*me and my dad, taken sometime during the age of the dinosaurs…
April 14, 2010 Arrooooooooooooooo….
Arooooooo, Werewolves of London – the current song that is stuck in my head. Last night when I should’ve been sleeping, wanted to be sleeping, needed to sleep, it was Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi whoops it just changed to Poker Face. I have been using the Lady’s music as background to my a.m. sit-ups, push-ups and weight lifting routine. The genius and devil of pop music is that it is so damnably catchy…can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker-face… My father has decided to live – thank you very much universal power for that – and as of today he has used his oxygen (prescribed for 24/7 use in January) eight consecutive days as the doctor ordered it those long months ago. This is a relief. This is a gift. This is a good choice because he still has a lot to live for and many, many people who love him and want him to be here for a good long time. People like me. My niece and her fiancé were here this past weekend and, having just about graduated from Med School (May 16th the actual date but all rotations and testing done), they went to work on him, asking questions, and examining his meds. He loved the attention which was, to my mind, the best medicine of all for him right now. He lied like a dog about his oxygen use – or rather he said he had been using it right along 24/7 – yes, right along for the last 6 days only, you old coot! And last night he went to his favorite watering hole with the portable tank where he met one of his buds, and threw back a few beers. I did not ask him if he smoked because I don’t want to know; I assume he did not but again, I don’t want to know and whatever choices he makes now, as I have a limited time left with him, are just fabulous, perfect, ideal, and wonderful as far as I am concerned. I also found out this past weekend what the mother of the bride (my older sister) and the mother of the groom are wearing to the wedding in May: gray suits, one from Armani and one of Versace’s. The groom’s mamma is going sleeveless (so Michelle Obama chic) and my sister’s suit has three quarter sleeves. This means I can now look for suitable color contrast in a suit or separates and so important to get it right because how often, really, does one get to dress up? Not often enough! The bride, need I say it, will be wearing Vera Wang. How fun! I love a good party! And I need one, although in less than two weeks I will be retreating with my best pal from college at Kripalu, a yoga center in the Berks. Yeah! Life is good, much better than last week. Deep breath, deep gratitude, deep love for my pop.
April 14, 2010 One Day at a Time
Today was a long – endless – bad day. After seeming to be improving, my father took a turn for the worse and is now in the hospital. The congestion in his heart and lungs has dramatically worsened; his o2 level on oxygen was 84 which is very low. He has gained five pounds in just two days, all retained fluid, as his legs are painfully swollen. He struggled to breathe all day. He signed a DNR, hospice was called, and will join us in taking care of this wonderful man tomorrow. I am exhausted and so, so sad. He does not want to be transferred to a larger hospital in Kingston or Albany; he does not want heroic measures. He wants to go home – and will, tomorrow – where he wants to die with his family and the people who care about him around him. And his dog. His mind and spirit are entirely intact. The nurse (who was fantastic and exactly his type: smart, feisty and attractive) was placing the little thingummys for an EKG on his tummy and he said “can’t you go a little lower, har har har”. I love him so much. His GP, affirming that he wanted to go on home and into hospice care, said “So Mr. Miller, you’re giving up?” and while I get where she’s coming from I also wanted to kick the living shit out of her. But I did not. And so life goes on although, sooner than I can bear to admit, without my beloved father. Everyone says miracles happen all the time, well, yeah, miraculously I had this great, great man as my dad for almost fifty-one years. Lucky me, but as to him bouncing back from the edge of the precipice, I don’t know about that one. Help me to help him, help me.
Diego Lou Mueller saying hello, and where’s my treat? His mummy so overdid it yesterday, mowing the lawn, weeding, shoveling material around the house to slow the (constant seeming) rain water, picking up woody debris, chasing a stray pup-ster who did not (understandably) want to go back inside, that she can hardly move today, and has decided to take a day off, sit in her very comfy chair and read a book, maybe even binge-watch something good on the boob tube. You’d be surprised by how many films and TV shows contain dogs and horses, my favorites! Which, if I am awake, I watch and even bark at from the end of the sofa I have commandeered from mummy because – well, because. Right now as mummy writes this I am barking at the vehicles that are running up and down my road due to it being turkey hunting season here, gobblers only, until noon. Mummy wishes they would all go away, or, conversely, that I would shut TF (I’m not sure what THAT means!) up. I love her. Whoops, another truck! Buh-bye!
You’re the end of the rainbow, my pot of gold, you’re daddy’s little girl, to have and to hold. You’re sugar, you’re spice, you’re everything nice, and you’re daddy’s little girl! ~ lyrics written by Burke & Gerlach ***but not their exact words, just the ones my ‘rents mashed together…
April 3, 2010 I Love You, Dad
A daddy’s girl is something I could never, would never, deny being. I adore my dad and while I absolutely know he does not and never did know everything about everything, deep down inside I still believe that he does, always has, and always will. Contradicting that ancient child belief of mine in his omnipotence is his current state, the result of a life time of smoking and his accompanying refusal to do what it will take to maintain even the gravely compromised state of health he has. He will not use his oxygen as he should; we are talking about a man who hasn’t worn short sleeves in decades because he doesn’t like the way his arms look, and you think he’ll cart an oxygen tank around? Not gonna happen. And he will not do the nebulizer four times a day preferring to wait until he “needs” it which is when he is hunched over, literally gasping for breath. This is very hard for this daddy’s girl to watch. And yet loving him as I do and so wanting him to do it his way, I have to (try to) respect his choices in this. He’s also not using the portable tank because he is and always has been truly, madly, and deeply cheap as fuck, so cheap it’s astounding. If he uses it, you see, then he’ll have to pay to get it refilled. His last bill for all of the oxygen equipment he now has (a lot) was around 45 bucks. He has many, many times that in his checking account and many more times that in his savings account. ARRRRGGGGG. He’s a Scotsman’s grandson alright, as well as a child of the depression. Ultimately, I cannot and will not force him to do anything, in large part because I haven’t got the will, the energy, or the desire to do so. This inertia, maybe we can call it that – inertia, is compounded by my certain knowledge that he is ambivalent about life, period, as in is it worth living for him right now, particularly as it narrows. He will be getting his lunch time meal delivered to his home; he has given up bowling and he will only get take out from his favorite breakfast haunt, because sitting there in public with his tank is not an option. And, he risks heart failure every time he leaves the house (to pick up his take-out coffee and bagel, to walk his dog) without it. Prayer helps. I trust the process of life, I trust the process of life, I trust the process of life. I surrender my dear, sweet, funny and profoundly cheap father to you, mother father God. He is such a good egg and such a good person. I am ready to let him go if reluctant, devastated, grief-stricken, and blinded by tears at the thought of just how much of a loss his passing will be. This morning I stopped by his house on my way to work in beauteous Bovina (I wasn’t going to, but couldn’t not do so) and found him in a bit of a state, unable to use the nebulizer because he had misplaced a part of it. I could not find it, called Lincare and they should be there any minute. Oh yes and I have to remember to breathe through this as well. In…one two three four…out…one two three four five six seven eight. I love you dad.
