I admit it: I was one of those dorks who was so pumped about the release of Wolfram Alpha that I compiled a list of potential questions to ask the magic machine as soon as it went live. Gripping my pen in hand, I hunched over my Moleskine and scribbled down the questions my inner child most desperately wanted to know the answer to:
How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop?
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
What is the meaning of life?
What is the 69th digit of pi? (I actually know this one, since I know the first 180+ digits of pi thanks to this awesome song)
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Of all the things I could have asked — and eventually I did get around to asking some good questions. I learned, for example, that there are 7 x 1000^22 stars in the observable universe — what I most wanted to know were questions that have been part of my character development since childhood. Questions that are the foundation of my generation. Questions that, in all honesty, I did not expect Wolfram Alpha to know.
I secretly wanted to see it fail.
So imagine my surprise when, after smugly typing ridiculous question #1 into the search box, WolframAlpha returned:
“All right, smartass,” I thought. “I bet the nefarious dudes behind Mathematica knew somebody would ask this. I’m not surprised you knew that answer. Let’s try another.”
So I straightened up in my chair and asked ridiculous question #2. Surely it would have no idea what I was talking about. But, despite the odds (or perhaps not— it isn’t like I have the faintest idea how WolframAlpha actually works) it returned:
Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t entirely accept that as the correct answer. The answer is (according to my own childhood), “He’d chuck as much as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” But then again I recognize there are regional differences in these sort of things, and a lot of time has gone by, and seeing as how I don’t think Wolfram went to elementary school in North Hollywood in the early 80’s, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Wolfram Alpha: 2. Amber: 0.
All right. So Wolfram Alpha could answer some “how much” and “how many” questions. Fine. But what would it do if I threw it a curve ball? Surely, surely Wolfram Alpha would stumble over its Mathematica-founded feet when I asked it the most fundamental existential query of all: What is the meaning of life?
But I probably don’t even have to tell you what Wolfram Alpha had to say about that. Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.
In retrospect I probably should have known better.
By now, of course, I was getting a good laugh not only out of my own hubris, thinking it would be this easy to trick the machine, but also out of how interesting this experiment had become. Sure, I’d only been asking questions about pop culture but those are precisely the kinds of questions I didn’t expect it to have an answer to.
Thinking that it was time to ask it a question it should know, I decided to ask a math question about pi.
I was disappointed that it didn’t sing the result back to me, actually. Because that would have been so rad.
Amazed and more than a little put out that I still hadn’t been able to stump the computer, I thought about my final question. It would have to be a real zinger. It would have to be something deep, something profound whose answer I had sought but still had not found. And after a few moments of soul searching, it came to me in a flash. In a fever, tongue slightly breaching the barrier of pursed lips, I typed out my coup de grâce, my final question, the question I most needed to know: “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”
I waited while the computer thought. I bit my lip. I bounced a little in my seat, waiting for it, waiting, knowing that I would finally know what my little girl self had never known:
Dashed! Destroyed! My eyes popped open is disbelief, my spine as straight as an arrow as I slammed my hands palm down onto the top of my Ikea desk. “No! No, Wolfram, you do know! I know you do. I have faith!”
I typed the question in again, but Wofram Alpha still didn’t know. It had no idea where in the world was Carmen Sandiego.
I admit it was a cheatful question, because Carmen Sandiego isn’t in any one place; she gets around. (She wouldn’t be a very good thieving villainess if she always hung out in the same spot). Still, I was hoping for something. Anything. Any answer would have been better than what it gave me. After all, when I later asked it, “Where’s Waldo?” it confidently responded, “Arkansas.”
Ah, well. Perhaps it’ll learn still. I have high hopes for it; it’s already performed beyond my meager expectations. As for now, as to the whereabouts of Carmen Sandiego, the world may never know.
Instead of eating lunch at my desk as I normally do, I went down to the turtle pond with two friends: an information architect and an editor.
Standing on the edge of the pier, leaning over the rail and feeling the sun on our arms, we watched. After a time, the information architect said, “I like to count the turtles. There were 45 last time. I only see about twenty this time.”
The editor kicked her feet through the slats in the pier’s gating. “I like the way everything down there has its place in the ecosystem. Turtles, snakes, fish, birds, algae, and the reeds. I like how they all live together.”
I smiled down into the green water as the turtles glided by, bodies submerged, their pretty noses poking out. “I just like being out here,” I said. “I love just being outside.”
You don’t need a degree in literature to notice a current trend in web writing. You can’t surf the web without running into articles, blog posts, and even interface copy that is sarcastic, self-righteous, question-talky and overly sincere. You’ll find myriad articles with advice about “how not to suck at…” or admonishing you that your blog (or your résumé, or your handshake) sucks. You’ll find bloggers and copywriters oozing disdain and annoyance all over their keyboards. (Try to read a couple posts from any popular mommyblog and you’ll see what I mean.)
