Hah!

We Are Warned About Too Much TV

But never warned about too much mythology. Quote of the day: "Oh, I wish the Goddess of Death would  not go around killing people. Why does there have to be a Goddess of Death?"

One thing I guess I sort of do, without having some specific plan about it, is feed my kid's imagination so that corporate-sponsored storylines can't take too much hold over it.

This hasn't worked with Star Wars but because Star Wars took hold of my imagination as a child, I suppose I just go with it.

My kid is obsessed with Star Wars. Note, unlike this story about Star Wars taking over the mind of young boys my child is not a boy. Nor was I a boy. Why this person thinks Star Wars would only interest boys is anyone's guess. The usual fucked up sexism. Star Wars has some technology in it. We all know women have nothing to do with technology. Why, if it wasn't for men we'd all be living in caves, right? Also we know that girls and boys are so fundamentally different that if a boy is interested in something it is impossible that a girl would also be interested in it. So if you parent a boy and your boy likes something (say, Legos) why, this is a sign of your boy's masculinity, no? Of course, girls could not possibly like legos because then legos would cease to reassure parents of boys that their kid is a 'real boy' and will grow up to do well in math so that they can be architects.

The woman who wrote the story hypothesizes that Star Wars love is about marketing and toys. But my child was immediately obsessed with Star Wars simply upon hearing the story--attached to a game played with sticks that were 'light savers.'  Every stick thereby became a 'light saver' and she has yet to have any Star Wars toys. (She also loves Legos.)  Of course, seeing the incredible light saber on the screen sent her to the moon. And it sent me to the moon when I was a little kid also. Those things are fucking cool.

Anyway, I'm not trying to keep my kid from liking princesses. It's more that my theory about princesses is that they are good stories badly told by Disney. So, to prevent Disney from commanding all storylines, I have sought other stories--and even other versions of Cinderella.

I'm not saying this is a conscious thing. I think what I unconsciously do is just remember all the powerful moments of my own childhood and then I kind of find the things that prompted those moments and give them to my child. So I'm not against Disney movies in some vehement way. I simply remember my childhood as this kind of  trippy fantasy world and now I have a kid who is so much like me in this way. Bad stuff happened to me as a child so I escaped into fantasy. But also, I was able to really live in imaginative worlds that were spin offs of stories I'd read. She also does this and so it's hard not to keep giving her all the stuff I was into.

Myths were a very big deal to me and my sister. We loved myths. So I thought it would be OK to read my child this book D'Aulaire's Book of Mythology for Children.

And I was charmed by the fact that the Barbies she has (I didn't buy them for her...Grandma!) turned into Persephone and Demeter and the Goddess of Fire. (There is no story about the Goddess of Fire. Where the Goddess of Death and Fire came from is anyone's guess.) Until she started becoming the last believer in Greek Gods and Goddesses. I'm not sure we're ready just yet to build a temple of Hera in the backyard.

3 Kinds of Assholes Not To Be

(That I'm not yet but might possibly become if I'm not careful. I'm probably some other kind of asshole I have yet to recognize.)

1. The Exploiter. The exploiter’s problems are always bigger than your problems. And somehow the exploiter convinces you that her problems are bigger than your problems, way, way bigger and uses you to do her work/give her what she wants/kowtow to her in some fashion because of her big, big needs that simply DWARF your little piddly needs.

Exploiters are essentially people who simply cannot grasp that others are exactly equal to them in value. That others are also whole selves and are not simply pawns to be moved around a chessboard. The reality of other people eludes them. This is very convenient in life.

It’s like they trick you with that sense of their own significance. If you lack such a sense that you matter more than other people, you are basically a walking target for Exploiters.

The most interesting thing about exploiters is that they know whom to exploit. Exploiters are exquisitely cunning. They are obsequious and friendly to the right people—sometimes they are friendly and unassuming to everyone. And then BAM. They get you right where they want you.

Another version of The Exploiter is that they think all the work they do is so important and nothing you do matters. This is probably another kind of asshole but I’m sticking it here because it’s so goddamn annoying when people do this.

I want to say: Beware The Exploiter. They are like the invisible octopi of society but not as cuddly as octopi. However, I know that most of us can’t beware them because they are unfortunately all over the place and they are probably working at the desk next to you. They will always be there, a few cubicles over and there’s not much you can do about that.

2. The Bulldog. Did you know that yelling at people is not cool? DID YOU KNOW THAT HUH? DID YOU? The Bulldog only seems like he’s losing control. For a long, long time The Bulldog has learned that yelling at people, intimidating them and making it very hard for them not to give in is a very useful tactic.

