A Recap In Your Ass, Part 2: Injustice Is Blind May 12, 2008

Had we been born a family of Greek humorists, my father - he of one seeing eye - may have appreciated the comedy in being called Cyclops from time to time.
 
But we are Koreans. Who pride ourselves on perfectionism (Ed. note: Uh), discipline (Ed. note: No), the use of metal chopsticks, love procured through immediate acceptances into top universities, and a brand of humor that plays like a macabre game of Hot Potato - the main objective being to pass any focus on you and your faults onto a nearby unsuspecting family member as soon as you can, with extra points awarded for verbal bullets directed at nonexistent weight gain or the time you fell off that seesaw you shared with hefty-and-perhaps-appropriately-named Asia (you know, like the continent) because if you couldn’t tell her you were afraid to sit on a seesaw with her, then it’s only fair you were catapulted off.
 
Everyone being fair game, that is, except for the patriarch himself.
 
To his defense, the story of my father’s lost eyesight is one more like Greek tragedy: An immigrant in pursuit of the American dream with a wife and two young daughters, conducting the mundane task of pruning a small tree in the front yard of his first American home when an errant branch poked his healthy eye and he was rushed to a hospital where a doctor of malpractice leanings slipped and slid with a scalpel too freely and injured the eye unfixable.
 
It’s the stuff of injustice and hard yanks at the heartstrings. Of Lifetime made-for-TV movies dowsed in sepia hues. And, as his children came to learn, the stuff that could add that extra oomph of guilt to already lofty expectations.
 
The story became intertwined with demands to do well in school. To become doctors one day, but - with a twist from that classic Asian demand! - doctors who could fix their father’s eye and restore his sight. A demand that my younger sister followed to Johns Hopkins and I followed to my junior year in high school, when I finally confessed to my parents that I had no desire to apply to Pre-Med programs when it came time to apply to colleges. 
 
It led to my parents both not speaking to me for two weeks.
 
A relative period of peace and quiet in my memory.
 
When the speaking resumed, the new commands handed to me were to become CEO of big company, maybe Coca Cola or IBM! Or to pursue politics because, surely, the position of Freshman Class President would look fine on any future senator’s resume. But first, law. Yes, law would have to do.
 
And the story of my father’s eye gained a new spin. While my younger sister pursued a career of medicine to fix the eye that lost a little more of its sight each day, I would become a purveyor of justice and use my father’s eye as my marker for what the injustice I needed to fight in this country looked like.
 
Slightly cloudy, a little withered, and, on its bad days, the provocation of a bad golf game.
 
A part of me could accept this. While the story served useful in well-placed doses to guilt his daughters into hand-picked careers (and to parlay martyrdom in college application essays for said daughters), whiny complaints about his eye were non-existant from my father. So little did he mention it day to day that I often forgot that he could only see well with one. When he explained with regret and frustration how he really hadn’t seen that car that had come up on his left side after a near accident, one couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him. A pang of sadness in ones heart and a re-commitment to offer this man something that could help him justify his pursuit of a Dream that was found to be littered with small trees and errant branches.
 
A law degree from Harvard University, after all, only needs one good eye to view.
 
But it’s been two and some years after my graduation from college and I’m no closer to holding a Harvard - or any - law degree in my hands. By my choosing.
 
So it was only prudent that the gods who have always favored fathers over their children (Ed. note: Look at Abraham and Issac!) step in during my visit home back in March and propel me from the life I’ve carved out for myself during the last few years that hasn’t included an omnipresent panic that I’m disappointing everyone.
 
Driving with my sister to meet our parents for dinner, we discussed her upcoming plans to apply to medical schools and her consideration of MD-PhD programs. I jested on her fine job of making sure our father’s eye and the horrors committed by that errant branch and the villainous doctor so many years ago would finally be remedied.
 
A pause far too long and silent passed after my comment. 
 
And this - along with prods of WHAT ARE YOU HIDING FROM ME - is how I learned that I directly contributed to my father’s loss eyesight.  
 
“But I remember the day that Ahp-ba was rushed to the hospital. I was outside while he was pruning that damn tree but I wasn’t anywhere near him! And I remember that eyepatch he had to wear for weeks afterwards,” I stammered. “He looked like some awful Korean caricature of Zorro with that moustache he used to have.”
 
“Yeah, well, one day shortly after that eyepatch was removed, I guess he was holding you up in his arms, and you had some picture that you had painted at school that you wanted him to see and he wasn’t looking at it so you kept waving it around. And you cut him in his eye with it,” my sister revealed.
 
“A first-grade picture is why he’s blind in that eye? But what about the doctor? The bad guy doctor?” I protested, while cringing at the idea of how painful a paper cut in ones eyeball sounded.
 
“I guess there were two doctors. The first one, after the tree incident, did a good job. But Ahp-ba had to go to the hospital AGAIN after you paper cut his eyeball since his eye was still recovering. And that’s the doctor that screwed up his eye.”
 
“So. Basically. Right now. You’re telling me that if I hadn’t waved around some first grade piece of watercolor shit or whatever it was and poked his eyeball with it, he never would have had to see the doctor that fucked up his eye and caused him to become blind in that eye?”
 
“Yeah… Sorry,” she squeaked.
 
When I relayed the story to my friend Pete once I arrived back in Chicago, he seemed unimpressed. “It was still the doctor that fucked up his eye, though,” he observed.
 
But, see, that’s not how this works.
 
When my father’s car was rear-ended my sophomore year in high school on his way to pick me up from a golf match, it wasn’t the other driver or the rain or the bad road conditions that were at fault. It was mine.
 
That’s how this game works.
 
While I find it admirable that my father never used this juicy piece of guilt-trip trigger against me in the eighteen or so odd years his eye has been injured, I have to say that knowing he chose to keep this information from me only makes knowing it worst.
 
Had he told me, I could choose to play Card Bitter. I’d still feel guilty, but hey, I’m a victim too.
 
Because that’s also how this game works.
 
But knowing that he told my sister this a couple months ago as they discussed her thoughts of pursuing surgical in the field of ocular diseases and disorders, him in some mood of confiding and bonding, and that it was unintentionally shared with me  - due to my sister’s inability to lie because she considers staying silent actively lying and yes, we are blood relatives -  is sugar icing on the cake tiered with mishaps committed by this eldest daughter to a set of immigrant parents, the one with all that potential just going to waste!
 
It’s also a reminder that for all ills my father is, he’s a man that’s sacrificed a lot for his family. Who - rather than throw piles of money to fight a doctor’s malpractice that would most certainly take tedious amounts of time and maybe end in a settlement no where near what he deserved - chose to save for his daughters’ future college funds. And buy music lessons. And clothing and housing and food and vacations and whatever else our family needed.
 
Who never let me have any idea that I led him to see that doctor who injured his eye unfixable.
  
It’s a hard yank at my heartstrings.
  
And I’m reminded of an instance in high school when I caught my mother struggling to keep one eye shut as she drove us home. She explained that sometimes she tries to grasp what it must be like for my dad.
 
I don’t have to go to those lengths. Trying to make sense of the tragedy and comedy that is life with my father and justifying the surges of hate that can all too quickly be followed by remorseful waves of gratefulness can feel all too much like I’m only using one good eye to interpret everything, the other one busy turning a blind eye.
 
Just call me Emotional Cyclops.

A Recap In Your Ass, Part 1: Home Consistent Home May 7, 2008

One of the more unsettling aspects about visiting your parents aside from the fact that you are doing the complete opposite of living your peaceful existence can be that sense that, while you’ve been away, time has stood eerily still. That it hasn’t flown all that fast or changed all that much.
 
And when you live a flurry-filled life in a quick-paced city (Ed. note: Stop scoffing, New Yorkers), that lack of change can be a welcome comfort.
  
Of course, when your parents are my parents, the emphasis on that last sentence sometimes rests a little too comfortably on can.
  
I made a trip to Michigan to see my family back in March. 
 
