Your Obsession With the “Enemy” Makes You Seem, Well, Obsessed

I loathe politics. Most people who know me know this very well. I’ve been quoted as saying “I’d rather someone fart in my face than put their politics in it,” and for the most part that’s the truth. Sometimes you just have to fart and can’t help it but discussing politics is always a choice.

Election season seems to bring out the worst in people – particularly on Facebook. I think the perceived anonymity of writing something on a computer is lost once it’s put into the social media. Personally, I liken Facebook to a party full of my friends. I try to think about the fact that when I post something on there it is indeed going out to every single person I am friends with. I figure if it’s not okay to walk into a room full of friends and make a statement then it’s probably also not okay to post it on Facebook. And this whole “And if you don’t feel how I do on this opinion then you can unfriend me” nonsense is childish and immature. There are people who I have been friends with for decades who have differing political opinions who have posted that shit and I’m like, “Really? You really want to blow me off as your real, actual friend because I don’t agree with you on some silly political ideology?” Hell, maybe they do. But they’re stuck with me because I’m not the type of person who disassociates with people because of their political beliefs.

There are a few people out there, however, who seem to find their opinions so important that they post incessantly about them. You know that person. The one who posts NOBAMA ten times a day. The one who puts a dozen links to partisan “news” sites (they’re usually blogs with about as merit as this blog has – which is none) with their research being linked to further partisan groups who have their own political interests in mind. They’re stuffed with “polls” that validate their point. The problem is, the people who vote on these polls are generally on the sites because they already agree with the ideology of the site they’re visiting.

Or, as my statistics professor put it: “If you stand outside a casino and ask patrons how they feel about gambling you’re likely to get a very favorable view on it. The numbers are accurate, but they’re not representative of the population. It’s bad data.”

Which is to say that linking information from MSNBC is likely going to be as pro-Obama as linking information from FOX News is going to be pro-Romney. And forget the idea of finding a truly objective news source. Everyone’s got an opinion and everyone’s got an agenda. People who seek out others to listen to them always have a slant. Even me. Why would I bother writing a blog in the first place if I didn’t want people to read it and listen to me?

The argument that people make for posting politics all the time on Facebook is always the same: “This is IMPORTANT! I am INFORMED!” Yeah, voting is important. And voting based off being informed on the issues and platforms of the candidates is important. I shudder to think that there are people out there who vote on a candidate based on who’s the cutest (although there probably are). But spamming your friends with political posts multiple times a day isn’t doing much but causing me to tune you out. Your opinion becomes diluted because you seem obsessed. I picture you sitting in your home, reading your partisan news website with a tinfoil hat on in hopes of blocking out the Democratic/Republican vibes that are coming from alien spaceships somewhere out in the cosmos, cackling when you read of a gaffe that the opposing candidate has made in his bid for the White House. This is literally the image that I get. I picture you as the man from Ancient Aliens.

This guy.

Do you want to be that guy? That guy who obsesses over aliens? You are the political equivalent of this guy if you post about politics more than once a day. After your one token post I start to think you are indeed this guy. Only instead of obsessing over aliens you’re obsessing over Mitt Romney. Or Barack Obama. Or obsessing over both of them.

In the early days of social media there was a joke about how people would post about anything and that nobody cared about the cheese sandwich you had for lunch. Oh, what I’d give to be back in the days of people posting about cheese sandwiches. I like cheese. Hell, instagram has actually made cheese sandwiches interesting again. And maybe cheese sandwiches aren’t “important” (unless you’re like me and really like cheese) but at least they’re not divisive. Nobody’s losing friends over cheese sandwiches. Maybe we should all try obsessing over cheese for a while.

Men Are Just Desserts

First of all, I’d like to say that I almost made it an entire year without writing which may or may not be some sort of record for me. While I must say that the primary reason for not writing is probably rooted in the fact that I’m really happy and content with my life right now it is quite frustrating to have the desire to write and not really be able to think of anything to write about. Oh, sure, I could delve into the old squash and come up with something unpleasant to write about but the truth of the matter is that I actually enjoy being happy a lot more than I enjoyed being unhappy. Yes, I admit it, I have been known at times to have actually enjoyed being miserable. But I’m over that shit now. I’m like that 80′s song “Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride. Nobody gonna slow me down – oh no, I got to keep on moving.”

Yep, I’m happy like an 80′s song. Deal with it.

But I still have the desire to write and, most of the time, have writers’ block. And that’s frustrating to me because I really like writing.

Interestingly enough, I was able to derive something to write about today out of how unbelievably happy I have been for the past year and a half which is somewhat shocking in and of itself. I’ve been laid up in the bed for almost a week with kidney stones so I haven’t been feeling well. And my computer decided it should have sympathy pains with me. Oh, lappy, I don’t need your sympathy. I don’t need you to be sick with me. I need you to work and entertain me when I’m all laid up in bed on painkillers. Don’tcha know? Yeah, Lappy missed the memo and kept giving me the beach ball of death. For you PC people, it looks like this:

(illustration by Allie Brosh of the brilliant blog HyperboleAndAHalf.com – go read it… it’s linked on the sidebar)

Anyway, I had to take my computer to the Apple Store in Jackson to get it worked on and since I couldn’t take it Friday due to the iPhone5 launch, I had to wait until today. Only, in typical Courtney fashion, I had to schedule my appointment after the Ole Miss game but early enough that I’d make it back to see Florida State and Clemson play at 7 p.m. Look, I have priorities, okay? And no sick laptop comes between me and my Rebels. And no sick me comes between getting stuff done (sometimes) so I had my dad drive my drugged-up ass over to Jackson.