April 6, 2010 Thoughts on Care-giving
Here are my thoughts on care giving: it sucks, it’s hard, it’s guilt and anger inducing, it fills one with tears and resentment, deep love and cold indifference (depending on the moment) and more than anything else, it’s exhausting… Sunday morning my father called me sounding as if he were breathing his last breath, which he was not, yet I burst into tears (it was 6:35 and I had just been deeply, blissfully asleep) and, after ascertaining what was going on (his dog needed walking and he was just too weak) I got myself up and out of bed, walked and fed my dogs, then drove the 3.5 miles to his house to walk his. I called Invisible Fence today because more than anything we want to keep my dad in his home (we being me, my dad, and my brother) and he loves that dog so much, any other alternative is untenable. So, I walked the dog for him throughout the day Sunday as well as several times yesterday, all the while asking around for paid or volunteer help on the doggie walking front, preferably young, female, buxom, and vivacious. My father is not well and although his G.P. is unwilling to make a definite prognosis for him, she was willing to tell me that while he can certainly prolong his life by being on oxygen 24/7 (something he has only been doing for 72 hours despite her having prescribed it three months ago) his lung function is not going to get better. This is a progressive disease; my father’s CO2 levels are going up indicating that his ability to process the oxygen he is getting is going down. This is not good (and since we aspire to educate, normal healthy blood CO2 levels are around 25, his are now at 67). How long it will take for his lungs and heart to shut down completely is any one’s guess. I am also concerned that he will stop the oxygen because he is feeling better, better being extremely relative as he was knee deep in the grave for most of the past week. We shall see and part of that is doing whatever I can to take care of the momentary needs he has as well as being vigilant about treating myself well so I can continue to do so – help him – with, mostly, a good and generous disposition. To that end I have scheduled a massage and a hair cut this week, and a weekend away at a yoga retreat toward the end of the month. Additionally, I have informed my father that he is paying for my booze during this time; he signed a blank check this morning made out to the local liquor store where I will, later today, purchase a case of wine and a bottle of tequila. The good news is that if signing and handing over to me a blank check didn’t kill him, he may have more life left in him than we know.
If everyone – every U.S. citizen, I mean – waited on tables for six months, minimum, I think the people in this country would be in a better place, be more grateful, for example. If everyone spent six months or a year working in a nursing home, in a pre-school or grade school, maybe, just maybe, we’d see people change their opinions and choices around life, death, and everything in-between, including exercise, diet, smoking, hospice care and euthanasia, as well as contraception and abortion. Maybe. It could happen, and regardless it wouldn’t hurt. If everyone in the U.S. chambermaid-ed (a word that is gendered, and therefore suspect right out of the gate) for two summers during a good old-fashioned tourist season in a hot or even just slightly warm spot (the spot I did it in was tepid, at best), I believe the world would also be improved. It suddenly occurs to me that in both seasons of White Lotus, we don’t see that segment of the help, the invisible chambermaids who clean up the messes in bathroom and bedroom, make the beds, change the sheets and towels weekly or daily, empty the trash cans, and pick up room service trays – all for minimum wage, and tips! And for tips, if they’re lucky. Hm. Those invisible, essential workers, invariably women.
Yes. Yes, I did. I waited tables on and off for almost a decade, and chambermaid-ed for two whole summers and a part of another, before and between my years of college, and yes, both of these jobs were also an education. Did it make me a better human per my opening statement? I think so. I like to think so, anyway, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Substitute teaching is another job everyone would benefit from doing – especially those who criticize teachers and like to talk about those ‘long summers off’. As far as I could tell during my seven years filling various positions at the local K-12, those long ‘free as a bird’ summers are only long if you’re a parent waiting impatiently for school to start again. I did that too, I substitute taught, and my respect for teachers took a lovely leap upward, although they were already high, with a few individual exceptions. Just as in every profession, I encountered a handful of people in the education business who had zero business being there. Ah, humanity. So sublime, and so horrid. And, everything in-between.
I stopped having waitressing nightmares only a handful of years ago after thirty-plus years of having quit that biz, the anxiety of too many tables, endless demand, not enough servers and customers who were demanding and selfish bubbling up in my consciousness. Caffé Pertutti. Hanratty’s. West Side Story. Arno’s. Big Nick’s. Shakespeare’s Tavern and Playhouse. When I finally decided never again, never, ever again would I do that, wait tables for a living, I stuck to it. I was twenty-eight, and never will I ever not be grateful for the women and even a few men I met and befriended during those days, but never will I ever cease wondering at the vagaries of people (the customers) and their food. Good lord. What a lesson in humanity, and everyone would benefit from that, eh? Whatever happened to Segundo, I wonder, my favorite ever busboy, a real gentleman, such a hard worker, and so sweet. Never did he ever hit on me or make crude gestures as we passed, never did he ever show resentment toward me for being both a lot taller than he was, and speaking English better. Hell, he spoke English and Spanish, so of the two of us, he was the more linguistically gifted. What a mensch. Segundo for the second of his mother’s sons. Working with people whose backgrounds are very different from ours is a very good thing, and the restaurant industry is chock full of that mind and heart-broadening opportunity.
