"Oh, the Danburrys! Big alums!"

In my current lifestyle, I not infrequently come into contact with people who are at that next level of wealth and connection -- the one where it goes beyond just having a comfortable income and having what you need in terms of consumer goods and the like: the level where they're not the ones going to the gala charity functions, and not organizing them, but being the whales that support them or the name that gets it done in the first place. But I think this is maybe where I, personally, top out -- me with my small-town Methodist pridefully-poor background, my scholarship-supported Ivy League education, etc.; I get glimpses of what happens behind those doors, and occasionally get vaguely invited into the lobby ... but I don't know how to walk through, nor, honestly, what I would want that for. Case in point: a family party Mr. Gleemonex and the kids and I went to on Saturday night. Fun party, love the hostess, but the place was chock full of the kind of people who are on the boards of stuff (i.e., a person more adept at and desirous of making that type of connection could've had a very productive evening), and I spent fully half of my time talking to two 20-something German au pairs. Oh well! They were funny and interesting -- who cares if they can't get me on some bullshit board.

And a third unrelated thing: It seems like I should be able to sing "Lyin' Eyes," but it's actually at some really strange pitch range for me and the breath control required is beyond my skill as a vocalist, even alone in the car. Weird.

Two Things, Unrelated to Each Other and Both Entirely Apropos of Nothing

1) I remember when I finally saw a twinset in real life. It was during college, early on, like probably freshman year. Some girl was wearing it/them in one of my Core classes. This girl looked like she would've been more at home at, like, SMU or Duke than at Columbia. And as my eye fell upon her, and stayed there -- skirt, sensible low heels, hair neatly arranged in a crisp smooth style, light makeup, subtle jewelry, at nine in the goddamn morning at college -- I realized that on her top half, she was wearing a thing I'd only ever read about: a twinset. It was a ... a sweater, over ... a sweater? It was a lovely blue, very fine gauge, beautiful material -- I have more or less stopped wearing sweaters myself because of the Mamie Van Doren effect and the fact that even the thin ones add about 23 pounds, visually, to my own top half, and for these reasons plus my entire lack of style I would never, ever, layer a sweater upon another sweater, no matter how fine the gauge. So I was impressed, and fascinated, and but almost laughed inappropriately-loudly from the unexpected revelation I had had right there in Lit Hum: THAT'S a twinset! Hot damn! 

2) Mr. Gleemonex and I had a date night a couple of weeks ago (we HAD to go see Dumb and Dumber To, the original is a thing with us), and on the way through the parking garage to the mall where the theater was, I was striding along with my Fast, Purposeful, 360-Degree Visual Awareness Radar, Don't-Rape-Me walk. Which is the way I walk in all such spaces -- parking garages/lots, city streets, endless Las Vegas hotel corridors, etc. This is the way I've done since at least my teenage years, as I suspect most women do, and I never even think about what I'm doing -- if I'm in a space I perceive as any more threatening or dangerous than a Barnes & Noble kids' section, that's how I'm ambulatin', son. And but so Mr. Gleemonex was like dragging on my arm, all "Slow down there, Run Lola Run, we're actually on time for once -- why you gotta be walking so fast?" (not his actual words). I slowed down, suddenly aware of my FP360DVARDRMW, and it was only later that I thought back on it and realized that he, Shatner bless 'im, doesn't walk like I do, because he is a man -- now, he's a GenX lefty feminist man, to be sure, and his walking behavior was as unconscious on his part as my walking behavior is on mine, but if the difference between the two styles doesn't illustrate what rape culture is, then I don't know what would: I perceive the potential for bodily personal threat everywhere (which is unfortunately not unreasonable), and he does not.

You have to learn how to take care of my things, Shelly.

Halloween post coming, but it was getting long (that's what she said) and I wanted to put this somewhere that is not Facebook where my mom will see it and offer some pitying, Jesus-based corrective that I did not ask for: 

I went to put on earrings on Friday night -- cute earrings, lightweight, but on the j-hook type of backing (as opposed to a post or a ring). I haven't worn earrings in ... hell, fff ...ive years? more? could my own wedding actually be the last time? surely not, the holes haven't grown over ... but I actually don't remember when it was. Now, back in high school and jr. high, wearing crazy earrings was My Thing. I had these great long fringy ones, some gigantic fake-jewel ones, root-vegetable ones, all kinds of shit. But I just straight-up haven't bothered in forever. And but so: Friday night, I was like, these Laura Palmer senior portrait earrings are hilaaaaarious, so I put them on -- and after about twelve seconds, I couldn't stand the swinging weight of them -- COULD. NOT. FUCKING. STAND IT. It felt like I had wire coat hangers stuck through my ear-holes, with coats ON the hangers, and I could already feel my too-hi-toned-milady, allergic-to-everything-but-24K-gold-or-sterling-silver earholes fiercely rejecting the lo-class metal of the hooks (I'd forgotten about that, dammit), and I had to take them out with a quickness and apply hydrogen peroxide, stat, to stop them getting seriously infected (again). Boooo.

That, and: Don't work the perfume counter at Horne's department store if you don't want to end up pimped out at One-Eyed Jack's.