Fritz was able to fix my computer fairly quickly and Lappy seems to be much happier than it was earlier so hopefully it’s all better.

But on the ride home my dad and I got into this really good conversation about how much my life has changed over the past couple of years. For those of you who have known me for a while you know that I’m prone to going through periods (sometimes really long periods) where I’m just not happy. Honestly, I think I can safely say that I wasted the best years of my life being not very happy and the only person I can blame for most of that wasted time is myself. Sure, I got knocked around some but it’s not like I had anything so devastating happen to me that I shouldn’t have been able to bounce back from in in a couple of weeks, or at the worst, a couple of months. But, no, I literally spent years upon years being unhappy. I wasted my college years. I wasted my 20s and I wasted half of my 30s. Or, as Greg Berendt says, “I wasted the pretty.” If you’re reading this and you’re going through a bad time in your life I hope you’ll continue reading this because this is the thing – life is too short, or too long (depending on how you look at it) to be unhappy. And if you’re unhappy with something in your life the only person who has the ability to change it is you. So, here’s my story of how I tricked myself into being happy. I’m not making that up either – I literally tricked myself into being happy. I wasn’t trying to do it, but that’s how it worked out and not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for how things happened.

Let’s flash back two years to September of 2010. I had been in Shreveport for 4 years and in that time had managed to date the two biggest losers out of a population of like 400,000 people. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but they weren’t good guys and they certainly weren’t good for me. I mean, on paper they looked good for the most part but you can’t get the meat of a novel from reading its Cliff’s Notes and you certainly can’t get it from just reading the back flap of the book. And with these two, the devil was indeed in the details. But, hey, this isn’t about them. This is about me. So that’s about all I’m going to say about those two with the exception of one event which happened about this time two years ago and how it impacted my life and made me who I am today.

For those of you who have seen the movie “Up in the Air” this will probably make a lot of sense and for those of you who haven’t read it but intend to then you might want to skip this paragraph and start back with the next one because there will be spoilers from the movie. Starting now. You have been warned. After the amazing weekend George Clooney and Vera Farmiga’s characters have at his sister’s wedding, he gets all romantic and decides to fly to Chicago to surprise her. He appears on her doorstep and knocks on the door and ends up learning that the woman he’s been having a relationship with for the past few months has a family and a life that she had kept hidden from him. Anyway, that’s basically what happened with me. I went to the guy’s house and knocked on the door and his ex-girlfriend (who I call Jaws) was there… in her pajamas… spending the night. This was three weeks after he’d said to me that he hated her and hoped he never had to speak to her again in his life. So yeah, to say that seeing her there was a bit of a shock might be an understatement.

I was shocked. I was devastated. I wanted to lay in bed and cry and at one point in time I remember praying, “God, you know I don’t have it in me to take my own life but if you were to do it for me that’d be great.” Yeah, I asked God to take my life for me because I am too much of a coward to do it myself. So that’s pretty much hanging from the bottom rung. And I’d been posting all this mopey shit on Facebook. Whiny status updates. Sad songs. Mopey quotes from sad novels. It was painfully obvious to everyone I know and love that I was in bad, bad shape. And sometime right after praying to God to take me, I realized that I was being absolutely ridiculous and that, since the guy was still Facebook friends with me that he could see everything that I wrote that he was probably all smug in knowing that I was upset and he was happy. And that made me really mad. Because in the movies the bad guy never wins but in real life they often do. Only, I wasn’t content in letting him think that his life was fabulous and mine wasn’t because that would mean he had won. And I’d be damned if I let him win.

So I made a rule that I was only allowed to post on Facebook happy things – that way he’d think I was out having a great time, that my life was fabulous, and I wasn’t missing him one bit. If I went to a friend’s house to watch a movie then my post was that my friend was FABULOUS and the movie was GREAT even if it wasn’t someone I was all that good a friends with and the movie wasn’t really anything all that special at all. But adhering to the old adage “If you can’t say something nice then don’t say anything at all,” I basically became the verbal equivalent of a Lisa Frank painting.

(This is the part of the story where I ask you to stop reading and do a Google image search using the words Lisa Frank. Go do that now. I’ll be here when you get back)

Yep. My posts were all sunshine and rainbows and kittens. Every time I got on Facebook I forced myself to write something good. And here’s the funny thing about me: I hate not updating on Facebook. I don’t know what it is about social media that’s so addicting to me, but I love it. So I’d be dying to post something but I couldn’t do it unless I had something positive to say. Which meant that even if I was having the worst day in the world, I had to make myself think of something good so I could participate in Facebook. And then something clicked in me that I really did have fun going to the movies with my friends and I really did enjoy going to my friends’ kids dance recitals and I really did love my family and spending time with them. I am a lucky person to have these people in my life that I call my friends and family and luckier still that they had stuck by me through years of mopey-ness.

