Loan Baby

It was romantic – all of that newness and independence and change.  College wooed me like a new lover.  It took me away from home, let me believe I was all grown up and ready for the world.  It promised it would change me, take me in, shelter me from the cold and teach me things I could not learn anywhere else.  I could stay with him, College, sleep over and eat every meal and stretch my legs on long walks between classes all the while holding his hand.  College gave me a place, gave me a purpose, gave me an identity.  College was my whole world for nine years.  Shhh, shhh, he would whisper, don’t worry about the cost, I’m taking care of it for you (I didn’t hear him add at the end: for now). You just focus on your classes, your experiences, your growing, your changing, your hopes and your dreams.  I listened.  I believed.  I figured that College wouldn’t lie to me – not smart and giving and loving and encouraging and good College.  He wouldn’t disappoint me.  He would take care of me. 

I was wrong.

College spent one more great day with me, a great big rainy day.  He and I wandered together through campus, remembering all of our good times there together, all of those things I learned with him, from him, through him.  As the afternoon wore on, I left the familiar paths between buildings and classrooms and he stayed behind, repeating the same promise that he would see me later, he would be there for me that afternoon and for my future.  

Back in my room, I put on my gown and I prepared for my new life with College by my side and the world waiting for me.  I stood with all of the others, their own love affairs now changing and evolving into something else.  I waited for College to greet me on the other side of the stage, behind his groomsmen-professors and bridesmaid-teachers, their faces plastered with pride and hope and knowing.  They handed me my contract, my signed letter of completion, just like he said they would.  But as I passed from one side of the stage to the other, moved the tassel so it hung on the side of completion, I searched the crowd, and I stretched onto the tips of my toes hoping to catch a glimpse of my companion.  But he wasn’t there.  I spun around to see if I had passed him, forgotten him, left him behind.  But I had not.  He had abandoned me.  I waited for him to appear, trying to convince myself there had been some terrible mistake.   My groom, my promise to take care of me for the rest of my life, cemented his feet behind me.  He was not coming with me.  He would no longer hold my hand.  Wasn’t that what was promised to me when I accepted the invitation to be one of his?  Wasn’t I signing up for a life that College would influence for the better?  Didn’t he promise he would be there for me, to open doors, ensure financial security, and stand beside me with all of those lessons learned and experience gleaned?  Wasn’t he my partner and my all-access pass to the world once I made it through all of those classes?   College had left me on the other side alone.  But not unburdened. 

The final nail in the coffin of our relationship and my future arrived three months after my graduation and our separation.  It was a shock at first, that letter, that bill, that closure between us – College and I.  It was too cold, too unreal for College to treat me so formally, with such distance and business-like demeanor.  Had I meant nothing to him?  Was he not going to honor any of those promises of the world lying down at my feet once I stepped off of the podium degree-in-hand?  The breakup would not have felt quite so harsh had College not left his mark on me in such a lasting way.  I probably could have gotten over College with enough time and distance and chocolate.  But no.  College was crueler than I could have imagined.

I am pregnant now with the debt and the payment due upon receipt of my earned diploma.  He has left me with the daily reminder of my choice to be with him, College, and without any assistance to help shoulder this weight, this charge, this offspring of my education.  I am bloated with resentment towards him and his duping other young persons into his charm of a changed life after spending a few years with him.  My feet are swollen from running around, trying to catch up, trying to work as much as I can to support this newly acquired debt, this money-child who will be mine for the next twenty years. 

I often sit, here with my debt-child, and think about all of the things I cannot do because of it.  It costs me close to six hundred dollars a month.  A Lexus payment.  Rent in a not-so-small apartment.  Six weeks’ worth of the really good groceries – vegetables and soy milk and the natural peanut butter, not the off-brand Peter Pan kind with oil collecting at the top.  Two pairs of Manholo Blahnik’s.  Half of a plane ticket to Europe.  A few fun hours at a blackjack table in Vegas.  Fuck, a whole trip to Vegas. 