Sometimes The Bulldog thinks he’s losing control but he’s not. 99 out of 100 times this is a planned response, but a kind of instinctive one that has developed over time because of its shown effectiveness in getting The Bulldog what he wants. That is, the yeller is not always being consciously calculating when he yells. He’s just put yelling into his repertoire and overall, this is calculated to dominate others unjustly.

Also, it is not cool to yell at people when you are simply losing your shit even if you are not trying to control or dominate. I do this to my husband sometimes. My husband has learned this fascinating thing, I think, upon having a child, which is that one can train one’s wife also. He yells back at me STOP YELLING AT ME. This is the only time he yells at me. Then I stop…well, fairly shortly afterward.  His yelling is especially effective since he never yells. He gripes though. His griping freaks me out a lot but honestly, it’s probably gentle griping as things go and only freaks me out because (a) it is probably justified and (b) he’s got so much to gripe about and (c) I’m scared he won’t love me anymore because I’m extremely imperfect.

I don’t yell at my husband very much. Usually, only when I am terrified about work and also have only had an hour of sleep and it is morning and I have to wake up and do 10,000 things or work one of my 11 hour days.

It’s still not cool.

Women can be Bulldogs too. There is a particular kind of female way of being a Bulldog—which is a dramatic, hysterical diva way. Yes, men use hissy fits also. But women are generally more skilled at this.

Rule #1 of non-assholery: Don’t fucking yell at people unless you are trying them to jump out of the way of a truck. Yelling is never necessary except to save lives or during a loud rock concert.

3. The Judger. God, I’m getting all gendered here in a very problematic way but…females are good at getting all judgey on each other. However, this is naturally a gender neutral thing. I think judgey people often have a sense of powerless and this might explain why women tend to be extremely judgey but this trait is ubiquitous in both genders..

Honestly, if some people would get over this, they’d be a whole lot more fun. (I should talk.)

I think I lack immunities to female judging. I love women so much and I’m more defended against men so women’s criticism really gets in through some kind of mental back door I left open.

Judgeyness is not the same as making a moral judgment about someone’s actions—like George Bush is a war criminal. It’s more of a kind of refusal to enter into the life conditions of some fairly innocent person making fairly innocent mistakes—to view such people with understanding and basic respect for the fact they are usually either (a) trying to get by or (b) doing the best with what they have. Even if they are goddamn annoying, or pathetic screw-ups which they might well be.

One interesting thing to me is that some bloggers who go apeshit when others seem to judge them are pretty damn judging. The reason this is interesting is that I think judgmentalness is a little bit like a virus you catch. The more judgey your milieu, the more judgey you tend to get.

Judgeyness has been getting to me a lot lately because I’m being severely judged on all sides by people about my marriage. Basically, for me to get work done my husband has to do massive amounts of domestic work. He does waaaay over 50%. My domestic work deficit is so high that I will never catch up. Mostly it takes the form of childcare since we actually don’t have time to clean our house much. It’s not like the house is neat as a pin.

It’s been said or implied that I am a bad wife and a bad mother. And great sympathy has gone to my husband who, one person said “was overwhelmed” with the care of our child. And all alone! He never gets to do anything.  He is the abandoned husband. The poor, beaten-down abandoned husband. I think it is also assumed that I must be doing something awful to him in order to get him to be so nice to me. Why is he so nice to me? people often wonder. What have I done to him? Husbands are not supposed to be this good to their wives, is the implication. It defies the natural order of the universe.

I feel guilty. I always feel guilty. However, I think it means something that my husband is not at all unhappy but basically understands the constraints. And his family thinks I’m a hero for all the work I do to provide. And they love him. So if he was getting screwed, they would be annoyed. Ergo, I think the judgers here are just being assholes.

One thing left out of the equation is that I’m working two jobs. The two jobs I’m working? Well, they are to pay for food, housing, health insurance, etc. My husband works one job that is slightly less than full time. That sucks. I would kill for my husband to work no jobs. But we are pulling together as a team, here. I have no options. My husband aware that the only alternative is that I fail, lose my job and then we’re flat broke.

It’s kind of disrespectful to think my husband is some dumb chump who would let me walk all over him. But of course, we have been together for 17 years. This nightmare we are currently in is a fairly recent thing, on the geological scale of our 17 year relationship.

Any other job I take will require retraining and will not pay as well. (As if there are any other jobs.) So WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ME TO DO PEOPLE? Seriously. How do I pay the bills otherwise?