Helping out in my dad’s store, as a kid, was also an education; I learned that rubbers were not only rainy-day foot wear, for example. I knew we had Dr. Scholl’s sandals, which of course I loved (red leather straps, always), but rubbers? ‘I don’t think so. You could maybe try the department store across the street. Hold on,’ I shouted, ‘Dad! Do we have rubbers?!’ My dad, helping someone else, rolled his eyes, laughing, and came right over. We did, it turns out, have rubbers, stowed behind the door of the back room, where many odd, mysterious and even dangerous things were kept. My dad took the blushing twenty-something man in his capable and compassionate hands, leading him to where he was able to discreetly make his choice of a product very much not in the footwear line. Oops.
Observing people, many people, people I knew in our small town, beg, plead, cajole and even vaguely threaten my dad to refill their prescriptions days or weeks or months ahead of schedule, was an education of a whole other kind. It made me certain I would never, ever do drugs, ever – and would do my damnedest to avoid ever taking prescription drugs. Okay, well, I did do recreational drugs, in college mainly, and might’ve done more, but as a pharmacist’s daughter, there was something I objected to in having to pay for it. Pay for it? Hell no. And while it was clear that there were others ways I could have access to drugs as a comely young thing, that wasn’t ever gonna happen either. Hell no. It was fun while it lasted, I’m glad I had those experiences, and thankful I had zero addictive inclinations, but no.
Oby Atkin (Obediah, I guess?), who owned an antique store in town, came in every other Saturday or Sunday when I was a teenager and bought a hundred or two-hundred dollars’ worth of porn magazines. I always felt embarrassed and awkward when I ran into his wife in town, but she didn’t seem to get out much. Doc Ferraro, the dentist, wrote script after script for his much younger wife, tried to charm me, and my dad, distracting us with banter while scratching his Rx pad. And he was charming, but everyone in town knew something was off, especially after his wife drove into a friend’s house one night. I don’t mean drove into their driveway, I mean she drove into the actual front of the house, crash, bang, boom, so they had to get a new porch and front door. You see a lot, know a lot, living in a small town, serving John and Jane Q. Public over the years. And, no matter what, my dad was discreet; he might hear the gossip, be told people’s secrets in that same backroom, but he didn’t share, ever, even about those calls, the ones that came in late at night because someone he’d known his whole life had swallowed a bottle of pills, drunk a fifth of scotch, and reached out to him because they’d changed their minds, and knew Dick wouldn’t judge, would only help, which he did.
My last waitressing job was at a schmancy steak house on the lower west side. I can never remember the name of the place, which is indicative of how much I hated it there. The customers were Gordon Gecko wanna-bes who treated the wait staff horribly or with a niceness that stunk of noblesse oblige, all of it depending on how the markets had been that day or week, bullish to bearish. The brothers who owned the place were very different, as in one was mostly absent and nice when present, and the other was ever present and presented as what he was: a short, fat hateful pig. He liked to humiliate the old guy waiters, especially in front of younger female employees like me. It clearly got him off, screaming at sixty and seventy-year old men, immigrants who need the work, and who as union members were within several months or years of being able to retire after decades on their feet, having built new lives in America. He’d shoot me sidelong glances as he strutted his stuff in the kitchen, having said his worst to these men, men who were always kind to me, the new kid on the block. What a schmuck. At that job, if you weren’t busy, you were required to stand with your back up against the wall, hands behind your back. This little shit of a human being, who was several inches shorter than I was, liked to push his belly and pelvis up against me as I stood there motionless, and – if not helpless – stuck for the moment, peering over his head. Oh, how I would love to rip the smirk off his face for all the young women I’m sure he did that to, over the years. Maybe I could send a copy of this to him? I do remember his name, if not the name of the restaurant. Yick.
Two full seasons of chambermaiding at the Mathes Hotel in Fleischmanns, New York, May – September rounded out my time making up beds and cleaning up after strangers. It was an early twentieth century hotel that had been updated in ‘50s and neglected ever since. My days there were in the late seventies. The Mathes was closed all winter, spring and fall, had minimal maintenance on a daily or annual basis, with entire facilities and wings shut down because the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Mathes, didn’t have or didn’t want to spend the money to get them up on running, or to make needed repairs. It was a strange place, faded and hollow, filled with returning long-time customers who were, like the Hotel itself, on their last legs. Both my younger sister and I had residents die on us that first summer, as in we were the ones who discovered their bodies in their rooms when we went in to clean. Then, after reporting the unsettling news, Mrs. Mathes shooed us away, bustling in to go through the individual’s personal effects. The woman whose cabin-ette I cleaned, the one who I discovered dead in her bed, was shipped back to New York City or New Jersey with all arrangements made by Mrs. Mathes. No one in her family bothered to make the trip, which seem hard, and tragic. She had always tipped me well, and was palpably, painfully lonely. I had made conversation with her, but I was on the clock and Mrs. M didn’t like us to dawdle, ever.
Twice that summer Mr. Mathes cornered me, or tried to, in the upstairs hallway, attempting to cop a feel. He had to have been in his sixties or seventies. I was eighteen. I told Mrs. Mathes after his second attempt, and she looked at me for a long moment, silently, finally telling me to get back to work. He was easy to outrun, so I let it go, and he never tried it again so maybe she said something to him? Mrs. Mathes was short and stout and efficient. They accepted cash only, and it was clear she was the one in charge of the money and reservations, the business side. It appeared to me that she and the Mister were fading away in concert with friends, albeit paying friends, all together in that place where, twenty and thirty years prior, they’d had experienced real enjoyment after the war. Many of them lost family in the Holocaust, but Mrs. Mathes didn’t talk about the past, none of the guests did either, at least not to me.