Two of the Many Things Teenage Me Actually Learned from Twin Peaks

1) Older people -- like, way over 22 -- could and did have sex. Even with each other. I realize this makes me sound like an idiot, but I was a very sheltered kid with typical unexamined childish ideas about sexuality, such as that, for example, one's parents had had sex exactly the same number of times as the number of children they produced together, and no longer had sexual thoughts, much less acted on them. But here were Ben Horne and Catherine Martell, gettin' it on all afternoon; here were Norma Jennings and Ed Hurley, unable to keep their hands off of each other; here were Donna's parents clearly still sexual even through they were old and the mom was in a wheelchair (that actress, btw? is Zooey Deschanel's mom). MIND BLOWN. Worlds expanding.

2) Even pretty people can be in abusive relationships. Again: Idiot. But I was accustomed, by some cultural osmosis or other, to domestic violence being seen as sort of a trailer-park thing that happened to the ugly and generally unfortunate. Twin Peaks went right for it, though -- Donna's BF at the beginning of the show (lovely young Donna, whose family life is as warm and supportive and loving as TV families ever get) is a major dick who orders her around and even lays hands on her (though he doesn't hit her), and then of course you see Shelly Johnson's incredibly awful marriage and home life -- they never go into it exactly how she hooked up with Leo, but she's this breathtakingly beautiful, capable girl who no doubt married a guy she thought was good-looking and had money, and then some months or years later, you end up cowering in his unfinished house while he prepares to beat the shit out of you with a piece of soap stuffed into the toe of a tube sock.

This is what a feminist looks like

So the kids're into a new-to-them show, a bland and ultra-formulaic computer-animated thing apparently written by Google scriptbots, called Paw Patrol. It stars six "pups" -- as in, puppies -- and one teenage (?) boy who is their ... idk, their minder? Scout leader? Whatever, he's the one who receives the incoming distress calls of various types at HQ, comes up with a plan, and gives the pups their orders, after which the day is, inevitably, saved (often, this involves apps, like on an iPad -- it's kind of confusing). There's a Moustache Pete type character (who does not have an Italian accent), and the town's mayor is a black woman, so -- I guess there's diversity kind of? Anyway, all the pups have cute short sassy names (e.g. Rocky -- I'm pretty sure Rocky is one of them) and some type of special skill with equipment to match, all of which are called into action -- COLLABORATIVE action -- with each mission. Aside from its general kiddie-show banality, my main beef with it was that there's just one female pup. Really, Paw Patrol? Grrrr.

But so then one night at dinner, Kid Gleemonex, age six, randomly muses, "I love Paw Patrol. But only one of the pups is a girl."

I say, "Yeah -- you noticed that too, huh?"

"Uh-huh," she says, with champion-level eyebrow. Then, sunnily and with an air of utter conviction: "But it's OK. She can fly."

Oh, yew've had PLENNY a honeymoons -- ya have one every time ya meet a boy!

Men I Have, at Various Points of My Life, Been Certain I Would Marry: A Partial List

--Kevin Bacon (1984-85)
--Matthew Sweet (1990-93)
--Andre Agassi (1988-91)
--Charlie Sheen (1989-92)
--Christian Slater (1989-91*)
--Michael Jackson (1983-86)
--George Harrison (1987-89)
--David Bowie (1986-88)
--this guy Tim that was my mom's friend and almost certainly gay as a tangerine (1980-90)

-----------------------------------------
*Entry appears solely because of stuff people wrote in my yearbooks. I do not remember feeling this way about him at all. But apparently I did, for awhile? 

Look away, Mr. Gleemonex. Just ... look away. You don't wanna see this.

31/40

So yesterday, because I am a grown-ass woman who can eat whatever I want, I had for my lunch a room-temperature (and thus properly-textured) half-round of the Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, which is the most delicious cheese in the entire universe. I smeared big honkin' scoops of it on these mini croccanti crackers from Whole Foods (which by the bye is where I got the cheese, I could crawl into that cheese case and live the rest of my life in it quite happily), and in between I ate slices of the most delicious honeycrisp apple for a palate cleanser plus also it (the apple) was, as I said, delicious, and alongside it all I drank two cups of fantastic super-dark extra-strong coffee with all of the sugars and all of the half-and-halfs. It was wonderful, and I was not hungry again until my actual dinnertime -- which is to say that, lunchwise, though probably not snackwise on account of logistics, also it beats eating Pirate's Booty straight out the bag over the sink. I'd sell a patella for a round of that fucking Mt. Tam. Who needs a patella, really? Just cut an air-hockey puck to the right size and stitch it up.

change the world! hahahahahaaa oh shit lollllllll

29/40

Stolen from -- I mean, inspired by -- the brilliant Me At 13: This is the room, c. 1989, of someone who might be a bit confused about things, the room of a person who is still at the stage of accumulating all of the influences and has yet to even begin the process of culling, of figuring out who she really is and swimming up out of the enormous pile of Maybe I Am.

And also: LAMBORGHINI DIABLO.

"Don't ever call me a have-not."

19/40

So among the things I learned in college is that there is, in fact, an us and a them. I am speaking specifically of the us/them of the moneyed and the non-moneyed.

