POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

“See, I grew up in Vegas,” you WHAT WHAT (me too.) WHAT

My grandpa, the only person in my family who went to college, spent the end of the eighties in Saudi Arabia. The government hired a bunch of American artists, architects, engineers, and urban planners to design a bunch of completely oil-independent futuristic communities in the middle of nowhere so that they would be prepared for a shortage. Those still exist. He spent most of his time on the peninsula hiding his cameras from the authorities. He didn’t wanna share state secrets, he just wanted to take pictures of ancient architectural details and public art and sandscapes. He got really into desert gardening, and his wife got really into supervised shopping for gaudy gilded housewares in air-conditioned markets.

When the towns were finished, he got offered a job in Vegas. He was a city planner, a fucking architect of the worst-designed metropolitan area to ever be conceived. None of that was his fault, mostly he just commissioned small-scale greenspace projects on traffic islands and took the aerial photographs they put in maps and reservoir reports. He helped found the neon sign museum in the desert outside of the city and he got a job as a graphic design professor in the architecture department at UNLV. My sister’s name is Rebel and even though she moved back to Michigan a decade ago she still has all kinds of shit with UNLV Rebels insignia on it. She graduated from Durango, the only daughter of five to graduate high school under the care of my father.

I guess my dad wanted to be with his parents and he probably said something to my mother like “it’s not like you have any family anyway.” He flew my sister Rachel and I out there and I’m not really sure if he had my mother’s consent.

“Where are we going?”
“Nevada.”
“I thought we were going to Las Vegas?”
“That’s in Nevada.”
“Are we in Ne-va-da?”
“No, were in Texas.”
“You said we were going to Ne-va-da!!”
“We have to stop here first.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s a desert.”
“How can there be a desert in America?!”

I was four-going-on-five and I drew pictures the whole plane ride over. I drew this flowering cactus with crayons and I was secretly upset when everyone thought it was a rose but I pretended like it was a rose because everyone told me I was such a good artist and I took after my grandpa. He had that framed and hung in his studio—the sprawling studio over the garage, packed with drafting tables and scorching lightboxes and pricy drawing equipment he let me play with, the studio I lived in for some months before we moved out. He’s the kind of guy that frames kids’ art and leaves it up for decades. Framing arrangements are one of his passions. I’m inclined to doubt it’s still hanging, as I’ve always considered myself the lost daughter. But it’s probably still there, because I know my grandpa, and he’s old and I guess all these years he thought it was me that never wanted to see the family again. Because my family might still love me, somewhere inside of them, but they’re fucked up enough to think it’s a ten-year-old’s responsibility to keep in touch.

My mom stayed home to sell all our stuff on the lawn and drive the rest of it out West in a Ryder truck, which was, at the time, a U-Haul for white trash. The cat, Spritz, wasn’t even in a cage. That motherfucker rode in the cabin the whole way there. The snake, Snickers, was in a pillowcase. I accused my mother of selling my prized Barbie Folding Funhouse at the garage sale. She has always denied it and I know she’s lying but I carry nothing but guilt for trying to make her feel guilty over that. Last year I found out that Rachel had begged for that toy but my mom told her she was too old for it and got it for me instead.

I can’t imagine my parents were together in Vegas long. I know now that they had been splitting even before we went out West but I can’t figure out if the move was an attempt to repair the marriage or if my mother was chasing him across the country so he couldn’t take me from her. I say “me” instead of “us” because with Rachel it’s weird.

When I was a freshman in a Michigan high school I wrote a poem about pink stucco houses. Really giant and ugly and poorly-designed box subdivisions full of fake pine trees, the kind of visual stand-ins for “suburbia” you’d see in any movie. Except they were all hot pink and peach and thick stucco. And the lawns—lawns! why were there lawns?!—were the brightest green ‘cause they were hardly even real. I wrote a poem about how the stucco was sharp and it would always make you bleed.

That’s what I think of when I think of Vegas: bloody knuckles, bloody stucco, fake air, fake grass, fake pine trees, fake palm trees, bald palm trees, real cactus quills in my butt. All-you-can-eat pancakes at Arizona Charlie’s and then stepping out of the conditioned air into the sun and puking on the sidewalk. (It’s why I don’t eat syrup anymore.) Eating so much lobster and prime rib ‘cause it was cheaper than groceries when the casinos just hope you’ll forget yourself on your way to the buffet. I could order a steak (medium rare) by the time I was five. The fear that everything in your environment is a half-second away from killing you: the heat, the sun, the spiders hiding in your shoes, thousands of adult men on vacations from their wives eying you weird ‘cause they know that kids that go missing in Vegas never get found in Vegas.