This loan-baby is with me all the time, it never leaves my mind.  It causes bags to creep beneath my eyes, tired from working two jobs to pay for its monthly hunger.  It parches my throat as I plead yet again to the other debts in my life to understand, to be patient, to understand how hard it is, to be a single-parent of this needy and expensive money-child who is always hungry and does nothing to help me.  You see, no doors have been opened once College had had his way with me.  My energy was used up from the beginning trying to care for the hundred-thousand-dollar-infant that he inserted into my life and walked away.  I have no time to do anything other than attend to it in the fastest way I know how.  I cannot leave this debt-child alone to attempt to intern somewhere without the income to support it.  Because even though in the long run, it might end up paying me more than I make now, I cannot escape its cries.  I cannot abandon it or feel secure that it will take care of itself for a while as I try to make a better life for myself.  It does not care about my quality of life.  It simply needs to be fed. 

For the next twenty years. 

And at the end of this dependency, at the end of the obligation I have to this loan’s life and send it on its merry way into the world in which I cannot see nor understand where the money has gone or was going, I wonder about the quality of my life.  I wonder if I’ll be able to sit comfortably in my now-empty nest of financial debt.  I worry I will not know how to talk to other grownups who do not have these worries, who were not unfortunate enough to find themselves saddled to a life like mine.  I wonder if I will even know what it will be like to not have that expense.  I will be nearly fifty-years-old, the age of my mother.  A life quite possibly two thirds over depending upon the havoc the stress of caring for such a burden for so long has left on my body.  It doesn’t seem real to think I will be able to sustain this type of living, this type of prison, this kind of hell for the next twenty years.  My life is not my own.  It belongs to the child, the demon-seed of College who will never do anything for me except learn how to live on not enough.  

What will I have missed out on because I couldn’t afford to do it with this cash-guzzling child around, suckling at every ounce of joy and dime earned?  What greater life could I have had if I had aborted the idea of going to be with him, College, and instead tried something else?  Nine years of my life, filled with happiness and experience cost twenty years of struggle.  There is no hope in this situation, no procedure or pill to get rid of it; simply resignation and regret.  

An Attack on Satire

Writing is big.

Writing is important.

People died today because they were writers.



I remember learning what satire was during my sophomore year in college.  We were assigned "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope, a poem that I still love and think about to this day.  In it, he talks about the artificial "beautifications" the aristocratic women applied every day.  He talked about how their wigs hid mice and other vermin.  He talked about the yellow stains of their undergarments.  He talked about the powders and the oils and the corsets and the odors - oh did he talk about the odors.  It is a lengthy poem and one that is full of many gems and garish detail and many mocking allusions to the upper classes of the society in which he was living and working.  I sometimes think to myself that I am perpetuating that same understanding of "putting on one's face" before I leave the house.  I've been told that I don't wear any makeup - or they notice when I have put on a little bit more eye shadow than normal.  In truth, it takes about twenty minutes to apply the undereye concealer masking the circles I have been cursed with since the tender age of twelve, the evening powder that hides any imperfections and smooths out sun damages, scars, etc.  We put on deodorant, hairspray, mascara, hair extensions, lipstick, lip gloss, whiten teeth, bronze forehead and cheekbones and collar bones and dab perfume.  All a mask - all a costume - all an elaborate rouse for the day.  I think about Mr. Pope even now and again as I go through my own "soft Transition," so that "we repair" all of the damages done the night before.

For those of you that might not know, the ol' Oxford English Dictionary defines "satire" as:

"The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."

Today, in France, twelve people died at the hands of Islamic extremists who had taken offense at the satirical drawings and articles about Muhammad and their religion.  Ten of them were staff at Charlie Hebo, a French newspaper that had suffered many other threats and attacks for their work previously.
Seeing this breaking story on the televisions hung above the cardio equipment at my gym as Spotify blared a random playlist titled "HIIT Workout" I was shocked and dumbfounded.  Even now, I cannot bring to mind any other violent attacks such as these in the past other than perhaps John Lennon.  I cannot understand or comprehend the desire to kill another human being based upon a cartoon drawing in a magazine with less than 200,000 subscribers.  I had not even heard of Charlie Hebo before this morning and I doubt many others around the world had not either.  But I guarantee that they will know the name now.  They may not remember it, another flashy story or tragedy or injustice will take its place in a month or a week or perhaps even tomorrow.  But this story struck me personally.