We’ve all had that sad sap of a person in our lives and at some point in time you get sick of that shit and you cut the person off or you stop answering the phone when they call. And for whatever reason, the majority of my friends had stuck by me. And, oh my gosh, how freaking lucky am I to have these amazing people stick by me when I probably would have gotten sick as hell of me and walked away? VERY lucky, that’s how lucky I was. So if you’re one of those people who I’m fortunate enough to call my friend and you’re reading this – thank you. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for whatever traits you have that made me like you in the first place and thank you for whatever reason it is that you didn’t leave me. You all add something significant to my life and that is why you are my friend. I do not say this lightly as one of my new-found mottoes is “If you can’t add something positive to my life then get out of it,” and I live by it. The two loser ex-boyfriends are no longer Facebook friends of mine. I deleted them both and blocked them quite some time ago and I have not regretted that decision.

Okay, so I’ve written for quite some time now and not gotten around to why men are just desserts. Rest assured, it’s coming.

As I was talking to my dad about how much happier I am now than I was two years ago – or ten years ago for that matter – I said that I felt like going through all of that really made me realize that it’s better to not be in a relationship and be happy than it is to be in one and be miserable. That’s not to say that I’m not a believer in love or relationships because I’m a hopeless romantic and I do believe in “happily ever after.” I know that life isn’t perfect and that there are ups and downs in all relationships but I’m fortunate enough to have been raised by parents who have been together for 42 years and to have parents who were each raised by a set of parents who were together until one of them died (my dad’s parents were married over 40 years and my mother’s parents for over 50). So, yes, I do believe in happily ever after and I do believe that there’s someone out there for me. Maybe I know them already and maybe I have yet to meet my Mr. Right, but I do think he’s out there somewhere.

When I got home I had a friend who was lamenting the fact that she is single and that she didn’t think that there was a man out there for her. To which I replied:

When I was in high school a friend of mine was reading this book called “Men are Just Desserts” and I thought that it sounded like the most ridiculous book. I never read it but I’ve thought about the title a good bit in my life and I have come to the conclusion that men (or for men – women) ARE just desserts. They’re great but they’re not what sustains you. Maybe you’re not in a relationship with someone right now because you’re not ready for dessert. You need to have your life where it needs to be before the relationship part can happen.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that a relationship shouldn’t be what sustains you. Your own personal happiness should be what you derive the most satisfaction out of. If you rely on others to make you happy then you are ultimately setting yourself up for disaster because the other person will at some point let you down and it’s only if you’re content with yourself as a person that you will be able to deal with those letdowns and be able to move forward. You have to get your life where you determine your own happiness and if that’s the case then the relationship is dessert – it’s the sweet thing that adds to your life after you’ve provided your soul’s own nourishment.

 

Round Here

I don’t know if there’s any other song in the world that can take me back to a time and place so completely as Counting Crows’ “Round Here.” When I hear it, it’s like I’m physically transported back to another place and time. I’m no longer in my apartment, or in my car, or at the beach. Wherever I am vanishes. The heat of summer or the freezing cold of wintertime are always washed away by the feel of a spring breeze coming through the open window of a dorm room on some random, completely unmemorable night in Oxford, Mississippi in 1994.

It is the spring. It is 1994. Bill Clinton is the president but I didn’t vote for him. Arkansas just won the NCAA basketball tournament but I was pulling for Duke because of their “not as hot as Christian Laettner” center, Cherokee Parks.

I am 19 years old, younger and thinner and prettier than I am now but it doesn’t matter because I was invisible to boys even then. My hair was longer but even then I was getting gray hairs. I’d been getting those since I was 15. Going through rush seemed to make it worse though. I’m not a size 8 like I was when I graduated high school but I haven’t maxed out yet either. Somehow I’m just cute enough, or just able to flirt enough, to be able to get into any bar I want to without an I.D. Even still, I don’t ever have dates for parties unless they’re Delta Gamma parties and I ask the guy myself. I’m somewhat bothered by this because I was raised to not ask out guys or even call guys unless I had a good reason for calling. So mostly, I hang out with my girl friends when they’re not doing something with their boyfriends.

I am sitting on the floor of my dorm room – Martin 410, (601) 232-6060 – working on an art project, doesn’t matter which one. Maybe it was the one with the scissors where I spent hours upon hours cutting out things out of black matteboard with an exacto knife. Maybe it was the one where I copied the Edward Hopper painting. Maybe I was just doing some shitty color wheel. It doesn’t matter. I was always working on some art project. I always had paint somewhere on my body, usually my right forearm from dragging it through paint on something I was working on.