Growing up, I thought that rich people just ... had more money than my family did. I had rich cousins (oil company); we happily took their hand-me-downs, which since they came from Neiman-Marcus usually and in great quantity, were awesome, and swam in their pool all summer long. There was the "Smith" family, whose daughter was in my class and whom I was pretty tight with, off and on, throughout school; they owned a few dozen fast-food restaurants, and therefore had a huge property north of town with what I now recognize as stupid new-money Texas kind of gewgaws on it like semi-exotic animals (ostriches, emus, a kangaroo), a video game room with full-size game parlor stand-up consoles (I remember Galaga, Q-Bert and a Ms. Pac-Man, but there were at least 8 in there),  fugly gold-plated fixtures in all the bathrooms, etc. This family is responsible for a lot of my Rich Knowledge, e.g. how to ski (they took five of us girls to New Mexico on a private jet in fifth grade, and paid for ski rentals and a week of private lessons) and what the inside of Dallas' Petroleum Club looks like.

But until college -- specifically, Columbia, an Ivy which is in the middle of New York Fucking City -- I didn't really get that there were entire WORLDS of money and family and privilege that I would never ever be a part of. I recall this one party, about two weeks into freshman year, at which things became crystal clear. My friend Tom and I decided to go to a "frat" party at this coed place -- St. Someonescock, I think, which was open to new membership -- for the free booze (rumored to be champagne). Tom is a middle-class Korean-American kid from suburban New Jersey; I am a scholarship hick from Hickburg. We dress up -- him in whatever he wore to, like, bar mitzvahs and such, me in a party dress of some sort from Dillards -- and hit the scene. It's slightly off-campus, like two blocks over, near the river, and once we find it, there is in fact Champagne (real stuff, Franch), which we drink some of, quickly, before someone detects a disturbance in the Force and comes to take it out of our rough, common hands. We never even had to speak the words aloud -- we both just somehow came to know that these were not our people, nor were we theirs. These kids -- Christ, they looked like adults, and had these beautiful well-made understated clothes on, with perfect imperfect hair, and the loveliest teeth and shoes -- they had great manners, they welcomed us warmly, they invited us to look around, asked us what we were studying and where we'd gone to school and so forth, and I can't speak for Tom's internal process, but I was inwardly panicking and feeling like a giant, giant asshole, ever larger, hicky-er and poorer by the moment. You can't say "Cowburg High School, in Cowburg, Texass" in response to "Where did you go to school?" when it comes out of that kind of person's mouth, you know? It was in those moments, that shattering half-hour, that I began to understand what lay behind a question like that, and why someone would ask it, and how an event like this, which was technically "open" because they wanted to maintain good standing with the college, was in reality as closed a circle as ever there could be in human interaction. It was deeply weird and unnerving -- not shaming, I've never been all that shame-able in terms of, like, one's story of origin -- but a real wowzer of an eye-opener, the type we experience maybe a handful of times in life.

If it happened today -- and various loops of my personal social Venn diagrammatics could put me in a place like that again, theoretically -- I'd be fine with it. I understand that our worlds are different, and that's all right, which I think is a great boon of my age and experience. So, long way of saying: Being 40 is not a bad thing.

It's turned us into a nation of people who say stuff like "open concept," as if that's even a thing.

These days, whenever I'm mainlining HGTV (which is often. like, really often. shamefully often.), I generally prefer the home-renovation shows (Property Brothers, the weirdly addictive Flip or Flop*), but I still see a fair amount of House Hunters and its various Law & Order-style spinoffs (HH International, HH Renovations, etc.).

And my favorite part of every House Hunters, always, is when one of the twerpy newlyweds realizes what a world-class pain in the ass their partner is. You can actually see why 50 percent of marriages end in divorce: It's because somebody married someone who, when they're both standing in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom (WITH a camera crew), cannot stop themselves making that stupid fucking joke that every nimrod makes about "Haha ok so this is great but where does YOUR stuff go?"

-----------------------------------
*Which Mr. Gleemonex and I are both hoping someday shows a complete, total flameout of a flip -- where Tarek & Christina lose their entire investment and more, ending up selling it for like twelve hundred bucks. 

Passive incompetence is one thing, but aggressive Nazi hostility on the corporate level is something else again.

Well, THAT was a needlessly dramatic cliffhanger disappearance, wasn't it? Ha! I'm telling you guys, the hardest thing to do is to find time to write when Kid Gleemonex isn't in school ... anyway. To continue. 

That Time I Met One of Satan's Many Manifestations On Earth: Part Two of Two

So the airport was the pokiest little goddamn thing (I actually called it "hilarious" in one of my interviews -- oopsie), and not in a fun way -- just in a bare-bones, beige 80s ehh whatever this is good enough for the likes of you kind of way. I stepped out of there into, like, an oven. A hot, wet oven. Started sweating immediately, lugging my little rolly bag out across seven miles of asphalt to get my rental car. Then with the AC on full blast, I followed the printed directions to the hotel. I was expecting some sort of segue into a town-like situation, but this was the middle of nowhere, and the trees and grass and whatnot looked a lot like the surrounds of Cowburg, Texass, where I'm from, so that was nice. I drove along two-lane country roads for awhile before finally finding signs of life -- the places you could just tell were the Good (aka white) Neighborhoods (how you know: They had vaguely British-sounding names, like The Duckston Manors At Whingely Wood). Then, closer in, the usual smaller houses, schools, fast-food joints. Got to the hotel, unloaded all my junk and headed back out for food -- nothing but chains available in any direction (except one intriguing-looking smokehouse joint whose sign piously announced outside that it's "Always closed on Sundays!" because Jesus).

