A warning: this is partially a filler blog. Since I've undertaken this assignment to write a blog a day for a month, I've quickly recognized how difficult it is. Every morning requires a mind strong enough for deep insights that lead me to self-publish. No one is making me do this. If I have a shit writing day no one should have to see it. But I'm forcing it upon the world (or my readership of four) anyway. The month before my wedding, I decided I had to--had to--run a half-marathon before I became a married woman, a sort of self-created rite of passage. There were no half-marathons in the area but I trained for one anyway and, goddamnit, I ran the 13.1 on a treadmill the Wednesday before the wedding. In life I decide to do a lot of things and don't complete nearly as many of them as I'd like, but it's as if there's some switch in my belly that springs on if I say the words I've decided in a particular tone: the guttural, even, deadly tone. Instantly I know whatever thing it is I plan to do will happen--it must. The same thing goes for this blog, and those two months in college when I decided I'd neither wash my hair nor shave. It will happen. I've decided.
Today is what many might assume a big football day for me: LSU v. Alabama. This game is so mega-hyped right now there's a link on Huffington Post reminding national readers what a kick-ass game this will be: view Saban as Savior or Saban as Satan. LSU fans have dubbed this Saban Bowl 3, and people around town here are equally ass-clenched, so understandably the perennial question on friends' and students' tongues has been, "Who are you going to root for?"
This clearly is an unanswerable question. I owe allegiance both to my alma mater and the school that currently butters my bread. It feels an affront to even have to answer this question because I strongly feel Brock and I brought success to Alabama football when we moved here in 2008; there's no denying football greatness follows us wherever we go. LSU won a national championship while I was a student, came hella close when I taught there, and as soon as we came to Alabama they were ranked #1, and this year they seem really likely to go all the way. So why am I not swooning over the pressure of Sophie's choice?
Here's the thing: I'm not the best sports fan in the world. If there's such a thing as being too dumb to be a cheerleader, that's me. It's not that I'm apathetic towards the games, or that I don't understand the difference between pass interference and holding (thanks to Brock, now I do). The problem is that in any sports situation under the sun, I will root for the underdog.
Monday night I was running at the gym, watching the Saints versus the Falcons while listening to Enimem. There is something eminently beautiful about listening to the white boy say he's gonna take Sarah Palin out to dinner and then nail her while simultaneously watching Jeremy Shockey nail some receiver into the Superdome turf. I was fist-pumping while running, Shockey was nailing, Sarah was getting nailed. It was outstanding. But I became concerned when the Saints got a little carried away with their winning. Two minutes from the half they were up 28-14, which is not a sizable lead by a long shot in the NFL--especially when we're talking about the Saints--and I would've gone into the half feeling real proud of our boys if it weren't for the long camera shot at Falcons head coach Mike Brown. He looked close to tears, real genuine upset tears. Brown squinted, blinking them away. I melted.
I got so sad I stopped running and instinctually thought, "We're ahead by so much! Why can't we allow them a tiny safety or field goal before the half? What could it hurt?"
(If you watched the game you know that the second half was a lot different than the first--it was a nail biter right up to the last second, because the fucking Falcons recovered their onside kick like the talented assholes they are and nearly came back to score the winning touchdown.)
The good thing about this perpetual rooting for the underdog thing is it's proof I'm a bleeding-heart, warm and fuzzy liberal-minded lovely empathetic person. The problem is it makes me a dumb liberal.
Real fans know loyalty to a team, and when said team is the lowest loser in the league the true fan never gives up hope, and if the team is lucky and talented enough to be on a hot streak true fans never surrender their merciless yearning to win. This instinct reminds me of the great longtime Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, who at the heart of his rivalry with Michigan, won one of the team's season closing games by an enormous amount of points, something like forty. In the fourth quarter of that game, when Ohio State was up by so much Michigan had all but given up, having just surrendered yet another Buckeyes touchdown, Hayes decided to go for the ultra-tricky two extra points rather than easily kick the one extra point. Of course the Buckeyes made their two. After the game Hayes was asked by reporters why he decided to go for the extra two points when the win was already his. He responded, "Because they wouldn't let me go for three." That's not only the embodiment of insanely cutthroat coaching, but it's also representative of what real fans feel in the heat of the game. Grind their noses in the dirt. Kill 'em. Send 'em home bleeding and crying for their mammas.
This may be tangential, but I have to end by commenting on how alike my mother and father are in respect of being true sports fans. In no other way have I seen an alignment in their personalities or mannerisms or ways of speaking or thinking, so much so that I've often wondered how the hell they got together in the first place. (Then I remember they were super-young and horny, and that Lala hated Roy thus Rosita had to have and keep him, and he was smart enough to be emotionally abusive in a charming way: "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you." For instance, Roy met Rosita while they were both working at Maison Blanche. She in the women's department, he in the men's. One day in spring he approached her for help because he wanted to buy a dress for his mom, as Mother's Day was just around the corner. Sweet, thought Rosita. She asked him what style his mother might be interested in, what size she wore. "Tent sized," said Roy. Hilarious, thought Rosita. She couldn't imagine a day when his acerbic language could be used to malign her.)
My dad is a psychotic sports fan. He curses in every sentence, spittles over every word. Those goddamn fucking good-for-nothin cock-suckin Saints. Just now I didn't even have to think of those words as I typed, because they were part of the litany of every weekend of my childhood. (And as for anyone who has a problem with my own foul language, forgive me. As you can see it's my cultural legacy--my dad's Sicilian, which means he also necessarily falls into the subcategories of alcoholic and uncouth. I'll give you his number if you want.) But don't think his profanity is that of blind fury, no. He'd walk around reading the paper as he watched the game, reading the analysis and (usually) disagreeing with it and watching it said by announcers pre-game, halftime, post-game. By knowing what others had to say about the team and game and synthesizing it with his own natural propensity to loathe the mediocre, his hateful spewing always carried an air of truth. So the Saints's fucking good-for-nothing quality had something to do specifically with Bobby Hebert's perpetual fear of being hit, his inability to connect to receivers, the sudden lack of fear during 3rd and 10 passes which usually led to interceptions. That fucker.
Rosita doesn't behave so analytically or profanely. She's just a real fan comprised of all sound and no sense. She knows exactly what's going on during every play and if something doesn't pan out right she'll lose it in a barrage of "Wh-wh-whaaaa's" and "Oooooh-nooooooos." Her brand of rooting involves the arms akimbo, high kicks, Rudy Huxtable end zone dance--fingers in the air, knees in and out. In other words, she's a big dork. But also super-loveable because she really means it. The woman finds ecstasy in the act of one man catching a ball thrown by another and running blithely with it across a green field. Right now I can't think of the things I find ecstasy in (maybe just loving deeply books and people), but the toss and catch of football isn't one of them.
So we're going to watch a game with friends today and I'll use whiskey and food to anesthetize myself to the question of who we'll be rooting for. I cannot possibly offer the only answer that's true: that I'll be rooting for whoever is losing. I'm sure all the other dumb liberals of the world will simpathize with my plight. It's all I know how to do.
Unless we're talking politics. The House better damned well pass that health care bill today, goddammit. I don't care what the disgusting underdog wants, it's time to get this reform going, and I mean it. Their sad and sparse teabag parties don't make me pity them a bit--it's time to see the bigots and CEO apologists and hinderers of progress and the sub-Mason-Dixon wing of the Republican Party (i.e. all of it) go down.
Seriously, if the nation stood up tomorrow, all 300+ million of us, and in one resounding voice called Sarah Palin a Beloved Cunt, I might not stand up and bellow along but I certainly wouldn't defend her. With the whole world against her, I'd go ahead and elect Eminem into office before her any day.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
You Just Got Rihanna'd
Yesterday Fort Hood happened, and since most tragic events since 9/11 cause me to completely shut down when I begin to obsess about them too much (and I will, I will!), I've decided I can't write about it. Partly this is because I don't yet know what to say, partly because the whole event and the frenzied aftermath of media coverage went down while I was completing my long teaching day. The closest I got to the tragedy was when I found out a friend has a brother stationed there, and through Facebook we all learned he was okay. As soon as Brock and I got home last night we put on Mad Men and popped open the wine. We turned our Thursday lives into a no-news day.
