Ah!!! I never imagined that once school finished I’d start neglecting this… Whoops. I guess I’ve been too preoccupied in finding a damn job. No one is freakin’ hiring. They’re just putting up a courtesy sign so as to not freak everyone out that things are far worse than they appear.
Well, I guess I’ll return to full force on or near sept. 20th. I might just post some stuff in here when I have the time.
‘Til then
-Jennifer
Hey hey hey, all!
It’s like, 2 oh-something right now. I should be sleeping, I could be sleeping, but I’m not. Do you know why I’m not sleeping? Because I had a coffee. And I’m procrastinating on a really important final due Wednesday. This is going to be like the Econ portfolio (ironically enough, it’s another, longer portfolio to be completed over a significantly shorter amount of time). I think that if I blog about something, it’ll get the creative juices (I hate that phrase, it sounds dirty) flowing and I’ll be able to write all fluidly and pretty-ful again. I work best right before a deadline. Unless I miss that deadline, and then I’ve fucked myself over.
So that brings us here with me talking about the various disorders I could possibly have. No, just kidding, this isn’t going to be one of those things. A thought just occurred to me. I have this gigantic folder of essays I had wanted to turn in, but then I changed my mind about them. They were all pretty good, they just needed to be finished. Maybe when the term is over, I’ll go back to those and finish them. That’ll give me something to do.
Teacher told us to go find some stories we liked reading. I like reading, so I’ve liked everything I’ve read. (Yes even “The Smoker,” though at first it felt all wrong, you sir have changed my mind about it.) In trying to gather up everything I’ve read, I went through a small self-discovery phase.
I learned that Google doesn’t consider punctuation as a search-able character. Things like the quotation mark, the comma, and in my case, the parenthesis serve a different function in Googleland; so trying to find this poem was excruciating.
Also, a lot of people have life problems. But more people have analogy problems. We are not fish, the only bowl I lived in was when I was 6 and wanted to be an astronaut. To say that you want “a life outside the bowl” implies that you’d rather not be stuck here with the rest of us. You’re not that special.
I learned that when taking a standardized test, no one, no one, pays attention to the prompt.
I also noticed that when IB tells you “Not to reproduce this test,” it means go ahead and assign the prior year’s test as summer homework for your English students. Looks like there are more Muradyan-like teachers out there.
I learned that to look for the bowl, one must think outside the bowl. I came up with probably fifty different searches for that damn poem. Only one worked.
And finally, I learned that spending three hours looking for something, getting frustrated, and walking away from it, only to come back thirty minutes later because you don’t want to do homework, is no way spend a weekend. I’ll be glad when this term is over.
Dear Sir,
Your little Buster is adorable. His little chubby dachshund paws running all over the place. When he dug a hole in our vegetable garden to play with my dog Wilson, we didn’t mind because Buster was just so cute. But here’s the thing. No amount of cuteness is going to make up for what you’re allowing Buster to do to our lawn.
It’s getting to the point now that trying to mow the lawn has become a real challenge. Can you imagine my surprise as I push the lawn mower over one of his ‘care packages’? The stink. Ugh. The walk from your porch to our lawn is not that far, the least you could do is walk down with a little Ziploc baggie and pick up your dog’s waste.
We have seen you and Buster in the night, sneaking around like criminals. Just the other day, Buster ran over to our yard and we had to chase him away with a broomstick. We’ve also noticed how you’ve resorted to taking his collar off so he won’t be so audible as he trots down to the strip of lawn in the front of the yard.
One night, we even caught Buster trying to get into my grandmother’s backyard, no doubt to claim some more territory for Busterland. She has warned you that if she catches him in her backyard, she’ll take him to the pound. We’re not mean people. We know what goes on at the pound. Please don’t make us do this. This can all be solved calmly and rationally, but we are so tired of having to pick up after a dog that isn’t ours.
