An uncharacteristically personal post.
As I'm writing nonfiction this term, almost exclusively, you'll find me, if you find me, learning to turn stuff I can't lie about into something interesting to read.
This? Is not intended to be interesting. Or fictional, or even creatively nonfictional. This is simply the world as I see it, from the eyes of an art and English student as the economy, so I keep hearing, spirals out of control.
I imagine it like water down the drain. Does the economy spin the other way below the equator? How are things in Patagonia?
They tell you when you're young, the cruel ones, that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. They promise you that if you just work a little harder, tighten your belt, just push that one extra inch, you will succeed.
It is a cruel lie. There are people in life who will not succeed. There are poverty-stricken drug addicts who will never be able to kick the habit, who will never be able to, if they just pick up another part time job for a little while, actually work their way out of poverty. America, the land of opportunity, where we exist on a meritocratic ideal: you can get anything, so long as you earn it.
Of course if you're a Kennedy, we'll just say you've already earned it and let you have it from the beginning.
But so long as you work hard, so long as you just go that extra mile, you WILL succeed. Because this is America. This is where our forefathers came to escape persecution, to build their dreams. To tuck the baby into the watertight wagon and ford the river and hope Grandma doesn't get dysentery. God above, this is the land of the free!
Unless you're an illegal immigrant, of course. You see, it's the land of the free only if you came here legally. The way the pilgrims did, when they jaunted over on their environmentally friendly boats, settled in, made good friends with the locals, and everybody lived happily ever after. For it to be the land of your freedom, you shouldn't walk, or raft your way in. You should take a boat, preferably from Europe. The western, white part of Europe. The god-fearing part. One god. The one who goes by God and expected Noah to find a coatimundi in a desert.
It's the land of the free as long as you're a good, morally righteous person, like those in Salem who really never had anything at all against black cats, black women, black magic? No, nothing at all, huggles for everyone. It's the land of opportunity.
America is the greatest place on earth. As long as you already have a job. As long as there's already money in your bank. As long as you've already got health insurance. As long as.
I speak as a college student, one nearing completion. This semester I'm taking Creative Nonfiction. You'll find me, if you find me, writing obsessive vignettes about men like Vlad Dracula or Michelangelo. When I wrote a list, you see, of people (or creatures) I hero-worship, so that I would know who I have the ambition to write about, I realized that the only people who have made a significant enough historical impact to catch my undying devotion... have been men. The only exception was a shark. She was a cool shark. A pretty little girl swimming solo in a tank for the delight of onlookers, who contrary to all logic managed - through parthenogenesis - to have a baby shark all by her lonesome. It's the land of opportunity, a world where when you grow up, you can be anybody you want to be. You can definitely be a mommy.
You can be anybody you want to be, unless of course you're running for President of the United States and sure, you've got diplomatic creds, and well obviously you already know your way around the system, and okay so you've proved to the country and the world over and over that you have the best interest of the weak and oppressed (just like Jesus preached!) at heart, and well, we don't care about that whole Iraq thing, but well, hate to tell you, but you have cankles?
The land of opportunity, where after the qualified woman got shat on by the entire country for daring, for daring! to have a Senate seat and career aspirations of her own, but mostly just for staying with her husband after he got a blow job? Well, hey, what's a little Guantanimo these days when there's spluge on a dress a decade ago? America, the country where the woman who did get to run a race which was far too tight got her place as VP-candidate by being pretty, by being uninformed, and by hero-worship Daddy McCain? God sure did create the world - how many years ago was that? And yes, God thinks women who are raped must dedicate their lives to raising babies that look just like the daddies who so lovingly conceived them. And God thinks shooting wolves from helicopters is fair game. But God hates cankles. Sorry, Hil.
I'm also taking Bio. Protons + Neutrons = Atomic Mass (and don't worry, kids, you won't need to worry about Isotopes on the test). It's been a while. I'd missed it.
You see, faith didn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to trust something you can't see. And yeah, okay, so Watson and Crick (and the chick they worked with who didn't get any of the fame; did you know about her?) couldn't actually see DNA, but they saw its shadow, so since we can see what was left behind by God (witch-trials, god) we should scientifically be able to trace it back to God, and teach it in a science classroom. Obviously.
The land of having the opportunity to spout off your bullshit in a public forum. It's my favorite part of America, not gonna lie. Though, actually, I think my favorite part might really be being perfectly allowed to ignore people.