(At the risk of making what I hope doesn't come across as an offensive analogy, this obliviousness of the news is the same thing that happened to me a few weeks ago with CNN's balloon boy incident. I pulled up Facebook at work and everyone was throwing up onto their keyboards about how horrifying this was--this little boy in the balloon would surely die--and by the time they found out it was a hoax I was just getting into my car to drive home from school, hadn't yet seen the silver spaceship-looking balloon. The gravity in these two situations is drastically different, of course, but Balloon Boy hovered over my head as I sat down to write this because it was another time when a news junkie like myself had no clue about the biggest story of the day, thus for me it hadn't happened. When it comes to a shooting rampage at Ft. Hood--a real story--guilt washes over because I should know about this, I shouldn't let ignorance prevail. But for now I feel if I escaped the terrible experience of seeing it go down live, why should I create pain by reading and learning more about it? I know: clear avoidance behavior. But these days I'm taking any path towards self-preservation that's available.)
So I've decided to write about Rihanna today. She's just given some very important 20/20 interview and said some pretty obvious things about her domestic abuse situation. Apparently she's now broken up with Chris Brown for good, though it took her eight or nine tries at it. It was very hard to get away, she said, because she loved and cared for him so much, she said.
Sadly I've very little patience for this. This may be unfair to say, but Rihanna has options. A young mother who needs a guy, any guy, to help feed the screaming kids she is not. Rihanna's a talented kajillionaire, and when her bruises and swollen eyes were printed in every major paper for the world to see, her love should have clearly died there. Because domestic abuse is a lot like alcoholism: the fewer people know you're suffering from it, the better. Once everyone knows, the spell is broken--you will be forced out by people who know better than you whether you like it or not. Common sense tells us this, but Rihanna was blinded by her (sigh!) love for Chris Brown.
I recognize this is not very liberal or kind-hearted of me. Maybe it's because I'm tired of the thread: growing up I witnessed a bit of domestic violence (a drunk screaming man + a woman not scared to slap = hello, police officer), and when I grew old enough to chose a person to love it was one who, when he felt abused by the world, felt better once he stuck a shrimp boot in my face or, with his course fingers, hooked my mouth like a fish to pull me around wherever he wanted: down to the ground where I belonged, or up to his face where he could tell me so. The only tragedy is that I was with this person for four years, but if you're worried about how I suffered, please don't: my final and most striking memory of him is my standing on the front porch of his friend's house, terrible boyfriend passed cold at my feet, and me taking this outstanding opportunity to kick and punch him in the head, practically swallowing his ear with the words, Do you like this, you little fuck?
So that's my quick domestic abuse story. What I worry about now is my youngest sister, Erica, whose boyfriend has been imprisoned for more years than he attended high school (from here on out I'll call him C, not for reasons of anonymity but just because it sort of sickens me to type out his name). C has also inseminated Erica with the gift of life--two times--but has yet to do any work to support these new lives he created, proving yet again to the young women of America that the penis cannot pay the bills. Erica is just learning this, seriously, and doesn't like it.
This C person has cut into my sister with a leather whip and pushed my mother into a window. He's injected needles into any available vein in his body, has dognapped my sister's dog, a sweet old dachshund who was found hours after his absence was noted in a garage refrigerator, mouth taped shut with duct, front paws and back paws similarly bound. Erica's beloved Cocoa, who she'd had for twelve years, died about a week later.
You can probably guess I've got murder on my mind.
(I say that, though, and worry that this C bastard will get killed one day soon and investigators will come across Buggy Face and conclude it's a grand plot I've conjured from Tuscaloosa. But I really don't worry so much about this, because my false imprisonment would be worth his inability to hurt my family any longer. Also, I don't believe in ghosts.)
I'm telling you this dog murder-leather whip-window pushing stories because of Rihanna, actually: these events in Erica's life happened right around the same time as the Grammys this year. As soon as I opened Firefox the morning after the Grammys and saw Rihanna's swollen eyes I thought: Erica. I'd heard about the leather whipping, how Erica called the police and how the coward fled the scene (and didn't know yet that in the ensuing weeks and months she'd protect him from the cops, "He hasn't been around here, Officer."). I imagined my sister's face superimposed upon Rihanna's, and I started to cry. That morning I had to teach, though, so I wiped my face and tried to focus on what was the most important thing to tell my students of creative nonfiction that day.
Later when I gave myself the time to think about it, I remembered how Erica loved Chris Brown, and she loved Rihanna, and came to the realization that this situation between the two stars was Erica's perfect opportunity to romanticize what was happening with her. It's love, man, it's love. Previously I'd never known what the big deal was with earnest parents who wished Britney Spears was a better role model for their children. I would think, you take offense to her personal behavior and not her music? Perhaps you, earnest parents, aren't the best role models either? But now I understand what they were railing over. These parallel domestic violence sitations couldn't have been aligned more perfectly for Erica, or more woefully for me and mom. We, the adults, had thought that by quietly supporting my sister and not talking smack about C (as was our previous tack), she'd glide away slowly, like a natural-moving ice floe. Now she was stuck the way Rihanna was stuck, in a pit of love adults just can't understand. It's love man, you just don't get it.
So basically I'm saying I blame Rihanna for my sister's horrible relationship. I don't blame my mom or myself for our sometimes less-than-role-model behavior (at least when it came to choosing successful, placid relationships), I don't blame Erica for having lived through enough to know better, for not getting herself educated and giving herself a chance for a way out.
It's safe to say that Rihanna is mostly to blame here, for returning again and again and giving my sister reason to do the same. Because of this I personally will not be purchasing Rihanna's upcoming album Rated R.
(At the risk of making what I hope doesn't come across as an offensive analogy, this obliviousness of the news is the same thing that happened to me a few weeks ago with CNN's balloon boy incident. I pulled up Facebook at work and everyone was throwing up onto their keyboards about how horrifying this was--this little boy in the balloon would surely die--and by the time they found out it was a hoax I was just getting into my car to drive home from school, hadn't yet seen the silver spaceship-looking balloon. The gravity in these two situations is drastically different, of course, but Balloon Boy hovered over my head as I sat down to write this because it was another time when a news junkie like myself had no clue about the biggest story of the day, thus for me it hadn't happened. When it comes to a shooting rampage at Ft. Hood--a real story--guilt washes over because I should know about this, I shouldn't let ignorance prevail. But for now I feel if I escaped the terrible experience of seeing it go down live, why should I create pain by reading and learning more about it? I know: clear avoidance behavior. But these days I'm taking any path towards self-preservation that's available.)
So I've decided to write about Rihanna today. She's just given some very important 20/20 interview and said some pretty obvious things about her domestic abuse situation. Apparently she's now broken up with Chris Brown for good, though it took her eight or nine tries at it. It was very hard to get away, she said, because she loved and cared for him so much, she said.
Sadly I've very little patience for this. This may be unfair to say, but Rihanna has options. A young mother who needs a guy, any guy, to help feed the screaming kids she is not. Rihanna's a talented kajillionaire, and when her bruises and swollen eyes were printed in every major paper for the world to see, her love should have clearly died there. Because domestic abuse is a lot like alcoholism: the fewer people know you're suffering from it, the better. Once everyone knows, the spell is broken--you will be forced out by people who know better than you whether you like it or not. Common sense tells us this, but Rihanna was blinded by her (sigh!) love for Chris Brown.