I also find it odd that I am a bad person for working when he is sometimes doing things like: Going to the beach, eating at the Chinese restaurant, hanging with friends or having dinner at their house, playing with our kid…

Of course, sometimes he’s doing other things like giving said kid a bath and taking her to karate at the asscrack of dawn while I sleep in. And making us lunch. And getting her ready for school.  And taking her to school. And sometimes picking her up…and, and, and…Yeah, he works like a dog, too. We both do.

And he does all the laundry. The judgers don’t even know this fact! Can you imagine what they would make of it if they did?

God, I really pray that they don’t find out I might take a (virtually free) trip to India with a friend. Holy shit. That looks bad, it really does. I’m currently googling plane ticket prices to send my husband somewhere good—With hot babes and mai tais on the beach and low hotel prices just so the judgers will get off my back. Of course, he only gets to look at the hot babes.  I might be wrong, but I’m fairly certain he would enjoy this.

Of course, I want him to have fun, not just shut up the goddamn judgers. A side-effect of all this is that I worship the ground my husband walks on. I would die for him. I practically want to arrange for a bevy of call girls to show up at our door if prostitution did not exploit women and if it would not make me kill him later. But how many wives can say that? I want him to be poolside for months, while nubile co-eds massage his feet. Of course, this would annoy me eventually or perhaps quickly. Clearly, that’s a weird thought. I’m exaggerating to make a point.

This situation is going to end soon, one way or the other. I may be getting unemployment checks, doing all the child care and then we will declare bankruptcy and FUCK YEAH! I think this could be the greatest period of my life compared to the hell I’m in now.

Oh, sometimes people like to judge ME for working too much and HIM for not making more money…just for fun, I guess.

There are at least two causes of judgeyness. (1) Envy. (2) A desire for self-validation. Sometimes you can get both in one fell swoop and I’ll bet that feels nice.

That’s not wholly true. You can learn from judgeyness if you always remember that the things you are judgey about are liable to be either your own foibles or things you fear you might become. Or things that make you insecure or envious.

Note that all three of these forms of assholery spring from people’s ego—their desire to place themselves above others in some way—by dominating them, by downgrading their value, by asserting their greater importance in comparison to others. This is sort of a driving force in assholery of all kinds.

It’s not easy to avoid this general human tendency. I think maybe you could just look up at the stars and remember your utter insignificance in the scheme of the universe and that you are made of organized matter with consciousness but that matter will eventually lose its consciousness and then return to disorganized matter and re-form into some kind of object totally unrelated to you. Now, I do not deny your consciousness could survive but really—even in your spiritual state does ANY of this shit matter that you are being an asshole about? Probably not.  It probably won’t even matter in six days let alone six months let alone six years.

I’m pretty sure this won’t work though, as I’ve tried it. It works for a split second. I find it a very soothing notion but then I go back to being all worried about where I stand in relations to others.

Truly though, I’m working on weaning myself from judgeyness.  

I’ll bet that will work as good as the ‘not talking bad about people’ thing that was my New Year’s Resolution. I think I’m still going to try this. Results so far: Negligible.

There’s still time!

Now, overcoming resentment when you have been affected by someone else’s assholery—there’s too much to say about this.

This is important, though. The asshole screws you over but there’s nothing worse than than allowing the asshole who screwed you over to occupy your thoughts as well.

I was trying a little mantra recently that was something along the lines of ‘people are complicated.’ The reason this sort of, kind of works is that usually, assholes are more than just assholes. It can help to see the asshole as a whole person, while avoiding excuses for them or having paralyzing sympathy for their plight that they have to go through life being such an asshole. You can sometimes avoid hating the asshole’s guts if you value the good things about the asshole. But do this in a very detached way or you may make them more powerful.

Sometimes it kills me that things go so well for assholes. They even have happy marriages and love and wealth and success. Worse, their assholery sometimes even gets them these things. The fact that rankles at times shows me that I have a ways to go to avoid my asshole-prompted resentment.

You know that thing about chickens coming home to roost, everyone gets their comeuppance in the end? It's a lie. A complete and utter fabrication. People tell themselves and others this to make everyone feel better about the fact that being an asshole can get you all kinds of good things in life that you often get to keep. Forever.

Things I plan to do this year (1) Become a vegetarian and (2) Stop talking bad about specific people. (Not about humans generally. Humans are terrifying creatures. It is, naturally, impossible for me to stop talking bad about people generally because people are just so bad.)

We’ll see how that all goes.

Maybe I could set more limited goals for my quest for moral perfection. What would be some more limited goals?

Anyway, feel free to mention new categories of asshole that you personally hope to avoid becoming.

 

 

Innoculation or: My Day At The Mall

For various reasons, I went to the mall today. Not really to buy anything but you know, the mall! Yeah!

The homeland.