Cleaning is simply not that much fun, in my opinion, except the part where you’re done and it looks great and feels like an accomplishment. And, chambermaiding was – not too awful, just not a job you want, long-term. Nice to be done by 11a.m. most days, not nice to find dead people, nice to get decent tips occasionally and not nice to clean up other people’s messes. The Mathes Hotel had a cook who firmly believed in a daily dose of stewed prunes with breakfast, and that created problems for us, the cleaner-uppers, more than once. I remember standing on the front lawn as I crossed from the laundry back toward the hotel proper, watching almost as if in slow motion as a poor man tried his best to get down the long front porch and inside to the bathroom before crapping in his pants, and on the floor. He got about half-way. I begged and pleaded with my sister to clean it up, and in exchange I did the room on the 2nd floor, the one with the woman who had regular problems of a related kind, but I’m pretty sure my sister got the short end of the stick. I was just happy we made it through that summer without any more deaths.
Maybe the real lesson of all the different jobs I had, waiting table, clerking for my dad, chambermaiding, was to see humanity at its best and worst and everywhere in-between, to prepare me for life out in the world, outside my fan-dam-ly. I was also able to see who and what I didn’t want to be, or how I didn’t want to be. I already knew I never wanted to make people feel like shit, although life has taught me that is almost inevitable, because there are those who already feel like it, are constantly look for confirmation, and are impossible to avoid. I knew I didn’t want my dad’s business, or job (neither did he, as it happened), or my mom’s, as a teacher. I didn’t want to wait tables or open a restaurant, own a hotel or manage one. I also didn’t want to manage a disco or move up through the ranks at any of the many places I worked as a teen and twenty-something, including a stint at the MTA as an information operator, one of those people attached to a phone headset who gave out train information, now, I believe, all automated. What a dead-end that was, for me. For me. Not for others, who had and have different needs and ambitions.
If you have talent or talents, and intelligence, drive and desire, and are interested in many things the possibilities are – potentially – endless. I once loved a very handsome man who told me his life was largely defined by all the women, and men, he’d said ‘no’ to, and it’s like that, in a way (he really was so, so gorgeous). But – it’s getting to yes that matters, getting to yes and a place of purpose and meaning – if you’re lucky, that is, and don’t have to make a living right now to feed kids or whatever meter is ticking regardless of ‘purpose’, or doing something that is deemed a contribution to society. All work is a contribution of some kind or another, even if it’s solely about putting food on a plate, yours or the plate of someone you love.
Maybe none of these jobs made me a better person, a better citizen, after all, but they did allow me time and experiences I would not have had otherwise, time to grow up and find out what I wanted to do, which ultimately was rather simple and, wonder of wonders, right back where I started as a child. Why is it the simplest answers so often elude us? Not that I didn’t know what I wanted, I just wasn’t sure how to get back there, get back there through the maze of expectation and projection, safe, sound and solvent, never having once again to wait tables or do any job that was a test of endurance and generosity of spirit. And what I wanted, all along? To read, write, talk to and be with friends, grow shit, watch good content, and absorb all the political news I can stomach. That’s it. And speaking of stomachs, I also wanted to eat good food cooked by myself, and, on occasion, by others (bless them), served by others (ohmigawd, thank you, and may your waitressing nightmares be few), paid for by me without a scintilla of financial agita, including a nice fat tip. Simple pimple.
*Lloyd Dobler, from the great flick, Say Anything, written by Cameron Crowe
There was a time when the only good female victim was the bleeding one. The high-water mark for salacious crime reporting—the yellow journalism purveyed in the late 19th century—made sure that every crime story came with an innocent, young, white victim, hopefully in a nightgown stained red. Justice for women inevitably took the form of white male vengeance attacking whomever had sullied the lady.
This vibe has prevailed in recent decades, even when it was lightly subverted; in 1973 Ms. Magazine infamously published a photo of Gerri Santoro bleeding out after a botched illegal abortion, under the headline “Never Again.” Time and again, the stories of lily-white women generously bleeding out for justice take center stage. To be a good crime victim demands youth, innocence, tears, and a life in tatters. It pulls a woman out of one airless box—property/wife/daughter—and pops her into another: ruined angel.
It would be nice if we could transcend this ancient narrative. And lately, finally,the “good victim trope really seems to be faltering, and I am absolutely here for it. Whether it’s Stormy Daniels chortling at the former president’s penis, E. Jean Carroll refusing to designate herself a rape victim (while still suing the former president for rape), or Amanda Zurawski testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week about how her inability to access health care nearly killed her, these women are not broken, defiled, ruined, or asking men to rescue them. They are, rather, pissed off, living their lives, and defying the public imperative to open a vein in public as a testament to their loss and brokenness. They are nobody’s property and nobody’s responsibility, and it is about freaking time we took them extremely seriously.
Zurawski’s testimony is particularly compelling after months spent watching the post-Dobbs reporting on all the women who must brush right up against death in childbirth before anyone can help them. It is a chilling reminder of how very much we love stories of dying women and the men who save them. But Zurawski’s testimony—that despite the fact that her pregnancy was not viable, her Texas doctors “didn’t feel safe enough to intervene as long as her heart was beating or until I was sick enough for the ethics board at the hospital to consider my life at risk”—reworked that story. Rather than center herself as a victim, she centered the men who hurt her (including Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, who didn’t show up for her testimony) and the ways in which she and her husband saved herself. It may not be a story you read in the mainstream press, but it is why abortion won the midterms and the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and will likely keep winning elections for anyone looking to preserve reproductive rights. Nobody is going back to Justice Alito’s halcyon days of witch burnings and Madonna/whore morality tales. Abortion advocates are, again, saving themselves.