So the next morning, I dress in what would be the thing to wear to an interview at my current place of employment -- a sort of dressy casual, brand-appropriate dark skinny jeans, cute flats (pregnant, couldn't deal with heels), cowl-neck shell top and jacket. I even wore makeup, bought in desperation at The Walmart in town Sunday night (because it's been so long since I wore makeup that I actually could not find any of mine in my house before I left). Bonus, what I'm wearing hides my thickened middle.

First interview of seven is at 7:45 in the goddamned morning (who DOES that?). I get up early -- way early, cause I'm on California time, and sofa king tired I almost bag the whole thing right there. Follow directions ... and twice drive right past the goddamned global headquarters of the corporation that "employs" more people than any other entity on planet Earth except the fucking CHINESE ARMY.* I'm expecting something big, distinctive; what it is is, a low three-story red brick bunker, almost windowless,** with only one small sign indicating what evil lies within.

I go inside, check in and get an ID photo (my kid found it the other day -- I could not possibly look more ghoulish, it's hilarious). Then I sit down and wait in what looks a lot like my junior high's east hallway -- vinyl flooring, fluorescent lighting -- with rows of cheap plastic stackable chairs all facing the same way like at the DMV or county court, "History of Walmart" photos all over the walls, and several televisions blaring -- all tuned to Fox TV. My sense of being dangerously, delusionally out of place increases.

The recruiter gal shows up, and she's as nice as she was on the phone. Her face is on and she appears not to notice Fox TV's histrionics as we chat about how my flights were and how hot it is already. She takes me through into the main building and y'all. Y'ALL.

OK, maybe it's worse for me because the building where I currently work -- in the global HQ of a specialty fashion retailer, in San Francisco -- is so lovely: all huge airy spaces, extremely expensive and famous modern art all over the place, marble and glass and hushed pleasantness, views from all 15 floors of the bay and the city. But I think by any standards, this place is fucking TERRIBLE.

It's a windowless, tube-lit acoustic-tile-ceilinged hangar divided into a warren of cubicles, separated by 7-foot-high walls covered in that awful material that's like a Delta airplane carpet from 1979, all of it a terrible blue that is indescribably disheartening -- it's not even that sad blue the Russians used to use; it's worse. It's like -- Morale-Crusher Blueisssh. Signs (Accounting, Communications, Cafeteria, Department of Paying Women Less Than Men, etc.) hang from the ceiling on chains -- plastic rectangles with the words pressed on them in white, the cheapest crappiest signage it would ever be possible to find in a graphic designer's worst PCP-laced nightmare. And the fucking TVs blaring Fox news were at every "lounge" area all over the goddamned place -- truly amazing cultural programming, inescapable like Orwell's telescreens, teaching everyone how to be goodthinkful and be doubleplusgood workers, I guess. It really set my nerves on edge in the worst way.

So. My first interview is with yet another HR screener, who informs me that actually they want about 25% of time here in Bentonville, and I'm like yeahhhh well we'll see about that, and she says that for a time she actually commuted like that from somewhere else (Chicago?), and it was "kind of nice, because although I missed my family, it was me-time." Mkay. Then I finally meet my direct manager -- a young woman about my age, whom I really hit it off with. We had a great talk, I had great answers to all her questions, a few ideas, some good questions of my own. I'm thinking this one is a winner.

I am escorted by HR Greeter Gal and a clearly junior HR Trainee Gal to some guy who has his own office (exactly like the cubes, but with a door and a ceiling, and still no window). He has some Yankees paraphernalia scattered around, so in the "getting to know you" bit at the end, I work in my own Yankee fandom, mentioning that I got into them in the early 90s when they were awful, and blowin' his mind with my knowledge of players and stats and whatnot. Another winner.

My minders take me to two more people, who are kind of a blur to me, but whom I remember also seemed to like me. Then they escort me -- you notice, I'm being escorted everywhere? Partly because of the Brazil-style warren of utter confusion, and partly because Walmart's corporate ethos seems to include the proviso that everyone is a potential criminal -- to lunch with the lady who would be my grandboss, a woman about 60 whose dress and manner remind one a little of Ann Richards. She's great, and but I can quickly tell that she brooks no nonsense -- as ever, but particularly contrasted with the everlasting roundabout shitshow of my current work environment, I have no problem with that, and could really see working well with her. She sits down first, though, and is the only one of my interviewers whom I catch getting a good look at my midsection -- and as a mother of four, I know she knows and then she knows that I know she knows. Ehhh, well.