I recognize this is not very liberal or kind-hearted of me. Maybe it's because I'm tired of the thread: growing up I witnessed a bit of domestic violence (a drunk screaming man + a woman not scared to slap = hello, police officer), and when I grew old enough to chose a person to love it was one who, when he felt abused by the world, felt better once he stuck a shrimp boot in my face or, with his course fingers, hooked my mouth like a fish to pull me around wherever he wanted: down to the ground where I belonged, or up to his face where he could tell me so. The only tragedy is that I was with this person for four years, but if you're worried about how I suffered, please don't: my final and most striking memory of him is my standing on the front porch of his friend's house, terrible boyfriend passed cold at my feet, and me taking this outstanding opportunity to kick and punch him in the head, practically swallowing his ear with the words, Do you like this, you little fuck?
So that's my quick domestic abuse story. What I worry about now is my youngest sister, Erica, whose boyfriend has been imprisoned for more years than he attended high school (from here on out I'll call him C, not for reasons of anonymity but just because it sort of sickens me to type out his name). C has also inseminated Erica with the gift of life--two times--but has yet to do any work to support these new lives he created, proving yet again to the young women of America that the penis cannot pay the bills. Erica is just learning this, seriously, and doesn't like it.
This C person has cut into my sister with a leather whip and pushed my mother into a window. He's injected needles into any available vein in his body, has dognapped my sister's dog, a sweet old dachshund who was found hours after his absence was noted in a garage refrigerator, mouth taped shut with duct, front paws and back paws similarly bound. Erica's beloved Cocoa, who she'd had for twelve years, died about a week later.
You can probably guess I've got murder on my mind.
(I say that, though, and worry that this C bastard will get killed one day soon and investigators will come across Buggy Face and conclude it's a grand plot I've conjured from Tuscaloosa. But I really don't worry so much about this, because my false imprisonment would be worth his inability to hurt my family any longer. Also, I don't believe in ghosts.)
I'm telling you this dog murder-leather whip-window pushing stories because of Rihanna, actually: these events in Erica's life happened right around the same time as the Grammys this year. As soon as I opened Firefox the morning after the Grammys and saw Rihanna's swollen eyes I thought: Erica. I'd heard about the leather whipping, how Erica called the police and how the coward fled the scene (and didn't know yet that in the ensuing weeks and months she'd protect him from the cops, "He hasn't been around here, Officer."). I imagined my sister's face superimposed upon Rihanna's, and I started to cry. That morning I had to teach, though, so I wiped my face and tried to focus on what was the most important thing to tell my students of creative nonfiction that day.
Later when I gave myself the time to think about it, I remembered how Erica loved Chris Brown, and she loved Rihanna, and came to the realization that this situation between the two stars was Erica's perfect opportunity to romanticize what was happening with her. It's love, man, it's love. Previously I'd never known what the big deal was with earnest parents who wished Britney Spears was a better role model for their children. I would think, you take offense to her personal behavior and not her music? Perhaps you, earnest parents, aren't the best role models either? But now I understand what they were railing over. These parallel domestic violence sitations couldn't have been aligned more perfectly for Erica, or more woefully for me and mom. We, the adults, had thought that by quietly supporting my sister and not talking smack about C (as was our previous tack), she'd glide away slowly, like a natural-moving ice floe. Now she was stuck the way Rihanna was stuck, in a pit of love adults just can't understand. It's love man, you just don't get it.
So basically I'm saying I blame Rihanna for my sister's horrible relationship. I don't blame my mom or myself for our sometimes less-than-role-model behavior (at least when it came to choosing successful, placid relationships), I don't blame Erica for having lived through enough to know better, for not getting herself educated and giving herself a chance for a way out.
It's safe to say that Rihanna is mostly to blame here, for returning again and again and giving my sister reason to do the same. Because of this I personally will not be purchasing Rihanna's upcoming album Rated R.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
One Missed Call
Again, this morning, the blinking light that proves I try to always keep the phone as far away from me as possible. This is paired, I will graciously admit, with the recognition and appreciation that most of those I love in life don't do so. Your phone is there when I need you.
One missed call: Lala Home.
It's nearly impossible to express how anxious this makes me. When I tell friends I've gone over a year without calling Lala because I was scared, they can hardly believe it. Scared of your poor old grandmother, who odds are will die sooner rather than later? They don't actually ask me what kind of a granddaughter I am but the inflection says it all: there seems to be something wrong with you.
(Recently my mother told me about a frienemy from work who, in response to my mom expressing how scared she is daily about the prospect of calling Lala, said, "You have to call your mother, Rosita. She's so old. When my grandmother died I felt like such a good person because I'd called her every day for that last year. She died knowing how much I loved her and was there for her."
When Mom reports this to me I tell her, "This bitch's grandmother dies and all she can think of is how good she feels for calling her. Jesus! She's a Republican, right?"
"Right," my mom said. See what I mean about these people? You just can't include them in any rationale discussions about real life.)
This is Lala we're talking about here. And yes, I'm damned well scared.
Formerly this fear had much to do with what you'd expect, if you know anything about Lala: she's the world's number one martyr (the homophonic qualities of mother/martyr didn't escape me even as a small kid when I first heard my mom use the word in reference to her own mom, but I was confused until I learned the real word later, because my actual mother is the farthest thing from it. It took me maybe fifteen years to figure out motherhood was extricable from martrydom.). Martyrs, as we all know, suffer most magnanimously in the world, and you may or not be the cause, but there is nothing you can do to help. In fact, your comments or suggestions or sympathy will likely only be hurtful, because: you can't know my pain--you've never felt this way--I should just die and get it over with.
This last one is the most difficult to deal with, obviously. It's already hard enough to talk to you, lady, and now I'm a grandma killer because I don't call enough? Lala has actually accused several of us of wanting her to die, which extends beyond martyrdom to sadomasochism. My uncle Carlos has more than once boomed into the receiver, "Well then do it then, dammit!" This would be heroic to me simply because the man has never not said exactly what he's thinking, and he's impossible to bully or even nudge, but the truth is these qualities make him a real asshole. So when I've heard he's said that to Lala I'll call her immediately and tisk-tisk, "I can't believe he said that to you!" And I say she's wonderful and my other mother and that I love her this much (imagine my arms spread apart, wings style), then I ask her to tell me a story. Telling stories is what Lala has always done best, besides perhaps living them, and when you ask her to do this on the phone or in person she has a new voice. She's alive, a young woman ready to take some bullshit down, or maybe raise somebody up. She's the furthest thing from a martyr.
But here's the problem: her stories are slowly dying. Not her stories, exactly, but her way of telling them. The narrative thread isn't coherent, in the middle of one story she goes onto the next one, characters appear as integral then are abandoned. It's difficult to keep up with, especially while talking on a cell phone with its perpetual two bars and while listening in Spanish, which requires super-attentive ears for a sometime-gringa like me.
Or maybe my interest in them is what's dying. It's difficult to care when the story doesn't make sense. I won't get into too many details for another fear--my family will read this and lose it--but Lala is convinced she's seen several of my sisters/cousins having sex with random men. Yes, just doing it on my mom's kitchen table, just doing it outside the window on top of the gardenias. How am I supposed to react to this? Aw, that's a shame my sisters have sex in the middle of the night while everyone's asleep, even though they have their own homes, even though they wouldn't even have any place to sleep there if they were spending the night.
Then she gets into the sanctimonious business. "Women respected themselves in my day!" Etc., etc., ignoring that she got knocked up at 17 and lived a loveless, abusive (though thankfully short-lived) marriage with that asshole.
What scares me is how whatever story she's telling works its way back to me. "You didn't do what they're doing at that age, did you?" No Lala, I didn't have sex when I was twenty. I didn't even have sex for the first time when I was fourteen with my first boyfriend, and I didn't even write about his purple thingy in my journal and mom and Kevin didn't even read it and lose their collective shits.
Atop all of this is the guilt she hasn't even placed upon me but which I'm expert at creating myself: as her storytelling skills are dying mine are just on the cusp of creation. For the first time in years I'm loving writing and taking it seriously (translation: I'd rather write than watch TV. My how I've grown!). Is she consciously leaving me this legacy? Did I cull anything from my phone calls with her over the years? Even when I tried not to listen was I prudently listening and learning? (At least one thing that's good about me: I'll happily give her or any loved one credit for any skill or accomplishment. To take full credit means I own it and I'm sorry--not ready for that responsibility yet.)