It began well. Expecting my father at the train station - him, happy to welcome any opportunity to drill life lessons in me while I am subject to no obvious means of escape (i.e. locked doors, moving car) - it was a fucking thrill to see my mother’s Saab in the parking lot. She, as is custom when having not seen me in many moons, smothered frantic hugs and kisses. And, once I was safely packed away in the car, my younger sisters unveiled a box of Brueggers’ Cinnamon Sugar Bagels (Ed. note: YUM) and a vat of Honey Walnut cream cheese (Ed. note: HOLY FUCKING YUM) while giggling about the milk my father drank earlier that day that may have been a few days past its expiration day, him theorizing that expiration date just way for milk company make you buy more milk and make more money! His hypothesis being proven wrong the reason for his absence.
 
My father’s first sentiment upon seeing me was that it was very nice to have me home. His second? But, Daughter, how you bigger still than last time I see you! What you eat in Chicago? Only deep-dish pizza breakfast, lunch and dinner, huh!
  
I resisted the urge to grab a pen to jot down what he had said. Or, alternatively, to gouge my ears until they bled.
  
That he told me it was nice to see me before he decided to assess my hypothetical weight gain from how I looked, covered by a heavy fleece blanket, as I sat on the couch is, I think, what the shrink I used to see before I had to make a financial decision between feeding my stomach sustenance and feeding my mind sanity would classify as progress.
  
And that he told me to eat at least three plates because three is good number you find many times in science and math, nature too of the Korean delicacies my mother had cooked just for me and my arrival right after inquiring whether I routinely eat deep-dish pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Well, I’m sure that’s just his way of making sure that I always feel like my presumed bipolar disorder has a friend in his.
  
There really is no place like home, yes?
 
Home consistent home.
 
The same two-story house. In the same gated community. With the same first grade picture of me - dressed in dark denim overalls and a hot pink and navy blue plaid blouse with my hair divided into twelve different braids because my mother loves me - framed, resting on the same Steinway whose keys I covered with peanut butter before a lesson one Sunday when I was eight because I knew my piano teacher had yup, just the worst allergy to peanuts and those peanut butter cookies sure do smell wonderful but NOPE! Can’t have a lick - not one! Darn allergy to those peanut nuts - gotta avoid ’em at all costs! and I? Wanted to avoid him at all costs.
  
Sure, the behemoth Sony I remember is now a flat-screen Samsung and my parents have figured out that the Internet holds more than just the keys to driving directions and I even hear myself telling my 17-year-old sister that I remember when I had to surf the Internet with a 52K modem and does she realize how lucky she is to have all this wireless Wi-Fi (Ed. note: Is wireless Wi-Fi redundant?) at home. But - when it comes down to it - the deck door off the kitchen still creaks when you try to sneak out of it at night.
 
And something else that hasn’t changed either, I learned, is my family’s uncanny ability to drop mind-fucking-jarring news to me with the kind of casualness that most people would employ to let someone know that it’s just begun raining outside or that the bathroom has just run out of its toilet paper. Which is why, coming soon, will be:
 
A Recap In Your Ass, Part 2: And Then I Learned My Father’s Blindness In One Eye Is All My Fault

A Recap In Your Ass, Part 3: And Then I Learned My Big Boobs May In Fact Be Large Tumors
 
Yes, indeed, all this lack of change? Can be welcome.
 
To this blog anyway. That can always use more to file under Family, Dysfunctional.

Home Dysfunctional Home March 27, 2008

Getting me to agree to visit my family in Michigan isn’t an exact science but well-proven methods are often involved.
 
Phone calls which increase in both frequency and urgency as mere weeks pass begin the whole process. Inquiries of but it been since Christmas! Why you not come home every weekend? It take birth of Christ make you come home to family that love you? 
 
And I not even remember how my oldest daughter look like! It be that long! How about butt, Daughter, it get smaller?
 
Inquires that allow me to appreciate my decision to approach all of this with a good sense of humor and fast typing fingers. Because you can damn well bet that I’m at least getting this shit down for blog fodder.
 
Like some mutated process of adaptation that never evolves completely, their phone calls incorporate a rationale that only achieves convincing a person - namely, me - to want and do the exact opposite of whatever it is that rationale is intended to convince someone to do.
 
Okay, maybe not make sense you come home every weekend. But at least once a month! Mr. Chang daughter come home once a month - you tell me Mr. Chang daughter love her father more than you?
 
Rational reasoning that’s always delivered with a healthy dose of guilt because they’re Asian immigrants and that’s the way Asian immigrants love their children. If your father from China or your mama from Vietnam never gave you or doesn’t continue to give you the kind of emotional shit that keeps you consistently trapped in a padded room of mental self-doubt, then I’m sorry to break the news to you but your parents don’t really love you.
 
When the compromises and the pleas and even the guilt fails to move me, my parents resort to bribery. But we cook you anything you want, they promise, and we not even make fun of you that you eat too much! We take you shopping - don’t you say you need new clothes for the work? How about Ipod or new laptop? We don’t give you car because remember when you have Jeep and you crash in high school parking lot? So painful memory. For you no car never! But Ipod maybe okay. 
 
Because it is, after all, my father. The same man who still likes to remind me of that time in first grade when I received a 4.5 on a scale of 5 in “School Spirit” on my end-of-the-year report card. When grades weren’t even bothered with because you were being measured on things like school spirit. Cold-call drops of painful memories are his forte.
 
I know that once my father - that no-frills immigrant! - is verbalizing purchases of playful items like an Ipod, rather than, say, Madeline Albright’s latest book or a large and obtrusive piece of exercise equipment to go along with the treadmill he bought for me my freshman year to keep in my 12×15 dorm room, then we’re only moments away from my father dumping our entire family into the car and driving to Chicago.
 
And the only thing that would be more inopportune than me making the trip to Small Town, Michigan and finding myself in an arm-length radius from my father is for him and my entire family to come to Chicago, unwarned, and barge my apartment. That houses booze. And mess. And still shows boxes left semi-unpacked from when we moved in once upon a time ago in September.
 
The last time my father arrived in Chicago with little warning was two Octobers ago. Him, and the rest of my family, around 11p.m. on a Saturday night at my apartment - that gorgeous Wicker Park 4-bedroom loft with stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors and a fire place and granite countertops with a place for bar stools. He sniffed a few times disapprovingly and made a comment about the pile of clothes in one corner of my bedroom. Reminded me that a clean room means a clean mind. Then, as my mother, two younger sisters and I giggled together and threw a bag of popcorn into the microwave as we got ready to watch Law and Order: SVU together, my father laid down on a couch and said, with a contemplative and calm smile, that he was ready to drive back to Michigan.
 
At one in the morning.
 
Rather than spend the night and drive back the next day.
 
Once I’m really ready to accept that I will be spending a string of days shaking like someone on their 14th day of a 21-day methadone rehab program, I give my parents the Yes, this weekend, I’ll come home, but you better deliver on that new laptop, knowing full well there will be no laptop. And I prepare myself to be pretty damn happy to be at home - fed, pampered, with access to a car and PARKING LOTS and MEIJER (it doesn’t take this city girl much to get excited) - all with the uneasy bated breath of someone who knows that the ball of gloom and doom that always drops will drop once more.
 
I make my trek today after work and I return on Monday. You? Can anticipate some great fucking stories. Hell, I’ll probably blog while I am at home, unable to suppress all! the! inspiration!
 
Just last night, right as my boyfriend and I were ready to fall asleep, I sat up with a start and yelled Shit! And when my boyfriend asked if everything was all right, I told him that I had just remembered that I would have to attend church on Sunday with my mother and sisters. And when he asked if that was really that bad, I shuddered. I thought of the swarms of mothers who have known me since I was little. Pinches of my cheeks between perfectly manicured fingernails and the exclamations that I get more and more beautiful whenever they see me but wait - is this some extra face fat for them to pinch on to? The shrill questions of when I plan to marry and mirthful reminders that I’m not getting any younger.
 