We wandered around in one toy store. Chiquita caused havoc with the little toy animals that turn on and bark and jump around. Whatever those are called. A swarm of kids arrived and the manager had to intervene.

My favorite moment was when she went into the window and stood there like a mannikin and said "I want to show everyone my style" and posed there for a moment.

One of my foibles as a mother is that I get bored easily so I always want to move on. I convinced her that there was an even better toy store somewhere else. Not that I knew if there was but isn't there always a better toy store, somewhere else? Isn't there always a toy store better than the toy store you are in?

As we sought this better toy store, she was drawn to the most disturbing store imaginable. It was a 'tween' clothing store called 'Justice.' What the store had to do with Justice I'll never know.

One thing that I love about Chiquita is that she saunters. She sauntered in and said in this adult way she has of speaking sometimes: "Let's go in here. Not that I'm going to buy clothes or anything. Just to look."

Hanging from the ceiling were these flat screen TVs with videos of tween stars intermixed with truly bizarre commercials of tween girls in bathing suits. (The camera lingered on their bare stomachs in a way that made me shudder in horror.) Then there would be a kind of cartoon news story about the store itself. It was very 1984 in its way.

(God, there were TVs all throughout the mall. Is this a new development in mall design?)

A girl walked by, a tween who had been fully colonized by the store. She had on what I think are the style for tween girls--a flowery shirt, the jeans just so, a tank top under the flower shirt, lip gloss, her hair done. It was chilling. I looked at my little girl and wanted to cry. Would I lose her to such things? God, one more reason to never go to the suburbs. Or the mall.

Of course, I wore lip gloss in sixth grade. But my idea of a cool store was Woolworth's. I kid you not. I bought my lipgloss at Woolworth's. Oh, the innocence. Except, in fact, I usually stole my lipgloss from Woolworth's. But I innocently stole it.

I ran a shoplifting ring in the 6th grade. It was actually founded on quasi-Marxist principles. I think I didn't read the Communist Manifesto until the 7th grade but even before that, I thought it permissible to steal from any corporation. Hallmark was a particularly favorite target. I even stole lucite crosses from Hallmark. And I was a religious kid. My shoplifting ring/girl's mayhem club actually had a Bible study component.

The most heartbreaking thing about the tween store was the little display of stuffed animals. The cartoons were also heartbreaking. As if the tween girls were still allowed to buy and play with toys but the only toys that could be sanctioned must occur within the space licensed by Miley Cyrus. Kind of like those toy dogs they sold at Victoria's Secret. Something to love. Training in the accoutrements of sexual attraction but a little something to love in that sad, sad quest.

Chiquita is helpless in the face of a display of stuffed animals. And I am helpless because I can never get her away from those goddamn displays of stuffed animals. My consolation prize for not buying much is to let her play with toys wherever she sees them, risking the ire of managers all over town. For her, stores are not places where you go to buy things but places where you go to play with things.

We got a couple of fishes to play with. I told her my name was 'Blue Fish.'  She had a pink fish with pink undertones and silver metallic patterns.

So she says to blue fish 'You aren't only blue. You have some other colors.'

I was impressed by this, in my role as blue fish. If Pink Fish were hitting on Blue Fish, I realized, Blue Fish would probably start to like Pink Fish.

Then I decided this was a great moment to innoculate her from 'the neg.'

The neg' is a pickup technique where a man both insults and compliments an attractive woman. For example, "I like your haircut. Why do you wear it so short?" "Interesting shirt. What's with the buttons?" I'm no expert on the neg, but I think it has to be ambiguous and yet undermine the woman's sense of herself. It is supposed to be used on beautiful women. I'm not sure if it only works on them.

The neg is described in this book by a pickup artist named 'Mystery' who started some kind of pickup society for dorks who could not get women and then, through the techniques of neurolinguistic programming, found they could.

Neurolinguistic programming! I must confess, when I heard about the neg I briefly considered learning neurolinguistic programming in order to manipulate others and bend them to my will. But it has that whiff of chicanery and Scientology-like pseudoscience and this deterred me.

So this is how things went

A bit of 'Hi Pink Fish!' "Hi Blue Fish" ensued then

Me as mommy: What do you say when someone insults you?

Me as blue fish: Your tail is too big!

Chiquita as pink fish: No, your tail is too big!

Then I realize that this wasn't the neg. So I try a different approach.

Me as blue fish: You have great silver spots. But why are they so shiny?

I bring in a third fish, in order to test.

Spotted (non-jerk) fish: Hey, he just insulted you. Shouldn't you refuse to talk to him now?

Chiquita as pink fish: No, I really like him. He's nice.