At the other extreme we have websites that are trying too hard to be your friend. Twalala.com tells me they “pinky-swear” not to divulge my password information. Moo.com wants “to change the world. No, really.”
The tone of currently fashionable web writing is awful. It’s embarrassing. It makes me want to scratch my ears out. It’s too much — too sarcastic, too friendly, too unreal. And it’s unnecessary. If your web team has done its job adequately, the entire site should lend itself to openness and trustworthiness. If your site works, is aesthetically pleasing, and I can find my way around, there’s no need to overdo the language. I don’t want to be friends with your website. I just want to do whatever I came there to do.
But the worst offender, the most egregious trend in current web writing, is the question talking. You’ve all read it, and you’ve probably even heard it in real life. It’s the bizarre new phenomenon where we break statements into questions for emphasis.
That? Is awesome!
I’m guilty of having done it. Which gives me even more reason to hate it.
In the old days when I learned English grammar and punctuation, we used question marks for one thing: questions.
Is that awesome?
Will it be awesome?
Could it be awesome?
Should it have been awesome?
Must it had to have been awesome?
These are questions.
“That? Is awesome!” isn’t. (Either awesome or a question.) I assume that that the real effect we’re going for here is emphasis. But we already have a wonderful tool for indicating emphasis.
Italics.
“That is awesome!” gets the point across and allows the reader to hear what she wants to hear. If, like me, your reader is so tired of the ubiquitous question-for-emphasis that she simply can’t bear to read it anymore, she’ll be so thankful that you left her to own devises. By resorting to the simple, non-trendy emphasis that is both timeless and culturally universal (or at the very least, more universal than the weird question thing we’ve been up to for a few years now) you’ve given your reader the freedom to interpret that emphasis for herself. You’ve given her the freedom to hear:
or
Or whatever. You get the point.
And while that might seem trivial, letting your reader dictate the tone she hears actually establishes a better relationship than forcing her to hear things your way.
Growing up, Thanksgiving was definitely the little Christmas. We always did Thanksgiving with tons of family, each nuclear family congealing in some central house, bringing at least one of their own prized dishes. The house always smelled amazing as everyone put their stuffings, casseroles, potatoes, pies, cakes, macaronis on the counter, and the parents spooned out platefuls of goo and yum for the gaggle of children at their own special kids’ table. One year, I was about 14, and we had Thanksgiving at my fake-Aunt Yolande’s house. My fake-Aunt Yolande is a special kind of crazy, the kind of crazy that is endearing and wonderful, never maddening. That was the year she tried to bake a cake using my mother’s baby formula because she was out of milk. I don’t know if I need to tell you that it didn’t turn out, but it didn’t. (She claimed it would have worked fine if it weren’t for the iron in the baby formula. Me, I think the fact that baby formula stinks and in no way resembles cow milk by any stretch of the imagination might have had something to do with it.)
That Thanksgiving was my first spent with fake family, and it was awesome. And by fake family, I mean a blend of my immediate family, friends of my immediate family, my stepfather and his brother and his kids and fake kids (and I’m not even sure in which way these kids were fake. Most black families I know have a tendency to call people by familial relations that don’t, in fact, truly exist, and good luck trying to sort it all out.) At any rate, there was food for days. My fake-Uncle owned a barbecue restaurant, so there was barbecue along with turkey, about eleventy billion side-dishes, and enough dessert to give all of south Los Angeles type 2 diabetes. We ate until we could hardly move, at which point the grownups commenced to drinking Chivas Regal and being overly loud, and the teenagers…
Well, ostensibly we were going for a drive to look for something to do. And we weren’t all teenagers. The oldest of us was in his early twenties, and the youngest of us was about eleven. If I recall correctly, the true objective of our mission was to find a store selling wine coolers so even us littles could partake in the fun of the day. We drove around for about an hour before giving up. Every shop was closed. That’s the lame part about holidays — once the holiday part is over, there’s nothing to do, and in our case, no alcohol to drink.
Another year, my father decided he wanted to take me and my brother to visit his family for Thanksgiving. This was a first for us — my brother and I scarcely knew our paternal relatives, and the idea of flying to St. Louis to have Thanksgiving in a hotel appealed to us. To our mother, not so much, but to her credit she did nothing to dampen our excitement. We packed bags and got on a plane and made our first (and last) trip to St. Louis.
Here’s another thing about Thanksgiving. It’s in November. You probably know that, but see, I’m from Los Angeles. Not much difference in Los Angeles between September, October, and November. It’s all pretty much the same, which is to say it’s pretty damn warm.
It’s not warm in St. Louis in November. In fact, it was snowing. And in further fact, I had packed a suitcase full of mini skirts and not a single jacket to my name. When my Dad found out, he was furious, and had to take me and my brother shopping for coats, which of course was fine by us. Getting to go shopping is what makes having divorced parents kind of worth it.