Olivia Nuzzi’s recent barnstorming profile of Stormy Daniels in New York Magazine is, similarly, one for the books, not least because of the tarot card reading that opens the piece, and the open roasting of the politics-to-reality-show pipeline that constitutes public life today. But the most arresting part of the story is the grouping of several Trump “victims”—Stormy Daniels, Kathy Griffin, Mary Trump, and E. Jean Carroll—into a category Mary Trump handily describes as having “no fucks to give.” (Disclosure: As a journalist, I’ve met all of these women in recent years.) Griffin, in a quote, goes one better, describing Daniels as “like a porno Dorothy Parker,” and then goes on to describe the fantasy as “me, Mary, E. Jean, and Daniels and probably her husband and a fluffer.” I love the descriptor, and not just because each of these women is funny, complicated, and comfortable in her skin, as well as generally quirky AF, but also because it signals that perhaps the era of the wan, ruined, long-suffering victim may be well and truly behind us.
I’ve all but given up on the pollsters and pundits who will never understand the seismic change Dobbs brought about in politics. They don’t seem to actually know any women like E. Jean Carroll or Stormy Daniels, and they clearly don’t have any idea about how to pick up the phone and reach one. If you live your whole entire life in 19th-century tabloids or 21st-century Hallmark movies, you can truly fail to understand that for most women, most of the time, sexual harassment, sexual assault, internet death threats, pay discrimination, the absence of a meaningful child and health care network, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and pregnancy complications are daily facts of life. All those things truly complicate and confound our daily lives, and still we manage to go to our jobs, and buy our yogurt, and call our moms. We’re actually, very few of us, huddled on a velvet couch palely waiting for some legislator to rescue us, or for some ethics board to deem us sufficiently wan and pale to warrant emergency lifesaving medical care. As Zurawski testified Wednesday, she never expected the senators who favored the abortion rules that nearly killed her to show up at a hearing to hear her story. They are as wholly invisible to her as she was to them. She just wants the rest of us porno Dorothy Parkers to be forewarned.
So, too, Carroll sat before a jury that already understands why women don’t report sexual assault the day it occurs, and told Donald Trump’s lawyer, “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming. One of the reasons [some women] don’t come forward is they are asked why they didn’t scream. Some women scream; some women don’t. It keeps women silent.” Indeed, she said, she now fully understands why women don’t report sexual abuse—because they won’t be believed (which is, paradoxically, what Trump’s lawyer kept saying: that she wasn’t believable). But this jury got to hear from a three-dimensional Carroll,who happily went into a changing room at Bergdorf’s with a guy because she was a journalist and he was a story. Her testimony was deeply hilarious and complicated and highbrow and ambitious and not at all designed for anyone’s fainting couch. “I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault,” she testified. “It was high comedy, it was funny, and then to have it turn …”
Welcome to the life of a woman.
It is worth noting here that Donald Trump’s defense in every case involving a female accuser is one-dimensional: She wanted his fame, she wanted his money, she wanted revenge. Women exist solely to steal his light, to cash in on his importance. In this Victorian telling, women are nothing until they can gouge a man.
But so many of the women presently in the world don’t actually believe that Trump is the source of their future greatness. With the exception of his wife and his daughters and some hapless attorneys, most women are smart enough to stay far away from him. To wit: What Stormy Daniels reports wanting from Donald Trump was principally to be left alone. When E. Jean Carroll’s friend Carol Martin advised her not to tell the police she’d been raped, it was because she wanted to spare her from being doubly injured by him. As Carroll put it on cross-examination: “I was afraid Donald Trump would retaliate, which is exactly what he did. He has two tables full of lawyers here today.”
Victims of persistent narcissistic misogyny, whether it emanates from Trump or Tucker Carlson or Harvey Weinstein or someone much less famous, always end up having to be “good” victims. In order to get anything like justice, they have to perfectly embody the trauma of what happened to them as the main plotline of their own life. The narratives always put their attacker, his wants and needs and actions, at the center of the story. Even when the attackers become incidental, or ancillary, or just tiresome, we have to keep behaving as though they are the beginning and the ending of the story.
But these new porno Dorothy Parkers keep making the choice to center themselves, their friendships, and their intricate lives. As Carroll testified Wednesday, “I’ve regretted this 100 times, but in the end, being able to get my day in court finally is everything to me. So I’m happy!” Like so many Trump accusers, she just wants to unstick her life from the sprawling miasma that is Donald Trump. She wants her voice back and her career back and her reputation back. Like Daniels, she just wants him to go away.
The notion that men own the law and women own their pain is so deeply ingrained in our legal system that nothing—not Anita Hill or #MeToo or decades of true crime and decades of obsessing over true crime—has fully shaken it loose. But in this post-Dobbs moment, we may finally have the potential to understand the cost of treating women as mere bodies, vessels, and victims, either perfect or ruined. Because unlike the women who bled out in random hotel rooms or died of infection, these women are surviving their mistreatment, and organizing around it. And they are finding a new way to talk about it—they are making these stories about them.
It is fitting that Trump most likely isn’t going to show up at E. Jean Carroll’s trial. It’s her story, after all. He’s just a bully she met along the way.
Today’s rain in the Catskills is very much welcome, not only because we collectively need it – our hay and corn fields and every other living thing – but because I personally need a slow day wherein my compulsivity doesn’t kick in, putting me out there (over)doing thangs when my muscles are already complaining, and rightly so.
And so, while I allow for a little recovery, a few choice quotes shared below to start a day of rest, plenty of deep breaths, no noticing of what all needs a good clean hereabouts (a lot) as that can wait for another day this week, or next! A rainy day in spring is a gift, a gift allowing time for focusing on writing, writing, and more writing.
Gloria Steinem, 1970, testifying before congress re: the ERA, which we still ain’t got, daggnabbit, “The truth is that all our problems stem from the same sex-based myths. We may appear before you as white radicals or the middle-aged middle class or black soul sisters, but we are all sisters in fighting against these outdated myths. Like racial myths, they have been reflected in our laws.”