No. Perhaps it’s not really that bad. However, while I don’t consider myself a very materialistic person, perhaps a new laptop and Ipod aren’t bad ideas. They’ll provide something to occupy my hands once I feel the inevitable urge to gauge the eyeballs in my head with the metal chopsticks that can be found in any self-respecting Korean’s kitchen.
 
 
 
[You can find me and more of my literary abuses at Indie Blogger today. It's a site run by the fantastic, brilliant, and worthy-of-(intense)-idolatry Anastacia. If you haven't checked out IB yet, you must. And if you haven't submitted something, fucking do. Give Stacey the chance to spread your good word. In her name I demand. Amen. And look at that. Maybe I'm ready for church after all.]

You’re Kind Of A Big Deal February 8, 2008

I have a lot of faults.

Too many, in fact.

And I’m quick to acknowledge all of them before anyone else gets the chance.

I know I drink too much. And that I talk too loud. I’m so fucking emotional. I curse. I’m inappropriate. That line that people always mention? I’m the one who crosses it. Repeatedly. I’m a glutton. I’m not good with money and I spend too much of it but - hell - it’s my money. I’m addicted to sex, bad TV, insomnia, and denial. I fall into fits of practicing unhealthy extremes. I lash out at the people I love when I’m in a foul torpor and feel copious amounts of remorse immediately afterwards. I’m all energy and flash and jokes and flurry when people first meet me because if I’m hilarious and fun as hell, it covers up all the shit, right?

It’s almost as though I enjoy conducting some macabre roll call in my head, where instead of the version teachers use to see if Billy or Tonya are present, I’m checking to make sure that all the dysfunctions that call my little brain or body home are still there. By being the first to point out just how fucked up I can be, I feel like I somehow win.

You can’t insult me with that. I already called myself out, bitch! 

(I think, by the way, that this is the strategy Eminem applied during his last battle in 8 Mile. When he was still thin. See? So inappropriate.)

It’s most likely a defense strategy I developed playing subject to my father’s repeated drilling growing up. I lived in frequent terror of him and our one-on-ones. He’d yell and yell and then yell some more while I tried everything I could to not cry in front of him because that only meant more yelling and - if he was feeling really ripe - some slapping around. I didn’t know how to protect myself from him. So I began trying to predict everything he might possibly say, the absolute worst thing that could happen, comforting myself that if I knew beforehand what to expect when he hired midnight until dawn to berate me, it might sting less when it actually happened. I was always wrong, it always stung, but I almost aways felt relief repeating to myself that the worst he can do is kill me. It helped put things in perspective.

I’ve made my peace with my upbringing. Sometimes, at its best, it’s only an uneasy peace, but it’s peace.

Of course, there are its longer-lasting effects.

I cannot accept compliments gracefully. I respond with quick self-deprecating quips or flashes of rolling eyes and half smirks. I don’t suffer from poor self-esteem; not in any typical fashion anyway. My father’s brand of steady attention parlayed indelible strength in me to stand up for myself always. Some may call it a wall that I need to fucking get rid of already, but I appreciate my fortitude. I know all too well I could have easily crumbled and ended up completely broken. In a round-about way, my father raised me to be a fiercely strong person.

But that social grace, the one of tactful compliment acceptance? That’s not exactly how my family worked. Grunts from my father served as acknowledgments for my first place finishes in 5K invitationals, and a mild frown from the guy was response to my mother’s announcement that I had been awarded class valedictorian. Those kinds of responses didn’t prepare me to hear things like You’re so pretty! or You’re so smart! comfortably. So I shrug those off. I guffaw. I throw the compliments back. (Ed. note: Minus the adulation that targets my sexual prowess or ability to annihilate large amounts of food in a single sitting. I have no problem accepting and wholeheartedly believing those.)

There are some really amazing people I have met by blogging. People I want to know. People I’d like to zap to Chicago or zap myself where they are so we can raise hell together in - gasp! - 3D life. Internet inhabitants that I dare call my friends. Genuinely cool people who read this thing and email me and leave comments and compliments that throw me into blown away disbelief. When I respond with some - probably failed - attempt at funny, I’m just hoping you’ll be too busy laughing to notice what a complete tool I’ve made of myself.

But believe me. I really appreciate the comments. Every single one. I don’t always know how to respond. All the ways I can think of saying thanks or that I’m flattered just sound so … plastic in print.

Maybe that explains why all Hallmark cards are so full of cheese and awkward humor.

I write about a bevy of stuff, but I know I focus often on my family. Or about how fucked up I feel. How fucked up I am. I make jokes about it. I share tales of my upbringing hoping that you’ll see beyond the anger and the sad and the hurt and detect the girl who is still all shades of sensitive and sickeningly idealistic. Maybe even see the humor in some of this stuff, too. 

Or perhaps display how fucked I am in the head to even be able to find some of this stuff funny.

I guess I choose to see it as acceptance. 

Because I wasn’t always so forthcoming about my family. Lying ad nauseum was standard modus operandi for a very long time. We looked the role of perfect on the outside, and I was too ashamed and scared to let people know what that shell of perfection hid. Distance and college helped, but one doesn’t heal in a handful of years the all too many spent broken and battered.

This blog has become a part of that adjustment. The writing helps. It sets that angry, emo kid inside of me free. The one that grew, hid and beat against my insides while I played Perfect Student, Perfect Athlete, Perfect Prep, Perfect Personality, Perfect Home Life, Perfect Little Miss Homecoming Queen. Nothing, I think, can be as suffocating to a person’s soul as playing so much pretend - playing dual, triumvirate, quadruple roles. It may be an anonymous truth released to the internets for strangers to read, but when even one person says something thoughtful or tells me they went through some shit like this too and that they relate, it helps. It helps with the sadness and feeling less alone; to digest the memories, pull out the moderately funny moments and gain a perspective less bitter and more contemplative. 

I learned on Monday that I had won the two 20something awards for which I had been nominated. I was stunned. Floored, really. I’m not sure if it’s proper etiquette to even mention this. Should I act more discreet? Make a joke or add it as a by the way to one of my posts? Just tack on the award images to my sidebar and leave it at that?

I chose to write something now that the voting thing is long over because I really appreciate the thought. I’m flattered. I’m grateful. I may have trouble accepting compliments and accolades, but it’s certainly not because I’m not thankful or touched. I always am. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because for all the sarcasm, the cynicism and the inappropriate cracks I make, don’t ever confuse me as an aloof or detached person. That people voted for me? Batshit manic, can’t stop with the inappropriate humor, ridiculously wordy me? Well. That means a hell of a lot.

This post isn’t really about the awards though.

Thanks for accepting what I write. It can feel scary as hell to post shit about my dad. How he used to lock me inside of a dark closet for hours to teach you discipline, daughter when he learned I was afraid of the dark. Or that I used to keep a strand of paper clips on my backpack in middle school as some kind of demented keychain that I’d add paper clips to every time I thought about killing myself. That’s some sad stuff. So thank you. For not making me feel like a complete freak when I share things like this. Or for letting me think that I’m at least a readable freak.

Thanks for understanding that sometimes, among the depressing and heartbreaking shit, I crack jokes and post pictures of my stuffed monkey Bernard hanging around on our fake rubber tree courtesy of World Market. No matter my upbringing, my fall-out is being able to see the humor in too much of everything. So thank you for tolerating all these multiple personas fit into my one person.

Thanks, Thanks, Thanks.

Because each blogger is allowed one gratuitous blog post waxing saptasical about blogging and their readers/fellow bloggers, yes?

Now, before I turn all Cady Heron and use MS Paint to cut up these awards - that someone took their time to create - into little pieces and virtually toss them around, I’ll stop.

(Best Title shared with the very kickass Ashley of This is Not the Life I Ordered! )

Come to Chicago - all of you. Rounds of tequila shots and champagne flutes on me. Some scotch, too, because I know there are a few of you that appreciate a nice glass of Glenmorangie. If tequila isn’t your thing (coughNicolecough), I’ll fill your gullets with cheese. And Barefoot Contessa Outrageous Brownies. Of course the Barefoot Contessa Outrageous Brownies.

