July 2005 Archives

Trying to make up for childhood traumas with corndogs.

I don't remember how old I was, maybe six or seven. My brother, Max, was a picky eater. My parents would joke that the only thing green he was wiling to put in his mouth were the M&M's of that lustrous color. One of the few things he was willing to eat were hot dogs, either in his Kraft macaroni and cheese, or on buns.

Our lunch one warm Saturday afternoon was, in deference to my brother's palate, hot dogs.

The two hot dogs were lined up neatly on the kitchen counter, as my brother and I stood there looking up at them and salivating. My father pulled the ketchup out of the refrigerator, and picking up one of the hot dogs, carefully wrote my brother's name, Max, in careful, curlicued script on it.

"Ooh!" I squealed with delight, as my father handed the hot dog to my brother. "I want one like that!"

"Just like Max's?" my father asked.

"Yes!" I cried, impatient to get a hot dog with my name on it. "Like Max's!"

My father grinned and began to carefully spell out my name in ketchup on my hot dog. Except, when he handed it to me, I saw that it said 'Max.'

"But.." I wailed, my mouth open slightly in confusion and a slight dampness gathering around my eyes.

"It's just like your brother's! That's what you said you wanted!" My father began to laugh loudly, his face contorting and turning nearly purple as he enjoyed his own joke. My brother laughed also, between giant, greedy bites of his hot dog.

I understood then, kind of, as the tears began rolling down my chubby cheeks. I ran out of the house and into the heat of the California midday sun, slamming the screen door behind me and not stopping until I reached the roundabout at the end of the street.

There I crouched, under a yellowing oak tree, wiping the grubby tears from my face, and slowly, bite by bite, eating my soggy wiener.

"Rousseau in the course of his Confessions narrates incidents that profoundly shocked the sensibility of mankind. By describing them so frankly he falsified his values and so gave them in his book a greater importance than they had in his life. They were events among a multitude of others, virtuous or at least neutral, that he omitted because they were too ordinary to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones.This is the type that most often writes about himself. He leaves out his redeeming qualities, and so appears only weak, unprincipled, and vicious."
--W. Somerset Maugham

My mother has a certain whine that one expects only to hear out of the mouth of a teenage girl--the sort of girl that would end all conversations with the word 'whatever.' She uses this whine only rarely, but when she does, it is usually accompanied by a slight shake of her clenched fist or a stamp of her dainty hoof. "Lina," she cries, regretting whatever it was that she just said, "Don't put that on your web page."

"Oh Mother," I sigh, "I'm a journalist. I'm obligated to tell the truth," I say, sniggering behind my hand.

"But," she squeals, "you only post when I say something offensive. You don't mention all of the nice things that I do."

My thoughts are that since I mention that she's my mother, the clear implication is that she gave birth to me, which was a pretty nice thing to do. This, despite the fact that she continues to complain about the birthing process twenty-six years after it culminated in my glorious entrance into this universe.

And perhaps she's right. It is possible that I don't repeat every single thing my mother says to me because frankly, most of her popular topics don't appear to be as interesting to the general public as when she talks about anal sex.

It hasn't occurred to her that the easiest way to get me to stop posting every time she says pudendum is for her to stop saying pudendum--at least in the presence of her daughter. This however, is a pleasure that she cannot forsake. She appears to receive no greater joy than to say naughty things in front of an ever younger audience.

Just a few weeks ago, she was holding Holly and Rene's baby. He was only weeks old, and she was cooing softly to him while Holly and I talked about the issues of the day. "Just like the BBC!" I exclaimed.

Holly innocently asked,"What does BBC stand for anyway?"

"Big black cock!" my mother crowed, overjoyed. She cuddled the baby closer, satisfied with both her nurturing and acronym-deducing abilities.

She's not the only one that has had her values falisified on shutitdown, though.

"Your page isn't real," my ex-boyfriend used to claim spitefully, "That's not what you are really like."

I tried to explain that the main difference was that on my webpage I was clothed, whereas in real life I was occasionally disrobed, and therefore he should count himself lucky. He didn't see it that way however. He was enraged by my apparent glibness about the problems that he felt were serious, the jokes about gangbangs (which he also thought were serious). He didn't like the fact that I didn't mention my relationship with him until our break up.

I thought perhaps, in the face of these complaints, that he would prefer that I write about him, so finally one day, a year into our relationship, I offered to include him here. "I want to read the posts first, and I don't want you to mention what country I am from. And don't imply that I'm a homo." These were just a few of the rules that he initally set down, and in the face of this, I decided that he wasn't very good material anymore, and never wrote about him.

As a side note, it was me repeatedly using the term "big black cock" in his native tongue that led to one of our most embarrassing (and public) fights. Fran can verify both the embarrassment and the publicness. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Apparently this fellow didn't want to get painted by my writer's brush, one which reduced him to a caricature with little more than a limp wrist and a questionable nationality. And although my mother complains, I know that she enjoys the fact that she's a popular, cartoonish character. It's hard to be honest on a web page, and it's even harder to be interesting. It's too easy to fall into the trap of detailing one's food consumption and cd-buying habits. Luckily, my family keeps me in enough material to avoid writing about anything (or anyone) too mundane. Even more fortuitously, most of them are weak, unprincipled, and vicious, so I'm not often forced to exaggerate.

..
While getting a mani/pedi the other day (that's a manicure and pedicure for you not in the know), the manicurist asked me in broken English if I had a boyfriend.
"Well," I said, "kind of. I mean, he's in New York," I explained, slightly apologetically. I knew she would be disappointed in me.
"That's bad," she replied.
"Yeah," I said, nodding in agreement.
"He might have other girlfriend," she said, shaking her head.
She looked knowingly at me and softly hissed, "or boyfriend."

..
At my friend Heather's wedding yesterday, I found myself followed by the bride into the bathroom. "Brad was asking about you," she said, ensconsed in her wedding whites.
"What?" I replied.
"He said that he made out with you ten years ago, but he doesn't know who you are."
I looked at her questioningly, not understanding.
"He recognized your name on the guest list," she said apologetically.

Today it was 'You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby" by the Smiths that made me exclaim with the delight of a blind man finally able to see. It made me feel kind of okay. I thought that one was supposed to grow out of feeling that a pop star is the only person that can understand you somewhere around the age of 14. But I still feel that way. What gives?

You must suffer and cry for a longer time
You just haven’t earned it yet, baby

My father's response was to refuse to directly respond to my lament, and rather, detail the myriad of ways in which his life was far worse than mine. He cited finding a receipt from a couch that he had purchased in 1981 and which was removed from our house sometime in my childhood. Finding this scrap of paper, he claimed, was the ultimate proof of a life not worth living. "I still have the receipt Lina," he bawled. "Do you know what that means for me? Do you understand how much crap I have to throw away?" He paused for a moment. "I," he mused, "really have no reason to live." A moment later he told me that he was too busy to talk, and then hung up. Needless to say, despite learning that my father's list of reasons to jump out of a window was longer than mine, I didn't feel better.

His response though, was not a surprise though. Just like his overbite, I've inherited his overwhelming negativity and tendency towards depression. I've spent the last 20-odd years trying to fight them both, with no noticeable progress in either category.

The older I get, the more I seem to be behaving like my father. The only things that make him happy are insulting other people and seething quietly, his face marred only by a rictus of murderous rage and a single throbbing vein in the middle of his forehead. Luckily, I lack the vein, for now. The rest, however, is all falling into place.