Carl Jung: “Life really does begin at forty, until then you are just doing research. And if an attractive woman is single, it’s because she’s smarter than everyone else thought.” (no comment other than LOLOLOL)
Tennessee Williams: “All the qualities of magic reside in women. This is why the fearful suppress them. This is why the wise follow them.”
Annie Ernaux: “The general belief is that one cannot go anywhere that is not familiar; people feel genuine admiration for those who aren’t afraid of going places.”
Vaclav Havel: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure everything ends badly. Instead, I am a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning—and that liberty is worth the trouble.”
M. Scott Peck: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
Herman Hesse: “We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome… We are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
Charlotte Brontë: “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
Jim Ralston: “The highest meaning of the social group is to foster the development of individual potential, for the community’s own well-being depends on it. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline. The very best citizens have also been the most evolved individuals. Groups, nations, classes, clans, and families tend toward narrowness, meanness toward other groups, nations, etc. It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. It is always the community that is ready to stone the witch.”
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: “You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”
Agnes Hobbs: “You can close the windows and darken your room, and you can open the windows and let light in . . .It is a matter of choice. Your mind is your room. Do you darken it or do you fill it with light?”
Thich Nhat Hanh: “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
T.S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Roman Payne: The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, ‘I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.’”
Sandra Cisneros: “I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear—and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me.”
Have a great day, y’all. I hope you found inspiration, as I have, in the above quotes from all sorts of peeps, and thanks for visiting.
*not a horror film duckies, just normal, annual clean-up craziness for April in the Catskills.
Today I will be working outside with my branch lopper, and my chainsaw, both of which are run by battery, which batteries are charging ‘as we speak’, and omg, if you’ve never used a chainsaw, it’s so so so much fun, and I highly recommend it ~ especially if you’re in a lousy, I want to break shit mood. And, of course, safety comes first. If you’re right-handed, keep that left arm stiff while operating the saw, vicey-versy if you’re left-handed you need to keep the right arm stiff as a board, wear protective goggles, do NOT bite off more than you can chew (egos in check, always, when operating any shit that can cut your fingers and other extremities off, keeping in mind that it takes only 2 – 5 minutesto bleed out a.k.a. die, corpse up, kick the bucket if an artery is hit), wear glovies, and avoid pants that have a lot of fabric like bell-bottoms or extree doo-dads hanging off that could get caught in the chain, and long sleeved shirts are best too, also worn tight to the body as again no extree fabric to get caught up. A hat is good too – the number of branches I’ve lopped off at the proper angle to drop just so over thattaway that have instead landed thissaway and on my noggin is more than a few (ouch).
I am doing April clean-up outside; it’s the spring month when it’s not too hot for me to be doing tree work that is hard, exhausting, and deeply rewarding as well as long overdue on a property that’s been in my family for over a century, but which has been in my hands – after six decades as a rental – for just four years. Once the house where lived, in my grandparent’s day, the hired hands for the family farm, the inside needed so much work, 98% done, I didn’t get a lot accomplished outside until last year, but now my full attention has turned to the property surrounding the house. I do what I can (not a whole lot, TBH, but some) with dead or struggling saplings, and with the removal of dead branches, and the numerous stinky whatever bush/trees no one seems to know the name of; these suckers flower but are the main head bashing criminals, growing up like a twisted rope of a mess that challenges me to my stubborn core, and yes, they stink when cut. They are mainly on the edges of the property, along stone walls I have begun to restore, proliferating during an age of neglect in what once was a corn or hay field depending on the year.
Everything hurts. Including my eyelashes.
A slight exaggeration. But, chainsawing saplings, and dragging them along with dead or live tree branches – even just the medium and small ones – is a lot and, it really is so much fun, it makes me smile just typing it out. I write this instead of finishing a piece on gender and sexuality because that subject is so broad, so deep, and so in need of concentration, I worry I’m too exhausted to do it justice even in this short form. I practically can’t move, and ~ I’m heading back out there shortly once the batteries are all charged up, because despite the fact that a dear friend of mine is horrified/thrilled I use a chainsaw at all, I know like I know like I know that, girl, it’s fun. And, if I do an hour or two or three a day, every April day, it’ll get done. Vroom, vroom!!
My dad is home and now instead of wanting to live, period, he wants to live “on his terms”, which statement I took to mean (since he removed his oxygen the moment after my sister, the nurse, left his house) that he wants to live unencumbered and free of both oxygen and a need to give up smoking. Whatever. I am exhausted and feeling blue because this is the beginning of what could be the end of the release and relief I felt after my mom’s death: release from being the decision-maker and caregiver who filled out paperwork and went to the status meetings with the staff at the nursing home, relief because care-giving my parents was, as of her death in ’07, an already eight-year-long process.