And if this post was entirely too obnoxious? Let’s pretend it never happened once tomorrow comes. Very much like some morning afters that I’m sure we’ve all experienced. I’m okay with being that blog as well.

Involuntary Family Lock-In (A Christmas Edition) December 25, 2007

Today has, among other things, forced me to reconsider the resurrection of my cigarette addiction.
 
A cigarette addiction that I supposedly quit for good a while back. 
  
My body (or is it my brain? my soul?) is playing the role of enabler too damn well. Today, on this fourth day of nonstop family fun, it wants a cigarette - nay, needs a cigarette (Ed. note: Nay even?). The tenuous grasp I hold on sanity begs for some assistance to keep it at its tenuous best.
 
I haven’t actually smoked anything yet. I made that mistake once before.
 
But tomorrow, when I am back in Chicago, I return to my world of solitude, silence, and availability to all imaginable vices. Is there a good chance that a cigarette may somehow find its way into my right hand to keep company the nth drink in my left? (This is a rhetorical question.) My boyfriend and my friends and anyone else that has developed a conscience when it comes to the future livelihoods of their lungs will disapprove. But a girl needs to recover after four continuous days of we’ll have you sleep four in a room because there are 12 of us here and isn’t it fun to all be in one house together like this for the holidays? Four continuous days of kin who normally remain a hop, a skip, and 400 miles away. I plan to start with some shots of tequila and see where that leads.
 
All this while I blog about the holiday weekend of course.
 
Merry Christmas! I hear my name being called. And questions of where I could possibly have been for the last twenty minutes. Time again for me to learn what other part of my body used to look thinner, daughter, did it not while simultaneously having my hands yanked from my body to hold yet anther plate of food that is being forced into them. Life with family is fun that way. 
 
Happy birthday, Baby Jesus.
 
Update:Two people (or the same person) stumbled upon my blog today using the search terms: ”bills gamblin hall las vegas hookers?” and “flight attendants” “mile high”. Ho ho ho, indeed, yes?

Totaled Denial November 30, 2007

My father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. My 16-year-old sister was the one to accidentally inform me of this a few nights ago.
 
Accidentally because our phone conversation began when she called to ask how one determines the subject in a sentence that uses passive voice. And it migrated to how my mother was anxious to see her new Saab SUV. Which led to me wondering aloud why the hell our family needs four cars. Answered by my sister telling me that my father’s truck was gone and that she had cried when she saw the metal carnage. And ended when my sister asked, “Do you think I wasn’t supposed to tell you about the accident?”
 
Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt.
 
Growing up, I lived in a town that was frequently listed in the top half of national lists that rank the best cities to live in America. Or raise a family. Or find good schools and safe streets and a real sense of community. One of those types of lists. It was a town with only one high school. The type of place where doors are left unlocked and golf courses can be found 10 minutes apart from one another. Where everyone and everything is beautiful and white and clean and perfect on the surface.
 
I played the charade. I never told anyone what happened behind the closed doors of my house, the endless oppression and desperation I felt when I was inside it for loving someone so much that I knew loved me too but only wanted to decimate everything about me that made me me. I went to school every morning with a large smile on my face. I got the grades and played the sports and had the hoards of friends. I got invited to all the parties and the tailgates and the bonfires and I lied endlessly when explaining why I wouldn’t be able to make it to this one this time. It was playing by the rules. Because that was my high school and that was my town.
 
Nothing, I think, can be as suffocating to a person’s soul as playing so much pretend. Playing dual, triumvirate, quadruple roles. Trying so hard to convince yourself that when you tell your best friend Allison that you’ll be at her house at 5:00 pm before the football game later that night, that this time, it’ll be true. And willing it to be true. Then going home after school and accepting the reality that if you dare ask your father for permission, he may strike you just for entertaining the idea of asking if it was okay.
 
In hindsight, I don’t think labeling my decision to not tell anyone what happened at the hands of my father as being fake is entirely accurate. I truly wanted to believe that I was the girl everyone thought I was, the one with the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect home. I may have been trying to fool everyone around me, but I think I was trying to fool myself the most.
 
I prayed. A lot. I prayed every night that when I woke up, I’d have a father who wasn’t afraid to love his family. I prayed for a father who’d stop hurting me. For a father who I didn’t need to be scared of and feel like I had to protect my family from. I placed myself in front of the firing squad, took the brunt of his verbal anger, because I didn’t think my mother and my sisters could still be whole if they were the targets. It hurt too much thinking of them hurting that much. 
 
These aren’t the things I remembered when my sister told me my father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. 
 
I remembered my father waiting for me every single day by the fence outside of my preschool with my favorite popsicle when it was time to be picked up, him hoisting me on top of his shoulders as we walked home. I remembered the day he taught me to ride my bicycle with no training wheels and how, when I finally got it right, with the background of my father’s laughter, I felt like I was flying. I remembered when my mother wouldn’t listen to my pleas to not make me sing O Holy Night in front of the whole town because I was terribly shy when I was a little girl. She was too busy insisting it was a great honor to be chosen for having the prettiest voice among all the students at my elementary school, and it was my father who talked to my mother and convinced her that it wasn’t the right thing to force me to do.
 
And I remembered how when I went home in October, my dad gave me a hug when he saw me and told me he was really proud of me. And how I just knew that this time, it wasn’t just a fleeting moment of him showing his semblance to a normal father.
 
I eluded to a family secret I wasn’t ready to provide elucidation on just yet many posts ago. But what are secrets but just another form of denial? An unwillingness to confront the truth?
 
My father was raised by a man who wasn’t his birth father, a man I thought was my grandfather until only a few years ago. My father’s birth father was my grandmother’s first husband, a great man who came from a powerful family. He was assassinated during the Korean War when my father was only an infant. The great, powerful family promised my grandmother they would care for her and my father. But my grandmother was scared and alone with a newborn in a country that was war-torn and had just lost hundreds of thousands of lives. So she married the man who came to raise my father and who I later thought was my grandfather for the first 21 years of my life. A man who passed away during my freshman year in college, someone who I always felt had treated my cousins a little nicer and a little warmer than me and my sisters.
 
I wholeheartedly believe that blood ties are not what creates family. Father, grandfather, grandmother, daughter … they’re ultimately nothing more than titles for roles that we fill and create meaning. There’s little in my opinion that is more beautiful than when children are adopted and given homes and love they may otherwise not have. Or when your friends can become your family, the people who love you unconditionally and provide you a safety net. So why bother to emphasize the distinction that my grandfather was not my “true” grandfather or that he was not my father’s “true” father?
 
Because this was a man who never embraced my father as his son. He only saw him as a reminder that his new wife, my grandmother, was not a virgin and had been previously married, both unforgivable in that society. He wasn’t a big enough or good enough person to rise above those things, so he abused my father endlessly. My father sold newspapers and shined shoes on the streets while my grandfather kept his other three children, my uncles and aunt, well-fed and spoiled.  He moved his family while my father was in school one day, leaving my father, a 12 year old boy, to come home to an empty house and wander around alone, until a neighbor informed him that his family had moved and where they could be found. My father walked the 30 miles to get there, and when he arrived, he was ignored.
 
My mother told me all of this a few years ago. And then my father told me himself during the long car ride back home after my junior year in college had ended, in a very matter-of-fact and non bitter but sad - very sad - way. And I finally began to understand some more of why things were the way they were. Because while it doesn’t provide excuses, I’m not interested in excuses. I’m interested in understanding.  
 
It was hard to look at my uncles and my aunt and my grandmother the same way for a few months after I learned all this, a grandmother and aunt and uncles I loved and thought were great people. It took a while for me to accept that they did as much as they could to help my father but that my grandfather kept everyone scared to do more.
 
And it was ironic and sad when the story began to sound, to feel, a little too familiar.
 
The difference between who I am now compared to who I was growing up, who I was even back in college, is that I know now that I play the game of denial at times and I don’t want to anymore. So it felt ironic and sad, but I can accept that. And I can be happy that while I hurt almost everyday growing up, I don’t hurt everyday now. I can’t hold grudges. I’ve never been able to. Maybe it’s just another example of denial - wanting to forget and shove the past away as much as I can - but I’ve always been one to live in the very, very present.
 