They were writers.

They were working on something that they believed in and doing it for very little money and a great deal of danger and risk.  Here in America and there in France, we no longer have the very real threat of censored reading, writing, living, believing.  We can pretty much do and say and think whatever we want as long as it isn't hurting anyone.  There is no Gestapo around the corner waiting for us after we have said what we think about Obama or Miley Cyrus (did I even spell her name right?  I don't care.)  However, today's massacre stands as a reminder that words have meaning.  Work and words and writing has value.  We are not here for long, there is no guarantee, but believe in what you do.  Stand up for it.  Leave your mark and waste no time.  There will always be those that are offended or enraged or become violent because of what you say and think and do.  But that shouldn't stop you - because it might offer some liberation and bravery to others that had not thought to speak up before they heard your voice.

Here's to speaking up.

Here's to those who fell this morning in a board room, probably joking around, drinking stale coffee and brainstorming on new ways to be clever and meaningful and informative.

Here's to the one's who were not afraid.

"Je n'ai pas de gosses, pas de femme, pas de voiture, pas de credit. C'est peut-etre un peu pompeux ce que je vais dire, mais je prefere mourir debout que vivre a genoux."

"I don't have children, nor a wife, nor a car, nor credit. This may be a bit pompous, what I'm about to say, but I'd rather die standing that to live on my knees."

-Stephane Charbonnier

This is a Poem about Distraction

It is 11:20 and I just woke up.

I wasn't even up that late.

I take the dog for a walk.

Boil some water
slice a lemon.

I go to the gym have breakfast read three chapters of Hemingway walk in walk out of Lush without buying anything head home sit at my computer and scroll through Facebook for an hour.

It is 3:58pm.

I take the dog for another walk.

I decide to shower, it'll make me feel better and maybe I'll go out and get a cup of coffee maybe that will help me write maybe that will inspire me.

Start a load of laundry.

Balance checkbook.

Feed the dog.

I get comfortable in front of laptop.

I get up again and get bottle of water.  I'm way behind.  Need to drink another 64 ounces.

Why did I sleep so late?

Look up favorite website on short fiction.  Hope it inspires.  Wonder if I should go to that coffee shop.

No.

Too much traffic.

Too much time wasted getting there getting comfortable figuring out the wifi password ordering a latte finding the right music settling on something to write about.

No.  I'll stay

home.


Check text sent from friend.  Wonder if I'll go see friend at work and get a glass of wine later tonight?
That would be nice.

I'd have to do hair and makeup.

Thirty

more

minutes.

Open three different working documents.

Nothing feels interesting enough to work on.

It is 5:25pm.

This is a Poem about Frustration

This is a poem about Frustration

it begins and ends

without

a resolution.

I just want

something

tomeansomethingtomattertoworkouttoendupalright

I wish there were

less

people everywhere I go.

THEY took away my bag at the bookstore.

THEY said it fights theft.

I take out my notebook and wallet and laptop and resignation and hand them my empty bag.

"Does this really cut down on theft?"

She tells me statistics that I don't care about.  I can't figure out
who
I
am
more
upset
with.

Her                               or                                         myself.

I was the one that

asked

if the bag was

too

                                                                                                                     big.

It's all my own fault.

I chose this

p       l                a                 c               e.

I thought it would give me enough

room

to

breath.

But it did the

e t i s o p p o

My jaw hurts.

I bet its from the clenching.

Or from my wisdom teeth that are not wise and are needing

to

come

out.


This poem is about Frustration.