This land of opportunity is great at ignoring people they don't agree with. You can ignore the guy who wants to take 'under God' out of the pledge, you can ignore the fundamentalists screeching and hurling things outside Planned Parenthood, shrieking 'Abortion is Murder!' They can say whatever the hell they want, and you can ignore them. It's a great system, been in place ever since we first started ignoring the tortured dying groans of the American Indians we fucked over so royally. Want to admit it or not, we oh-so-civilized folks are murderous fuckers.
But our problems is so infrequently violent. We're good people at heart. We are. And we can be anything we want to be when we grow up. Our problem is that we have developed the ability to look away from pain. We have developed the ability to separate who deserves poverty ("It's the land of opportunity. If they'd worked a little harder, they wouldn't be poor, now would they?") and refuse to aid them, because they didn't try as hard as we tried. Sure, they might have been handed the shit end of the stick, but if they'd tried harder, they could have turned lemons into lemonade. They're just lazy. And good hard-working Americans shouldn't have to pay for the defects of lazy sonsofbitches who have no drive to improve their own lot. It's obviously their own fault.
You know who else's fault it is? The blacks. They've gone and gotten all uppity again. This time with a President Elect who is - dare I say it? - elite.
And educated.
The new four letter words.
May I ask, quite simply, when being educated, when being diplomatic, when being smarter than (ahem) Joe Six-Pack became a bad thing?
Nothing against Joe Six-Pack and Co., but I'd just like to point out that the chicks I graduated high school with who are now knocked up and engaged to the baby-daddies cheated off me in high school. You graduated high school because of my smarts, so now that I've been through college, shouldn't you still trust my judgment just a bit?
But no, now that I've been to college, in this land of opportunity (I was given, you see, the opportunity to indebt myself at a cost of about $44,000 a year in order to rise from my small town roots), I'm deemed one of those damned bleeding heart liberals who should be ignored.
I don't eat red meat, you know.
I also think Prop 8 was the biggest bullshit move this country has pulled in years. And we've been the cream of the crop for bullshit for a good long time. Some of my best friends are as gay as they come. One of my best memories was going underwear shopping with a dainty fellow. He pointed to a dress in one of the stores I wanted to stop in, and said, "Would you still be my friend if I wore this?"
"No." I said. "That dress is godawful. The one next to it is prettier and would look better with your skin tone."
I teased him at a fancy dinner we were seated together for. The man carving the turkey asked if he wanted breast meat. I said dryly, just loudly enough for my friend to hear, "He doesn't like breast meat, but how 'bout a thigh?"
We watched Pretty Woman together one time and drooled over young Richard Gere. I damned well better be invited to his wedding once this country gets its shit together.
This semester I'm taking Japanese Ceramics. There's little like shaping bowls to calm your nerves. I'm nervous, you see. With the economy flushing counter-clockwise - or is that clockwise this far north? - these days, people are losing jobs. It's not that they misplace them, it's that they're lost. Gone. Tragically missing. People with years of experience, good workers with kids to feed, are being laid off, pink slipped, sorry, you were an asset to the company, but not as big of an asset as this guy.
And I expect to get hired fresh out of college with negligible experience? They tell you, when seeking employment, that sometimes job recruitment centers can be a life saver. They tell you that people never think to use them, but that they're awesome, and that they have outstanding placement rates. Of course then you get a politely phrased letter that says, "Regrettably, we cannot register every candidate who applies."
So while I'm sure you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, you might have to work at it. It's a problem, trying to get hired when there aren't jobs. It's great to have an outstanding placement rate at your disposal, if they accept your application. Must be I didn't go that extra mile.
I'm taking a seminar in Art Criticism. We spent the first real class trying to define art. I'm supposed to be writing a short essay on it right now.
My definition of art has been, for a while, 'anything an organism does that is not specifically intended to promote survival."
Under that umbrella somehow manages to fall everything from protected sex to pottery. It's a definition that works for me. Art is what makes people proud to be human, is another one I've heard. I like that one too.
Can you get a job these days if you tell them that your credentials include figuring out whether or not two identical paintings by two very different people are or are not art?
Illustration. The class I've been looking forward to most. A business woman with many contacts in the field, who indirectly taught me to construct a resume, recently told me that an EngLit/Art major could get a business job in a heartbeat. My growing desperation to know I won't starve to death - or worse, have to move back in with my parents - after graduation at the end of May suggests that I take her up on that suggestion and ask her if she knows of anybody who'd be looking for a critically minded science-loving incredibly artistic creative person who absolutely sucks with number crunching or calling employers 'sir' or 'ma'am.' I really wouldn't mind marketing design. Unlike many artists, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of commercial art.