When I heard my father got into a terrible car accident, I didn’t remember the hurt. I remembered the walks home after preschool; the mornings we’d play golf when the dew still clung onto the blades of grass; the lectures he gave me about how family always came first. And I felt grateful that there may be a chance for more because he’s alive after an accident that could have easily taken his life. Grateful - but also frightened - that I have parents that try to not bother me or cause me senseless worry by telling me my father was involved in a terrible car accident that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive.
 
I’ll still push things I don’t like to think about into the far corners of my mind. I brush aside questions about whether I’ll finally be attending law school next fall. I try not to remember my four best friends who hurt the living hell out of my heart last summer and how things have still been left with ties loose and tangled. I don’t want to think about the fact that I’ve gained pounds that don’t fit correctly on my body. Or that my grandmother has been very sick recently. And that I really should start saving money because living paycheck to paycheck is fine until - who knows knowing me -I need bail money or an emergency room. And how I’ve noticed a dark spot on the inside of my right calf that seems to be bigger than it was when I first noticed it a few months ago and holy shit what if after all my jokes about getting skin cancer for summers upon summers of ruthless tanning are finally coming true? And how I’ve considered canceling my alert emails from the Chicago Tribune (that I have no idea why I receive because I’m no big fan of the Tribune) because looking at my Gmail account and glancing at subject lines like ”Train accident,” “Henry Hyde dead,” “Charges in U. of C. student’s slaying,” “Former model gets 8 years for musician deaths” just starts to feel so heavy and sad.
 
But the denial about my past? And the trying to pretend I’m perfect and everything is perfect and holding everything inside and lying and hiding and the faking that nothing bothers me and only surrounding myself around people who want to fake and pretend and just keep running, running from their dysfunctional demons too?
 
Like my father’s truck, it’s been totaled.

The Broken Spring November 13, 2007

During the latter part of my senior year in college, I began to see a woman named Wendy once a week.
 
My father had begun calling every morning at 6 a.m. that spring. Pressing Talk on my cell phone unleashed his voice into my bedroom, a voice that held more weight than just sounds uttered from a mouth. And even though he was hundreds of miles away, my mind instantly ran back to the nights he’d yell at me for hours in the study of our house, keeping me awake to listen to things that no child of any parent who brought them into existence should have to hear.  To the mornings I’d wake up with eyes swollen shut from uncontrollably crying once I was allowed the safety of my own room, my own bed. To the breakfasts I’d have to endure with my mother and my sisters, pretending to be the perfect family we appeared to be to everyone else. Sometimes I’d recall one night in particular, the night I left the study after having to listen for hours about how the sight of me disgusted him. He chased after me and punished me for having the audacity to walk out on him while he was talking to me. My mind would eventually bring me back to my present, and I would think about how easy it would be to just click End. And I would think about how I knew that I could never do that.
 
He began every conversation as though he was already in the middle of it. You get accepted into Harvard Law yet? What about Yale? Daughter, you hear me? What about Yale Law! You get letter yet? Why you so quiet? You not just wake up right now, do you?? And he had a point. I was quiet during these morning conversations that sometimes lasted for multiple hours, normally preoccupied with lighting cigarettes or mixing drinks. It may have only been 6 a.m., but to me, it beat the uncontrollable crying.   
 
As early as the orientation week before freshman year even officially begins at my university, students are informed that our school allows us a certain number of free psychological counseling sessions at the campus health center to be used at any time during our four years. It’s a valid attempt to stave off suicides at a prestigious school that employs a demanding quarter schedule and is located in a climate that knows harsh weather and long dark nights once October comes and lasts until April, sometimes even May, leaves. 
 
I had dealt with his demands all throughout college. Booze, friends, and distance had always been enough to take the sting away from his ranting phone calls.
 
But something changed that spring of my senior year. He had finally broken me. Really, really broken me.
 
After years of verbal and, sometimes, physical torment; after years of being the best and hearing it wasn’t enough; after 3 1/2 years of intense collegiate learning; and after the previous two months of going out and getting fucktastically trashed six nights a week to run away from the demons, I had nothing left.
 
So without telling anyone, I went to the health center, tagged in my free counseling sessions, and began to see Wendy.
 
It’s not that seeing a therapist hadn’t crossed my mind before. But in my family, sprained ankles were looked upon and told to be “walked off.” And ibuprofen or other painkillers? For far too fucking long did I think women actually had to feel like knives were being thrashed around the insides of their uteri once a month. If my body dared get sick, my father blamed my “poor character”. Physical pain was hardly allowed to be recognized; mental health didn’t have a chance. You were fine, and that was it.
 
My friends in college were the type of people that loved how fucking crazy we were. There was no time to worry about what life may bring after graduation, no time to worry about moving away or falling apart; we were too fucking busy having too much fucking fun. Racking up stories to tell the next day at brunch. And I loved it, too. We did too many fucking crazy things, but we were taking advantage of the unique situation we’d never be in again - old enough to get anything we wanted, but young enough to not really have a fucking care in the world.
 
Then the daily phone calls from my father began. And the precarious balance I was walking between sanity and that other side quickly became no balance at all.
 
Wendy may have saved me that quarter. I had my hesitations entering the sessions. I had walls. I came in skeptical. I didn’t want to be fed self-help book crap or mantras I should repeat to myself every morning while looking in the mirror. But Wendy just listened. No judgment. And it wasn’t until then that I realized that was the one thing I was desperately missing from my life. One thing that wasn’t judging me. Or competing against me. Or talking about me. Or loving me. Or hating me. Or pushing me down. One thing that would let me just be. Wendy gave me that.
 
After several weekly meetings had passed and we had gained a comfort level with one another, she suggested I meet once with the health center’s shrink. And I dutifully agreed. But I didn’t get to sleep the night before the appointment - pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper that was due that same morning - and seconds before my meeting with the shrink, knowing I looked off, knowing I felt off, I decided to see how crazy I could make her think I am.
 
I know this is a fucking awful approach to seeing someone who was trying to help me, but with a few choice answers, she had prescribed me sleeping pills, anti-depressants, and Adderal after a 35-minute session. Prescription medicine can be a beautiful thing, but thank God I knew, for me, this wasn’t about chemical imbalances that needed to be rebalanced. I never took the pills continuously. The sleeping pills made me feel too drowsy all the time, and what the fuck is the point of life if you can’t just be on? And the anti-depressants? I knew I was going through something incredibly rough that made me hurt every waking moment, but I knew that my spirit, my will to live, my soul, was not depressed. That probably sounds like a lunatic saying that they know they’re not crazy to you. I’m certainly not suggesting that there aren’t people who do need this type of help and do need this type of medication and there is nothing wrong with that and everything great about it if that is what that individual needs. But I knew what I needed, and what I needed was to talk and have someone listen.
 
(Oh - I forgot to mention the aftermath of the Adderal, didn’t I? Well, with both my best friend and I having senior honors history theses due that quarter, I think you can safely assume where those went.)
 
A part of me will always hold on to denial, that weapon that was my best friend through a lot of painful times when I was younger. Writing about these kinds of memories forces me to remember, to think, to ask myself if I’m a better person now. I think having these memories, in some way, makes me a better person now.
 
There’s a lack of anxiety and nerves now. No feeling in the pit of my stomach that gnaws at me constantly. But oddly enough, Wendy popped into my mind the other day. The woman who may have saved me my senior year in college. It may sound cheesy, but I thought about how happy she would be for me to hear that I am doing better, if not well. To hear that things with my father, while not perfect, are improving.
 
I think I’m going to buy a card for her during my lunch break tomorrow. Write a message with subtle reminders of who I am in the chance she may not remember me. Emphasize how much she helped me. Remind her that what she does - on a campus full of students who appear to care more about their high-end drugs, fashion and BMWs than their mental health - is important.
 