But about this lunch -- in the cafeteria, which every one of my interviewers has mentioned as a great boon, a terrific perk of employment: It is a for real, straight up cafeteria, so much like the one in my junior high that I almost have a PTSD episode, wondering where to park my Dooney & Bourke purse before I get in the food line to make sure I get a seat with at least a second-tier group. Long cheap formica-topped picnic tables, fluorescent lighting, industrial tile floor, molded plastic chairs with metal feet. There are several stations -- grill area, salads, sandwiches, etc. But they're all kind of lame early 90s airport type food -- you can tell everything is premade and shipped in, frozen; the salad bar is like the one at K-Bob's where I worked in high school (iceberg lettuce, baco-bits, shredded cheddar, ranch and Thousand Island dressings). And again, maybe it's worse for me because of what I'm used to -- a cafe with a large landscaped terrace on the seventh floor, flooded with natural light, all blond wood and marble and little clusters of wooden tables, with a menu that has to compete with the offerings outside the building in one of the biggest foodie cities in the world; everything's organic, locally-sourced, seasonal, yada yada, and made by culinary school grads and chefs who take their game very, very seriously.

Plus, I hate eating in front of people like that -- where I'm supposed to talk and eat and there's a judgment component, you know what I mean? Also I was FUCKING STARVING, because of the baby and missing my usual second and third breakfasts due to interviews, so I was using all my self-control not to just cram that stupid ham sandwich in my face-hole like it was the last piece of food on New Caprica.

So after that, my minders took me to one more person, whom I do not remember at all, then fail to deliver me to Lucky #7 (the three of us wandered the rat maze of two different floors for nearly half an hour while they try to track down whoever it is, and finally I'm like, ladies: I gotta make like a tree and get outta here). I bail, with many thanks, and drive to that podunk airport like I'm catching the last chopper out of Saigon. My flight is delayed, as is the next one (if I'd've known I'd be at DFW for four and a half goddamned hours I'd've called my family to meet up for some Flamin' Nachos at Frontera Grill or whatever in Terminal D).

And all this -- the late flights, the people who just sat there and let a pregnant gal hoist her own bag into the overhead, the rubbery chicken at the airport TGI Fucknuts that almost made me puke, the weepy phone call to Mr. Gleemonex about the delays and how I would miss putting Kid Gleemonex to bed, the exhaustion, my extremely dangerous falling-asleep, post-midnight 1.5-hour drive home from SFO -- ALL OF THIS I laid squarely at the feet of Walmart as its particular and purposeful fault.

The lesson I learned was that no matter how much they're paying, it's not worth it to work somewhere so deeply, terribly morally wrong and against my own principles. Also I learned that environment can and does reflect and reinforce thought and behavior.

I had danced with the Devil, and felt lucky to have survived it.

------------------------------------
*This is the factual truth.
**Hunter S Thompson describes a hotel a lot like this in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 -- run by penny-pinching anhedonic Germans, with empty mini-bars and every view a wasteland of tarpaper roofs and dirty air vents.

Mommy, what's a "rough men" that's in the camps?

Further adventures ...

A Few More of the Conversations Occasioned By Reading the Little House Books, In Order, With My Five-Year-Old Daughter in the Year 2013

--The creative bedtime-routine evasion one: 
Me: Hon, it's time to brush your teeth and go potty.
Kid Gleemonex: After I finish my chores, Mommy -- I hafta put my horse on its picket line. [returns to carefully tying length of embroidery thread around a drinking straw stuck deep into the pile of the carpet; the other end is around the neck of Goldie the stuffed unicorn]

--The one about predetermined gender roles: 
--KG: Why can't Laura go with Pa out to the field?
--Me: Well, because she's a girl -- back then, if you were a girl, you did all the work in the house, and if you were a boy, you went out to the fields, and did the hunting, and all that stuff.
--KG, with all the reasonableness of a Montessori-schooled Californian child in 2013: But a boy could learn to sew. He might like to sew. And everybody who wants to can cook, and if a boy wants to wear a dress he can, and --
--Me: I know, baby -- that's how it is now, but in Laura's time, the rule was, boys did the outside stuff, and girls did the inside stuff. Nobody had a choice, and not many people really thought about it.
--KG, declaratively, flatly, with narrowed eyes: I want to learn to sew. And I want to go out to the garden and help my Daddy. And [Danger Baby] can cook. [sudden tone shift, as is her wont] Danger Baby is a poop-butt! He's a butthead! Mommy, Danger Baby is a poopy-butthead butt-poop-face! [extended giggling fit]

--One of the many about guns and animals:
--KG: Why does Pa always take his gun with him when he goes out?
--Me: In case he finds some game to shoot for them to eat, or if he runs into danger.
--KG: Like bears or wolfs or panthers?
--Me: Yeah.
--KG: And if he sees an animal that would be good to eat, he can shoot it and then they will eat it!
--Me: Yeah, they don't have grocery stores, so if they want to eat any protein, that's pretty much the only way they'll get it.
--KG: But my daddy doesn't take a gun with him. What if there are bears when Daddy goes running?
--Me [stupidly, because we have gone down this road before, many times]: There aren't any bears here, not anymore --
--KG, morally outraged: Because BAD PEOPLE went and shot ALL THE BEARS just because they were big and scary and but they weren't even doing anything to the people and now there AREN'T ANY BEARS ANYMORE!
[fifteen-minute digression on how sad it is that all the bears around here are gone, and how we understand that the point of guns was different once upon a time than now and how we wish people weren't such ignorant aggressive assholes]
--KG, with conviction: Guns are the baddest. I would take all the guns in all the whole seven continents and put them in a hole and cover them up and pour concrete on the hole and nobody can ever shoot any animals or people anymore.
--Me: Yeah -- me too, baby. Me too. [hugs her tight]


Bonus Feature: My Image and Search History, Chronicling My Attempts to Provide Visual Aids to My Explanations of Certain Antiquated or Unfamiliar Objects and Concepts Detailed in the Books

--corset
--1870s corset
--1870s corset hoop skirts
--covered wagon
--prairie grasses
--where is the prairie
--thresher
--bullwhip
--oxen
--oat shocks
--how to make butter
--panther
--Sioux
--Osage
--sod
--firebreak
--calico
--how maple sugar is made
--what is tree sap

Take a look, it's in a book

Right now, we're in the middle of By the Shores of Silver Lake. 