I'm told I could have a job in a second, in my field, even with my limited experience, if I was willing to relocate to the City. The City, to anybody in this national region, is NYC. My own personal hell. The sheer suffering, the overwhelming population, the emotional tension that is everywhere, I feel it. The rats. The city is overrun by rats. Is it my fault if I can't find a job in my field[s], because I didn't go that extra mile and sign my life over to a Bronx public school for five years? Is it my fault if I know that moving into the city would change me forever in ways I can't bear to experience?
Four weeks of subletting a Brooklyn apartment and I know that that city makes me ill.
I called answering machines crying, when I knew nobody was home, just to hear a friendly voice.
---
This had an arc. Not a story arc, but it did have an arc. It had a theme. It had the underlying theme of college courses, and it had the solid repetitious idea of the land of opportunity.
I was side tracked.
I am furious.
I can't finish what I was writing, because I am furious.
One of my friends is organizing an event wherein several students from Albania will come to our school to take a look at American education and SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise). So basically: a bunch of Albanian students are going to be arriving on Sunday, leaving next Friday. A few are crashing in our living room.
Last night some guys involved in the project kept banging on our door, asking for our friend (she wasn't home), claiming there was 'a SIFE emergency.'
Today I found out what the emergency was. I just now learned what this
emergency
was.
According to these humans - I will not insult men by classing them amongst them - some half of the population of Albania is Muslim.
According to these beings - I will not insult animals by calling them that - they refuse to house
"terrorists."
My friend is now searching frantically for a group of guys on campus who will let two teenage European boys crash on their floor for five nights
because these
things
that live in the apartment above mine
have had a last minute change of heart and will only (their words) house these poor boys if my friend first inquires to make sure that they are some denomination of Christian.
And I am furious.
I am offended.
I am horrified.
These people live above me.
These people, who would judge and hate and be cruel to people they have never met, people they don't know, people who are...
My friend, and I have never been so proud of her, told one of these - people - to get out of our apartment. That whether these boys are Muslim or not, she doesn't care, she WILL NOT ask them, and she would never now knowingly house anybody in the apartment above ours.
This? Is not intended to be interesting. Or fictional, or even creatively nonfictional. This is simply the world as I see it, from the eyes of an art and English student as the economy, so I keep hearing, spirals out of control.
I imagine it like water down the drain. Does the economy spin the other way below the equator? How are things in Patagonia?
They tell you when you're young, the cruel ones, that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. They promise you that if you just work a little harder, tighten your belt, just push that one extra inch, you will succeed.
It is a cruel lie. There are people in life who will not succeed. There are poverty-stricken drug addicts who will never be able to kick the habit, who will never be able to, if they just pick up another part time job for a little while, actually work their way out of poverty. America, the land of opportunity, where we exist on a meritocratic ideal: you can get anything, so long as you earn it.
Of course if you're a Kennedy, we'll just say you've already earned it and let you have it from the beginning.
But so long as you work hard, so long as you just go that extra mile, you WILL succeed. Because this is America. This is where our forefathers came to escape persecution, to build their dreams. To tuck the baby into the watertight wagon and ford the river and hope Grandma doesn't get dysentery. God above, this is the land of the free!
Unless you're an illegal immigrant, of course. You see, it's the land of the free only if you came here legally. The way the pilgrims did, when they jaunted over on their environmentally friendly boats, settled in, made good friends with the locals, and everybody lived happily ever after. For it to be the land of your freedom, you shouldn't walk, or raft your way in. You should take a boat, preferably from Europe. The western, white part of Europe. The god-fearing part. One god. The one who goes by God and expected Noah to find a coatimundi in a desert.
It's the land of the free as long as you're a good, morally righteous person, like those in Salem who really never had anything at all against black cats, black women, black magic? No, nothing at all, huggles for everyone. It's the land of opportunity.
America is the greatest place on earth. As long as you already have a job. As long as there's already money in your bank. As long as you've already got health insurance. As long as.