I don’t have a roommate anymore. She moved out on October 1st after a horrible fight. She didn’t like me because I got into a sorority and she didn’t. I didn’t like her because her boyfriend called every night at about 2:00 a.m. and made her cry, which in turn woke me up. She’d never take the damn cordless phone out into the hall like normal roommates did when people called in the middle of the night. She said it wasn’t her phone. She had to have everything of her own. Her own fridge, her own stereo, her own telephone. How many electronic devices do 2 people need in a 12×12 room? But because I have no roommate, save a red and blue betta fish named Rebel, my room becomes a haven for people who are fighting with their own roommates, people who come in to town for the weekend, and people who are drunk and bored. They know I’ll be up at all hours of the night working on one of those art projects. Some of them, like Cam, come in every so often just to see what I’ve been up to. They’ve usually been out at the bars and smell like booze and cigarette smoke. I usually light my kudzu candle and pull out the box of wine from my mini fridge which we’ll pour into plastic wine glasses and chat for a while. Then they’ll go back to their room and I’ll go back to my art.

Funny, I wish Cam was 19 again too and knocking on my door, drunk, wanting to talk about the bars and what bands she heard and how dumb boys are. I’d still drink box wine with her even though I now know that white zinfandel and box win in general is kinda trashy just to relive the old days. Of course, I have no idea where Cam is now. I think she left after our freshman or sophomore year and I lost touch with her. She was fun. I miss her.

I know I’m a little bit different from the other girls I live with. They’re always so happy and having so much fun. They always have dates for Paddy Murphy and Ivy League and Old South to get ready for. They usually come to my room to borrow clothes or have me do their makeup for them. They always make sure I promise that I’ll come to the after-party that everyone is invited to since I don’t have a date for the party itself. I go and I have fun sometimes but there are other times when all I want to do is sit out by the airport and watch the light from the tower spin around. Green. White. Green. White. I can see it best from Gina and Ginger’s room and sometimes they’ll let me hang out in their room when they’re not there and let me use the computer to write a paper. I don’t have a computer in 1994, I won’t get one until that summer. It’ll be a crappy 386 with Windows 3.1 and I’ll use it mainly to play solitaire – but that won’t be until I move to Crosby in the fall…

Mr. Jones came out in the fall. I liked it a lot but didn’t buy the CD for some reason. It wasn’t until I went into Koondog and Perky’s room on the Thursday before Spring Break that I heard Anna Begins. I know now that I have to have this CD. This is a song that will capture me and hold me under its spell. I don’t know at the time that 11 years later it will have the same hold over me. I only know that it’s the best song I’ve ever heard up until that point in time. And I must have it. But I’m not talking about Anna Begins.

I put in the CD.

I hit play.

Track 1.

Round Here.

Every night it starts out the same, just as every morning I’m awakened by the 32 hi-hats at the beginning of Dave Matthews Band’s “Ants Marching” coming from Mallini’s room. Only this is the way my every night that spring start out. It’s usually late and the dorm has already gotten quiet. People are either out or asleep. I’m sitting on the floor in jeans and some random t-shirt that I’ve accumulated from random parties. The carpet’s nasty because all I have is a little dustbroom sweeper. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to go down to the lobby and check out the real vacuum. Besides, the boys in Stockard have basically ruined it. It’s almost the end of the year anyway. There’s no sense in lugging it home. I end up throwing it away when I move out of the dorm in May.

She says “it’s only in my head”
She says “Shhh I know it’s only in my head”
But the girl on the car in the parking lot says
“Man you should try to take a shot
can’t you see my walls are crumbling?”
Then she looks up at the building
and says she’s thinking of jumping
She says she’s tired of life
she must be tired of something

I wonder how it would be if the door to the roof of the dorm wasn’t locked. Am I sad enough to jump? It’s eleven stories. I know it’s high enough. But would I do it? That’s the question. I’m sure that’s why they locked it in the first place – to keep people like me off of it. Of course, I don’t think I’d really do it. I might go up there and look at the light from the airport because you can see it really well from up there. And I might take my clunky discman up there with me and listen to this song over and over again and cry. But I don’t think I’d do it.

Besides, I’m only 19. There’s so much in life to look forward to. I’m sure I’ll get a date for at least one football game next fall. I’m sure I’ll start running again and lose those 15 lbs. I gained. I’m sure… I’m sure… I’m sure…

On Writing

I’m not going to lie. I feel like I’m beginning to be known in the blogging world as the Sea Monkey girl. I say this like I get so many hits every day that I’m allowed to anoint myself with this title but seriously, who else do you know who’s gotten 175 hits from people searching the term “sea monkeys” in Google (or Yahoo or Bing or whatever it is that the kids are using these days)? I bet I’m the only one. Then again, I’m probably the only person you know who thought they were once small enough to swim inside a grandfather clock so I guess strangeness just goes with the territory.

This is not good...

On one hand I’m sorry that there are people out there who are genuinely interested in Sea Monkeys who thought they were going to get some valuable information because I don’t have much to offer. But on the other hand I’m glad that people have stumbled onto my blog. I hope that they like what they see and want to hang around for a while. That way, somewhere down the road I can pretend like I’m a real writer and I can sit on my ass in pajamas and drink coffee all day long while generating income though my writing.