We arrived at the hotel in a taxi, and upon arrival my grandfather pushed a box of chocolates into my hands. “Here, take these,” he says, as he struggles to pull luggage out from the cab. The box is white and glossy, wrapped with a red ribbon. Fancy chocolates! My brother and I look each other over with glee.
Up in our room, we tear open the box of chocolates and start to devour them, only to discover that they are the nastiest chocolates on the face of the earth. “Yuck,” my brother says, spitting the caramel into the trash. “Where did he get these chocolates from?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shuffling through the box. I pulled out a round chocolate with pink stripes. “Let’s try these.”
Nope. Nasty, too. How about the light brown ones with the crunchy things on top? Okay, the dark brown with the green drizzles?
We tried them all before giving up.
When my grandfather returned later and asked us for his candies, were were dumbfounded. His candies? You mean they weren’t intended for us?
“You destroyed $100 worth of diabetic candy!” My grandfather raged. We didn’t feel bad, because we didn’t know they weren’t ours. And what kind of person hands a box of chocolates to two young kids and expects them to hold onto it for safe keeping? I thought that was stupid then, and I think it’s stupid now, and I can say that, because the grandfather in question is dead so he probably doesn’t remember this incident, anyway.
That Thanksgiving, I learned to french kiss (with the one kid there that wasn’t a relative. At least, I don’t think he was a relative. I think he was someone’s step-son. I guess I’ll never know, and yeah, that’s kind of gross, but I was in junior high. If I walked around regretting every stupid thing I ever did in junior high I wouldn’t get a hell of a lot done.) I also saw Alzheimer’s up close and personal for the first time. My father’s grandmother, who raised him, was at the table, frail and oblivious to everyone and everything. She couldn’t control her body well, and she ate with her mouth open. It wasn’t a pretty sight. She seemed sad. Everyone seemed sad. They seemed to both want her there and not. But I guess that such conflicting emotions are probably very common in these circumstances.
Dad never asked us to Thanksgiving with his extended family again. Honestly, I don’t think he went either. I think that particular trip down memory lane was enough for him.
I mention these two particular Thanksgivings to illustrate a larger point: that my childhood holidays were bustling, filled with adventure, people, misadventure, laughter, turmoil, and joy. And so while I harbor a soft spot in my heart for this holiday, a part of me is sad, too. My adult Thanksgivings are spent with my husband and two children. That’s it. We have no family close, and all our friends have other places to go, other family to visit. We have each other. And while yes, I am very grateful for that, I do miss the extended huggings and kissings, the trading of boisterous stories, the passing of plates down the tables rows, and the drama. I do miss the drama. I miss all the things I’ve come to associate with family holidays.
And so this year, as I’m standing in my kitchen baking buttermilk pie or kneading the bread dough for the stuffing — everything from scratch for Thanksgiving! — I will think not only about how grateful I am for the people in my life now, but also for the people that were in my life then, who gave me such wonderful memories, who filled me with joy and laughter that I can draw from now, in the quiet contentedness of a drama-free Thanksgiving household. I will toast to them and think of them, and hope that in some way I have and will continue to fill someone else’s life with the same images, warm feelings and sacred stories that everyone needs to live a full, happy life.
This morning, I woke up to a text message from a friend that read, “So when are the Libertarians and Independents going to send out their Eff You message?”
Having just roused from sleep and not yet being of sound mind, I had no idea what she was talking about. But after a moment passed, the lightbulb went on and I had myself a very decent chuckle, and I hope you will, too, as I share this story with you.
In 2006, a good friend and co-worker ran for Congress. He ran as an Independent against a much beloved Democratic incumbent and a Republican who was a self-proclaimed practitioner of Eckankar.
Although my friend lives about 30 miles away from me in a demographically different part of town, we happen to live in the same congressional district. (Gerrymandering at its best, I suppose.) He asked me if I intended to vote for him.
“Well, no,” I said. “Firstly, I’m not registered to vote in Texas, and secondly, I don’t believe in anything you stand for.” He was a bit put out by this, as he had somehow decided that friends should vote for friends even if their politics do not jibe.
But not to be dissuaded, he invited me — and everyone else in our department— to an election watching party. He had hoped to watch the results roll in and bask in however many paltry votes he had managed to accrue. Now, when I say he invite the whole department, what I really mean is the whole college, as at the time I was working at the University of Texas. He invited us all: the Dean, his coworkers, and all the faculty. The only people he didn’t invite were the students, and probably only because he didn’t have their email addresses. Thank FERPA for that, at least.
Election night (and the aforementioned party that I did not attend) came and went, and the next morning, I was greeted with the following message in my inbox:
Subject: No offense, but F**k you
Body: I’m not sure what to say at this point.. but I am beginning to think that F**K YOU may be appropriate.… I have tried on several occasions to invite you to a party I am hosting and yet you have not attended (with very, very, few exceptions), let alone bothered to acknowledge that I even invited you to attend.