I speak as a college student, one nearing completion. This semester I'm taking Creative Nonfiction. You'll find me, if you find me, writing obsessive vignettes about men like Vlad Dracula or Michelangelo. When I wrote a list, you see, of people (or creatures) I hero-worship, so that I would know who I have the ambition to write about, I realized that the only people who have made a significant enough historical impact to catch my undying devotion... have been men. The only exception was a shark. She was a cool shark. A pretty little girl swimming solo in a tank for the delight of onlookers, who contrary to all logic managed - through parthenogenesis - to have a baby shark all by her lonesome. It's the land of opportunity, a world where when you grow up, you can be anybody you want to be. You can definitely be a mommy.
You can be anybody you want to be, unless of course you're running for President of the United States and sure, you've got diplomatic creds, and well obviously you already know your way around the system, and okay so you've proved to the country and the world over and over that you have the best interest of the weak and oppressed (just like Jesus preached!) at heart, and well, we don't care about that whole Iraq thing, but well, hate to tell you, but you have cankles?
The land of opportunity, where after the qualified woman got shat on by the entire country for daring, for daring! to have a Senate seat and career aspirations of her own, but mostly just for staying with her husband after he got a blow job? Well, hey, what's a little Guantanimo these days when there's spluge on a dress a decade ago? America, the country where the woman who did get to run a race which was far too tight got her place as VP-candidate by being pretty, by being uninformed, and by hero-worship Daddy McCain? God sure did create the world - how many years ago was that? And yes, God thinks women who are raped must dedicate their lives to raising babies that look just like the daddies who so lovingly conceived them. And God thinks shooting wolves from helicopters is fair game. But God hates cankles. Sorry, Hil.
I'm also taking Bio. Protons + Neutrons = Atomic Mass (and don't worry, kids, you won't need to worry about Isotopes on the test). It's been a while. I'd missed it.
You see, faith didn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to trust something you can't see. And yeah, okay, so Watson and Crick (and the chick they worked with who didn't get any of the fame; did you know about her?) couldn't actually see DNA, but they saw its shadow, so since we can see what was left behind by God (witch-trials, god) we should scientifically be able to trace it back to God, and teach it in a science classroom. Obviously.
The land of having the opportunity to spout off your bullshit in a public forum. It's my favorite part of America, not gonna lie. Though, actually, I think my favorite part might really be being perfectly allowed to ignore people.
This land of opportunity is great at ignoring people they don't agree with. You can ignore the guy who wants to take 'under God' out of the pledge, you can ignore the fundamentalists screeching and hurling things outside Planned Parenthood, shrieking 'Abortion is Murder!' They can say whatever the hell they want, and you can ignore them. It's a great system, been in place ever since we first started ignoring the tortured dying groans of the American Indians we fucked over so royally. Want to admit it or not, we oh-so-civilized folks are murderous fuckers.
But our problems is so infrequently violent. We're good people at heart. We are. And we can be anything we want to be when we grow up. Our problem is that we have developed the ability to look away from pain. We have developed the ability to separate who deserves poverty ("It's the land of opportunity. If they'd worked a little harder, they wouldn't be poor, now would they?") and refuse to aid them, because they didn't try as hard as we tried. Sure, they might have been handed the shit end of the stick, but if they'd tried harder, they could have turned lemons into lemonade. They're just lazy. And good hard-working Americans shouldn't have to pay for the defects of lazy sonsofbitches who have no drive to improve their own lot. It's obviously their own fault.
You know who else's fault it is? The blacks. They've gone and gotten all uppity again. This time with a President Elect who is - dare I say it? - elite.
And educated.
The new four letter words.
May I ask, quite simply, when being educated, when being diplomatic, when being smarter than (ahem) Joe Six-Pack became a bad thing?
Nothing against Joe Six-Pack and Co., but I'd just like to point out that the chicks I graduated high school with who are now knocked up and engaged to the baby-daddies cheated off me in high school. You graduated high school because of my smarts, so now that I've been through college, shouldn't you still trust my judgment just a bit?
But no, now that I've been to college, in this land of opportunity (I was given, you see, the opportunity to indebt myself at a cost of about $44,000 a year in order to rise from my small town roots), I'm deemed one of those damned bleeding heart liberals who should be ignored.
I don't eat red meat, you know.
I also think Prop 8 was the biggest bullshit move this country has pulled in years. And we've been the cream of the crop for bullshit for a good long time. Some of my best friends are as gay as they come. One of my best memories was going underwear shopping with a dainty fellow. He pointed to a dress in one of the stores I wanted to stop in, and said, "Would you still be my friend if I wore this?"
"No." I said. "That dress is godawful. The one next to it is prettier and would look better with your skin tone."
