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[femaleprosthesis]

Second Contact

Hot off the press of an attempt on my own life, the words that never leave come to me, and make a home in the margins of my notebooks:

They'll never feel the wrath

Sooner or later I've got to thank them for this miracle

because rage burns out

but apathy is forever.

I begin to see a variation of these words in everything I write at 15, its primary appearance in the first thing I got on paper since the attempt on my life. I spend my high school years writing of a static and apathetic wrath that sat at the bottom of my throat. I write even more to get away from them. They never leave.

I pursue the study of communication and information. My vocabulary mutates. I learn how to write in active voice rather than passive. I'm reading press releases to transform into articles. I'm transcribing interview tapes to pull quotes. I hold a microphone at a press conference. The translator relays what the subject said in Italian. I analyze web traffic. I conduct A/B tests. I can invert a pyramid on its head. I frame the words. I lie to the audience.

I sow seeds of information / I plant seeds of information in the ground / to be found and interpreted / I reap secrets / I keep them above ground / I know you're watching / I know you're listening / Reveal thyself / I don't sow seeds of poison / I don't sow seeds of doubt / I choose what springs above ground / I don't spit poison

Something is watching me from my window. Down the hill at the end of the street, a transformer begins to cough and glow. No one believes me when I bring it up in the morning.

[femaleprosthesis]

First Contact

I'm 14 years old and Hurricane Sandy makes landfall quite close to my childhood home. Sandy sliced the power supply with her teeth, even when she was still at sea. Weathering the storm, I was afraid, as she had hurled a tree into a neighbor’s garage.

When Sandy finished roaring into the pitch black, I awoke to an eerie quiet at dawn, the kind of silence only following an angel passing through the night.

I found myself immediately bored -- I normally would've been in school at this time. I intended to begin there; walking to the junior high school to see if any familiar faces would congregate.

Like a procession, the townspeople walked downhill towards the river, away from the school. I recognized two girls, who said they were going to the riverside park to survey flooding damage. Everyone was going!

The floodplain was very close to my childhood home, but the residential area began where a steep hill crept up. Water was receding from the boggy grass, where Sandy overfed the river, now with no clear distinction between water and land.

What struck me the most was how Sandy turned the massive oak trees on their head. They were a perfect 180 degrees wrong, with roots reaching to the sky, and leaves and branches creating meteorite holes in the ground from sheer force. It was difficult to process the image. It was something unnatural, an upside-down tree. The destroying angel passed through Egypt.

There was danger around. I felt the presence of the angel of destruction in downed power lines. They'd been twisted and cut, wrapped into nooses around splintering trunks, and dunked into the flood of Sandy to be drowned. Yet they emitted a buzzing death rattle, crackling and sparking, dancing in puddles with a Lazarus effect. The coughing remnants of electricity emitted cried out in lieu of mass communication, "Come outside, come to me."

What I later learned, is of the three days I went missing, of which I was unaccounted for, along with seven-or-so other girls. We were allegedly last seen gathered around the entrance of a street, blocked off by Hurricane Sandy flood waters, fallen trees, and actively sparking downed power lines, made more intense by the pools they touched.

[femaleprosthesis]

Click here to lurk!

If you think you've stumbled upon information you aren't supposed to see, you'd be correct! There are billions of users on the World Wide Web, using digital platforms to draft diary entries. Something as innocuous as a blog can contain the most intimate details of one's life. One can so easily come across something they shouldn't be seeing, without the intention of uncovering said information.

What say of you, of those who seek out user-specific information? Being watched in the physical realm can be uncomfortable, but being watched in a digital space is like having a guardian angel.

You're referring to the commonplace practice of online "lurking," in which a user will place themselves in an interactive community, like a forum, without directly participating. Lurking is the passive observation of a public conversation.

While lurking has traditionally been used in the context of traditional internet communities like message boards, it's gained usage in Web 3.0. For example, a lurker could be a user who scrolls through a social media page but never posts on the platform, nor attempts to contact the admin of said social media page.

There are a variety of reasons why a user might prefer to look instead of participate. A lurker might enjoy reading more than posting. It takes a lot more effort to join the conversation and be an active member.

On the other hand, lurking serves as another form of content consumption. To unabashedly intrude into the life of another is the most relishing form of entertainment.

There’s someone watching. Something about your digital self is engaging and lively. There are data sets to be collected here.

Click here to lurk!

[femaleprosthesis]

"Down Bad Jersey Trash" will serve as a shorter written introduction prelude to "Female Prosthesis."

"Down Bad Jersey Trash" addresses beauty standards for women, heterosexual partnership, and coming-of-age in New Jersey.

[femaleprosthesis]

"Female Prosthesis" is an ongoing, semi-autobiographical, multimedia project.

neocities (start here)

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"Female Prosthesis" addresses the intersection of digital communication and in-person social connection, women's reproductive rights and autonomy, Catholicism, and absurdism in the context of the digital age.

I've been trying to document it for years, but traditional descriptors elude me. It can never be chronological. Words feel diminutive. It'll come in waves, or all at once. I've got some nerve, don't I?

[femaleprosthesis]

Possession (1981) Movie Scene