Spotted fish: But you shouldn't talk to someone who implies your spots are too shiny.

Pink fish: It's you I don't like.

Me as mommy: No, now when someone tries to imply there is something wrong with you and that you should change who you are, you should avoid them.

Pink fish (to spotted fish): Stop picking on blue fish!

Me as mommy: I'm not being the spotted fish right now, I'm being the narrator.

Pink fish (did she say this dreamily or was I just projecting)?: I really, really like the blue fish.

Then the sharks came and the fish had to swim away. Except there weren't any sharks so we had to pretend that the stuffed birds were sharks.

Anyway, that experiment failed. My technique needs work.

Like all my days with Chiquita, I thought this was the most glorious day ever. I said "Did you have fun at the mall today with mommy?" She said "No, not SO much fun."

God, I work too much. I never get to see my own kid.

According to this person, Jane Austen knew about the neg.

Da Meta

I'm on Five Star Friday.

I just like the idea of linking to someone who is linking to me so that I link back to myself.

But I think I'll just link to the website.

I Know One Is Supposed To Apologize

I had a dream I was an accessory to murder. The problem with the dream is that I woke up utterly convinced that it had happened and had to get my husband to reassure me over and over that I couldn't have possibly murdered anyone.

I was so convincing that I had been an accessory to murder that my husband temporarily seemed confused and was not as reassuring as I needed him to be. I think for a minute I had him convinced that I had been involved in a murder.

Real life cause: In real life, there was a death of a family member I deeply loved. Cousins I hadn't seen for years came to the funeral. I drank a lot. I talked to them and complained about how this family member's child had essentially taken money from this person for years. It hurt because I did not know. I did not know that this child was bleeding his parent dry.

There's an absolutely heartbreaking part to this, to me. This person, the person who died, had been saying they wanted to visit their sister but they couldn't afford to. I had the idea of giving them a birthday present of some money but I did not get around to it yet and the sister died before the person could go see her. The person showed me all these things that had been saving to bring to the sister. So they never go to see their sister. I remember thinking at the time: Why were they suddenly poor? Why could they not afford the plane ticket. I hadn't known to offer them money because they had always had money.

But their child was a drug and gambling addict and took it all. This child is in their fifties.

At the wake, I drunkenly told this cousin the whole story. I knew there was something wrong with doing so. After all, the person who died would not have wanted me to do that.

Of course I wanted confirmation that what the child had done was wrong, oh so very, very wrong. But the cousin did not give me that. The cousin said that it was the person's money to dispose of and they would have given it away in any case.

Oh, shit. I'm now realizing what this dream was about. Oh, blogging. It's so revealing sometimes.

I haven't even told you the dream yet. In the dream, I was with this cousin and the cousin hit someone on the head with a blunt instrument.  Instead of going to the doctor, I got the brilliant idea that the problem was simply brain swelling. Let's open up his head! Cut off some of the skull, alleviate the pressure on the brain.

The person--whoever it was--died.

The dream was a memory of the murder. In the dream, I was simply remembering the murder. So when I woke up, I had this crazy feeling like I had remembered something that had actually happened.

This is the closest I've ever been to the experience of true madness. It was like knowing what it was to be truly mad (instead of the little bit of mad that I already am). The brain tricks you with the thought and the thought comes accompanied with the markers the brain gives it to distinguish the real. It is not real but you don't have the mental guideposts to know that.

I've always been afraid of going mad (given that I'm slightly mad) and this confirms the obvious--it would be horrible.

To be honest, this bit of madness is caused by lack of sleep and overwork. I'm so fucking sick of working all the time. I'm so tired from constant work and my fatigue is making me fall behind in my work which causes more fatigue as I try to catch up. I am a little bit insane already.

So the dream. Now I get it, perhaps. I wanted, in some unconscious way, to kill this person who had caused their parent all that pain. Is that right?

God, blogging anonymously sucks sometimes. I could tell this story better if I didn't have that hangup. Of course, if I wasn't hiding my identity, I wouldn't tell it at all.

Off The Grid

I think I'm going to do a little series on the people I google and whether I found them or not.

Later, I'm going to try and figure out why the hell I keep googling these people.

My motivation is a little mysterious to me. I MUST KNOW. WHAT HAS BECOME OF YOU?  EVEN THOUGH I NEVER WANT TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN. Why? Why must I know this?

One problem is that sometimes I cannot remember people's last names. This is true even of people I remain ardently curious about.

I get very attached to people. Later, I will write a post explaining how I don't like people. I don't like people and yet I become attached to them. (In this post, I will explain how I actually do have friends and once had many, many friends. Just so you don't think I'm a big loser. Not really liking people--this is surprisingly taboo, I have found. Don't put this in your personals ad, is all I'm saying.)