The truth is that in spite of studying Accounting, I still really want to be a writer probably more than anything else in the world. But, hey, you know J.K. Rowling had some job before she wrote all those Harry Potter books and for right now I’m just trying to figure out something that can pay my bills until the writing gig takes off. Sorry, mom. I do like accounting. I just like writing more. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I can do it while sitting on my ass at home in pajamas while drinking coffee.

The problem with me is that I go through long periods of writer’s block and I will sit and stare at the screen for a while trying desperately to get my thoughts in order so that I can write something. Then, after about five minutes or so I’ll say, “fuck it” and I’ll go play Luxor since I’m already on the laptop and all. Luxor is the greatest time-suckage of all time. I thought I had gotten to the last stage earlier tonight I was like, “Finally! Tonight I will beat Luxor!” and then I realized it keeps going on past level 12. Who knew? Interestingly, it was while I was playing Luxor that I was inspired to write my last blog which has absolutely nothing to do with Luxor, Egyptians, little colored balls, or video games. But I guess I felt relaxed enough while playing the game that I was able to think about something to write.

Is it possible that I’m a manic-depressive writer? I go through periods where I can’ think of a single thing to write about and then I go through other periods where it seems like the only thing I can do is write. This week has been like a dream for me on the writing front but a disaster in all other aspects because every time I get started on a project I get distracted by some idea and I’m like, “Must. Write. Now.” The ideas just keep popping into my head and I can’t make them stop. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’m writing in Word and saving the things I write until a later date so I don’t have information overload on my poor 12 readers. I want to dole it out bit by bit. I’ve actually written almost 10,000 words this week alone though and that’s a scary thought because that works out to something like 32 pages in 12 pt. double-spaced printed paper. Seeing how I often struggled to make a paper with the topic of my choosing even ten pages while I was an English major, this surprises and almost disturbs me. What is it about this week that has made writing so effortless for me? I don’t understand it but I also don’t want it to go away. I like being able to write even if it comes at the expense of other things like, say, sleeping.

Okay, you know I’m into something if I said I’m able to do it in lieu of sleeping and I actually like it. Everyone who knows me knows how much I love my sleep. I’m no different about that now than I was fifteen years ago. I love to sleep. But when the ideas are coming to me so rapidly I don’t want to put them off at the risk of losing them forever. There has to be a balance. I just don’t know what it is. Until I find it I’m going to have to choose one or the other.

Just Like Heaven

Homecoming

I am in a black velvet dress. It’s off-the-shoulder and it has feathers looping around my upper arms. I love this dress. It was my mother’s dress back in the 80s but by a strange twist of fate where I couldn’t find a dress to wear to prom the previous spring, it became mine. There is a bit of irony when you think about the fact that I am the daughter of a woman whose clothing store sells formal dresses. Yet, for whatever reason, I hate everything so much that season that I choose to recycle one of my mother’s old dresses. I then proceed to wear it not once, not twice, but three times to three different formal events over a three year period. I am not good advertising for my mother’s store.

The small cafeteria has been transformed into a dance floor for the night. Crepe paper streamers and balloons in purple and gold drape the walls and ceiling. A deejay is set up in one of the corners. Most of the music he plays is current top 40 fare but every so often there is a break from the Paula Abdul and C+C Music Factory and he’ll play something by the Violent Femmes or The Pixies. This particular song isn’t new – no, it came out years earlier but upon hearing the first chords the dance floor springs to life. Guys grab the hands of the girl closest to them and run to the dance floor. My hand has been grabbed and off I run. Nobody wants to miss dancing to this song.

My date is the kind of guy you want to marry when you’re 30 but don’t much want to date when you’re 16. If that sounds cruel I assure you it’s not meant to. He’s smart and polite and dependable and sweet. He opens doors and tells you how nice you look. He’s on the football team. I sit with his family during the game and proudly wear my homecoming ribbon with my date’s name on it. I could sit with my friends at the game but I choose to sit with his family because I like them. No, there’s nothing bad at all to say about my own date. My date is Mr. All-American. I’m quite happy to be there with him.

The boy I’m dancing with, however, is not my date. I’d like to think that he came alone because that’s the sort of thing it seems like only he would have done. But in reality he had a date – he had to have – I just don’t know who it was. At any rate, I don’t know who his date was then any more than I know now and that’s just as well because that way I feel no guilt for dancing with him. Actually, I do feel guilty for dancing with him because I’m abandoning my All-American date for a dance with a boy who fascinates me. He’s also smart and also on the football team and on paper this boy might seem even more Mr. All-American than my own Mr. All-American date is. He’s not. He’s darker. He’s moodier. He’s prone to doing things that lead his classmates to call him different. I’ve known who he was my whole life but I hardly know anything about him at all. I could have probably told you the favorite colors and foods and songs of almost everyone in the room that night – but not him. Kids who grow up in small, tightly-knit Southern towns can do those sorts of things so the fact that I know nothing about him is, to say the least, strange. Sure, I can tell you some things about this boy – who his family is, where he lives, what kind of car he drives – but other than those things I can’t tell you much about him at all. All of my information comes second-hand and most of it is less than flattering. It’s not that he’s menacing or hurtful to people. He’s not. He’s just different. His jokes puzzle people. He’s prone to interrupt a conversation about last week’s party with commentary on Descartes or Machiavelli. High school kids don’t know how to respond to such things except to roll their eyes and mouth “whatever,” to each other.