As a result of tonight’s turnout, amongst my fellow employees , I may not be in the office of Thursday or Friday because I have serious things to consider as to why the f**k I am working with you, and why you will not support me.
Have a great morning you inconsiderate jackasses,
**
Yikes, I thought. Guess no one went to his party.
When I got to work, I asked a friend, “Hey, did you get um… a strange email this morning?”
My boss overheard, sighed, and shook his head. “Well all got it. And I mean, we ALL got it. He even sent that email to the Dean of the College.”
Thinking it must be a joke, we all huddled around my computer to re-read the message. On second reading, we were still a bit taken aback by the vitriol — and unintentional hilarity — of the email, but we were also convinced it wasn’t a joke. (Though we did joke about whether the final salutation was directed only to the Democrats amongst us, or if “jackasses” was intended more inclusively.)
It wasn’t a joke. And though tempers flew, especially the Dean’s, he wasn’t fired. In fact — and this is really the best part of the story— the very next month, a mere three weeks after this incident, he was awarded Employee of the Month.
There is no moral to this story. There is no great political message to be learned. It is simply something I wanted to share in the aftermath of the 2008 election because even after two years it still makes me laugh and shake my head in wonder.
My gorgeous daughter after her concert, still in makeup.
I’ve always believed that words have power. One of my favorite euphemisms for putting a curse on someone is “to put words” on someone – to bind them by the finality and imperviousness of actual words, of letters, the actual building blocks of the universe. And owing to my deep loyalty to this belief, I won’t allow people to say things in my presence that I really don’t want to come true.
Nevertheless, my midwife cursed my daughter and me on the day of her birth. As she slid into this world covered in goo and screaming her slimy pink head off, my midwife stared at her white skin, her slender nose, the almond shape of her eyes, the dark blonde hair. And the midwife looked from the newborn baby to me, her newborn mother, and put words on us both with, “If I didn’t just take this baby out of you I’d never believe she was yours.”
North Hollywood, California, was a truly diabolical place in the 1980s. Which is to say that, guided by the loving paranoia of my family and churchmates, I found Satan absolutely everywhere I looked. He was prevalent in popular music, movies, cartoons, and role-playing games. Watching an hour of MTV was a sure ticket to Hell. In fact, Satan was so ubiquitous that I grew to be both terrified of and enthralled by the unholy trickster. I took great pleasure in finding various ways to irritate Satan, which included random acts of kindness (though never directed toward my brother) and engaging in long monologues in which I would tell Satan why his zeal to steal my soul was a lost cause, for I was bathed in the blood of the lamb and could never be tempted to damnation. And as I would say this, I would stamp my feet (to annoy the demons below) and smile as widely as I could, for a song that I had learned in Lutheran school had taught me to “Smile sweetly, sister, so you’ll send Satan sadly away”. The alliteration appealed to me, of course, but so did the idea that I could piss Satan off simply by donning a smart-ass, shit-eating grin. So many days were passed stomping my feet and grinning like a fool, all in the service of Jesus Christ’s army.
(On more than one occasion I was asked what the hell I was doing, stomping my feet and smiling like a damned fool at the ground. “I’m smiling at Satan,” I’d reply. “He doesn’t like that.” Grown-ups would raise their eyebrows. Unbelievers. “Satan doesn’t like it when you smile at him?” I shook my head. “No.” I knew they were ignorant about the ways of Satan, but it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t go to Lutheran school when they were kids and therefore didn’t know about the song, “Grin again gang get gung-ho about Jesus*. If they’d known that song they’d have known all about how turning a frown upside down was the best way to get Satan to crawl away with this tail between his legs.)
But Satan was tricky, and he kept finding ways to wriggle himself into my life. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to divest myself of his wily charms. One morning on the playground as I was building a sand trap (for unsuspecting kindergarteners to fall into) I was humming softly to myself when my best friend Kimberly sauntered up to me, hands on her hips and said, “You know that Boy George is going straight to Hell, and my mom says I can’t be friends with anyone who listens to Boy George.”
I looked up, puzzled. “Boy George is going to Hell? What for?”
Kimberly flipped her blonde hair and shrugged. “I think for dressing up like a girl. The Bible says that in the end times the men will look like women and the women will look like men, and Boy George dresses like a woman so he’s going to Hell.”
Now, I sure didn’t know what Satan would want with a boy that wore blue eyeshadow, but then I didn’t understand most of Satan’s motivations so I had to take it on faith that Kimberly was right and Boy George was going to Hell. But “Karma Chameleon” was my favorite song in the world that month, and I wasn’t going to give up humming it even for Jesus. I h ad spent many hours sitting on the floor with my telephone hitting redial to call KIISFM and asking them to please play “Come on, Chameleon”. After all, as far as my little girl self knew, there was no such word as “karma”, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have known what it meant, and even if I had, well, “Come on, Chameleon” just made more sense anyway.
Mentally, I vowed never to hum Boy George in Kimberly’s presence again, but I still loved the song.