Never Again

I will never again be thirteen at summer camp after my mother battled my way into going a year early because I skipped a grade.  I will never be left out like I was there, some of the counselors taking pity on me and talking to me while all the others flirted and played cards and talked about life back home.  But most of the counselors treated me like I didn’t belong there either. I pretended to be asleep when the boys came into the girls’ room one night and sprayed shaving cream all over our bunks and bathrooms.  I lied incredibly still as a boy duct taped me to my bed, pretending to be asleep.  I didn’t want to give anyone else an excuse to hate me.  Near the end of one of the worst weeks of my life, I attended an assembly where various religious leaders and random people got up and talked about their experience with Jesus Christ.  I chose my seat, trying not to intrude or invite myself to sit next to people that didn’t want me to sit next to them.  I listened to a particularly large girl talk about a dream she had about Jesus.  She said she was lonely and depressed growing up throughout most of high school and college.  According to her, because she was overweight she didn’t go on many dates and never had a boyfriend.  She hated herself.  She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.  And then sometime in the middle of college, she said she had a dream where this beautiful man in a tuxedo walked up to her in a crowd of people, leaned in close and whispered in her ear “I’ve been waiting for you.”  And she knew Jesus was the only man she needed to worry about seeking approval from.

I loved this story.  I cherished this story and kept it close and waited for my own personal tapping from a tuxedoed man from beyond.  But it never happened.  

Maybe he is still waiting.

I will never be nineteen again living in England.  I will never go on a date with an amazing man, beautiful and successful and inexplicably interested in me.  I feigned a throat ache to escape one of our dates early to try and catch the other man I’d been seeing before his shift was over at his bar.  Except the first man caught me hiding behind a building, and somehow, we ended up hanging out for longer.  I think I made up some sort of lie that it didn’t seem like he was having fun so I was trying to give him an easy out.  He told me it wasn’t true and he wanted to go have another drink, and if I would join him.  Of course he chose “this great place around the corner” which happened to have been the bar of the other man I was seeing.  I will never be so young and naïve again to think it would all turn out ok.  They didn’t throw punches, but they got in each other’s face and words were said, threatening and brutish words from the man behind the bar, and apologetic and sophisticated words from the man I had brought there. I ran to the bathroom with my roommate who was already there and we giggled and were nervous and were too tipsy to be grown up about any of it.   When I came back out, they were standing in front of each other and it was like looking at two archetypes of different classes.  One that goes to a bar, and one that is working behind it.  After the beautiful man took me home in a car far nicer than anything I had ever ridden in, I kissed him goodnight.  For all of his beauty and success and kindness towards me, he wasn’t that good of a kisser.  And it was how I rationalized choosing one over the other.  I texted him later that week and told him I had decided to date someone else.  I didn't think I deserved him.  I thought he would figure out who I was and how much better he was than me.  I will never again believe I deserve only the man behind the bar.  

I had to say I was sorry a lot to the other man, the “someone else,” but he forgave me quickly.  My bringing another date into his bar made him realize how much he actually cared about me, so he told me later.  He was my first love. 

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lied about my throat.

I will never be twenty-four again and walk out of my professor’s office with the warm and smooth feel of my readers’ handshakes on my own clammy hand, nervous and shaking.  The world will never feel that big.  The triumph I felt after defending my work will never be replicated.  The possibilities of “out there” will never feel so numerous.  But I’ll also never feel so disappointed in myself at the very same time.  After all of their validation and congratulations on the work I had done, I wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t work at all.  I will never again look back with such clarity at the end of those nine years, nineteen semesters and ninety thousand dollars how I had slept through it.  I didn’t try.  I never had to.  I laughed a little bit in my car as I drove myself home, alone, after calling my mom and my dad and texting my boyfriend to see where we should go to celebrate my zombie-walk through my college career.  They let me get away with it.  They handed me a degree and a bill.  (No promises though, the hard part would come later.)  Should I have taken harder classes?  Were there harder classes?  Should I have gone to better school or was I too chicken to have applied? 

I’ll never know. 

To Shirley...

We were the lucky ones.

We were the ones that got our grandmother twice a year for weeks at a time.

We would see her in the summer, leaving behind the heat and the sticky air and the small town gossip and drive up north to where it was just then spring, pink blossoms and her huge yard exploding with color.

We would see her in the winter, for Christmas, for New Years, for snow, for cookies, for presents, for hugs.

And when we didn't see her, we talked to her on the phone, for hours.  She entertained our little stories, believed in our little worlds, told us about her little garden fairies causing mischief again and her little poodle that could never quite catch them.