I have heard through a friend that he is interested in me. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure when you’re getting your information from a friend whose mother was talked to his mother who said he liked me. Or maybe his mother told my mother that and my mother told me. I can’t really remember. All I know is that someone’s mother talked to his mother and for whatever reason one of them had decided that he was interested in me. (Now that I think about it though he really doesn’t seem like the kind of boy who would have discussed his interest in a girl with his mother so maybe everything I just said isn’t true at all.) But, at this point in time I believe that he might be interested in me. And since I’m the kind of girl who is everyone’s buddy but nobody’s girlfriend I’m fairly excited at the prospect of dancing with him.

Three minutes and thirty-three seconds. That’s all I was given. I can see it all like it was yesterday both through my own eyes and also through some omniscient view that your mind throws in years after. The effect is like you’re getting to watch your life replay on film. For the span of this one song I smile and dance. I am completely high on the adrenaline of dancing with this boy who I’ve only watched from afar. It was like I was shy and unable to speak to people when in reality that’s far from the truth. I’m the type of girl who speaks to people in line at the grocery store. I’m the one who’s first to greet the new kids in school. I am many things, but I am not shy. Yet with him I am always watching and never speaking. I don’t know how to talk to him. I want to, but can never think of anything to say that isn’t banal. I know I want to stand out and be different from the other girls but I can never figure out how exactly to do that. So I dance and I smile and I hope that maybe this will lead somewhere because I want to talk to him in spite of the fact that most of my friends think he’s different. He is different. That’s why I want to know him better. Deep down I think that I may be different too.

I never spoke to him save pleasantries before or after that night. We didn’t even speak at the dance that night and I certainly never went out with him later on. He continued to be a mystery to me. I continued to study him from afar in a desperate hope that I would think of that one thing that would make me seem interesting to him. It never happened. But for those three and a half minutes he was mine.

As strange as it sounds, I rarely ever think about where he is now or what he’s doing. I have a vague awareness that I’ve gleaned through conversations with mutual friends and every so often I will run into one of his parents when I’m at home and I’ll ask how he is.  They never tell me much about him other than he’s fine and I’m actually okay with that because it’s like the knowing now might color my memory of that night in the fall of 1991 with the life he leads twenty years later. I don’t want that. I want my perfect memory from a night when I was sixteen and myself a completely different person.

Here’s the thing about memories though – as time passes they themselves morph and change into something other than what really happened. I know that when I think about the drive up Seven Mile Beach from Georgetown to the condo we always stayed in that we drove on the left-hand side of the road. But my mind always flips it around and puts me on the right because that’s the side of the road we drive on in America. No matter how many times I try to tell myself that when we’re driving north on that road that we are on the same side as the ocean, I always see cars passing between me and the beach. Logic tells me I’m wrong but I can’t stop how I see it in my head. Maybe the boy never liked me. Maybe it was another girl named Courtney or someone with a different name entirely. Maybe he didn’t like anyone at all. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. It wouldn’t affect the way I tell the story because sometimes the story itself is the memory.

Schadenfreude… and Randomness

I hate to admit it but I really do delight in the misfortune of others – particularly those who have done something to me which I perceive as unjust. I guess it would have been better to have laughed about it at the time but since I didn’t know about it until today I couldn’t laugh about it until today. So laugh about it today I will do.

In other news, I have come to a point in my life where I’m going to have to decide what kind of angle I’d like to take with this blog. Will it be family-friendly or is it something that I’d really prefer only adults with a little bit of a thick skin to read? On one hand I find myself still amused by things I see on Texts From Last Night and want to share them with my readers and my college friends and roommates – most of whom have little interest in laughing about stupid stuff that happened ten years ago because they’re now married and have kids and the things that happened a decade ago that were once funny are now taboo subjects. Like this:

It was a sobriety test blowjob. If he could get it up, he could get me home.

I read this and instantly thought it sounded just like something one of my friends would have said to me back in 1997. Like, as in one specific friend who would have said this exact sentence to me while we were up at City Grocery having drinks the next afternoon and laughing about the night before. I was so tempted to copy it and send it to her and then I was like, “Oh yeah, it’s not 1997 anymore and she probably wouldn’t think that was funny, especially since she’s been married for like ten years or something. I bet her husband would find it particularly not funny and then he wouldn’t like me anymore. Well crap.” And then I’m left not being able to share it with anyone other than using it as an illustration of what I’d like to do but can’t do anymore because somewhere along the way life has kinda passed me by and Texts From Last Night shouldn’t even be funny anymore to me but it is and I can’t rightfully explain why.

I first noticed that I cared about such things last summer when I was scanning and posting pictures from high school and college. I took special care and made sure to omit any photographs of people holding alcohol and/or cigarettes (or at least crop out the booze and smokes) because most of them have families now and most of them also don’t want their spouses/kids/parents to see pictures of them doing what almost every other kid was doing at that age. I wouldn’t say they want to erase the past (well, some of them do and that’s their business and I respect it) but most of them do want to whitewash it a bit.