But since I was now harboring a fugitive piece of Satan in my heart, I had to counteract that act of espionage with something truly Christian, something out of the ordinary. Stomping my feet and smiling like a madman wasn’t going to be enough. If I was going to let Satan into my heart via the music of Boy George, I had to find some way to really let Jesus’ light shine through me.
I let the question stew inside me for several days before I gave up. Maybe it wasn’t really that important. After all, I was constantly surrounded by Satan’s temptations and he had thus far failed to capture my soul. Perhaps I was simply immune to Satan’s seductions.
The idea that I might be among the blessed few to be above and beyond Satan’s reach changed my outlook on life. I started doing things I wasn’t supposed to do, like watch the Smurfs on Saturday morning TV. (My mother had heard that the creator of the Smurfs sold his soul to Satan for a hit cartoon show, and that one night, while drawing the tiny blue characters, a Smurf jumped off the page and bit the artist on the arm. As a result, my brother and I were forbidden from watching the Smurfs. It put quite a damper on my ability to contribute to playground conversations.) I snuck in a few minutes of MTV watching. And sometimes, after an especially long day at school, I skipped bedtime prayers and simply went to bed.
I just wasn’t afraid of Satan anymore.
One night, sound asleep in bed (on a prayer-free night, I’m sure) something shook me awake. As I opened my eyes to complain that it was too early to get up, I realized that no one was standing over me, cajoling me to wake up. It wasn’t just me that was shaking — my entire bed was shaking. And it wasn’t shaking slightly, it was rattling, the brass screws coming loose, creaking, cracking, making horrible sounds as it shook. I tried to scream but the sound caught in my throat and it was all I could to hang on to my blankets and sheets lest they tumble to the ground. If I had to get out of bed to retrieve them I would be exposed to whatever evil had shaken me from my sleep, and the thought of baring myself in that way was soul rending. I clutched my blankets to my chest, too paralyzed to scream, to confused to cry. And then, as suddenly as the shaking began, it stopped.
The darkness around me thickened as the silence settled. There was no sound to hear beyond my own heartbeat. If anyone in my family was disturbed by the phenomenon in my bedroom they didn’t show it. I sat staring into the darkness, waiting for something else to happen — for the roar of demons to descend upon me, for my bed to lift off the ground and start to fly, something. But after an eternity of sitting and waiting, I finally accepted that nothing more was going to happen, and eventually I fell back asleep.
By the next morning I had forgotten all about the incident the night before. One of the magical aspects of daylight is its ability to erase the fear and anxiety that can only exist in the black of night. With the sun overhead, the sound of bacon frying and intermittent notes of some obscure piece of classical music wafting up from downstairs, no such thing as demons or Satan could be a problem. The possibility didn’t exist, therefore there was no reason to remember anything about the night before.
It was Monday morning. I dressed for school, ate breakfast, and went outside to wait for my mom and brother by the car. As I stepped out onto the patio, I noticed a pile of broken ceramic pieces on the ground. I looked up and saw that a planter had fallen and shattered. I knelt down and watched little ants and tiny spiders crawling through the dirt. I probably should have picked up the shards and threw them in the garbage but it never occurred to me. Besides, watching insects was much more interesting. Finally my mother and brother bounded out of the house, backpacks and purses in tow, and we piled into the car for our daily commute. I rode the thirty minutes to school with my nose in a book. I kissed my mom good-bye and dashed out onto the playground, just in time for the bell that called us to line up.
The day went by quickly, or at least nothing memorable happened. We were focused on our lessons, just like every other day. My teacher, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, was in a particularly crabby mood, and every time I tried to pass a note to one of my friends I was scolded, and eventually asked to sit in the corner.
When lunchtime finally came, I gobbled up my food and hurried to the playground. I hadn’t been able to talk to anybody all day and I felt like I was going to explode. My inner chatterbox was bursting to get out. I found my friends sitting under a tree and plopped down next to them dramatically.
“I think someone tried to break into my house last night,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say it until the words came out. It wasn’t even true, and I knew it wasn’t true. I just wanted something to talk about. It was a persistent problem I had in those days.
One of the girls, Robin, looked down at me through her long, dark lashes. She seemed to ooze disdain. We were not friends. “Why do you think that?”
I sniffed. “Because,” I said importantly, “one of the planters on our front porch was knocked down and broken. I bet the burgler knocked it over and it made so much noise he got scared and ran away.”
I smiled smugly at Robin, because I knew my logic was infallible. Now everyone would ask me if I was afraid, if we’d get a guard dog, and the next thirty minutes I would be the center of attention, just the way I liked it.
But Robin tossed her hair back and shrugged. “It probably just fell during the earthquake last night, that’s all.”
I frowned, stumped. Earthquake? We’d had an earthquake the night before? Why didn’t anyone mention it? And why hadn’t I felt—
And then I remembered. North Hollywood, California, was certainly a diabolical place. It also happened to sit damn near on top of the San Andreas fault, one of the most active fault lines in the country.