So when Lala starts off on these stories that aren't real, or have changed throughout the years (formerly my grandfather bit off her beauty mark that matches mine--how my mother forced her to get it surgically removed), I simply get bored. I find myself staring at the book titles and deciding which to read next, wondering when this torture will end. I'll leaf through the Spanish-English Dictionary on my desk and pick a word randomly and give myself a test: Brooke, you have to use this word first in the next sentence you speak to Lala. Find a way to do it.
Even with resumen. Outline.
One missed call: Lala Home.
It's nearly impossible to express how anxious this makes me. When I tell friends I've gone over a year without calling Lala because I was scared, they can hardly believe it. Scared of your poor old grandmother, who odds are will die sooner rather than later? They don't actually ask me what kind of a granddaughter I am but the inflection says it all: there seems to be something wrong with you.
(Recently my mother told me about a frienemy from work who, in response to my mom expressing how scared she is daily about the prospect of calling Lala, said, "You have to call your mother, Rosita. She's so old. When my grandmother died I felt like such a good person because I'd called her every day for that last year. She died knowing how much I loved her and was there for her."
When Mom reports this to me I tell her, "This bitch's grandmother dies and all she can think of is how good she feels for calling her. Jesus! She's a Republican, right?"
"Right," my mom said. See what I mean about these people? You just can't include them in any rationale discussions about real life.)
This is Lala we're talking about here. And yes, I'm damned well scared.
Formerly this fear had much to do with what you'd expect, if you know anything about Lala: she's the world's number one martyr (the homophonic qualities of mother/martyr didn't escape me even as a small kid when I first heard my mom use the word in reference to her own mom, but I was confused until I learned the real word later, because my actual mother is the farthest thing from it. It took me maybe fifteen years to figure out motherhood was extricable from martrydom.). Martyrs, as we all know, suffer most magnanimously in the world, and you may or not be the cause, but there is nothing you can do to help. In fact, your comments or suggestions or sympathy will likely only be hurtful, because: you can't know my pain--you've never felt this way--I should just die and get it over with.
This last one is the most difficult to deal with, obviously. It's already hard enough to talk to you, lady, and now I'm a grandma killer because I don't call enough? Lala has actually accused several of us of wanting her to die, which extends beyond martyrdom to sadomasochism. My uncle Carlos has more than once boomed into the receiver, "Well then do it then, dammit!" This would be heroic to me simply because the man has never not said exactly what he's thinking, and he's impossible to bully or even nudge, but the truth is these qualities make him a real asshole. So when I've heard he's said that to Lala I'll call her immediately and tisk-tisk, "I can't believe he said that to you!" And I say she's wonderful and my other mother and that I love her this much (imagine my arms spread apart, wings style), then I ask her to tell me a story. Telling stories is what Lala has always done best, besides perhaps living them, and when you ask her to do this on the phone or in person she has a new voice. She's alive, a young woman ready to take some bullshit down, or maybe raise somebody up. She's the furthest thing from a martyr.
But here's the problem: her stories are slowly dying. Not her stories, exactly, but her way of telling them. The narrative thread isn't coherent, in the middle of one story she goes onto the next one, characters appear as integral then are abandoned. It's difficult to keep up with, especially while talking on a cell phone with its perpetual two bars and while listening in Spanish, which requires super-attentive ears for a sometime-gringa like me.
Or maybe my interest in them is what's dying. It's difficult to care when the story doesn't make sense. I won't get into too many details for another fear--my family will read this and lose it--but Lala is convinced she's seen several of my sisters/cousins having sex with random men. Yes, just doing it on my mom's kitchen table, just doing it outside the window on top of the gardenias. How am I supposed to react to this? Aw, that's a shame my sisters have sex in the middle of the night while everyone's asleep, even though they have their own homes, even though they wouldn't even have any place to sleep there if they were spending the night.
Then she gets into the sanctimonious business. "Women respected themselves in my day!" Etc., etc., ignoring that she got knocked up at 17 and lived a loveless, abusive (though thankfully short-lived) marriage with that asshole.
What scares me is how whatever story she's telling works its way back to me. "You didn't do what they're doing at that age, did you?" No Lala, I didn't have sex when I was twenty. I didn't even have sex for the first time when I was fourteen with my first boyfriend, and I didn't even write about his purple thingy in my journal and mom and Kevin didn't even read it and lose their collective shits.
Atop all of this is the guilt she hasn't even placed upon me but which I'm expert at creating myself: as her storytelling skills are dying mine are just on the cusp of creation. For the first time in years I'm loving writing and taking it seriously (translation: I'd rather write than watch TV. My how I've grown!). Is she consciously leaving me this legacy? Did I cull anything from my phone calls with her over the years? Even when I tried not to listen was I prudently listening and learning? (At least one thing that's good about me: I'll happily give her or any loved one credit for any skill or accomplishment. To take full credit means I own it and I'm sorry--not ready for that responsibility yet.)
So when Lala starts off on these stories that aren't real, or have changed throughout the years (formerly my grandfather bit off her beauty mark that matches mine--how my mother forced her to get it surgically removed), I simply get bored. I find myself staring at the book titles and deciding which to read next, wondering when this torture will end. I'll leaf through the Spanish-English Dictionary on my desk and pick a word randomly and give myself a test: Brooke, you have to use this word first in the next sentence you speak to Lala. Find a way to do it.
Even with resumen. Outline.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Motherhood
King has a limp in his leg. King has a strange lump on his back. Nola, curled at the side of my blue chair, is doing the thing where she chomps down on her thigh in quick typewriter-like jabs: che che che che che che che che. It's fleas. It's a sprain. It's cancer and my baby is going to die.
Between grading essays and keeping up with horrible readings I must assign for early British lit, I'm reading Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (thanks Amy!). So far I'm only three chapters in but it's impressive in anecdotal evidence of the bond (girl buys dog and falls in love) and the pyschological/social research that reflects why we love them so. Knapp suggests the answers are as simple as we'd think--companionship, fulfillment, restitution for some loss--but that it can also be more complicated. I haven't gotten to the complicated part yet.
All I can think about is that for years now, when Brock feels the imp of the perverse coming on, he's said to me, "Now, King won't be alive forever. He's getting older (look at those white whiskers!) and you should prepare yourself for it." At which point he'll put on a wistful face, and look at King as if he's already passed, doing so only to ensure I get close to tears. And just when I'm on the brink, Brock stops with the charade and assures me all is fine, as our King will live forever.
What troubles me now is he hasn't said this for awhile. Either he's forgotten our playacting or he's getting as worried as I am. We've googled the lump on King's back and our bugginess calls it a nodule, but our pragmatism says we need to get it checked out. Now. The problem is this costs a lot of money and, guys, we aren't allowed to use credit cards, that's how broke we are.
So my best baby in the world might be dying and all I can say is, sorry King buddy, I'm broke? You can imagine that every time I buy sushi from Publix or order an Amazon book or purchase something equally unnecessary I remember the boy and fall into self-loathing. Instead of writing now I should be selling some crap on Craig's List and getting my son to the vet.
I am completely aware I am not a mother and don't want to be for awhile still. King is not my substitute son, though I often refer to him as one (read: the blog you're reading). Yet the connection between King and I is so powerful and real I can't imagine my life without him, and like Caroline Knapp, I'd argue this isn't perverse. He and I are almost always on the same psychic page: all he ever wants is to be touched and, for most of my life, all I desire is to touch. Each time we sense what the other wants we do what we can to provide it. It's beyond buggy.
At the same time, lots of time goes by when I'm not thinking of his best interests. In other words, I often ignore him. As a teacher-writer-reader-wife-house cleaner-daughter-granddaughter, I'm up to my eyeballs in duties. Lots of times when I'm done performing them a moment comes when I should feel good about them but don't yet and can't figure out why. And then I see King and get into the petting routine, me on the blue chair and him on the floor. The guttural purr of a dog in love.