Actually, I do like people. I simply don't like being around them most of the time. Is that bad or something?

So person #1 that I googled for a number of years and could not definitively find I will call Gina.

I met Gina because she lived in the dorm room next to me in college. Gina was extremely beautiful and we became inseparable. In other words, Gina was extremely needy and  I was also one of those people who, at that time, was willing to nurture and soothe needy women.

Gina's desirability and our very, very close association became a bit of a problem. We sometimes slept in the same bed (Gina's idea). Every man in the entire school wanted to have sex with Gina. So they were constantly hitting on Gina. Then, Gina would start frantically searching for me. Gina would be at a party all the way across school and send these frantic messages to people. So I would be walking across campus and someone would randomly say "Gina is looking for you. She really needs to talk to you." Somehow, in my 18 year old confusion, I would think that this put a real demand on me to find Gina. I would arrive at the party and Gina would be in the center of some cluster of boys. Dumbass frat boys, often. They would be doing coke or some such thing and Gina would insist that they give me the free drugs they were giving her.

In other words, Gina made me her personal cock blocker. This engendered no little amount of resentment on the part of these boys, who were often remarkable assholes. (I admit, I do wonder what happened to all these boys. Some of them were such assholes. And also, stupid. Did they all grow up to be stupid assholes? Or is that just a phase they were in?)

Basically, the image of me was of the lesbian girl who was not as hot as Gina cockblocking their moves with my inexplicable lesbian hold over the delectable Gina.

Worse, Gina wouldn't let me leave. I would be forced to sit there for hours with her, with those boring stupid assholes, because she could not tear herself away from the attention and she insisted that I get high, like her. Not that I did, every time, but I was unfortunately very receptive to any substance that would fuck me up good back in those days.

Then Gina would leave with me. She would go home with me or take me to the taco truck and buy me quesadillas and we would stay up until dawn and then sleep in her twin bed.

The deeper part of my bond with Gina was our excessive use of LSD. We had some amazing trips together. And then an odd thing happened. Gina started to adopt my mannerisms, phrases and speech patterns. Also, my interests, anything I knew or cared about. One difficulty here was that Gina was better than me at being me. She was like an incredibly improved version of me, as if my brain had been downloaded into the world's most luscious fembot. And of course, I only looked like a pale version of her.

It was quite confusing, particularly since this was my freshman year and few people knew me. It seemed as if I were Gina's hanger-on. I was somewhat pretty. But I was not sexually alluring the way that Gina was. Gina was always very intrigued by anyone who was more interested in me than her. This was not an issue for me at the time, since I already disliked people and hated attention from them. (I naturally attracted attention somehow then--I was standoffish, had strange taste in clothes. Or maybe I only think this since I was so disturbed by any attention I got. So Gina was as good for me as a more powerful attractant I could hide behind as I was for her, someone to be a companion for her while she tended her flock of men.)

I was so unmoored from any sense of myself that I would wonder: Am I being Gina? Is she being me? It certainly felt that Gina was being me. All doubt was removed when Gina came to visit me in my home town and my friends were horrified at Gina's successful appropriation of my personality. This verified that I had not dramatically changed into Gina. Gina also hit on the boy who was in love with me. This also did not bother me as I did not particularly want anyone to be in love with me. But it did bother him and suggested a peculiarity about Gina's interest in me. She would go on and on about how amazing and brilliant and special I was. It was as if she was my ardent admirer and the form her admiration took was simply to have everything about me become something about her.

Later, Gina dropped out of school to follow the Grateful Dead. I saw her one more time after that. What had happened is that she had found a woman named Star and she had begun appropriating all of Star's personality. In fact, she started to believe she was Star. So she sought some kind of medical treatment and she may have been hospitalized for a time. When she was explaining that she had this problem of losing herself in other people, I did not mention that she had done that to me. I only realized that I had resented her more than I had known.

I never saw her again after that.

Here is a terrible part of the story: Sometime during the first semester, Gina was raped by a football player. He came over to get some kind of homework from her and raped her in her dorm room. He was never punished. I think, after he raped one more woman, he was required to leave campus and not return until the particular women had graduated. In fact, he was only one of several rapists on the campus who had this deal. They got to come back later, and rape more women but their current victims were supposedly spared their harm. I remember that one of them hostilely stalked me at a party and began insulting me but somehow my response did not attract his later rage. Some other woman--who I met later--was the victim that time.