Thank her for meeting with me, the skeptical brat, once a week during the spring of my senior year, and just listening.

Just A Girl November 9, 2007

My parents planned to name me Alex had I been born a boy. I think having this name ready was my father’s attempt to will his first born to be a son.
 
But I wasn’t born a boy. And neither was my sister who is two years younger than me, nor my baby sister who is eight years younger than me. I like to think of her as my father’s last stand.
 
I’ve always maintained the belief that had my father been born a son, life would have been a hell of a lot easier for our family. Namely me.
 
Maybe I’m wrong. Having a son could have made my father an even stricter disciplinarian. Made him expect even more from the XY chromosomed offspring. Made it even more tempting to live vicariously through his child. Made it impossible for his son to become anything but a brooding asshole without that delicate female touch.
 
Or maybe having a son would have made my father feel like he had a compatriot in a family of all females, a son to take golfing and run errands with and teach the overwhelming nuggets of knowledge in his brain. My father’s abilities of retention had always left me amazed as a child. I sure as hell couldn’t go to him for a hug after falling down or to gush all about my latest tween crush, but I knew that if I needed to know something about anything - the name of Plato’s dog, why e had to equal mc², the color of Queen Elizabeth’s eyes, whatever - my dad would know it and happily - oh, too happily - impart.
 
Most importantly, a son would have also meant someone to share the “protect and provide” burden my father shouldered, something I imagine he developed while growing up in a country that had recently been war-torn and lost a million of its citizens, an estimated 85% of them civilians. One of those one million citizens included his real father, my true grandfather - a very buried family secret I learned only a few years ago. One I’m not ready to provide elucidation on just yet.
 
Who knows. Unless reincarnation is the rule of the afterlife, and the heavenly host(ess) decides I have to return as a son to my father, this is nothing more than my musings on a massive “What if” conundrum.
 
So growing up, I became the one who played golf with my dad. I went on errands with him. I learned a fragment of the overwhelming information in my father’s brain. I played three sports every year during high school. I was instructed to run miles until I dropped in exhaustion whenever he thought I displayed weakness. One night in high school, I ran for two hours, as my dad followed me in his car. I was physically reprimanded if I dared cry in front of my dad. He hated liars and cowards and he made damn sure his children knew it.
 
I was the son my father never had. Literally.
 
My father never started calling me Alex or had my hair cut short or told my mother to dress me in all blue and ask for the boy’s toy during our annual trips to McDonald’s when I was ordered milk with my Happy Meal. Wilted fries and a single cheeseburger with warm milk did not a happy meal make. But I digress (damsel-ly?). There are plenty of memories in my eroding brain of ballet classes, Barbie dolls, and adamant refusal to attend Tae Kwon Do (yes, Tae Kwon Do) classes to know that I had my fair share of girlie childhood experiences.
 
However, while the other little girls ran off to Cinderella on Ice or Paula Abdul Before She Developed a Case of the Shakes to Display on National TV, I dutifully followed my father to basketball and football games. Attending sports events together was a rare opportunity for us to combine our acerbity and direct it towards a common enemy: the visiting team, the referees, our team, the coach, other fans … everyone but one another.
 
Knowing so much about sports when I was a little girl wasn’t too well-received though. I once interrupted two boys who were yelling (incorrect) facts about two professional basketball teams on the schoolbus en route to our grade school. The boys paused, then taunted, “What do you know, you’re just a girl!” The same boys who later (in life, not later that day) jizzed at the fact that a girl who looked and acted like a girl could give insight into who should start as quarterback for the local college football team (because let’s face it, sharing time between two quarterbacks never works) or who would be drafted first by the NBA that year.
 
Chicago is nothing like my hometown in the middle of (kind of) nowhere and there’s a lot more to entertain myself with than sports. Even if Chicago does boast 5-7 professional sports teams (I debate whether soccer or women’s basketball should count). The availability of free will and disappearance of the immigrant father has led to the alcohol-fueled deterioration of my brain, and it’s become more entertained by inane celebrity gossip than the latest sports stats. In other words, fuck the efficiency of the West Coast Offense, I just want to know which celebrities are Just Like Us! I’m not completely convinced this is an XY vs. XX issue - I’ve caught many boyfriends, who have mocked my guilty indulgence of celebrity gossip, reading my US Weeklys. Because let’s face it, We Like Trainwrecks! That’s how I’ve always explained interest in me.
 
This isn’t meant to be a commentary on gender roles. Girls can be everything and whatever the fuck they want to be, and they can like whatever the fuck they want to like, and including my comment about women’s basketball up there (Ed. note: I did make fun of soccer as well), everything I say should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt (accompanied by a shot of tequila and a lime). There is no standard a female should measure herself against, and no expectations she should feel she needs to fill except those that she places on herself. To my father’s defense, he never said he wished he had a son or that I was a boy. Or maybe he has and I’ve just done a really good job of repressing that particular memory.
 
The foundation for my contradictory-and-multiple-personality disorder can most likely be attributed to my father. Because for a man who wouldn’t let me go to sleepovers as a young girl because you not hear about girl who get strangled at sleepover? She go to party and she get killed - just sleeping inside Snoopy sleeping bag and then killed! Maybe if you a boy then okay but you a girl so you sleep on floor at home if you want to, daughter, he sure as hell taught me that I could beat anyone, male or female, at anything as long as I wanted it more. His odd mix of empowerment lessons included telling me I would be the first female president while also warning me that man can be stronger and you not even take tae kwon do!
 
Naturally, I can’t help but wonder if my dad would have lightened up were I a boy, but I don’t think he believes a male is more capable. I don’t think he believes a male has more worth than a female and thank God that in my mixed bag of fucked up issues extraordinaire, troubled self-esteem about being a female and/or misogynistic attitudes aren’t included because nothing irritates me more than a girl who declares she just loves misogyny! While I am all for a woman who knows what she wants, please don’t fucking say things just for shock value (I’m also looking at you, Ann Coulter, who proves that hell really is other people). If a woman wants to stay at home and raise children, then more power to her. And I know that sometimes, some women just don’t have a choice. By the very fact that they are doing something out of necessity shows integrity.
 
I recall a string of muggings and attempted rapes that fouled my college campus one quarter, and, as a result, emails were sent that included a message that girls in particular should be careful when roaming the campus streets very late at night. And I remember that some girls were very offended and purposely walked alone late at night as a Fuck You I can Walk Alone If I Want To! And I remember that I was slightly offended as well, because let’s face it, women of my generation have been taught that we don’t need no man protecting us, uh uh *finger snap*. But then I realized that these warnings of being more careful aren’t demeaning. They’re accurate. Yes, it fucking sucks that girls have to be more careful when walking alone late at night, but it sure as hell fucking beats getting raped.
 
Because being a girl means being aware. It doesn’t mean being a man, whatever the fuck that means. It doesn’t mean disregarding all female norms simply to disregard them or playing into sexist roles in the quest to show how womanly you are. Sometimes it means following sports until you realize that you’re at a point in your life where you have approximately 1 hour all to yourself when you’re not working or sleeping and all you really want to do is watch America’s Next Top Model and delight in all its trashiness. No apologies. Would this make my father proud? Obviously fucking not. But I don’t really give a shit because, in a round-about fucking way, my father raised me to be proud of myself, the unintentional result of him harassing me my entire childhood and forcing me to always stand up to him.
 
On my way to the bathroom back in the spring, I was stopped by a male co-worker who wanted to discuss our brackets for the NCAA Tournament, about Southern Illinois’s chances of beating Kansas and how badly both our brackets would fare if Georgetown didn’t do well. Some ten minutes into the conversation, I glanced down, something screaming for my attention out of the corner of my eye. And poking out of my boot for the world to see was my white and green polka dotted tampon (Thank you, Tampax Pearl) clashing oh-so-noticeably against my caramel brown boot. Oh hell.
 
Why was there a tampon in my boot? Because I was wearing a dress and with no obvious places to hide the item in question, i.e. up my sleeve or in a pocket, my boot seemed like a safe option. Why didn’t I just bring my purse? Because I clearly like setting myself up for moments like these.
 