We got the house that's best for him, that's true. Every time we let him out the doors there are fields to explore and birds to chase then ignore. But I can't remember the last time I had him on a leash. If it's good for a dog to be disciplined (and you don't need to be Cesar to know it is), King's been experiencing a whole lotta bad. Continuous petting does not a happy dog make.
Admittedly we've gotten lazy since the move. In Baton Rouge I ran him round the lakes for miles almost every day. After three years of doing this he was never broken of the routine of pulling my arm of its socket during the first mile of the run, and panting behind me during the rest of it. And I loved the routine, even though he made me look like an asshole in front of all the other lake joggers with their well-behaved dogs, even though I tried to be a good mother but obviously was not.
I'm writing this hoping to affirm that King's okay, that my love for him is okay, that if I forget about him tomorrow for a few hours I'm still his mother who genuinely loves him. And maybe seeing these words in print will remind me to check out that lump again, to find a way to find a vet so that, from now on, I can focus on times like his first jump on top of me, when I came down with him to the ground. I'd known Brock a month and already wanted to marry him, but never knew before a bugginess like King's.
On my desk I've got a picture of King at less than a year old, standing in an open field of Ohio snow. At this time in his life I'm not even alive to him yet, but I'm going to pretend from now on that this isn't true. Whatever woman snapped that picture is dead. After this picture was taken, now that I'm remembering it, King turned his face to the long shadow he cast on the snow and pounced on it, and the shadow moved continuously and King chased and chased after it. He didn't yet have his bearings; his paws were huge but his legs still stubby. It was so cute how he kept tripping over his front legs, and how his shadow would stumble along with him. You really should've been there.
Between grading essays and keeping up with horrible readings I must assign for early British lit, I'm reading Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (thanks Amy!). So far I'm only three chapters in but it's impressive in anecdotal evidence of the bond (girl buys dog and falls in love) and the pyschological/social research that reflects why we love them so. Knapp suggests the answers are as simple as we'd think--companionship, fulfillment, restitution for some loss--but that it can also be more complicated. I haven't gotten to the complicated part yet.
All I can think about is that for years now, when Brock feels the imp of the perverse coming on, he's said to me, "Now, King won't be alive forever. He's getting older (look at those white whiskers!) and you should prepare yourself for it." At which point he'll put on a wistful face, and look at King as if he's already passed, doing so only to ensure I get close to tears. And just when I'm on the brink, Brock stops with the charade and assures me all is fine, as our King will live forever.
What troubles me now is he hasn't said this for awhile. Either he's forgotten our playacting or he's getting as worried as I am. We've googled the lump on King's back and our bugginess calls it a nodule, but our pragmatism says we need to get it checked out. Now. The problem is this costs a lot of money and, guys, we aren't allowed to use credit cards, that's how broke we are.
So my best baby in the world might be dying and all I can say is, sorry King buddy, I'm broke? You can imagine that every time I buy sushi from Publix or order an Amazon book or purchase something equally unnecessary I remember the boy and fall into self-loathing. Instead of writing now I should be selling some crap on Craig's List and getting my son to the vet.
I am completely aware I am not a mother and don't want to be for awhile still. King is not my substitute son, though I often refer to him as one (read: the blog you're reading). Yet the connection between King and I is so powerful and real I can't imagine my life without him, and like Caroline Knapp, I'd argue this isn't perverse. He and I are almost always on the same psychic page: all he ever wants is to be touched and, for most of my life, all I desire is to touch. Each time we sense what the other wants we do what we can to provide it. It's beyond buggy.
At the same time, lots of time goes by when I'm not thinking of his best interests. In other words, I often ignore him. As a teacher-writer-reader-wife-house cleaner-daughter-granddaughter, I'm up to my eyeballs in duties. Lots of times when I'm done performing them a moment comes when I should feel good about them but don't yet and can't figure out why. And then I see King and get into the petting routine, me on the blue chair and him on the floor. The guttural purr of a dog in love.
We got the house that's best for him, that's true. Every time we let him out the doors there are fields to explore and birds to chase then ignore. But I can't remember the last time I had him on a leash. If it's good for a dog to be disciplined (and you don't need to be Cesar to know it is), King's been experiencing a whole lotta bad. Continuous petting does not a happy dog make.
Admittedly we've gotten lazy since the move. In Baton Rouge I ran him round the lakes for miles almost every day. After three years of doing this he was never broken of the routine of pulling my arm of its socket during the first mile of the run, and panting behind me during the rest of it. And I loved the routine, even though he made me look like an asshole in front of all the other lake joggers with their well-behaved dogs, even though I tried to be a good mother but obviously was not.
I'm writing this hoping to affirm that King's okay, that my love for him is okay, that if I forget about him tomorrow for a few hours I'm still his mother who genuinely loves him. And maybe seeing these words in print will remind me to check out that lump again, to find a way to find a vet so that, from now on, I can focus on times like his first jump on top of me, when I came down with him to the ground. I'd known Brock a month and already wanted to marry him, but never knew before a bugginess like King's.
* * * * *
On my desk I've got a picture of King at less than a year old, standing in an open field of Ohio snow. At this time in his life I'm not even alive to him yet, but I'm going to pretend from now on that this isn't true. Whatever woman snapped that picture is dead. After this picture was taken, now that I'm remembering it, King turned his face to the long shadow he cast on the snow and pounced on it, and the shadow moved continuously and King chased and chased after it. He didn't yet have his bearings; his paws were huge but his legs still stubby. It was so cute how he kept tripping over his front legs, and how his shadow would stumble along with him. You really should've been there.
Mary Karr: Her New Memoir is Called "Lit"
The summer of 2003 I went to Prague for a month of writing classes and perfunctory castle tours and, when that got old, make-out sessions with near strangers, but before any of this happened I landed on that city and almost immediately met Mary Karr. Embarrassing as this is, she was the only writer involved in the Prague Summer Program who I'd ever heard of before. Not that this mattered, of course, because you may be able to tell from the sentence above that I really wasn't there to work on writing. On the first day of workshop, our poetry professor Aliki Barnstone asked everyone to go around the room to say something about their oeuvre, their style of writing, and I simply said, "I'm a genre whore." This line makes me want to puke now, but Aliki and my classmates loved it. They called me Wild Woman, and they weren't surprised weeks later when I showed up to class late in the same clothes they'd last seen me in because I didn't go home the night before. My half-blind metro ride back to Charles University that morning is something to be explored in a different blog.
Back to Mary Karr. I got to Prague and I loved her. Before I got the chance to wonder whether or not I'd get to meet her I did, just like that. There was a big party at a dark bar for the writing program participants. Pot was blithely passed around which was of course titillating. I knew smoking and possession were legal (the technical law term was "in small doses"), but it was still a turn-on to imagine the Prague police were going to bust in any moment and we were all going to Prague Pot Prison. Obviously whatever got passed to me was some good shit.
Then my friend Ashley, without whom I could not have survived Prague, led me to a table of writer adults and there sat The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Mary Karr, and our LSU sometime-poetry-professor (and now dear friend) Andrei Codrescu. I pretended to know Andrei and said some words to him while staring at Mary. She was about 50 at the time but looked 20--the woman was stunning. She knew it and I didn't care.
It might help you to know I was in a rather chunky body phase at the time, which means my boobs were two cup sizes larger than normal. Also then, as now, I had no approach to fashion and was wearing one of those hideous American Eagle graphic baby tees with a bike on it, over which was inlaid the words, Wanna go for a ride?
The tee was tight. The bike was stretched long across my chest.
Mary Karr looked at me and said, “Wow, nice shirt. Can I borrow it sometime?”
I was so high already and drunk on Gambrinus I could hardly respond, and didn't actually. Instead I whispered loudly to my friend Ashley, “Ohmigod Mary Karr wants to borrow my shirt! What do I do?” We found some way to weasel out of there before I could do the obvious and literally give her the shirt off my back, and we met some boys, most of whose names I've forgetten, but I've always remembered that moment with Mary Karr because it was my instance of being starstruck (followed only by meeting Sean Penn and Chuck Todd).