I teased him at a fancy dinner we were seated together for. The man carving the turkey asked if he wanted breast meat. I said dryly, just loudly enough for my friend to hear, "He doesn't like breast meat, but how 'bout a thigh?"
We watched Pretty Woman together one time and drooled over young Richard Gere. I damned well better be invited to his wedding once this country gets its shit together.
This semester I'm taking Japanese Ceramics. There's little like shaping bowls to calm your nerves. I'm nervous, you see. With the economy flushing counter-clockwise - or is that clockwise this far north? - these days, people are losing jobs. It's not that they misplace them, it's that they're lost. Gone. Tragically missing. People with years of experience, good workers with kids to feed, are being laid off, pink slipped, sorry, you were an asset to the company, but not as big of an asset as this guy.
And I expect to get hired fresh out of college with negligible experience? They tell you, when seeking employment, that sometimes job recruitment centers can be a life saver. They tell you that people never think to use them, but that they're awesome, and that they have outstanding placement rates. Of course then you get a politely phrased letter that says, "Regrettably, we cannot register every candidate who applies."
So while I'm sure you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, you might have to work at it. It's a problem, trying to get hired when there aren't jobs. It's great to have an outstanding placement rate at your disposal, if they accept your application. Must be I didn't go that extra mile.
I'm taking a seminar in Art Criticism. We spent the first real class trying to define art. I'm supposed to be writing a short essay on it right now.
My definition of art has been, for a while, 'anything an organism does that is not specifically intended to promote survival."
Under that umbrella somehow manages to fall everything from protected sex to pottery. It's a definition that works for me. Art is what makes people proud to be human, is another one I've heard. I like that one too.
Can you get a job these days if you tell them that your credentials include figuring out whether or not two identical paintings by two very different people are or are not art?
Illustration. The class I've been looking forward to most. A business woman with many contacts in the field, who indirectly taught me to construct a resume, recently told me that an EngLit/Art major could get a business job in a heartbeat. My growing desperation to know I won't starve to death - or worse, have to move back in with my parents - after graduation at the end of May suggests that I take her up on that suggestion and ask her if she knows of anybody who'd be looking for a critically minded science-loving incredibly artistic creative person who absolutely sucks with number crunching or calling employers 'sir' or 'ma'am.' I really wouldn't mind marketing design. Unlike many artists, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of commercial art.
I'm told I could have a job in a second, in my field, even with my limited experience, if I was willing to relocate to the City. The City, to anybody in this national region, is NYC. My own personal hell. The sheer suffering, the overwhelming population, the emotional tension that is everywhere, I feel it. The rats. The city is overrun by rats. Is it my fault if I can't find a job in my field[s], because I didn't go that extra mile and sign my life over to a Bronx public school for five years? Is it my fault if I know that moving into the city would change me forever in ways I can't bear to experience?
Four weeks of subletting a Brooklyn apartment and I know that that city makes me ill.
I called answering machines crying, when I knew nobody was home, just to hear a friendly voice.
---
This had an arc. Not a story arc, but it did have an arc. It had a theme. It had the underlying theme of college courses, and it had the solid repetitious idea of the land of opportunity.
I was side tracked.
I am furious.
I can't finish what I was writing, because I am furious.
One of my friends is organizing an event wherein several students from Albania will come to our school to take a look at American education and SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise). So basically: a bunch of Albanian students are going to be arriving on Sunday, leaving next Friday. A few are crashing in our living room.
Last night some guys involved in the project kept banging on our door, asking for our friend (she wasn't home), claiming there was 'a SIFE emergency.'
Today I found out what the emergency was. I just now learned what this
emergency
was.
According to these humans - I will not insult men by classing them amongst them - some half of the population of Albania is Muslim.
According to these beings - I will not insult animals by calling them that - they refuse to house
"terrorists."
My friend is now searching frantically for a group of guys on campus who will let two teenage European boys crash on their floor for five nights
because these
things
that live in the apartment above mine
have had a last minute change of heart and will only (their words) house these poor boys if my friend first inquires to make sure that they are some denomination of Christian.
And I am furious.
I am offended.
I am horrified.
These people live above me.
These people, who would judge and hate and be cruel to people they have never met, people they don't know, people who are...
My friend, and I have never been so proud of her, told one of these - people - to get out of our apartment. That whether these boys are Muslim or not, she doesn't care, she WILL NOT ask them, and she would never now knowingly house anybody in the apartment above ours.