My mom and I moved out of my dad’s parents’ house—he never has—and moved from apartment to apartment then from couch to couch. One woman we stayed with locked us out and stole all of my toys and gave them to her daughter. The cops wouldn’t come so my mom took me to my dad’s, went back, and broke into the house to get my Mista Bear and whatever else she could grab. We spent the last month our two in Nevada staying on a futon in Rebel’s apartment, which was really a re-purposed motel. Rebel was eighteen and married, I spent most of my time playing on the balcony. It overlooked the UNLV campus. That was the summer “Don’t Speak” was playing everywhere, but my favorite song was still, naturally, “Don’t Look Back In Anger.” I had my first pair of high heels, black strappies with a half inch.

I experienced it as if it all made sense and was planned, controlled. But of course I know now that my mother was in crisis, isolated, needed to get the fuck out of that city and be with what family she had. She put everything we had in storage. My aunt talked to me on the phone before we flew back,
“We’re setting up a room for you here. What’s your favorite color?”
“Teal.”
“What color do you want us to paint your walls?”
“Black.”

They settled on a hot magenta dresser, painted just for me. They must have paid for that plane ticket, there’s no way my mother could have. We left in August of 1997 and we stepped off the plane in Detroit into one of the worst blizzards in years.

Every second of my life is a weird boner. And I’ve got postpartum depression from delivering that blink-182 baby.

Defenestraphobia: the fear of windows

like, I can’t do it
even when it’s easy,
even when I think I am interested in it. I can’t.
I’ve got no sense of consequence, maybe
or just like nothing feels like anything so I’m just not going to do it and I’m like a few hours’ work away from not failing everything but honestly not failing everything doesn’t even seem worth it.

look at this infographic:

sometimes at least it makes me feel so great because it’s so funny

if there was a transcript of the last six months of my medication it would look something like this:

25 mg
25 mg
50 mg
50 mg
50 mg
100 mg
100 mg
100 mg
100 mg
150 mg
150 mg
wait no this is terrible
100 mg
100 mg
100 mg
50 mg
running out of it finals week

i think i should just be exempt from incorporation into the human

“Like if somebody made a movie or tv show about this crisis I would be like oh shut the fuck up.”
“I don’t know, maybe. But dropping out of college is scary.”

And then I realized that it is scary for me for a different reason, because now I am a different kind of statistic. I mean, I probably won’t drop out, but I’m not convinced I’m going to finish.

can I sue big pharma for my bad grades

?

suicide intervention makeup blogging 2k12

suicide intervention svu blogging 2k12

musicigrewupwith:

Shawn Colvin - Sunny Came Home

My Mom’s Anthems of Empowerment and Struggle, 1990-1999:

1. Paula Cole, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”
2. Collective Soul, “December” (her “Vegas song”)
3. The Cranberries, “Linger”
4. Annie Lennox, “No More I Love You’s”
5. Tom Waits, “Invitation to the Blues”
6. Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”
7. Tom Petty, “Free Fallin’”
8. Shawn Colvin, “Sunny Came Home”
9. Dar Williams, “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono”
10. Paula Cole, “Tiger”

(via desliz)

I used to have this framed 8x10 photograph of my parents. Who framed that? How did that survive until the early 2000s? It was one of the only couple photos I’ve ever seen of them. My dad still had hair—my dad had black hair, isn’t that wild? My mom’s hair was long, she looked very much like me and very much fabulous. I think she was kneeling and had a diet coke in her hand. They were at a picnic somewhere. I was an infant.

I kept that photo on the very top of my pale yellow desk hutch in middle school, meaningful but not adored. I kept it somewhere my mother wouldn’t have to look at it. Once I got in a fight with her and I smashed its glass, laid it in a garbage bag and left it by the curb.

It was one of the only times I directed that kind of destructive anger at her. Normally when we fought I would take things I had made and tear them up, smash them, and throw them away. I tore up the lion sketch that won me some sort of art award in third grade. I think that made her much sadder than a smashed photo of her ex-husband.

Read More