Thursday, July 07, 2005 How I learned to stop worrying and have a nice life and then start worrying again and was happy about that for some reason
A few years ago my life got flipped, turned upside down. I spent the summer before my senior year of college working on an internship at a small town weekly paper on the Eastern Shore, because the idea was that spending the summer going to town meetings for towns of 300 souls would prepare me to edit others who would be writing about pressingly dumb SGA issues (such troopers they were! There was a reason I wasn't trying to be a reporter. If I'd ever had to write about the damn SGA, my articles would have just said "BOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGG" in 24 pt. font.) and sparsely attended guest lectures ("Excited Crowd Gains New Insights on Mollusks, Enjoys Refreshments").
When my workday of doing those small town journalism tasks easily passed along to interns (fielding calls from certain local crackpots, typing, going to photograph the first ripe tomato of the summer in an adjoining town), I worked on my thesis, which was a novel that was going to make me famous and win me some money.
I had a nice summer, but in August my internship ended a couple days before I had to get out of my summer housing, which in turn was a couple weeks before I was allowed to move back into my regular dorm. I went to DC to visit a friend.
My friend was involved in homeless rights activism that involved making big scenes to make Mayor Anthony Williams' life less pleasant for him. It seemed fair, because there were certain very unpleasant aspects to being homeless. These included lack of adequate services, especially in certain neighborhoods, and death from exposure.
I went down and visited her, and that night there was an Itchy and Scratchy cloud of banners, u-locks, and the musk of anarchy, and after the air was clear, I was riding in a van whose exact destination I didn't know. I did know that three of the others in the van, two grizzled adult full-time activists and one boy I was trying to impress were going to enter a building someone else (still don't know who: wasn't told on purpose) had broken into for us earlier, and we were going to take it over.
We did. We hopped the fence around it with our armloads of banners handpainted on stolen sheets (the mayor with a death's head and trademark bowtie, ripping buildings up by their roots) and snack food and various other pieces of non-respectable activist paraphernalia, and we went in.
The next day, people outside marched in circles in the park below us, and when the cops and camera crews showed up, we dropped our banners out the windows and yelled things (It didn't matter what. No one could really hear us, but they cheered for whatever we said, including "Get a haircut!"), and then every cop in the city showed up, and I and the others got arrested and taken to jail.
The next day I was arraigned and released on my own recognizance, and I had a new boyfriend.
That really set the tone for senior year. My life was different after that, and I may go into it more later, like, "Oh, look, I'm doing prequels now. How very." It was a big year for irrational decisions and getting into trouble. Worst daughter challenge: I missed my mother's 60th birthday because I was in jail again, and she found out why I wasn't there by watching the news. Then I spent New Year's day, 2003 in another holding cell in another state, and that time they set the bail high.
My life has a lot of room for fucking around. It turns out that if one starts with enough priveleges and safety nets, one can screw up and screw up and screw up and still end up more or less OK. I finished college, for example. The school paper I edited was riddled with a few more typos per issue than it should have been, because (now it can be told) I could never get the proofreader to show up when I needed her, so I decided that since I always had to do her job anyway, I would combine her tiny weekly stipend with my own.
Every little bit helped, because I was supporting a parasite who spent his days playing video games and playing with our landlord's cockapoo. He began to brag to me that the dog liked him better, because unlike me, he was just naturally good with animals.
I was also making a completely unnesscessary commute back and forth to school. It was an hour each way. My little remora had got hisself run out of town pretty early on in my senior year, for a crime or series of crimes too stupid for me to mention right now, but it was out of the question for us to live apart.
I totalled my car on that commute, the week before my thesis was due and two weeks before graduation, but I crashed on Leah's floor, and I got that turned in, perhaps more easily than I would have otherwise. I was insured, too, so I could buy a new car immediately and under great pressure, and I could pick out the worst possible car for the most possible money. I could do it with someone yelling in my ear.
ANYway. Booooooorrrrriiiiinnnnggg.
My life went to Jupiter and got more stupider for a good while after that, and somewhere in there, in that quagmire of court dates and freaking out about money and day to day bickering that turned me into someone who threw things at other people when she was angry (because she was a very desperate housewife indeed), I lost my taste for politics.
My veganism fell by the wayside that year, because I was lazy and because it was a fight I didn't feel like having every day. Aloha, casein-free soy cheez. Aloha, Tofutti. I eat dairy now, like Hitler.
I was a super-ultra-mega lefty in my heart, but I had a hard time seeing the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Where I came from "reformist" was a dirty word. A right-wing call center paid my bills, and I wasn't just doing surveys. There were several loathesome push poll campaigns, and God help me, but there was fundraising for repugnant causes. I justified it to myself by researching the specific groups I was "Good evening, [sir or madam] calling on behalf of", and knowing that they were crooked excuses for their founders to get rich. The hated call center, with its bust of Reagan by the door (Neverfuckingmore, all right. Weak and weary.), was the only place we found that would hire me and my shadow without my shadow having to give up his God-given right to self expression through ridiculous fashion choices.
It was important. I was already sponging off my parents on his behalf (What's worse than worst, as far as daughters go? Worst is already an absolute.), and paying and paying and paying my way and a lot of his way, too. I couldn't pay for everything. I needed at least some token help from him, and so he needed a job, and he needed the car to get there, and I couldn't find anything else that I didn't also need the car for and blah blah blah call center excuses.
The politics receptors burned out in my brain. So did my capacity for enjoying debate of any kind. Constant day-to-day battles over everything make debate into less of a party game and more of a boulder to push up a hill.
Things changed again. My life became unbearable, and I scraped off my barnacle, sold him the awful car (for a song!), and went to go be a mess for a while. Everything was hard. I panicked in stores. I couldn't look people in the eye. I felt like I was coming out of a cave, wearing a long gray beard. People were kind to me constantly, and gave me a ridiculous number of second-to-umpteenth chances and free lunches and places to stay, and for some reason, it worked.
It's been a while. Things have been good and getting better ever since I moved to Baltimore. My job is dumb, but I've been able to keep it, and as much as I complain, the nature of the work is very pleasant. My house is wonderful, and so are my friends. I've still been almost wilfully ignorant of politics, but listen to this: a crocus is growing.
The other night, my boyfriend (I link with the title of our relationship, because it is what he did to me a few days ago, not because I have no soul) and I were talking, and the Bush administration came up, and I wanted to talk to him about it. I had opinions, it turned out. We discussed them. Nobody shouted anybody else down. Parts of my brain that I'd shut off a long time ago flickered back on.
I feel dumb even bringing this up like it's some kind of revelation, but yes it goddamn is. Sticking my head deep into the sand for a while may have been necessary for me to get OK, but I am so glad that I am finally able to get all worked up again. posted by Frenz | 7/07/2005 11:28:00 AM
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