It all came back — the shaking, the rattling, the inability to scream, the soul-deep fear. The certainty that Satan and his minions had come to claim my soul, to put asunder my relationship with the Prince of Peace and Redeemer of Sins once and for all. My body went cold with the memory, and as quickly as realization dawned on me, there was embarrassment not too far behind. I was glad beyond belief that I hadn’t remembered my brush with Satan earlier or I surely would have mentioned my near-possession to my friends and Robin, who would have sneered in that snooty way of hers and informed me that it was probably just an earthquake that had awakened me in the middle of the night and not Satan at all.
It wasn’t Satan that had shaken me out of my bed and scared me out of my wits. It had only been an earthquake. Not the Devil, but an act of God.
Nevertheless, as I sat there wallowing in my shame, I swear I could hear Satan laughing at me, and all the demons in hell howling right along with him. I knew then that my lackadaisical attitude toward Satan had to be retired. The score was obvious: Satan:1, Amber: 0. I resolved to be more ruthless in my attempts to defy and annoy the great UnderLord from there on out, all in the effort to be gung-ho about Jesus.
*Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.
Smile sweetly, Sister, so you’ll send Satan sadly away, hey hey!
Buck up, Brother Billy, cuz a bunch of bitter boys become a bunch of better boys behind a big, big smile.
Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.
I am competitive by nature. Even at stuff I don’t care that much about and know I’m not very good at. I once knocked over a little girl at a wedding reception so I could catch the bouquet, even though I was, for all intents and purposes, already engaged. So you can imagine my extreme frustration and annoyance by the fact that my son, a tiny little hobbledehoy, creams me at both Wii bowling and Wii boxing. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even want to play with him, especially because he seems to have mastered the art of excessive celebration; if this were the NFL, he’d be fined for the shit he pulls when he licks me in a match. He cackles with glee as dances about the living room chanting, “Uh huh! I’m awesome! You suck!” He gyrates those hips and pulls faces, all the while maintaining eye contact for the rub. It’s maddening.
And what’s even more aggravating is that he’s so freaking cute when he does it, I simultaneously want to hug him and rip his head right off his bony, little shoulders. Read the rest of this entry »
Most adults were amused and bewildered by my precocious ways at only four years old, but by September 1st, 1981, my mother had enough of my constant questions and demands for explanations and decided it was high time I went to kindergarten so she could have a break. Trouble was, most schools required that children be five years old by September 1st to begin kindergarten. But one local Catholic school had a cut-off date of December 1st.
Seeing as how my birthday wasn’t until the 16th, you’d think that would have posed a problem. But my mother was a resourceful woman, and she simply got a hold of my birth certificate and erased that 6 in 16 right off the page, making my birthday effectively December 1st. That’s probably the first thing I really remember learning: forgery.
And that’s how I came to be enrolled at St. Francis de Sales Catholic elementary school under the tutelage of Mrs. Parker and Sister Conrad.
Sister Conrad was about a hundred years old and as mad at the world as a blind man at a wet t-shirt contest. Her favorite pastimes were whapping kids with a ruler and praying loudly for our everlasting souls whenever we dared behave like children. I was terrified of her and avoided her as much as possible, which I’m sure she appreciated. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, Sister Conrad and I were to be together engraved in the annals of time and St. Francis de Sales, because she believed in torment and I believed in personal assault.
My parents and I played a game every schoolday morning; as soon as I was out of the car, I’d race my father’s black Cadillac down the street. I’d run with all my might alongside the chain link fence that separated my school from the street while my father drove as slowly as he could so I could beat him to my classroom door. I didn’t know that at the time of course. I pumped my little legs like all the demons in Hell were chasing me, and all I knew was that I was the swiftest girl in the world; I could outrun the fastest slug and my daddy’s black Cadillac. And when I arrived at my classroom door, once again the champion, I’d be out of breath and full of confidence because if I could outrun a car, I could do anything.
This particular morning, however, Sister Conrad was standing at the classroom door when I got there. She fetched me by the ear and dragged me into the room scolding me, for there was no running allowed in school! Trecherous! Horrible! Disobedient girl! There is nothing worse to an old, Irish Catholic nun than disobedience, and breaking school rules was just about the most brazen thing one could imagine.
Only, there is one thing the Irish Catholic nuns at St. Francis de Sales hated worse than disobedience, and that was left-handedness. Being left-handed was a mark of Satan; we weren’t supposed to use our left hands for anything at all if we could help it. I wasn’t left-handed, thank the Lord, but the smallest boy in my class, Clippy was, and boy did he ever catch Hell for it.
Every time Sister Conrad saw Clippy writing with his left hand, she’d sneak up on him and smack his hand with a ruler. Humiliated, Clippy would switch the pencil to his right hand, head ducked low, and try pitifully to write. After a little while, though, he’d always switch back to his dominant hand. Learning to write was hard enough when we were five; I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for Clippy to have to learn to write with his off hand.