I attempted to inconspicuously push the tampon back into my boot, raising my other foot and using my toe to appear as though I was scratching my calf. When that didn’t work, I casually bent over sideways and jammed the damn tampon back into my fucking boot with the subtlety of Donald Trump’s hair. My male co-worker glanced down and, after a look of recognition, snapped his head upright and stuttered for at least 5 more minutes about why he regretted having Wisconsin go all the way to the Final Four. I think he felt like he had to engage in conversation longer to prove that seeing the tampon did not make him uncomfortable.
  
So that’s my life (or at least this post) in a nutshell. The fates making me their plaything at any opportunity? Sure. Talking about sports while being reminded that I’m just a girl? Of course.
 
But being proud of being a female means being able to embrace all the fucking shit that goes along with being a girl, embarrassing stories tout inclus. I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass if being a boy would have made my life easier when it comes to my dad. I love being a girl. So I thank the fucking heavens I’m not a boy named Alex.
 
Even if that means that sometimes, I’ll be caught with a tampon sticking out of my boot.

Smoke Break November 6, 2007

My body, the damn enabler, wants a cigarette right now.
 
Technically, I have quit smoking. Technically, I quit after I graduated from college two years ago. Not coming close to achieving this, I technically quit again this year.
 
In truth? I greedily eye every cigarette smoker that I see and I filch guiltlessly, smoking a barrage of cigarettes every time I am out - the latest incident this past Monday (yes, Monday) - acquisitions for my right hand while my other holds its nth drink of the evening.
 
I grew up hating cigarettes. My father used to smoke when I was very young and some of my earliest memories recall Pigtailed Me approaching Moustached Him (hey - it was the 80s) in his study, navigating through a hazy curtain of smoke, crinkling my nose at the acrid smell. Add the poster that hung over the sink in my second grade classroom of healthy lungs (red, large, vibrant) next to the lungs of someone who had smoked for 50 years (gray, shriveled, dead) that to this day I can still picture in clear pixel pixel clarity, and I was one kid hell-bent against smoking.
 
My father is a very health-conscientious man who, recently, was kind enough to point out that I’ve gain weight, why you not same size as when you in high school? You still not waking up every morning at 5 am and running 3 mile like I tell you? How you feel that your father still do push up with one hand only and you not even run 3 mile at 5 am everyday?, so I always found it incongruent that he had ever smoked, let alone smoked until I was 8 years old. My mother eventually explained to me that he had picked it up while serving his mandatory two years in the army his homeland required. To learn that even my father is not entirely impervious to temptations, albeit in a shit-fucked situation like forcedly serving in one’s national army, was comforting.
 
Of course, like everything my father does, once he decided to quit, he quit with conviction. Cold turkey. No wobbling back and forth like his prodigal daughter.
 
During Thanksgiving break my sophomore year in college, I made the mistake of trying to smoke while I was home. A couple months before, I had made a new friend who smoked like a fiend. Perhaps because she was one. My lungs were still red, large, vibrant. But I was in college, and I was open to any and all ways to erase feelings and stress. So I bought my first pack of cigarettes with her – Marlboro Menthol Light 120s – and with that, I sold my soul to the nicotine devil.
 
Well come Thanksgiving family dinner did: My father who wants to sit down and make life plan for you! I draw arrows to paths you follow!; my grandmother who reminds me that someday I need to marry good man and make babies or break grandma’s heart, O.K.? But only after you go to Harvard Law School, O.K.?; my aunt who satisfies her predilection for comparing her eldest daughter to me by reminding me you know she get into top program at MIT? Right now, you two stand next to each other, back to back, let’s see who taller! Then you both play Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 3rd Movement Part 1, we decide who better; my recently college enrolled cousin who regales me with charming tales like Dude I met this kid who went to your high school and when he found out I was related to you, he was like, Dude, your cousin’s so hot, and I was like, Dude, I know; and my mother who is strong and incredible and is able to laugh through all of this mayhem with a graciousness and poise that I can only hope to exude 1/10th of someday.
 
Severely erred in judgement but desperate for a temporary reprieve, I determined that smoking in the windowless bathroom on the second floor was the best place to indulge my guilty pleasure once I arrived back at our house. This reflects the tenuous (at best) connection I have with common sense, because seriously, what was I thinking? I came out of the bathroom and there stood my mother, with a look that clearly reflected how severely disappointed and shocked she felt.
 
She thrust a can of Glade Air Freshener Aerosol Spray Clean Linen in my face and said, “Spray this, everywhere, NOW. Open all window. If your father smell the smoke, he kill you.”
 
I’m used to disappointing my father and having him make that very clear to me. However, when I feel like I’ve done something to disappoint my mother, I feel compelled to run to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on bare feet and procure the Hope diamond to show her how sorry I am.
 
Disappointing a parent is very irritatingly guilt-trip ridden but effective. This incident shocked me into early retirement from the whole gray, shriveled, dead route.
 
For a moment.
 
I picked it up once again with gusto when I became friends with Tim during my junior year in college. (Are we seeing a pattern?) One could even say our friendship was born from the time we spent together during our frequent smoke breaks.
 
“Goddamnit. I can’t figure out how to finish this paper about Jaruzelski.”
 
“Smoke break?”
 
This pattern continued when both of us were foolish enough to think that writing honors theses in history would be a fun way to spend our senior year. Smoking while huddling in front of the library doors at 2 a.m. became synonymous with sticking it to the Man/Higher Education and reflected a “Fuck you, we do what we want” attitude. Combined with the 6 out of 7 nights a week we’d go out, get drunk, and smoke a pack each, my throat had never known such manhandling. (Please insert your best deep-throating joke here.)
 
But now I’m an adult. Technically. And smoking is bad for you. Technically. And none of my family smokes and almost all of my close friends are responsible care-takers of their lungs. As history has proven, if I am one that must follow the pack when it comes to my cigarette addiction (pun intended?), one would assume this should be enough incentive to quit.
 
Then there’s the smoking ban that will soon be enforced in all Chicago bars and clubs. Fact: It is cold in Chicago 9 out of 12 months. Fact: This will be the real reason I kick the habit. Nothing is worth battling below 20 degree weather with 40 mph winds in a backless halter top.
 
For now, I suppose I’ll have to distract my absolute desire for a cigarette after very little sleep and showing up late to work and being screamed at by my boss who finds nothing abnormal about telling me to send out something today so that it got to the person five days ago by popping some Advil and humoring my caffeine addiction.
 
Because I’ve quit smoking. And sometimes, the easiest way to end one addiction is to distract yourself with another, mildly less harmful one. Especially when you are at work.

Hot Child In The City August 25, 2007

I grew up in a house where newspaper articles neatly covered the front door.
 
In the off chance you’re picturing a house with a front door enshrouded with yellowed pieces of newspaper, fluttering in the wind, I should clarify that the articles were placed on the inside of the door. The neighborhood council of our immaculate gated-community would surely have had a fit at the sight of a door in their perfectly-mowed-lawns subdivision adorned with something as atrocious as yellowed pieces of newspaper, God forbid.
 
These newspaper articles weren’t of achievements that had made it into the local paper; they weren’t of current events; and they weren’t the latest U.S. News rankings of top undergraduate institutions and medical schools. Those went on the fridge next to the paper on which I received an A, with my dad’s note Next time you do better! You try A++! I think he failed to understand that A+’s - let alone A++’s - were no longer handed out after 5th grade.
 
The articles that decorated the inside of our front door were about young girls who had been raped, kidnapped, and murdered.
 
Sometimes, on my way to volleyball practice, I’d catch a headline that read unidentified girl found in park. If I were so lucky to go watch a movie with my friends, I’d glimpse scratches indicate prolonged torture before leaving my house. The most fundamental lesson my father wanted his daughters to remember before leaving his house was that if we let our guard down for even an instant, we could become Nancy Thomas, 7, last seen at Crosstown Shopping Mall or Jessica Moore, 23, reported to be seen leaving local campus party with tall, Caucasian male, please call (xxx) xxx-xxxx with any information.
 