You my claim that our dog is the one who’s causing the problem, but when Wilson has to go, we either take him to the park and pick up after him, or let him go in our backyard, where we pick up after him. We never let him go up front, and we pick up after him. Could you imagine what our neighborhood would be like if no one picked up after their pets? It’d be piled all over the lawns, in the street, on the sidewalk. So that is why there is a city ordinance regarding animal waste disposal. We have been very good neighbors by putting up with this. However if this continues, we will be forced to do something about it. It is starting to feel like this is on purpose. We are very nice neighbors, and we would like to continue this neighborly rapport, but it will take some effort on your part as well. Respect our property and we will respect you. The first step to this potentially long and happy friendship is cleanliness, so can you please start picking up after your dog.
Sincerely,
Your Neighbors
This morning, I had an errand to run. He made that experience hell. It went something like this:
—
“Where do you want me to park? Should I park here? Tell me where to park.”
“No, don’t park here, park in the front.”
“I can’t park in the front.”
“Yes you can, it’s summer, there aren’t any buses running.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t park here!”
“Yes you can! Didn’t you just hear me?”
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!!!”
—
And like that, my morning went from being a decent outing with him, to one of the awful shouting matches that I’d grown to expect. They weren’t terribly bad anymore. I remember a 6-year-old girl asking why he was always so loud, and why was he jumping on the couch? At 10, he decided not to go away to football camp, and she was upset that he was going to stay. At 14, she was starting high school, and it was supposed to be his turn to step up to the plate as a parent. Never happened. At 16, he convinced her to not pursue a really good education, and just settle for a mediocre one. And now at 17, she despised him.
There were some good moments in all of that hatred. Good memories. He knew I liked to drive around, or rather be driven, and when he would take me to minor league baseball games all across the state, I was always thrilled. And it was these moments that I relished. The high moments just before the fall. Right before there was a problem with food, or cost, or stopping. They were once “trapped in L.A. traffic” and he was afraid that he “wouldn’t be able to merge back on,” so he withheld restroom privileges until we were out of city limits. Another time, we were on a particularly long trip, and he limited me to only one food item a day, and that item had to have come from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. But I got off on the high moments just before these awful events took place. The pleasant conversations and the happy times. I could always feel when he was getting ready to fuck it up again, and I always guarded myself against any significant hurt.
I’d also mastered the technique of lying straight to his face. Such as this morning
—
I opened the car door. He stuck the key in the ignition, expecting me to sit down. Instead, I closed my backpack, picked it up, and looked him directly in the face.
“I’m not riding with you today.”
“Why not?”
“Mom has to take Matthew out there to pick up something. I don’t even know what it is. But they’re all going, and they were wondering if I’d like to ride with them. They know how I don’t like your car.”
He tightened his grip on the seven dollars that he was to give me today for lunch. Just getting that seven dollars was an ordeal, but that’s a different issue entirely.
“Was it anything I did?”
“No, not at all. She just figures I’d like riding with her instead.”
He loosened his hand and gave my my money.
“Oh. Okay then. Well, I’ll see you after class then.”
“Yeah, totally. Thanks.”
I closed the door and walked away.
“Fucker.”
—
In the seventeen years that I’ve known him as my father, I’ve always wondered how he can be such a dipshit and feel no remorse for treating my mother and I like… I don’t even know how he treats us, I don’t think there’s a term for it. At this point, I’ve stopped caring. I want him away. I want him gone. Not dead, but like how it used to be, when he’d leave and then come back for 6 weeks and leave again. I’m quickly running out of tolerance for him. I wish he initially had more for me.
Tuesday.