For a year at that point I’d been in love with her, and if you’ve read The Liar’s Club you’re in love with her to. In the book she writes about possibly the most difficult childhood one can imagine: two alcoholic parents, one of them a hysterical mother who tries to murder her, horrible sexual abuse by a neighborhood bully and a babysitter, cold grandparents who can only sigh at the situation--all this by age nine. Her life was so incredibly fucked nearly from the start of it, but she presents it in such a pitiless, extraordinarily beautiful way. The first wonder is that she survived her life. The second is that anyone can present anything--especially such misery--in the unparalleled way she does. To love her writing is to hate her, because immediately you can recognize what you can never do.
However.
Yesterday I heard her interview with Terry Gross on NPR and I wonder how much has changed within the last six years: now I hate her. It’s not just because this last half-decade’s newfound Catholicism, which admittedly I found strange. In The Liar’s Club she’s a smart agnostic, like her father, which I thought nicely mirrored my smart agnosticism, along with my father’s.
It's not just because her new memoir, Lit, is about her struggles with alcoholism, and how I've got this terrible habit of rating the severity of people's drinking problems because I feel I've seen some of the worst in history. So I shake my head in sad amazement when she tells Terry, "I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted."
I thought, "Bitch! Real alcoholics want to stop, but it's their bodies that say no, you need a drink, if you don't, you'll have a heart attack." Yes, I've already written in another blog about how I recognize that there are many different kinds of alcoholics. But the nature of Mary's comments suggested to me that her dire alcoholic troubles were a facade masking the professional troubles of writing another memoir. (By the way she is not just any memoirist, she is one of the best selling of all time. And book publishers remember this, and pay big bucks, and are impatient.) Her first two were about her childhood, and now she had to construct one about her adult life. And I can just imagine her thinking of the ways she's fucked up as an adult and landing on something easy: ah, alcohol! I drank it, thus, am alcoholic, thus, have subject. Think plus type plus bind equals third memoir.
Her glibness in the interview also wasn't very endearing. It seemed she'd told the stories she was telling Terry quite a lot, so while she was always witty there was something false about it. Here's what she has to say about meeting her very rich (now ex-) husband's parents for the first time:
“Oh Terry, you could've lowered me onto an island with the peace-loving Tasaday and I would’ve been more comfortable than I was with the WASPs.”
The Tasaday. Really, Mary? Just pulled that obscure Phillipino tribe off the top of that well-read, highly-cultured, intellectual brain of yours? I have to believe that smart people, well-read people, don't talk like that because I don't. And I want to be smart and well-read, too! But my reference would have probably included being dumped into Thailand on the set of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, and of course my clear worry is that this makes me dumb.
Here is how she described being raised by a sometimes-terrible human being like her mother:
“We [Mary and her sister] were like lizards in a terrarium who, every few weeks, my mother tapped the glass to see if we were still alive.”
Of course the metaphor is sad and astounding but, geez! How did she think of that just then? The thing is she didn't. She's got these incredibly smart rote answers for everything and people who do that scare me because I can't conjure many insights even with all the time in the world (the time it takes to write this, for example).
What probably pissed me off most was her pontification of how difficult this memoir was to write. I mean the first two were nuthin, but this one nearly killed her. The struggle, Terry, the struggle. Mary threw away three drafts of the book, hung around for weeks at a time in a bathrobe and sighed at the rafters. (I'm thinking, bitch, you have rafters! What the hell is there to sigh about!)
But listen to how she cheered herself up. "I called Don DeLillo, and I said, 'Don, what should I do? I can't finish this book!' And then a few days later Don sent me a postcard that said, 'Write or die, Mary.' And I sent one back that said, 'Write and die, Don.'"
Ho, ho. I know Don DeLillo. Howdy-fucking-do.
Then she got to call Robert Haas, of course known to her as Bob, and she sobbed into to his receiver and he consoled her because she's brilliant and beautiful, she's Mary Karr. He reminded her of this and other things, leading good to triumph over evil, thus helping her finish the book. And it's at this point in the interview that she finally admits her biggest fear in finishing a book that might be bad was the fear of not being a special writer anymore who gets to call Don DeLillo and Robert Haas and is famous and beloved. "I just didn't want to get sent back to the farm club."
So much for God, huh Mary?
But as I read over and think back on what I've written, I see that all my problems with Mary have to do with how seeing her makes me see myself. If she employs an obscure reference to make a point, it's somehow an affront to me because I'm incapable of doing the same. If she gets to call Bob Haas, I'm upset because I'll never get to call Bob Haas (whose Field Guide was too erudite to change my life--as I was just about to lie and tell you--but was beautiful nonetheless. I'm smart enough to know that much.).
Maybe hating her now is a reflection of how I feel about the then-Brooke, the 22-year-old Brooke who met Mary. I got this amazing opportunity to go to another country, explore Europe if I wanted, learn important things from important writers, but instead I spent the whole time drinking and smoking and getting lost on the way home from strange expatriate's houses. The 22-year-old Mary was ambitious, smarter, ready to take on the literary world, and if she'd gone to the Prague Summer Program with me at that age she would not have made out with strangers, she would've seen all of the important things to see, she would've written the best poems in the class, she would've already been what I still long to be: a Real Writer.
Or maybe she would've done like I did, and just gotten lit.
Back to Mary Karr. I got to Prague and I loved her. Before I got the chance to wonder whether or not I'd get to meet her I did, just like that. There was a big party at a dark bar for the writing program participants. Pot was blithely passed around which was of course titillating. I knew smoking and possession were legal (the technical law term was "in small doses"), but it was still a turn-on to imagine the Prague police were going to bust in any moment and we were all going to Prague Pot Prison. Obviously whatever got passed to me was some good shit.
Then my friend Ashley, without whom I could not have survived Prague, led me to a table of writer adults and there sat The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Mary Karr, and our LSU sometime-poetry-professor (and now dear friend) Andrei Codrescu. I pretended to know Andrei and said some words to him while staring at Mary. She was about 50 at the time but looked 20--the woman was stunning. She knew it and I didn't care.
It might help you to know I was in a rather chunky body phase at the time, which means my boobs were two cup sizes larger than normal. Also then, as now, I had no approach to fashion and was wearing one of those hideous American Eagle graphic baby tees with a bike on it, over which was inlaid the words, Wanna go for a ride?
The tee was tight. The bike was stretched long across my chest.
Mary Karr looked at me and said, “Wow, nice shirt. Can I borrow it sometime?”
I was so high already and drunk on Gambrinus I could hardly respond, and didn't actually. Instead I whispered loudly to my friend Ashley, “Ohmigod Mary Karr wants to borrow my shirt! What do I do?” We found some way to weasel out of there before I could do the obvious and literally give her the shirt off my back, and we met some boys, most of whose names I've forgetten, but I've always remembered that moment with Mary Karr because it was my instance of being starstruck (followed only by meeting Sean Penn and Chuck Todd).
For a year at that point I’d been in love with her, and if you’ve read The Liar’s Club you’re in love with her to. In the book she writes about possibly the most difficult childhood one can imagine: two alcoholic parents, one of them a hysterical mother who tries to murder her, horrible sexual abuse by a neighborhood bully and a babysitter, cold grandparents who can only sigh at the situation--all this by age nine. Her life was so incredibly fucked nearly from the start of it, but she presents it in such a pitiless, extraordinarily beautiful way. The first wonder is that she survived her life. The second is that anyone can present anything--especially such misery--in the unparalleled way she does. To love her writing is to hate her, because immediately you can recognize what you can never do.
However.
Yesterday I heard her interview with Terry Gross on NPR and I wonder how much has changed within the last six years: now I hate her. It’s not just because this last half-decade’s newfound Catholicism, which admittedly I found strange. In The Liar’s Club she’s a smart agnostic, like her father, which I thought nicely mirrored my smart agnosticism, along with my father’s.