A Few of the Conversations Occasioned By* Reading the Little House Books, In Order, With My Five-Year-Old Daughter in the Year 2013

--The one about Jack dying: 
Me: Pets ...[choking sobs, tear-swabbing] ... don't live as long as people so ... [honking nose-blow] ... they -- they die [more sobbing] ... and Jack was a good dog ... and ... oh honey, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous [laughing through FLOODS of tears], I'm crying about s-s-omebody else's dead dog from a hundred and fifty years ago! [weeping, nose-blowing, furious tear-mopping]
Kid Gleemonex [wrinkling brow, reasonably, dry-eyed, though possibly worried about my sanity]: But Mommy, Jack was old. He died and went to Kevin, just like your Daddy did.

--The many about how much more was expected of children back then vs. now: 
Major topics of emphasis have included: Mary and Laura taking the family's cow (a huge animal that could trample them to death if it took a notion) to meet the herd each morning; the fact that children did chores, and it was a hell of a lot more than taking their own plates to the kitchen after meals; sitting still and quiet in church; why don't we go to church Mommy; they woke up everybody, all the kids, to work in the nighttime? Won't Almanzo be grumpy and get a lot of time-outs the next day because he's tired?

--The one about Mary going blind: 
KG, extremely alarmed: BLIND? You mean she can't see anything?
Me: No, sweetheart -- she got sick and it made her blind, and that means she can never see anything anym --
KG, outraged: She has to get un-blind! She has to get better. How can she see anything if she's BLIND?
Me: [Fifteen minutes on how blind people adapt to living in the sighted world, with digressions on the topics of seeing-eye dogs, causes of blindness, and the ways in which disabled people were viewed in "prairie times" vs. how they are viewed today]
KG: So can she see again in the next book?

--The one about Santa Claus being unable to cross the Verdigris River: 
KG: But Santa Claus's reindeer can fly! Why wouldn't he be able to get across a river?
Me: ... uh ... they, ahh ... didn't have any snow and ...
KG: Mommy, we don't have any snow. Santa Claus came to us!
Me: ... um ...
KG: Maybe Mary and Laura and baby Carrie weren't good girls. Is that why -- THAT'S why Santa wouldn't come.
Me: Yep! Mighta been. Anyway let's keep reading, OK?

--The one about what a flaming racist Ma is: 
KG: Why doesn't Ma like Indians? My teacher, Ms. Varsha, is an Indian -- she's from India. It takes twenty hours to get there on an airplane.
Me: [Solid half-hour on "not that kind of Indian, the kind of Indian so called because Christopher Columbus was a dummy," and on the racist colonialist mindset of the times which held that non-white people of all kinds but particularly the ones who happened to occupy the land "we," aka settlers/colonists, wanted to live on were "savages," and how fear of them was not necessarily misplaced -- they DID kill settlers -- but was not exactly justified either because damn it we were fucking stealing their land and killing THEM off, so what would you have them do]
KG: Ma was not being nice to Indians. But I bet if she met Ms. Varsha she would be nice to her. Or maybe not nice, because Ma is not very nice. To Indians I mean.


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*"Occasioned by" -- is that a thing? It sounded normal when it popped into my head when I wrote it, but the more I look at it, the more it looks like bizspeak verbing or something that does not mean what I think it means ... but hell, I'm leaving it. You know what I fucking mean. 

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.

Fourth in a series of four. 

Things About and Around My College Transcript: 1995 - 1996

--So many of my favorite classes were this year! Suburbia and Its Culture, Film Censorship in America, The U.S. During the 1960s, The American Revolution, Italian I (easy A! love this language!), and my #1 favorite: History of the City of New York, taught by one of the greatest professors ever, Kenneth T. Jackson. God, that was a great class -- I wish I could take it over and over. The marquee event of it was the annual all-night bike ride throughout the city, with some 250 of us led by Professor Jackson starting on campus at 9:00 p.m., riding all over the damn place, stopping for a pub breakfast at 4:00 in the morning, swinging by the Fulton Fish Market, and finishing by crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn.

--Annnnd also two of the worst: Laboratory in Screenwriting, and Senior Project: Screenwriting. OMFG these were terrible. My screenplay was fucking horrifyingly bad -- so bad that I wouldn't even read it at Cringe, because even now, seventeen years after I turned it in at the prof's office and went straight back to my room to smoke out and watch Dazed and Confused again to get it off my mind, I'd have a brain aneurism and die of shame.