The problem comes about for me in that I have great stories to tell and most of those stories involve people involved in situations that they may not like to be associated with.

Then there’s the whole thing with using bad language. It’s a well known fact that I’m a Southern girl who can and does cuss like a sailor at times. I try not to do it out in the open like I did when I was in college because, honestly, I don’t want to be dropping a bad word and some poor grandma or a child hear me and break into tears. When those dogs were yapping at 5:30 a.m. I wanted to scream at them “SHUT THE EVERLIVING *&(^% UP!” but what I really said was, “Guys, hush!” in a stern voice because I wanted to be respectful of the people living around me. (side note: even the tamed-down version got me evicted) However, I really don’t feel so much like I want to do this in my writing. I mean, I certainly hope that the average 8 year-old who’s surfing the internet doesn’t just stumble onto my blog and read curse words but my friendly little stat-o-meter tells me that the search words that lead most people to my blog are “sea monkeys” and that the average 8 year-old might not expect to stumble onto my blog by typing “sea monkeys” into Google.

Do I censor myself in the anticipation that there are people out there who might want to read a G blog only to find that it’s more like PG-13? I mean, yes, I can tell a nice story about John Denver’s “Country Roads” without dropping an f-bomb but at some point in time I’m going to end up telling a story about an ex-boyfriend or something else that makes me literally cringe and it’s fair to say that some “not-so-nice” language is probably going to slip out in my writing. Yes, I can say that someone is a fool but if I say they’re a damned fool then it really gets the point across. I guess you could say that I curse for emphasis. Emphasis gets the point across.

I’ll tell you who’s not getting the point across very well though – Honda. While watching The Amazing Race last night I saw two commercials for the new Civic featuring superheroes and monsters and possibly a ballerina as well. The end card said, “To Each Their Own.” I’m sorry, but did nobody notice that the words “each” and “their” do not go together? “Each” implies a singular thing and “their” implies plural. But in the days of politically correct bullshit (see, I told you it was bound to happen when I needed to curse for emphasis) we’re no longer allowed to say “To each his own,” or “To each her own,” because by specifying only one sex we have glaringly omitted the other. I’m sorry, but I am just not so overly sensitive that I would read “To each his own” and infer that this would not also mean “her” own because it’s 2011 and women are not only allowed to drive cars but they can also purchase them and even register them in their own names. Yay, progress!

One of the most horrifying moments of my return to college was being told in a business communications class that it was not only appropriate but expected that a writer would use “s/he” in proper business communications. Like, use it just like that with the slash in it to indicate that not only are men allowed to so something, but women may do it as well (but only as a marginal forethought as the women are only allowed to participate with 1/3 of the correct pronoun). I’m sorry but I’m not going to stray from the standard male pronouns that I was taught to use when I was in grade school because when I read the sentence “If an employee needs to request time off, s/he should do so in writing at least a week before the anticipated absence from work,” I cringe. It looks bad. It sounds bad. In my head I read “s/he” and my mind thinks out “Shu-hee.” C’mon ladies, stand with me if you’re against this butchery of the English language! I don’t want to share a pronoun with a man at work any more than I want to share a bathroom with one. I suppose that makes me an anti-feminist. Whatever. I just hope I don’t have to hear any femminazis talk about having spashdown in the “bothroom” because some guy forgot to put the seat back down. I’d laugh because that would indeed be Schadenfreude.

How to Lose Friends and Influence People

I’ve been saying it for a long time – forcing your political views on other people is never a good thing, particularly if you have people around you who you really like but really don’t agree with at the polls. Yet, for some reason, I guess people think that venues like Facebook and Twitter aren’t “real” venues of communication among friends so I’m constantly bombarded by others’ politics on a daily basis. Political posts on Facebook are kinda like bumper stickers. Or, as April Winchell so eloquently put it today on regretsy.com:

And by the way, spreading the gospel with bumper stickers and decals is not “generating awareness.” It’s generating resentment. A T-shirt is not a conversation. It’s a way for you to shit your opinion out and I have to smell it.

Most days I ignore it. Some people who post a ridiculous amount of politics or religion get their posts hidden and I’ve even deleted a few of them because I wasn’t really friends with them anyway and they didn’t have anything interesting to contribute to my life via the internet.

But there are some friends I really like who don’t post political things all that much and, on a regular basis, post things that I find both interesting and important. And yet, sometimes they post something that’s been sensationalized in the media (left or right, I don’t differentiate much because they both sensationalize things in my opinion) and they immediately jump on the bandwagon and post something about it that, quite frankly, is just inaccurate.