The same day as my unfortunate morning run-in with Sister Conrad, I forgot my lunch at home. Kindergarteners did not go to the cafeteria, and if we forgot our lunch, we were shit outta luck. Luckily for me, my best friend Jaimie offered to save the day and share her peanut butter sandwich with me. We sat next to each other, happy as clams, munching on our sandwich halves.
Clippy appeared from the classroom with a mischievous grin on his face. “Hey Amber,” he said, “you wanna see what I can do?”
The answer to that question is always yes. “Sure,” I said, mouth full of peanut butter.
Clippy pulled from his brown lunch sac a plastic sandwich baggy, to which he had tied a GI Joe figurine. Eyes wide as saucers, he threw the sandwich bag into the air and we watched in rapt joy as the sandwich bag magically ballooned into a parachute, gently floating the GI Joe to the ground.
It was probably the coolest thing I had seen in all my five years of life on Earth, and Clippy was absolutely beaming he was so proud. I was about to clap when Sister Conrad snatched Clippy by the ear. “Clippy, what do you think you’re doing? Is that garbage you just threw on the ground?”
“I know perfectly well what it is, boy! Should we add lying to your list of offense for the day? Shall we?” And she swatted him with her ruler, accusing him of littering.
“Now you pick that up and throw it in the trash where it belongs,” she said, eyes hard as stones. “And don’t ever let me catch you littering again.”
“But Sister Conrad — ”
She swatted him again for interrupting her and for general insolence. Defeated and on the verge of tears, Clippy picked up his GI Joe figurine and makeshift parachute and deposited them into the trash.
“And what is going on over here?” she asked, turning to Jaimie and me. “Are you eating Jaimie’s food?” she asked me, incredulous.
I knew better than to argue or explain; I’d seen Clippy get hit enough to know how useless it was. I merely nodded. “Yes.”
“Horrible little girl!” she cried. “Get out of here! Give Jaimie back her sandwich! Go out to the playground; I can’t even look at you! Stealing other people’s food. I won’t have it!”
I handed Jaime back her sandwich; I couldn’t look her in the eye. I had only taken three bites of sandwich, and I was so hungry. I turned and walked off toward the playground, my mind filled with thoughts of Clippy and his poor toy in the garbage, and my ears filled with the sounds of my stomach rumbling.
I hated Sister Conrad. I hated her, and wished she would die. As I walked out to the playground, I found myself praying with all my heart for the good Lord to snatch Sister Conrad from the surly bonds of earth and whisk her off to Heaven where she could sit at the LEFT hand of God the Father Almighty (just because that would have burned her up real good) and to keep her far away from Clippy and his wickedness and glorious friends who share their peanut butter sandwiches.
But apparently it wasn’t enough for Sister Conrad to embarrass me and send me off to the playground half starving; I was no more than twenty paces away when I heard her behind me, following me, yelling at me in her horrible, raspy, old hag voice.
“Back in my day we’d have gotten a good spanking for stealing other people’s food! Thou shalt not steal the Bible says! And don’t think I didn’t seeing you encouraging that horrible Clippy to litter our beautiful school! I just don’t know what is wrong with children today. Nothing a good paddling wouldn’t cure, I tell you what, you spoiled brat!”
And at that, I’d had it. I’d had enough of Sister Conrad. I’d had enough of her ear-pulling, hand-swatting, garbage-spewing, torturous, hateful ways. I was so angry, so humiliated, so hungry that I did what any hot-blooded little five-year-old child would do.
I turned around and punched the living daylights out of her. I got her right in her gut with all the strength my tiny little body could muster.
And a week later, Sister Conrad up and died of a heart attack.
We found out at chapel, and when my classmates heard the news, several of them turned to me and made choking sounds, or drew their index fingers across their throats in a slicing motion. “You killed Sister Conrad,” boy whispered to me.
The idea that I killed Sister Conrad left me in a tizzy. Could I really have killed her? Was it possible? For days on end kids came up to me on the playground and called me the witch-killer, the nun-slayer. I could get no relief. I was marked.
My mother noticed something strange about my manner and after a few days she asked me about it. When I could hide my question no longer I blurted out, “Mom, did I kill Sister Conrad because I punched her?”
My mother drew me to her chest, stroking my hair, shaking her head. “No, baby,” she assured me, her voice soothing. “Sister Conrad was an old woman, and it was just her time to go. Now, you shouldn’t have punched her; that was a very bad thing to do. But you had nothing to do with her dying.”
I pulled away and looked up at my mother. “I didn’t?” She shook her head. Crestfallen, I turned away. “Darn.”
My inner ears are deformed, preventing water from draining out of them properly, causing many ear infections as a little girl. Swimming therefore terrified me, because a stint at the pool usually ended in pain and two weeks of amoxicillin.
If swimming frightened me, you can surely imagine what I thought of the idea of full body immersion baptism. I put my foot down.