This is a big part of why Gina dropped out of college. This may be the primary reason. I do not think it was the reason she appropriated other women's identity because I had met a friend of hers from high school early on and discovered that Gina had actually taken this woman's handwriting. They had the same handwriting and it was pretty clear to me why that was.

It is hard to remember but I worry now that I was not a good friend to Gina about the rape. If this had happened even a few years later, I would have raised the roof. I would have fought for Gina. But then, I was paralyzed and confused. Of course, I was on her side. But I did nothing for her.

God, I hate to think any girl on campus would have this same experience now and her friends would be so unknowing. I'd already been sexually assaulted by a stranger in my hometown (and  had escaped) and had not done anything about it. I had only told a random group of kids at school and they had just said something like 'Oh. Weird.' And I told no one else for years and years. I think that this was what women often thought (God forbid they still think) they should do when sexually assaulted--they should pretend it did not happen.

Of course, I wonder what the hell happened to these various predators. I can't google them. I don't remember their names.

Gina was off the grid for a long time. I did find mention of her on a Deadhead board. Some man, of course, talking about her beauty and whether anyone had ever seen her again.

I finally, after many google attempts, found someone I think is Gina. She's working as some kind of environmental liason in a county where a lot of former Deadheads live. I can imagine how things might have gone for her later--she must have kept in with the Deadheads. Back then, I did also, but primarily because they had the best acid and other drugs. I wonder if she is still smoking lots of weed. I imagine she must have gotten plump. She loved to eat.

I am so far from this world I lived in, the Gina world. It might as well have happened to someone else. Her email was available on the website I found through google. I will not contact her. I hope that she is happy though.

I am googlable, very easily googlable. With a picture even. SoGina can easily find out about me.

Pretentious

I was reading the post of this blogger woman who everyone is all SHE'S SO COOL! SHE'S JUST SO VERY COOL.

And I agree she does exude cool.

One of her complaints on her blog was about people who make references that other people don't get in jokes and then everyone has to run to wikipedia to get them.

And I was thinking: Hm. I wonder if that person is doing that on purpose and if it's so fair to hate on them like that.

I always had this fear that I would be pretentious or something and I would be one of those people who thought I was so hot with all the references and such. Also, that I would not be able to relate to normal people but would become one of those grad school freaky-deakys. From the outside it looks like people are pretending but from the inside, you are just around people all the time. It's kind of like being one of those people who plays Dungeons 'N Dragons all day and then forgets other people don't do that and don't understand your Dungeons 'N Dragons references.

But of course more difficult in some ways to gauge what the other people don't know because actually, most dumbass pretentious sounding things out of overeducated people's mouths are actually things about the world and once you have been around a bunch of people just like you for too long, you don't remember what other people know or don't know about the world.

Do I sound defensive?  It's not that I know every reference that everyone makes but of course then I say 'what is that?' or 'who is that?' and then I do know it.

I don't know why I'm writing this. I have such terrible regrets about this whole thing, really I do. The strange world I sequestered myself in, the insane amount of time I have to put in just to survive in it and the self-destructive behavior that the overwork and fear engenders that will probably cut my life short. But what are you going to do? Otherwise I would have been a lawyer. If I'd had it in me, I'd have gone for library science but that has its own pitfalls. Jokes about the Dewey Decimal systemand such.

Sticker Mom

Whatever I do, I can't say that I do it well exactly.

I'm doing absolutely everything by the seat of my pants at all times.

This goes back many years. I was the kid at school who forgot the Campbell's soup labels. Back in the day when kids had one pair of school shoes, I would lose my shoes. In fact, one reason we have too many pairs of shoes in this house is because we lose Chiquita's shoes. (We got most of these shoes for free, as hand me downs from a friend with a child a few years older than us. They must have much more crap than us because I cannot even process the donations sometimes. Thank goodness for them, though.)

I found one pair of shoes I lost. I found them in the summertime, months later, under the bushes. They were size 13, I remember. They were sort of dried up after some spring rains and the summer heat and I was crushed that they no longer fit. I still remember them. They were these kind of saddle shoes, but not white and black but dark brown and tan.

How they got under those bushes is anyone's guess.

I once divided people into coupon clippers and people who keep boxes in their kitchen, sometimes for years (PWKBITKSFY for short). I am a PWKBITKSFY.

We PWKBITKSFYs make people angry at times. We exude chaos and they fear our chaos. I secretly believe that those who freak out the most at chaotic types are  PWKBITKSFYs who are trying to become coupon clippers.

I try to embrace my chaotic tendencies as a kind of bohemianism. I try to prefer to be more Gertrude Stein than Edith Wharton. (Not that I don't love Edith Wharton.) I have to prefer this. I have come to see that I have no choice.