In an attempt to keep my friends more, um, “centered,” I sometimes find it necessary to correct what I know to be wrong or to at least try to show the other side of the issue – which is what happened the other day. A friend of mine who I hold very dear to me posted an article stating that oil giant, Exxon, paid no money in U.S. income taxes. Since I’m studying accounting and taxation is something that is interesting to me (gross, right?) I stepped up to the plate and tried to explain some reasons why Exxon may not have paid taxes. I’ll admit that I did so very simplistically and I only used one example to illustrate my point, but I felt it necessary to explain to people who would read this article that there are many valid reasons why a multi-billion dollar corporation would not pay taxes just as there are many reasons why an individual who makes a good living may not have to pay year-end taxes or may even receive a refund.

My friend politely disagreed with me but one of her friends (someone I do not know) felt it necessary to jump all over me and tell me that I was “sad” and “pathetic” and that my teachers were teaching me a bunch of junk and how it was people like me who enabled rich people to rob the poor through federal income taxes while corporations skated by paying nothing.

I’ll admit I should have let it slide. I should have ignored it. But I do not take kindly to a complete stranger telling me that I am “sad” and “pathetic” nor do I like the insinuation that I am an immoral and unethical person by proxy of the profession which I am studying. I will be the first to say that on the first day of my income tax class I was told, “Your job as an accountant is to save your clients from paying anything which they can legally avoid.” But the emphasis was on legality. And it’s true, a tax accountant’s job is to just what my professor said. Or, to expound on that sentiment, if a person makes $50,000 a year, and the fall into a 25% tax bracket (which they would), they wouldn’t pay all $12,500 that would make up the 25% of their income. Based on deductions ranging from number of dependents to owning your own home (to countless other things) and credits that a person can receive, the $50,000 wage earner could possibly pay nothing at the end of the year or even receive a refund from the government. More or less, these same principles apply to corporations (please know I am grossly oversimplifying this, but the principles are basically the same).

You’ve all seen the commercials on television – H&R Block will do a “second look” of your taxes to see how much more money you could have saved. Well, businesses employ accountants to do the same for them and while I’m sure there are people out there who don’t like the fact that businesses don’t always have to pay more at the end of the year, sometimes that’s just how it works out. People love it when they save on their own taxes, but when a business does the same thing it’s somehow greedy and underhanded and only happens because “government is in big business’s back pocket.”

Okay, that’s enough politics. I don’t give a shit whether you agree with me or not that businesses are entitled to do some of the same things that individuals do, come April 15th, it happens.

So, yeah, I felt a bit put out when a complete stranger found it necessary to insult me for pointing out what I just said in the previous paragraphs, and I did find it necessary to defend myself – which I did in private because I’m not trying to get a friend of mine to take sides and pick one friend over the other on this issue. Maybe I was wrong to do that. I probably should have just let it go. But I don’t like being called stupid when I’m not and I don’t like being called unethical when there’s no way I would cheat on taxes that I knew that I, or my clients, filed. And I did think that it was important to point out that I was being accused of not having any idea of how taxes worked by a person that I feel fairly certain has never taken even an introductory accounting class, much less one on taxation. I mean, the way this person responded to me would have made you think I was pushing old ladies into the street with one hand while clubbing kittens over the head with the other – all with a smile on my face.

Anyway, my friend has taken down the entire offensive thread but I fear the damage may have been done. I know that on a political front my friend agrees with the other person, which is her right. I’m not friends with her or with anyone else because of their political beliefs. Lord, if I picked my friends based on their politics I wouldn’t have any friends at all. I wouldn’t even be friends with my own parents. I have never once met someone who agreed with me on every single political issue and I doubt that I ever will. I don’t care about that because I’m friends with my friends because they enhance my life. This is the very reason why I beg people not to discuss politics online. Just because you’re not face to face with someone when you make a statement doesn’t mean that it can’t be offensive or hurtful. I just wish my friends could understand that politics is something that should really only be discussed among people that you’re absolutely certain have like ideas (for me, that’d be with nobody) or expressed in the voting booth. Facebook is neither of those places and I wish that more people could understand how divisive posting things like this can be.

I’d like to reach out to my friend and ask if they’re indeed angry with me for responding to the other person but I think maybe I should just wait a while and let the storm blow over. I feel as though I probably did respond to their friend in a particularly scathing fashion but that’s how I react when I feel as though I have been backed into a corner and accused of things that are patently not true.

Oh, but here’s the truth about Exxon – and it’s from CNN, which I find to be a generally middle-of-the-road media outlet, and its source has been cited in case you don’t believe me:

Exxon paid the most taxes last year of any U.S. company, by far — but not a cent went to the IRS for income taxes. That’s because the oil giant does business in some of the mostly highly taxed countries in the world. Want to extract petroleum in Nigeria? Be prepared to fork over up to 85% of your profit in tax payments.

Exxon doled out more than $15 billion in income tax payments to foreign countries last year. U.S. tax codes allow companies to take massive deductions in light of those international charges, which knocked Exxon’s federal income-tax bill down into negative territory.

That said, Uncle Sam gets his money in other ways. Including sales taxes and duties, Exxon recorded $7.7 billion in U.S. tax costs last year, and paid even more overseas.

Its grand total in global taxes for the year? A whopping $78.6 billion. The company’s effective income tax rate was a hefty 47%, its highest in three years.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.top_5_tax_bills/2.html

Okay, just we have that all cleared up.