It's not just because her new memoir, Lit, is about her struggles with alcoholism, and how I've got this terrible habit of rating the severity of people's drinking problems because I feel I've seen some of the worst in history. So I shake my head in sad amazement when she tells Terry, "I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted."
I thought, "Bitch! Real alcoholics want to stop, but it's their bodies that say no, you need a drink, if you don't, you'll have a heart attack." Yes, I've already written in another blog about how I recognize that there are many different kinds of alcoholics. But the nature of Mary's comments suggested to me that her dire alcoholic troubles were a facade masking the professional troubles of writing another memoir. (By the way she is not just any memoirist, she is one of the best selling of all time. And book publishers remember this, and pay big bucks, and are impatient.) Her first two were about her childhood, and now she had to construct one about her adult life. And I can just imagine her thinking of the ways she's fucked up as an adult and landing on something easy: ah, alcohol! I drank it, thus, am alcoholic, thus, have subject. Think plus type plus bind equals third memoir.
Her glibness in the interview also wasn't very endearing. It seemed she'd told the stories she was telling Terry quite a lot, so while she was always witty there was something false about it. Here's what she has to say about meeting her very rich (now ex-) husband's parents for the first time:
“Oh Terry, you could've lowered me onto an island with the peace-loving Tasaday and I would’ve been more comfortable than I was with the WASPs.”
The Tasaday. Really, Mary? Just pulled that obscure Phillipino tribe off the top of that well-read, highly-cultured, intellectual brain of yours? I have to believe that smart people, well-read people, don't talk like that because I don't. And I want to be smart and well-read, too! But my reference would have probably included being dumped into Thailand on the set of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, and of course my clear worry is that this makes me dumb.
Here is how she described being raised by a sometimes-terrible human being like her mother:
“We [Mary and her sister] were like lizards in a terrarium who, every few weeks, my mother tapped the glass to see if we were still alive.”
Of course the metaphor is sad and astounding but, geez! How did she think of that just then? The thing is she didn't. She's got these incredibly smart rote answers for everything and people who do that scare me because I can't conjure many insights even with all the time in the world (the time it takes to write this, for example).
What probably pissed me off most was her pontification of how difficult this memoir was to write. I mean the first two were nuthin, but this one nearly killed her. The struggle, Terry, the struggle. Mary threw away three drafts of the book, hung around for weeks at a time in a bathrobe and sighed at the rafters. (I'm thinking, bitch, you have rafters! What the hell is there to sigh about!)
But listen to how she cheered herself up. "I called Don DeLillo, and I said, 'Don, what should I do? I can't finish this book!' And then a few days later Don sent me a postcard that said, 'Write or die, Mary.' And I sent one back that said, 'Write and die, Don.'"
Ho, ho. I know Don DeLillo. Howdy-fucking-do.
Then she got to call Robert Haas, of course known to her as Bob, and she sobbed into to his receiver and he consoled her because she's brilliant and beautiful, she's Mary Karr. He reminded her of this and other things, leading good to triumph over evil, thus helping her finish the book. And it's at this point in the interview that she finally admits her biggest fear in finishing a book that might be bad was the fear of not being a special writer anymore who gets to call Don DeLillo and Robert Haas and is famous and beloved. "I just didn't want to get sent back to the farm club."
So much for God, huh Mary?
But as I read over and think back on what I've written, I see that all my problems with Mary have to do with how seeing her makes me see myself. If she employs an obscure reference to make a point, it's somehow an affront to me because I'm incapable of doing the same. If she gets to call Bob Haas, I'm upset because I'll never get to call Bob Haas (whose Field Guide was too erudite to change my life--as I was just about to lie and tell you--but was beautiful nonetheless. I'm smart enough to know that much.).
Maybe hating her now is a reflection of how I feel about the then-Brooke, the 22-year-old Brooke who met Mary. I got this amazing opportunity to go to another country, explore Europe if I wanted, learn important things from important writers, but instead I spent the whole time drinking and smoking and getting lost on the way home from strange expatriate's houses. The 22-year-old Mary was ambitious, smarter, ready to take on the literary world, and if she'd gone to the Prague Summer Program with me at that age she would not have made out with strangers, she would've seen all of the important things to see, she would've written the best poems in the class, she would've already been what I still long to be: a Real Writer.
Or maybe she would've done like I did, and just gotten lit.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
November Plans
November is the cruelest month, except that when I stepped outside today a crisp 70 degrees touched my face and hair, a few small pieces tied lightly in the back. Today I got to wear my long skirt and my long hair, and I walked through campus with books on my hip, dreaming myself a modern-day Joe from Little Women.
Today itself was so buggy I found poetry. For this blog I will try to place some of my pretty findings here. Fingers crossed, I will be self-deprecating in a charming way and you will continue to like me.
Here are some new November victories to smile about:
Today itself was so buggy I found poetry. For this blog I will try to place some of my pretty findings here. Fingers crossed, I will be self-deprecating in a charming way and you will continue to like me.
Here are some new November victories to smile about:
- Next semester's impossible schedule was changed and now I'll get to commute with Brock, but more importantly will teach EN 206, which means I'm out of ArcaneLand of wizardry and homoerotic masculinity (I'm talking to you, Beowulf and Lancelot). Keats, I can't wait to kiss you.
- Sub-note to above bullet: My spring schedule will require me to be on campus every day, but I've decided to join the rec center as an addition to Snap to ensure I'm totally fit and happy.
- Thanks to the generousness of my birthday benefactors, we're pretty much caught up on money this month which means it's movie splurge time again. I'm voting for the new animated Wes Andersen. Talking Foxes! Voice of Meryl Streep!
- By the People comes on HBO tonight, which I'm sure will make me inspired and lachyrmal (like I was just a short year ago after the election!)
- Both yesterday and today I ran six miles, and that totals twelve and as you can see I'm already becoming totally fit. Really, I barely even finished Jason's famous pecan pie this morning.
- Everyone I ran into today elicited a positively natural reaction from me. Never once seethed under my skin.
- Brit lit students seemed to do well on the test, proving I'm not just an inspiring but fair teacher.
- Yankees are having a good enough series to keep my mom and Lala happy but not so good as to make Brock feel like putting a gun to his head.
- NaNoWriMo is a thing of the past as far as I'm concerned because of this recent revelation: I transcend both quantity and quality.
- I've come up with a list of blog topics for my daily entry this month (hell yes, I'm doing it!) and they are listed as follows:
- Frenemies--why we can't let go those we loathe the most, and why the answer lies inside the man in the mirror, which in this case would be me
- Who's the Best--the insipidness of poetry readings, the way everyone is always waiting her turn, always measuring her poetic superiority, and how it's never inspirational and how I hate many poets including the ones I love most
- Hospital Scenes starring me and mom and Lala--how between mom's pragmatism and my romanticism we'll keep Lala alive forever
- Tarot Reading featuring Turd
- The Anecdote of the Insurance Company (I'll bet you can't guess the villain)
- Problem with Underdogs--I have one, big time, because I might just be such a callow liberal that I'm incapable of being any kind of sports fan as evidenced last night when the Falcons head coach nearly started crying at halftime and I thought, "Oh, the Saints are ahead by so much, why can't we tack on a tiny little safety or field goal to make him feel better?" Yeah, I really thought this, and about the-fucking-Falcons. Now what, am I going to start stuffing votes for that wacko Doug damned Hoffman in New York's 23 District, who's supported only by Palin's Facebook page? I don't think so. But that's what this skewed underdog mentality suggests.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Spanish or Hispanic or Latino, oh my!
A meeting of academic minds is so fun because, if the academics are your friends, you'll discuss interesting issues comfortably and in non-PC terms. This is great for me because I'm growing incapable of political correctness. One of our great conversations started when Courtney told us that last week she discussed with her students the problem with using the word bitch because of its misogynist overtones (kinda like using the word gay as a substitute for anything bad), and together she and I decided we'd call things dickish instead of bitchy to really put guys in their places.