I am helpless to fight my naturally anarchic character but admittedly, I am aesthetically pleased by disorder. I saw a picture of Gertrude Stein's living room when I was young and thought I want that.

Sticker Mom is a mom at our child's school. When our kid was doing the occasional new school freak out and her kid was doing the occasional new school freak out she told us about the stickers. If her kid did not freak out, she would get stickers. We would stand there watching the kids leave and if our kid did a bit of a teary wave she would say tersely, 'those stickers are working great for us.' The stickers! She recommended the stickers to us for about a week or two. But then she must have noticed our kid's messy hair and our general dishevelment and gave up on us. Sticker Mom doesn't talk to us anymore.

I've begun looking for sticker moms and they are all over the place. And I've wondered: Do I have a problem with sticker moms? Is there any kind of reasonable critique a person can make of the sticker moms? Aren't sticker moms the backbone of America?

There are things that sticker moms just can't do though, and some of these things might be needed by the world.

One thing that sticker moms don't get is that we aren't deliberately trying to break their rules. We don't even understand their rules. There seem to be these basic principles by which they live which I cannot fathom. What are these principles? Where did they learn them?

What is the code? Where did they learn it?

I simply do not understand the fundamental principles of organization of material objects, one's daily life, time, dates. I do not understand how people live that way. Where do they learn this skill? How do they remember where their shoes are?

I must confess that it is not that being a sticker mom does not attract me at all. I once yearned to be a sticker mom and even tried to date a man who might become a sticker dad in the hope that this sort of thing wears off on you. It doesn't, though.

I admit that I do have certain rules, my own code. They are fluid abstract things like--notice when you are driven to do something by your ego and then be suspicious of that thing and of your own ego. I crave a simpler, sticker-driven code but I fear it is too late.

Hell!

Damn I think of funny things and then I forget them and write late at night when my mood is always dark and strange.

The other night I had a dream about what sends us to hell.

In the dream, God does not send you to hell. There's no judgment. You just get to pick the things you care about the most and you go wherever there are those things. In heaven, there's only love. In the other places, the hell places, there are all these desirable items--like beautiful architecture and nice swimming pools and hot girls.

The only problem is that there isn't any love in those places. So they are hell. But you picked them. The problem is that you get everything you want all the time and you forget how to love. You never get out of hell because your desires are so well satisfied that you are entirely occupied at all times. You cease seeking what is good.

I think this dream was caused by the combination of two things.

Reading an illustrated modernized version of Dante's Inferno that was very hilariously written and absurdly updated (with things like Jimmy Swaggart in hell). It was fascinating that certain 'public' sins were the ones that sent you to the worst place whereas the private failings were less serious. Sowers of discord are down at the very bottom whereas lust is one of the higher levels.

The second thing was this crazy rant to my husband that was probably caused by two hours of sleep and unfathomable levels of stress where I was talking about these people "who are lampreys clinging to their plastic reef of garbage until they lose their souls."

I've had other hell dreams. It is interesting to me that hell is often white and rather aesthetically appealing. In my dreams, hell is very minimalist. It's emptiness, nothingness, orderly and clean.  In at least one of these dreams, there was a neon sculpture. This was a teenage dream, when neon was somewhat cool. As if the devil has fashionable taste.

In the dreams, the devil sometimes doesn't always feel like I imagine evil to feel. Hell isn't run by decisions in some of the dreams but by forces. It felt like a magnet that pulls on whatever is inside you. Like a natural force, rather than a malevolent spirit. I have had dreams of a malevolent spirit and these were terrifying. But the natural force scares me just as much.

I hope I won't be tempted by mid-century modern furniture upon death. Or a 1963 Thunderbird ragtop and a cool rain on a road by the sea. I guess I better work on my desires.

N Is For Naughty

The week's letters are 'N' and 'W'. Chiquita has to find a picture of something that starts with N and something that starts with W.

--I can draw a picture of 'me.' 'Me' starts with 'm.'

--It's N. N as in Nancy. N as in nice or naughty.

--I can draw a picture of me being naughty. Or of other kids teaching me to be naughty.

--Like what?

--Breaking the house down and then setting it on fire! Killing my mother!

--Uh (thinking of the many visits to the school psychologist that might result). What about something a little less naughty? Like stealing cookies?

--Stealing cookies from the store!

--How about: Stealing cookies from the cookie jar? (Thinking: Stealing from stores. Still too anti-social.)

--Yeah, from the cookie jar in the store!

Moral (or question): Children are not natural innocents. The socialization process might be taking the anarchic violence out of them, not just preventing their getting it in the first place.