--Mr. Gleemonex and I shared my eensy tiny single dorm room this year (he raaather unofficially, heh). He was working a job that was a very good learning experience and a "name" to go on his resume, but which paid a very studenty wage, so we shacked up. Mr. Gleemonex still had his student ID from the same dorm from the year before, making the whole thing relatively easy to manage. Side bonus: Total parental rebellion on my part. Ma and Pa Gleemonex would have shat twice and died if they knew. To this day, I think Ma Gleemonex prefers not to know. 

--This is also the year we met and bonded for life with the Drink Nazi, aka the Hedonist, aka Our Most Beloved Jew, aka The Kid/The Freshman. The seniors had all the singles in this dorm, and the doubles were filled with freshmen. This guy's roommate was an utter dud, so being a social guy in general, the Kid was more often out of his room than in it, and became well-known on our floor. He stopped in to my room in search of a microwave for his Hot Pockets once, and the rest is history (history that involves a LOT of weed, a ton of booze, the best snacks ever when we were smoking up together [except that one time he brought matzoh crackers which WHAT. THE. FUCK. where is the Ben & Jerry's], making snow angels in the middle of Broadway around 2:00 a.m. one quiet still new-snowy night after tumbling out of an extremely loud campus bar, a lot of the deep philosophical conversations that you have all the time when you're a freshman and have mostly abandoned by the time you're a senior, etc.).

--So, a lot of weirdness, a lot of good times, a lot of graduation-related agita* looming, some of the funnest parts of the whole four years -- and I finished with another semester on the Dean's List and a 3.6 cumulative GPA. College, y'all.

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*O dumpster-diving christ I cannot even BEGIN to tell you how stressful it was to have my family there for graduation -- my mom quitting a 30-year pack-a-day smoking habit & going through menopause, my dad recently fallen off the wagon mit force, my sibs not in good places in their own lives, general what-next angst, no job or school prospects lined up, no fucking money AT ALL, weight at an all-time high because of the weed munchies and a diet consisting mostly of SunBolt and Cheetos .... yikes. That shit makes seventh grade look awesome by comparison. 

Plus someday it's going to AMAZE you how thoroughly well you remember all the lyrics of late '80s/early '90s Aerosmith, and you'll wish with heretofore unknown intensity that you had that brainspace free now.

And While I'm Thinking About It, Teenage Me (Not That I Would've Listened to Old-Ass Me):

You have to stop writing quotes all over stuff from songs you've never heard, books you've never read, and philosophies you don't understand. I'm serious, stop it. Instances of this were legion, but I (blessedly) can't remember them all; however, here are some specifics:

--Bruce Springsteen songs. The lyrics of "Born to Run" are pretty great; they speak to the teenage heart ("no one in this shithole gets me, and someday I'm hittin' the road with the One who does," basically). But OMG when you actually hear this song, some ten, fifteen years hence? You are not gonna BELIEVE what it sounds like. It sounds NOTHING like what you think in your head. You're going to feel like a dummy when you realize that. Although it's not anywhere near the cringeworthiness of this next one:

--Ayn Rand. I cannot even. What the fuck. You think it makes you ultra-cool, like some kind of teenage iconoclast, to scribble upon your geometry folder, "I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life." Where did you even get that from? Jesus. You and this fuckin guy and every "got mine, fuck you if you can't get yours" douchebro on the planet. 

--Communism. You actually do not understand what this is, as evidenced by your simultaneous adoption of hippie style, careful lettering of "END COMMUNISM" on a collage poster you made of a whole bunch of cool '60s stuff, and arguing with the stupid chucklefuck of a Government teacher* that "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is truly the only valid structure for a Christian society. Go to the library, read up -- no skimming to sound smart this time, OK?

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*Truly, sincerely, the man was a stupid chucklefuck and a complete asshole besides. I fucking still hate that guy. 

All that you can do is watch them play

Yesterday in San Francisco proper, following a divine massage at a spa (gift card I've had since January 2011) and a faaantastic non-chain-restaurant lunch, during which I sat blessedly alone and read two entire New Yorker magazines -- o heaven -- I was doing some wandering around, and on the way to the Powell St. station to begin the long journey back to the ass-end of the Silicon Valley, I found myself  taking a razzoo through Forever 21. 

Now, this is a store that I hate for a lot of reasons -- I haven't been in one in five years at least, because A) believe you me, I am a lot more than 21, B) the very idea of wanting to be Forever 21 is repugnant to me, C) "fast fashion" is cheap, wasteful and built via the bloodied and harassed fingers of the lowest-paid workers in the garment industry at the worst environmental offending factories of same, D) the founding family of the company is a bunch of evangelicals who print bible verses on their bags, and E) the things they sell are awful and the store is a mess. 

But I had like ten minutes to kill, so. 

And y'all ... it is all still true. Forever 21 is like a big, cheap, badly-organized costume shop targeted to your next 80s/90s party. They were playing Blur ("There's No Other Way"). I felt old, and strange, and like I'd taken a weird tumble in the fucked-up wayback machine, ending up in a combination Claire's/Express/Limited/Wet Seal/Slutty Laura Ashley mashup store from the mythical year 199119891994. It was ... disorienting. I did not last long. I am quits with that place, for all time. 

