio, who has been trained and armed at a cost of thousands if not millions of dollars and then sent thousands of miles from home miscalculates, or doesn't even miscalculate, just follows orders and accidentally drops a giant bomb costing thousands of not millions of dollars on another kid, or maybe a whole truckful or tankful of kids from, say, Oklahoma, lighting them on fire and burning them all to death or maybe just hitting one or two kids and smearing their guts and brains and limbs all over in front of their friends, when they've all been sent thousands of miles from home to kill terrified Iraqi kids. Or maybe they're not terrified, maybe they're all pretending to play video games. Hard to say, don't know much about war myself except books and movies. Anyway, it would be too ridiculous to say 'the 18-to-25-year-olds who make up the bulk of our army have just accidentally killed one of their own for no apparent reason, despite having the most expensive gear tax dollars can buy, one American has just smeared the guts of one of his fellow Americans across the desert, it's too bad, really,' so they use the euphemism 'friendly fire.'
Do you understand now, Lucy?"

This is why I love my job. This is also why I'm not cut out to teach in a normal school. Or possibly have any contact with children whatsoever.