She taught me to paint, my memories of this as blurry as the water colors on those thirsty pages.  I was never any good, my creativity in the arts leaked out of me and was swallowed up by my mother and sister.  My poppies looked like red upturned umbrellas with a giant black hole in the middle, my grass and sky separated by a thick black line broke the picture up too violently, my people drawn too large or too small to scale with my simple houses.  Her pictures were like pictures out of a book, like the paintings that hung on the walls of the museums she would take us to, showing us Monet, Manet, Renoir and Van Gogh.  But she never let on that mine were not perfect.  She always praised.  She always kept them, framed them, showed them off to all of her other artful friends.

She taught me how to string popcorn and cranberries to hang on the tree.  She taught me how to make deviled eggs.  She showed me how to make cakes and would tell me all the stories about working in a bakery and helping her father and about how pretty her dresses were that she wore to her high school dances.  She was brave and strong enough to pull out our loose teeth and she promised it wouldn't hurt, and it never did.  She told me about the trouble she would get into with her brothers and sister.  She made me feel less badly about fighting with my sister because she said that's what kids do.  She made me feel like a person.  She let me know that I counted.  She filled me up.

When we would drive home, I would cry until almost Kentucky, so sad to be away from the magical woman for another boring six months.  And then our mother would let us stop and talk to her at a payphone along the way, checking in, hearing her soothing words that summer break would be here before we knew it, and oh all of the fun things she already had planned for us.  She was going to take us to Fernwood.  She was going to teach us to draw in nature.  She was going to take us to tea.

She always had short hair, effortlessly stylish.  She wore purple, even though she was so young.  She smoked, but I never remember her smelling like it.  I only remember peppermint and lilacs.  I made her a chart once; a thirty-step guide to quitting in a month.  I allowed her a pack a day, and then eased her off day-by-day, cigarette-by-cigarette.  It was misspelled and the drawings of the come-to-life cigarettes with scowls on their faces surely brought a great deal of laughter from her and her siblings as they all sat around the dining room table in her mother's house, my great-grandmother, for a family reunion.

But then she got sick.  And her heart didn't want to work anymore.  And it was terrifying.  And I wasn't allowed in the room.  And I remember my mother crying.  After hearing all of those words and too-big thoughts and so-many-months to live, I was aware of my own heart like I had never been aware of before.  I felt like I could see everyone else's heart, we were all beating and pumping and working like nothing had ever happened, like they all hadn't just been broken, like they hadn't all been pierced with the possibility that there would be one less among us.

I had just learned fractions.  I remember that.  And I remember them telling us, or telling my mom and her sister and then they telling us in words that were softer, were easier, were simpler to swallow, that she had only a third of her heart left working, the rest of it, the upper two-thirds had simply quit.  And because I had just learned fractions, I knew one third was much smaller than two thirds.  And that it wasn't good. They didn't think she had more than six months left with us.

So we moved home, we moved to her home, we moved to the wonderful place that once was but was now just a shell and ticking clock.  She wasn't the woman that once made me feel like anything was possible.  We were there to say goodbye, to pray, to hope they were wrong.

And they were.

That was almost fifteen years ago.  And the approximate 186 days after the doctor had delivered the blow that would change our lives forever, she kept on breathing.  Her heart with only a third of its power and strength and will to live kept on pumping.  She stayed with us.  She woke up smiling.

I believed in magic that year.   I believed in angels and God and miracles.  I believed they were as close to us as we were to her, sitting in her garden, helping her weed and mulch and set up her easel.

She has never stopped being part of my life.  I am a woman now, a grown up that moved far far away.  But we still share secrets.  We still talk and giggle and commiserate over the phone.  She still encourages my creativity, prints out all of my stories and saves them in a file for when "I'm famous."
Well, Gram, this one is for you.  Thank you for everything.  Thank you for staying alive.  Thank you for making me want to live this life creatively.  Thank you for making fairy furniture and reading me books and teaching me to bake.  You left your mark.  You influenced my life.  And I will forever be grateful.

Happy birthday.

All my love,

Lynnie.

Feminism, Memoirs and What Got Me Really Heated Tonight.