I ditched Stats today. I was supposed to go to tutoring, but something, perhaps false pride, kept me from going. Instead, I walked to the Cafe and ordered the standard macchiato and drank it outside. Sitting there with almost two hours before class started, I decided now would be as good as any to re-read the short story he told us to read. So I broke it out on a table and started reading it. It was a story about this lady who pseudo-adopts the daughter of her friend, and then messes up the relationship between her and the daughter. (“How to Tell Stories to Children”)
I read it, highlighted it, re-read it, analyzed it, and still had about an hour and a half until class started. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to just sit there and look all hopeless and friendless. What to do? I decided to walk around. And in this intellectual silence, you would think that I would conjure up some spiritual assessment of myself. But no. I stood up, put my stuff into my bag, and started walking around to the pace of a Nine Inch Nails song (‘Just Like You Imagined’).
I walked through L quad. The fountain in the center of the quad was off today. Five weeks and I still hadn’t figured out the pattern for the fountain. Not like I’d ever run out of time to figure it out. I’ll be stuck here at De Anza forever. Stuck in limbo. I really should have listened better in high school. Could have bypassed all of this shit. Hindsight’s 20/20. A sparse collection of people sat scattered across the campus, all sitting alone. There was this one kid who always walked by singing at the top of his lungs some sort of song/rap. Once he tried singing Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” He was off-key. He was also nowhere to bee seen today or yesterday. I wondered if the “man” had gotten to him yet. As annoying as his interjections were on my life, I missed them now that they were gone. I’m sure he’ll be there tomorrow.
I stopped at this circular bench on the outskirts of the east campus. There is a pathway, some hills, and some tall trees marking the divide between campus and parking lot B. I usually sat on the shaded hill, directly underneath the limbs of two tall, but still relatively small pine trees. But it was morning, so I sat on the circle table. This table had obviously been there for a while, because it was covered in graffiti. This wasn’t like hard to read graffiti, but rather drawings of various things, ranging from rudimentary penises to a very good rendition of Peter Griffin from Family Guy. It was under this picture that I contributed my piece by writing “Freakin’ Sweet!” underneath Peter. Killed five minutes doing that.
When I finished, I, once again, had nothing to do. I took my book out again and started flipping through the pages. I read the book (The Best Nonrequired Reading of 2007) as it was meant to be read, discovering some things about myself within the stories and a few things that the book was designed to make me feel. People in my class started walking over to the classroom and I put my head down.
There was still half an hour before class, an he was probably out smoking or something. Not like I cared or anything, but I was always overly observant, particularly so in this class. I’ll admit I felt threatened by the pro-ana girls (or at least someone as big as I am would see them as pro-ana) who were constantly vying for the attention that they lacked within themselves. I decided my sword against them would be an uncanny ability to see past the bullshit and try to find a deeper, almost poetic meaning to everything. I usually succeeded in this, or at least I thought I did, and that was enough for me. If I could keep myself in this cloud of “Oh, of course I matter,” then I could at least look him in the eye.
That was another thing. I’m usually pretty good with eye-contact. I used to be able to look any teacher directly in the face and say what I felt. This does two things. Shows assertion, and shows maturity. This assertion adds a certain truth to what I say. You’re more likely to believe a person who looks you in the eye, that someone who is always shifting focus. In my experience, younger people (i.e. people my age) feel less certain about themselves. Direct contact says “I know who I am, and I can see that you don’t,” which is disconcerting for some (not all). I used to be able to do this eye thing. I can’t do it anymore. It started to fade last year. It’s all but gone now. A gentle deterioration of my confidence.
And so, unable to sit in a classroom, or in front of it for that matter, is too much to ask for me. I got up from my table and walked over to class. The door was locked. What to do? I walked around the whole quad this time, From B/C Lot to the Student Center, over towards the construction, and back. Again, listening to the sounds of Metric this time bounce around my empty mind. Coffee really fucked me up this morning if I’m on a caffeine at noon. I should stop skipping meals.
By the time I had meandered back, a lady, we’ll call her the key lady because she always (for some unknown reason) has the key to his classroom, had just walked away from his room, keys still in hand. So the door was open now. I made a beeline for the door, and walked in to the silent room. Four students, but not one sound. And sitting in the front of the room meant that there were no eyes to look at.