The hardest part is negotiating boundaries. What will my father allow me to do for him and to require of him, if he expects me to do so much, as in get him to the doctors and the specialists and make sure his oxygen equipment is kept clean, although it was my nurse sister who called to give me those instructions, thank you very much. Every three days some part has to be thoroughly cleaned – don’t ask me which one – I was at work and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to take instructions from afar regarding my dad’s care from someone who has, for years now, had minimal contact with my parents. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. I love my dad and this will all be worked out I am sure but if he chooses to begin smoking again, I may just lose it. I won’t take care of someone who won’t do that one thing for himself. I know it’s not a small thing, but rather a g.d. addiction, but Jesus H. Christ come on. I have three siblings he can call for help and there are services he can make use of, services for people like himself who are functional but need some extra looking after. I am much too tired to be making decisions and even thinking about all of this, yet I am unable to think of much else. Tonight, I will take a long hot bath, watch Project Runway (ah, escapist TV, how I love ya!) and contemplate how best to do nothing at all except love my self. I did my work-out this a.m. which I skipped yesterday due to running around to get pop back home. Oh oh oh – it’s a gorgeous sunny day and all I can think of is how much I long to be asleep in my wee bed. Only 11 more hours of awake to go……
February 9, 2010 A Drama Queen
Yes. I am a drama queen, especially when tired and stressed, both of which I have been of late. Last night I slept well and long and as a result life looks much better this morning. I have had my long walk, started a fire in the wood stove and set-up a time for lunch with a good friend I have not seen in several months; all of which are life affirming actions. And, I have taken innumerable deep breaths in the process. I was also better able to sleep because I had a talk last night with my father about some of the issues I have with my being his primary caregiver, the one who does for him because I want to, but also because I can, and because it’s the right thing to do and I just want you to know, daddy, that sometimes doing the right thing SUCKS. And he acknowledged me and all that I’ve been doing and have done this morning (admittedly in his very understated way but still…), an acknowledgement that went a long way toward making it a lot better. And yesterday afternoon I wrote. I worked on a creative writing project I have had on my desk for about a year – a project I have neglected far too often. I had dropped it in the midst of the crisis, and as I had not sat down to write for two whole days it was eating at me, adding to my sense of anger at my poor old pop, who is certainly not responsible for my lack of discipline when it comes to my writing. Hard to write when I’m a wreck, and all I really want to do is watch mind-numbing TV, but it can be done. Another deep breath. I equate writing, especially on the bigger projects, with diving in, immersing myself in another, imagined world. It takes some time and space and a lot of commitment to go there. And writing is lonely. Suck it up, drama queen, and get down to it. I shall, once I am done here, promise. My dad keeps taking his O2 off and has a follow-up appointment with his doc next week. We’ll see how his blood oxygen levels are. Maybe, drama queen, he won’t need it for ever and ever, especially if he can stay away from cigarettes. Anyway, I am not responsible for his choices, but as I reminded him last eve I do tend to get most of the picking up of the pieces when both he and I pay for the bad ones he makes. Still and all, it’s all good. I slept. I dreamt I was in love with The Office actor Jon Krasinski and we were planning a fun day and night to celebrate his birthday. Hilarious. I also told my dad that I love him. Always a good thing to know and say, drama queen.
I am one of those young women who, at the age of sixteen, began to feel that virginity was a burden that needed to be shed. I was tired of reading about sex in all those great paperbacks of the seventies while simultaneously diddling around with my boyfriend while he diddled with me. When were we going to DO IT?
Honestly, I think I was pretty happy with all that deep kissing and sweet caressing. It did go on for hours, after all, and I never remember feeling all that deprived. But all that changed pretty quickly after my boyfriend left mid-winter to do a three-month service project, and I was left alone with that pulsing libido.
But leave me he did, however well-intended we were on reuniting in the late spring, and meanwhile, a new fella slipped onstage. Literally. He was my co-star on the big stage of our high school musical, my Dolly Levi’s Horace Vandergelder. How terribly convenient. A real Broadway cliché.
This guy knew I had a serious boyfriend of nearly two years, but he moved in anyway. And he was cool – ran with a group of seniors (I was a junior) that smoked a lot of pot and had deep philosophical discussions that I could barely grab onto. There was Andy and his girlfriend Shelly, and Leslie, who had the longest hair I’d ever seen and was the daughter of the assistant headmaster (this was a New Jersey private school, after all), and a handful of other hippie intellectuals, mostly males. They were definitely the freaks and not the geeks (which the school had plenty of). Lots of talk about the band “Little Feat” and weird movies that I’d never watched. And after a month plus of absence, my boyfriend still hadn’t written to me. At all. I was pissed and horny. So, when this guy started to pursue me in earnest, I figured, why not? And he was cute, with his long hair that was cut to his shoulders with precision.
We’d lie on the couch making out, and I remember him whispering in my ear, “We really should sleep together.” His words didn’t so much excite me as challenge me: could I? Should I? Would I? And I knew what he meant by “sleep”! At least that didn’t confuse me.
He let this question worm its way through my head for a few weeks, repeating it maybe twice. Meanwhile, the idea was forming. Why not? Why the heck not? (I was and still am a pretty good Presbyterian.)
So, I thought about it. For a little while, though not too long. The opportunity soon presented itself. My seducer actually lived within walking distance to the school, and this was long before things like security guards and other forces that keep students within the walls of school if they don’t want to be there, so all I had to do was skip (!) over to his house during my study hall. How long would it take, for real? It was time! I was done with this virginity thing! LET’S DO THIS!
So we did. He knew I was a virgin, and he used a condom. He wasn’t unkind, but it was mostly underwhelming, as I believe it is for a lot of young women basically brought up on the idea that sex was going to be the most sky-rocketing, mind-blowing, transformative thing you could do in this lifetime. Meh. Of course, it was my first time, so I imagined I had a lot of road ahead, and who knows what I might learn along the way, right? So, bottom line: did it, done, and moving on! I now had my teenage “lover” and I was interested in where all this might lead. More sex? Better sex? Maybe even, love??
This was not a boy who “gave love to get sex,” but I was probably a girl who believed I could give sex to get love.” It just didn’t actually work out like that.
After that fateful afternoon, we carried on, only we didn’t have any more sex. I didn’t know why, and I was too awkward to know how to ask. What happened? We still hung out together, mostly with his friends, but sometimes just the two of us (I think?). Nothing had really changed, but something was off, something was different. Did I do something? Did he not like me anymore? Maybe my greatest fear: Was I that bad “a lay”??
I remember his bedroom was in the basement, and one day about a month or so after my “deflowering,” I was down there looking around. I was alone for the moment, and I don’t remember where he was, but I had a moment when I looked over at this large wall calendar he had hung on the back of his door. I noticed he had made some notes on the calendar, some markers of specific dates, so I thought to check out the date we had “done it.” And there it was! Marked on his calendar with my initials. Ah, how sweet! And next to my initials was a symbol: it was a small circle with a perfect X/Y axis through the middle. Basically, the same thing you see when you look through a scope to set aim on your target. A crosshair. Well, I had a pretty good idea what THAT meant, didn’t I?