It didn’t matter that we lived in a town of a few thousand people in Michigan, 50% immaculate gated-communities, 50% golf courses, 100% WASP, where the worst crime to occur every year was the toilet paper defilement of someone’s yard. My dad always had a retort ready when I’d begin my 17th attempt at reassuring him I’d be perfectly safe at the local Applebee’s with my friends.
 
“You think you safe? Wendy Gleason, 27, think she safe and then she get found in trunk of beat up car!”
 
“That happened in New York and I think she was a prostitute.”
 
“Why you think she be prostitute? She be prostitute because she have father who let her go everywhere all the time and now you think she having fun? You think if she knew what happen she go to the Applebee now?”
 
I hated how overprotective my father was and I played the part of fucking pain in the ass with the best of them because I knew I’d never be Wendy Gleason, 27, found dead in the truck of a beat up car because no teenager ever thinks that something bad will happen to them. Teenagers think they’re fucking invincible, and to our luck, for us fortunate ones, we escape all of it with nothing more than some bruised egos or memories of a bad hangover from the party that served all that jungle juice.
 
Of course, such memories are very limited for me because my house was a prison and my father the warden, albeit a nice prison, probably the kind of prison stayed at by Martha Stewart, but a prison nonetheless. It didn’t help that I got all the invites to all the parties all the time. It only led to more frustration. And to my fucking awe today, high-school-senior me began sneaking out of the house. A lot. I can’t believe the fucking balls I had to do that because I shake right now thinking about what would have happened to me had my dad ever caught me. Or maybe I can believe it. I was desperate.
 
Once out, I hardly did anything worse than sleep over at someones house until I could come back at around 7 am, accoutered in running clothes, pretending to have finished an early morning run, almost hoping my father would see me because I knew I’d hear him tell me you run early by yourself is very good, I like and you keep doing. Sneaking out was one thing, but sneaking out at 1 am and then trying to find a party to go to was near impossible. My home town was not that cool.
 
Possibly the most significant sip of alcohol I ingested before college occurred when I was four years old. I tried to drink from my father’s glass, confusing the liquid inside for apple juice. Okay, daughter, you drink and tell me if you like. My father had been sitting with one of his friends, and they both laughed uproariously when I immediately spat out the sip I had taken. This memory makes me really like my dad. When I have kids, I’ll let them take sips out of my glass too – it’s a good way to ensure they’ll stay away from beer for a while anyway because to a four year old, beer tastes worst than black jelly beans and you know you didn’t go near black jelly beans as a kid.
 
It’s not that I wouldn’t have drank alcohol had I been given the opportunity, but I wasn’t ever allowed the opportunity. So I arrived at college not only excited to get away from the complete tyranny of my father but to enjoy every single thing I wasn’t allowed to during high school. And when I have my mind set on something, I make sure I get it done. My dad taught me that much.
 
Recently, someone who went to my college told me that during our freshman year, he knew me as that girl in X Hall who’s always drunk. Exact words. I actually had the humility to feel embarrassed. Not because I drank a lot because everyone drank a lot freshman year, and I sure as hell drink a lot still. But I certainly didn’t know what the fuck I was doing freshman year. I played the quintessential obnoxious lush at the party/club/bar who doesn’t know how to hold their liquor and makes a stumbling ass of him or herself because I didn’t know how to hold my liquor. How could I? That’s what I imagine you learn in high school. And even though every kid goes through a drunken awakening to alcohol and all its fucktastic awesomeness during his freshman year in college, I went through it more severely than most.
 
So I felt embarrassed. Because freshman year wasn’t pretty. Publicly vomiting for hours in the communal bathroom and even one trip to the hospital that we later learned wasn’t entirely my fault due to a drugged drink at a frat party I had attended earlier that night and I praise the Holy Father that nothing worse than a $800 ambulance ride came out of it. So even though it may not have been entirely my fault, it was my fault. Because I didn’t know better. And I didn’t know better, because I grew up locked inside a large immaculate home that looked perfect from the outside. So maybe that was my dad’s fault.
 
I don’t know what the right answer is. I certainly don’t think parents should be allowing their kids free reign to do whatever they want, especially when you hear stories about middle school kids throwing sex parties and you see 14 year old girls wearing outfits that even I have the decency to not wear in public – at least not when it’s daylight and a Wednesday [unless I’m making the Walk Cab or El Ride of Shame, which is an entirely different story].
 
When I hear about parents who knowingly let their high school kids get drunk at home, I’m not sure what I feel but it’s not approval. If you told me that a high school kid got drunk by sneaking into his parents’ liquor cabinet, I’d say more power to them. Have to learn at some point how much a hangover hurts after pounding too much hard liquor the night before. But a parent, most likely trying too hard to be cool, letting their kid invite their friends over and mixing up the party punch themselves? No, it just has to send the wrong message. Parents aren’t supposed to be cool. Not at that age. They probably aren’t supposed to be raging authoritarians either, but they sure as hell can’t be more concerned with being your “friend.” Not at that young age.
 
During my sophomore year in college, my family came to visit me during Parents Weekend. I was nervous at the prospect of seeing my dad and for him to see the wild mess of a dorm I called home. Not being able to do much else, I cleaned the fuck out of my dorm room. My family arrived, my dad stood in the middle of my room, gave a disapproving scowl and then he sat on my bed.
 
“Why … what I sit on?”
 
He reached under the blanket and drew out a Miller Lite bottle.
 
I think I died on the spot.
 
What brought me back to life? My dad started laughing. Laughing. The man who frowns when I eat too many cookies because I’m proving that I’m too weak to say no to chocolate? you too soft! you need DISCIPLINE, laughed. All he said was, “Okay. I know. You in college now. You growing up. But still you be careful.”
 
It was beautiful. And utterly fucking right.
 
That’s the thing about him. He makes me so angry and feel so hurt and sad that I get frightened by how badly I feel. But then I’m reminded of how cool he can be. And I think about how he and my mom put up newspaper articles on our front door because they were so scared that no matter how hard they tried to keep us safe, they knew that you never fucking know what can happen to your kid when they leave through the front door, and they wanted us to know that so that we’d at least be that much more careful. I think about how much someone has to care to be that scared.
 
He chastises me now for living in a big city far away from home. Well, he chastises me for a lot of things, and living in a big city is one of those things. For someone who couldn’t even allow his daughter to go to a football game on Friday night for a few hours, I’m sure it makes his world go round that I now live hundreds of miles away with - gasp - no adult supervision. Well, other than my own, I suppose, and I’d hardly call that adult or much of any kind of supervision.
 
During a recent phone conversation, he again approached this topic and began lamenting about the evils of big cities. He ended the conversation, “Daughter. I hate you living in big city far from home. And doing nothing! Not law school. Nothing! Why you waste time? I think you must come home. *Deep pause.* But if you not come home, read newspaper. You read newspaper and find story about girl who get killed. You remember what happen to loose girl who not careful?”
 
And I do remember. I make a lot of poor decisions. A lot. On a fairly consistent basis. And I find myself in a lot of situations that normal, good girls probably stay far away from. I’m more careless than I should be. But I know for as reckless as I behave, there’s usually a voice inside my head that tells me the difference between when something is fucked up crazy and when something is too fucked up insane bat shit crazy get yourself the fuck out of this situation right now. Maybe my crash course in unsupervised mayhem that was college allowed me to get most of my unabashed thirst for the crazy out of my system and learn a thing or two. Maybe I have Wendy Gleason, 27, found dead in a parked car, to thank.
 
Or maybe it’s my dad who deserves the credit. And if that’s the case, I’m going to need a drink to process that information.
 
“Oh. And daughter–”
 
“Yes, Father?”
 
“Have you heard this song Hot Child In City? I hear some song about a hot child in car today and I get worried.”
 
“Um, yes,” I said, taken aback.
 
“Do not be Hot Child In City. You be hot child, and then you ruin respect. And then you become dead girl in car trunk. Now when you go to law school?”