What started out as procrastination from completing my words for the NaNoWriMo contest -  scrolling through Facebook and seeing all of my proud friends clicking the button the lets their newsfeed know that they voted today, a few stragglers who are just now uploading photos of their Halloween costumes, and a couple funny Youtube videos, turned into the absolute necessity to write this blog post. 

Lena Dunham released her first book and memoir Not That Kind of Girl  a few weeks ago.  I bought it, proud to support a fellow memoirist and my local bookstore, and eager to read what she had to say about growing up, becoming a writer, and becoming the phenomenon that she is today.  Admittedly, I might have gone into it with the hope that I would be clued in to some small secret of unlocking one's creative potential, or the acceptance of one's body as it is - beautiful - and not the object of public scrutiny and constant demands to be perfect.  And, while I liked it, and read it quickly, it felt more like a longer and more literary (obviously) version of her show "Girls," which I also thoroughly enjoy and often relate to.  I passed the book along to a friend, another "Girls" lover and haven't thought much about it since.

And then I found out, during my non-writing spree on Facebook, that Dunham has been receiving numerous attacks on her book, calling her a "sexual predator," and "child molester."  

The scene that is receiving all of these complaints is as follows:

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn't resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.

My mother came running. "Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!"

My mother didn't bother asking why I had opened Grace's vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did.

This scene gave me no pause.  I barely remember it being in the text, let alone prompt me to wage an all-out tweet and hashtag attack on someone for sharing a memory from when they were seven-years-old. The political and cultural critics complaints are ludicrous.  Jia Tolentino, a contributing writer on Jezebel wrote the article "The Right to a Sexual Narrative"  not only doing an exceptional job of detailing exactly who Lena Dunham is, why she is so popular, and what some of her flaws as a writer and public figure are, it also completely dispels the validity of the complaint with her memoir and it's "encouragement of sexual abuse."  My favorite lines from the article:

"To be an adult woman is to have your body be near-universally read as a sexual object when, on the inside, you often feel very different, like a Pokemon or a hungover bag of meat."

"There is enough real abuse out there. There are enough people who never got that freedom to let their own kid bodies be unburdened. Part of granting people the ability to tell their own sexual narrative is granting them the ability to tell their own sexual narrative, whether it matches your reading or not."

I have now read MULTIPLE articles about this, falling - nay - leaping headfirst into the black hole that is the internet and all connecting links to anything even remotely having to do with this case.  It's insane.  I even ambled into Truthrevolt.org (a terrifyingly propagandist place where all logic and reason and TRUTH go to be twisted and swallowed up in a very minute percentage of the population's agenda) and their article about how the First Amendment protects their accusation of her as a sexual predator and their withdrawal of an apology for stringing together DIFFERENT sections of her books to piece together a case in which she was seventeen and not seven when this episode occurred.  Disgusting.  One of the articles states that "Everything doesn't need to be shared..."  I'm sorry, why the fuck not?  Not only has her sister fully supported her sister through this and given express permission (as all memoirists and writers of non-fiction are contracted to do if they are intending to write about and publish real people without changing names and dates and places - did you know that?) of Dunham's use of her memories of her and her sister's interactions.

It's unfortunate there is such hyper-sensitivity out there, from BOTH sides (some of my favorite feminist writers jumped on this ridiculous bandwagon as well, shaming Dunham for using her platform to encourage the "abuse" of the innocent), and that a work of art or piece of writing or the TELLING OF ONE'S OWN STORY is grounds for an accusation of wrong-doing.  The evisceration of the safe space in which to tell about an innocent childhood memory is abhorrent.  She was seven.  This is a non-issue.  What IS the issue is the constant control being perpetrated on women's sexuality insofar that it creates  falsehoods about a CHILD'S intent and natural curiosity.  By exaggerating, misdiagnosing, overreacting and lying about what Lena Dunham "did" to her sister is yet another example of how the media, cultural critics, politicians and uninformed and knee-jerk reactionary FEMINISTS encourage the damaging discourse over what is "appropriate" for a woman to do with and think about her body.



It is a control mechanism people, and it must be recognized as such.