But the truth is, I love the word bitch almost as much as fuck, and use it in about every other class period (not with the freshmen--I'm not insane), along with the word pansy, which is a habit I've got to get rid of because pansy is just as offensive as gay. Though political correctness is no fun, I certainly don't want to offend the gay community or women or blacks or Hispanics or Asians or Native Americans or the handicapped. But white men, especially those with the conservative tinge who do their damnedest to make sure this litany of folks aren't equal to themselves (how will the world know I'm better and more deserving of a life if everyone has health care?), yeah, they are straight up dicks. I like the sound of that.
At one point someone brought up the question of which was the preferred term for brown people like me who speak Spanish: Hispanics, or Latinos? (My personal favorite happens to be Chicano, but I'm pretty sure that term is reserved for those of Mexican origin. And I know damn well better than to call myself that, as my Lala is the proprietor of the phrase, "I not a Mexican!") Now here's the real embarrassing thing: I didn't have an answer to that question.
In an effort to answer the question now, I've pulled from the freshman composition student playbook and consulted Dictionary.com and, what do you know, the words Hispanic and Latino are 100% synonymous. It's purely a matter of preference. I feel I remember Lala using the word Hispana when I was growing up, but more often she referred to us as Ecuadorianas, which if you're counting is five syllables long. It's fucking hard to say with a mueca lengua like mine. (Loose translation: I've got a messed up tongue when it comes to speaking Spanish.)
Once in college I referred to myself as Spanish because I thought, hey, it's the language I speak, and hey, this is the universal name for Brown. (This was the late 90s and despite my frequent habit of being full of shit what I'm saying is actually true.) At the time I was trying to skip out of a few introductory Spanish language classes because I was about fifteen years past conjugating verbs. On the first day of class the Colombian teacher asked if anyone wanted to test out of the course and I raised my hand.
She asked, "Who are you?" and I said, "Brooke."
She said I wasn't funny and I knew for the next two years I was fucked. Sra. Colomer was the only Spanish instructor in the school, and when she asked a question she expected a certain type of answer. At this point she had no interest in my name--she wanted to know who the fuck I thought I was for trying to test out of her all-important Spanish 101.
So I tried again: "I'm Spanish."
She smiled tiny and her teeth looked thick (the only thing that scares me more than thick teeth is impossibly small mini-M&M-sized teeth...eww!). She said, "Do not say you are Spanish. Are you from Spain?" Why wait for the answer when you already know it? "Listen," she continued, "don't say that because you sound like you just got off the boat."
This was in front of a class of forty-five strangers. I wanted to strangle her and quit school and walk the ninety miles back to New Orleans. Instead I said, "Oh, my grandmother speaks Spanish and she taught it to me. She's from Ecuador. She arrived here forty years ago. On a plane."
According to Lala, Ecuadorians and Columbians traditionally hate each other, but not as much as both groups hate Hondurans, who we're pretty sure don't bathe and are labotomized at birth.
The truth is I don't know if any of this is real. I go through life with a set of beliefs--hatred among these South American countries just one of them--many of which were instilled by Lala who 10 out of 10 psychologists have deemed near-out-of-mind nutzo. She once argued with my mother that the moon was bigger than the sun because, "Look at it! It's bigger!" She's also convinced she's seen two of my four sisters having sex at my mom's house and described the incidents in vivid details, claiming one sister made the lucky guy scream so hard she must have teeth in her vagina. (For the record, my sisters no longer live in the house--she imagines and believes the scene in her mind completely.)
She transcends Hispanicness or Latinaness, she's a helluva lot more than an Ecuadoriana. Lala is some strange engine of love and wonder. After thirty years I still don't get her, still don't know how to deal with her. Between my mom and I we've called her a crazy bitch (lovingly, of course) more times than I'm will to admit to Courtney.
Lala has said and done a lot, so much that I'm scared to finish writing a book about it. Tonight's the night I call her and find out what's happened in her mind during the last week. Maybe she's talked to my grandfather again, now dead nineteen years. If you stay tuned I'll find a way to tell you all about it.
But the truth is, I love the word bitch almost as much as fuck, and use it in about every other class period (not with the freshmen--I'm not insane), along with the word pansy, which is a habit I've got to get rid of because pansy is just as offensive as gay. Though political correctness is no fun, I certainly don't want to offend the gay community or women or blacks or Hispanics or Asians or Native Americans or the handicapped. But white men, especially those with the conservative tinge who do their damnedest to make sure this litany of folks aren't equal to themselves (how will the world know I'm better and more deserving of a life if everyone has health care?), yeah, they are straight up dicks. I like the sound of that.
At one point someone brought up the question of which was the preferred term for brown people like me who speak Spanish: Hispanics, or Latinos? (My personal favorite happens to be Chicano, but I'm pretty sure that term is reserved for those of Mexican origin. And I know damn well better than to call myself that, as my Lala is the proprietor of the phrase, "I not a Mexican!") Now here's the real embarrassing thing: I didn't have an answer to that question.
In an effort to answer the question now, I've pulled from the freshman composition student playbook and consulted Dictionary.com and, what do you know, the words Hispanic and Latino are 100% synonymous. It's purely a matter of preference. I feel I remember Lala using the word Hispana when I was growing up, but more often she referred to us as Ecuadorianas, which if you're counting is five syllables long. It's fucking hard to say with a mueca lengua like mine. (Loose translation: I've got a messed up tongue when it comes to speaking Spanish.)
Once in college I referred to myself as Spanish because I thought, hey, it's the language I speak, and hey, this is the universal name for Brown. (This was the late 90s and despite my frequent habit of being full of shit what I'm saying is actually true.) At the time I was trying to skip out of a few introductory Spanish language classes because I was about fifteen years past conjugating verbs. On the first day of class the Colombian teacher asked if anyone wanted to test out of the course and I raised my hand.
She asked, "Who are you?" and I said, "Brooke."
She said I wasn't funny and I knew for the next two years I was fucked. Sra. Colomer was the only Spanish instructor in the school, and when she asked a question she expected a certain type of answer. At this point she had no interest in my name--she wanted to know who the fuck I thought I was for trying to test out of her all-important Spanish 101.
So I tried again: "I'm Spanish."
She smiled tiny and her teeth looked thick (the only thing that scares me more than thick teeth is impossibly small mini-M&M-sized teeth...eww!). She said, "Do not say you are Spanish. Are you from Spain?" Why wait for the answer when you already know it? "Listen," she continued, "don't say that because you sound like you just got off the boat."
This was in front of a class of forty-five strangers. I wanted to strangle her and quit school and walk the ninety miles back to New Orleans. Instead I said, "Oh, my grandmother speaks Spanish and she taught it to me. She's from Ecuador. She arrived here forty years ago. On a plane."
According to Lala, Ecuadorians and Columbians traditionally hate each other, but not as much as both groups hate Hondurans, who we're pretty sure don't bathe and are labotomized at birth.
The truth is I don't know if any of this is real. I go through life with a set of beliefs--hatred among these South American countries just one of them--many of which were instilled by Lala who 10 out of 10 psychologists have deemed near-out-of-mind nutzo. She once argued with my mother that the moon was bigger than the sun because, "Look at it! It's bigger!" She's also convinced she's seen two of my four sisters having sex at my mom's house and described the incidents in vivid details, claiming one sister made the lucky guy scream so hard she must have teeth in her vagina. (For the record, my sisters no longer live in the house--she imagines and believes the scene in her mind completely.)
She transcends Hispanicness or Latinaness, she's a helluva lot more than an Ecuadoriana. Lala is some strange engine of love and wonder. After thirty years I still don't get her, still don't know how to deal with her. Between my mom and I we've called her a crazy bitch (lovingly, of course) more times than I'm will to admit to Courtney.
Lala has said and done a lot, so much that I'm scared to finish writing a book about it. Tonight's the night I call her and find out what's happened in her mind during the last week. Maybe she's talked to my grandfather again, now dead nineteen years. If you stay tuned I'll find a way to tell you all about it.
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