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On another note: San Francisco, goddamn you. You're super pretty and there is good stuff all around you, but you will always be a toy city, not a real city, and you want to know why? You made me (and six hundred other people) wait 27 minutes for a fucking N train, at a transit hub, on a Monday morning during rush hour, for NO REASON AT ALL. Your transit sucks NYC's smelly cocknballs with an extra lick to the taint, and the worst part of it is, you don't even realize that this is what's wrong with you. Plus also your restaurants close at 9:00 p.m. TOY CITY. 

I mean, minus the hookers and assholery.

If House had existed back in the day when I was in jr. high and high school, my crush would've been on this one: 

The soft, pretty one with the floppy blond hair and the ozzie accent. Nonthreatening, vaguely exotic, very Elwes. 

But it wouldn't have taken me long to get to this one: 

Because Dead Poets Society. And but then, I'd've ended up here: 

As you do. As one does. Sorta like how your Beatle crushes start with Paul, take a little jaunt over to Ringo, and then eventually fix permanently upon John or George. 

What nice underclothes you both have.

I need to axe you guys a very serious question: What do you do with the clothes that aren't dirty and aren't exactly clean? Like you wore them once, maybe twice, briefly & didn't sweat in them?

I mean -- you can't re-hang/re-drawer them. They're not -- freshly clean. You don't want to deceive yourself that they're ready for prime time.

But you can't toss them in the laundry. PROFLIGACY!

And they look fucking awful in a pile at the foot of the bed (not to mention that this is apparently an arachnid re-spawn point or something, or IT COULD BE), or on that chair over in the corner -- it's the kind of clutter that makes my face hurt to look at. So slovenly. But those clothes are (mostly, kind of) clean, dammit!

Help. Please.

Remember the one with Charlie Sheen on the cover, waist-deep in a swimming pool, and in the article it became clear he was kind of a dick?

Oh, Sassy!!!

Scans! of the actual pages and covers! The Internets have finally invented a wayback machine that works!

God you guys, this new tumblr is KILLING me. Anybody who wants to know what the little basic nuggets of my heart and mind are made of, how my personality was formed, what is the secret ingredient in the essence that is my humanity -- read it. Sassy came to me at a most crucial, vulnerable time in my life, and it could not have been more important to me at that time. I mean -- oh Shatner just go read these.

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PS: Berwie: Remember that ski trip we went on with your dad that time, and we took like thirty Sassys for cabin downtime reading? That was awesome.

PPS: Other reasons it was awesome: 1)Your dad bought us drinks once -- ice cream drinks with about a thimbleful of Bailey's or something, after we badgered him for like TWO HOURS and he was finally all OK GODDAMMIT NOW YOU KIDS SHUT UP. 2)You kept stopping us on the mountain to smoke. I am sure we looked pretty cool to all the hot guys, and the only reason they just passed us by without a word was that we were too cool for them and they knew it.

Swatch dogs and Diet Cokeheads

So the Family Gleemonex went to an alleged "Art & Wine" Festival (at which I saw very little art, and only a couple of opportunities for wine) in the neighborhood last weekend, which turned out to be mostly about the awesomeness of bouncy houses as far as Kid Gleemonex was concerned.

Me, I spent most of the time fascinated, repelled and horrified by these bevies of young ladies from the area's middle and high schools (they were identified by school logos on their ultra tiny-fit tees/tanks and on cheerleader uniforms -- a big part of this festival was performances by school groups in the big tent at one end of the grounds).

Now, recall, we moved here for several valid reasons, such as: great schools (as identified by their California API scores). But these girls -- o readers, these girls we saw.

Roving packs of them, all dressed more or less identically: Tiny tee or tank, shorts of an impossibly tiny smallness in a length such that you'd be able to see the bottom edge of underpant if they wore traditional underpants, which they didn't (them shorts could accommodate thongs only), and some sort of sockless shoe at the end of their early-puberty colt-length toothpick-skinny legs. They roved around in packs, long straight shiny hair aglisten, makeup expertly subtle (with occasional glittery accents), wee t-shirt-bra-clad chests caved in in that painfully self-conscious way that is universal and utterly, biologically unavoidable at that age.

We, my peers, Gen X -- we did not look like that at that age. We shared the chest-caving and the pack-roving, but that is all. We tried as hard as we could to look sophisticated and cool, but our makeup was clownish, our clothing raided from the Golden Girls' condo, our hair permed and curling-ironed and sprayed and mostly utterly inept, our bras stretchy and ill-sized garments out of a box from the Teen section of Dillard's. You could see that we were children, no matter what WE thought of ourselves.

But the Kids Today ... not only do I not know how they get this way -- the sheer energy, the time it must take to develop skills like those -- but also, I am scared to death by what it means. They look so ... adult, but in a creepy way. I know their minds and emotions are in more or less the same place ours were, but they look like 25-year-olds, they look available to men and boys (who, assuredly, will take this look at face value, and subject them to things they aren't ready for). I'm fucking this up here, I'm not saying what I mean -- there's something about it that makes them look like prey, is what I'm kind of getting at. I don't want to go back to the weirdness, repression and body-shaming of my day, and I'm not trying to shut down anyone's, like, sexuality or whatever -- but these ARE still CHILDREN, and it's seriously unnerving to see them present themselves (pretty successfully, if not for the chest-caving) as adults.

Homeschooling begins to make a twisted kind of sense ... ugh.