“But I don’t wanna be baptized!” I cried. Even saying the words, I felt slightly like a traitor. Jesus, after all, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried, and I was throwing a tantrum over spending five minutes in a holy wading pool. But traitorous or not, I held my ground: Jesus did not have to suffer two weeks of amoxicillin.
“Don’t you want to be born again, baby? Like in the Bible?” My mother’s eyes were pleading.
“I don’t like swimming,” I whimpered.
“It won’t be like going swimming,” my mother explained for the hundredth time. “You’ll plug your nose, fold your arms over your chest, and the minister will dunk you under for just a few seconds and then we’ll be done. I promise you it won’t hurt your ears.”
I sniveled and shook my head defiantly.
“You can explain it til your blue in the face,” LaVerne said reasonably. “but it won’t make any difference. If you want to hear the end of it, offer a B-R-I-B-E.”
Cutting my eyes sideways, I asked, “What’s a ‘bribe’?” mostly to remind LaVerne that I was 8, not 4, and perfectly capable of spelling single-syllable words.
My mother heaved a sigh. “After the baptism,” she said slowly, “I’ll buy you a Cabbage Patch doll, okay?”
After a moment’s consideration, I nodded, satisfied. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a Cabbage Patch doll. My mother considered the matter closed and we didn’t discuss the upcoming ordeal any further.
Years later, when asked why she didn’t bother to discuss the baptism with my brother, my mother would recount a story from when he was three years old. We were at a public pool with some of my mother’s friends, I in the shallow end playing with little kids, my mom and her friend dangling their feet in the deep end, my brother somewhere in the background playing with toys.
At the far end of the pool, a large man cannon balled into the water, causing an enormous splash: women screamed for fear of the ruin of their carefully coiffed ’dos, and children broke out in uproarious laughter and applauds. I suppose it was this reaction that my brother simply couldn’t resist.
My mother says that as she sat on the edge of the pool, she saw a shadow on the water, and noticed something flying over the top of her head. Next thing she knew, my brother was flapping wildly in the pool, heading bobbing dangerously under the water’s surface. He couldn’t swim of course — he just hadn’t known that at the time. My mother jumped into the water to save him, dragging him out coughing and gasping. He threw his arms around her neck and said, “Let’s do that again!” My brother, it seemed, had no fear of water.
The baptism was held on a Tuesday night. My mother was all nerves and excitement, as all three of us were to be baptized in the pool together. “Hurry up and get dressed you guys,” she said. “We have to be at Church on the Way in thirty minutes.”
My brother tugged on my shirt. “On the way to where?” he asked.
I shrugged. I had often wondered the same thing. “On the way to Toys R Us, I guess,” I said. “Mom said she’d buy me a Cabbage Patch afterwards.”
“What?” The unfairness of the situation did not escape his five-year-old mind. “She didn’t promise me anything!”
“That’s because you didn’t have to be bribed,” I said smugly, pleased to be able to use my new word.
My brother turned angrily to our mother. “I want to be bribed!” But she ignored him and shuffled us to our rooms to finish dressing.
An hour later, we were dressed in our white baptismal garments, standing on the edge of the water. Hundreds of people sat in the pews watching the ceremony. The minister led the three of us into the tank of warm water. I felt calm. My mother was right: there was nothing to be afraid of.
In fact, we were so comfortable in the water that my brother started dog paddling around the baptismal tank. Several people in the front rows snickered. My mother, mortified, trailed after my brother and yanked him to her side. “This is Jesus’s water,” she said sharply under her breath. He scowled, but stood still. We both knew better than to incur our mother’s wrath.
My mother was dunked first. I went second: it was quick, just like I’d been promised. But when my brother’s turn came, my mother paid for not having explained the process to him, for no sooner did the minister dunk my brother under water that he started flapping his arms and kicking wildly, splashing water everywhere.
His little head broke to the surface and he gasped loudly, “I’M DROWNING! I’M DROWNING! HELP! HELP!” He was crying and screaming, little body thrashing about in the water. In his terror, he’d forgotten that the water only came to his shoulders: if he’d just put his feet down he would have been just fine.
My mother collected my brother in her arms, too embarrassed to look at the minister. I thought she was going to fall through the floor when my brother wailed, “I don’t wanna be born again! I was born just fine the first time! That’s why babies cry when they’re born, you drown them! I don’t want to drown for Jesus!”
We left the church that night in sobriety, but we arrived home with a Cabbage Patch doll and a bagful of Transformers in tow. As we sat on the living room floor ripping open our bribes, my brother proclaimed, “I love Church on the Way to Toys r Us.” My mother sighed, withdrawn and defeated. I don’t think it was the experience she had hoped for.
{Note: As it turns out, Church on the Way is so named because it is on Sherman Way in Van Nuys, California, not because it is on the way to Toys R Us though, to my mother’s shame, it often happened that the one followed the other.)