Then I zoomed out of that particular date and swept my eyes over the days, weeks, and months both before and after that occasion. And I saw that symbol again, only this time there were different initials. I knew pretty quickly who they stood for: it was Shelly, and it was Leslie. And it was more than once, way more than once, for both of them.
But wait a minute! Shelly had a boyfriend! Andrew! And Leslie was just a friend, not his girlfriend! What the fuck (now I’m getting upset) is going on? Did I really need it spelled out to me? Shelly was actually a friend of mine by now, or so I thought. So I called her (not him, of course) and asked if we could meet so we could talk.
To her credit, she didn’t even try to lie. Yes, they were sleeping together. It was just for fun, it didn’t mean anything, and Andrew didn’t know or care, I can’t remember which. And Leslie was just a “free spirit” and they did it when they were bored. It was all very “The Group” or “Peyton Place” – all very enlightened and free and no hang-ups, ya know? No baggage, no expectations, just plain old fun between the sheets. I didn’t need to be upset about it, after all.
But of course I was. I was devastated. But not just because he had been sleeping with other girls. The part that hurt me the most was that he’d slept with them multiple times, but only done it with me that one time. I took this as an obvious indicator of my bed-worthiness. Clearly, I was subpar, not only not as cool as the other cool girls, but also – clearly – not as sexy. It was a rejection that cut deep.
It took me a while to finally confront him with what I knew. He wasn’t very apologetic. It was one of those “I’m sorry you are upset” kind of things. Like “it’s no big deal.” But I couldn’t get over it. What was I supposed to think? And what about the crosshairs? But we stopped seeing each other, pretty much by mutual agreement, I guess.
Later that summer, we actually went on a school trip together, something we’d planned earlier in the spring, but by the time the trip actually happened, he wasn’t speaking to me anymore. In fact, he avoided me completely the entire time. It was the most miserable two weeks in Europe you could imagine. I remember I just ate bags of candy and stared out the window of the tour bus, wondering what in the world it all meant. I’m still not sure I know.
But I think about those crosshairs. Maybe it was just a mark, not really significant beyond its use as a code for intercourse, but still – I did feel like I had been a target. That he had decided to bed me, and even though I thought I made that decision free and clear, did I really? And how did this experience inform me of what sex meant, or intimacy, or – even – love? Or was I just an idiot?
Sunny and fair, yet windy as all get out, as I found out on my bike ride into town (approximately 2.5 miles, felt like 5 with the wind in my face) to see my dad (he needed milk – not for himself, but for his dog). He is enjoying sitting in the sun, it lolls him off into sleep, but his noontime dog walker is worried about him getting a sunburn. He and I both found that amusing as among all his other issues a sunburn would be nothing. Yesterday he did something he has not done before, he handed me a letter to read without even attempting it himself. In fact, I was on my way out the door after picking up his mail (also a new development) and he halted me with a “Hey! You there, read this” or it’s near equivalent. He struggles so with small print that seeing him last week with his face pressed into a magnifying glass, hands trembling, made me burst into tears. I am spending too much time with him, and not enough. I am hovering, micro-waving his lunch, delivered by a senior meals program, and cleaning his counters needlessly. I am afraid to leave him alone, but I must. I look forward to work, but when I am at work, I am preoccupied and exhausted, drained. And, he does not need me hovering although he hasn’t complained, yet! Is he weakening every day or is that just my melodramatic fear? Do I have six more months with him or six years or, dreadful to even think it, six weeks? On such a beautiful day death can’t be an option for this still funny as hell, sharp as a tack guy. Odd to think it was easier with my mother due to her dementia, because at the time, the last year she was at home and the first year she was in the nursing home, nothing was easy. And yet, it was easier because I still feel so much his child, wanting always to defer to his judgment, tip-toeing around the hard questions and decisions that must now be asked, looked at, discussed. I did make my brother come to the house this past weekend for a minor discussion of the hard stuff. It was pretty low key, yet useful. Oh dear, I am realizing too that this hits me where I live as well because when one’s parents are entirely gone, one’s own mortality is more real – closer, up front and center – ugly thing that it is. Ugly? Why? Who knows, and I am not in a mood to work it out. My dad and I agree that heaven and hell are here, right now, on this earth, not in some murky fantastical afterlife. Let him pass from it and from me with grace and dignity – but not yet, not yet.
April 10, 2010 Overwhelm
Yesterday I had a nice meltdown – not too long but long enough for me to cry buckets of tears and feel as though my innards were melting away. This was brought on by exhaustion and the pettiness (to my mind) of others. I knew I loved my long slow morning ritual – a pot of tea and bowl of banana and steel cut oats, journaling and a walk or run up gorgeous Dry Brook Rd. but now I know I not only love it, I need it, and, for the moment, it is gone, baby, gone. I am now getting up to walk and feed my dogs, ordering my dad’s breakfast, then driving into town to get it, and then I walk his dog. Then I go home, shower, make my lunch or plan dinner for us both, and get to work or to the school to do whatever I need for Carousel. My day (and stress level) was complicated yesterday by a call from the Principal of the school regarding the show: point one, kid A has an academic honors banquet an hour away two nights before showtime, and some possible inappropriate language that Kid B has to say in the show. Kid A, with his parent’s consent – he is playing the male lead in the show – has chosen not to attend the banquet. Teaching kids to make choices and deal with the consequences is part of what we’re supposed to be doing, right? His choice to skip the banquet for the show is a good choice as far as I am concerned (selfishly, I know) and the one I hoped he would make, but it was up to him and I told him so. The principal doesn’t understand why I can’t move the dress rehearsal (45 people involved) to another night or time. It’s not that I can’t (although it would be hugely inconvenient), practically impossible, but I won’t, not for any single kid no matter how large a role, or for any reason. And knowing he had his parents support for the choice he made, why would I? The other issue is that Kid B, a regular F-bomb dropper whose parents are divorced and whose dad (a man who left a wife and family in Ohio and then left kid Bs mom and his three siblings to marry a co-worker he’d been schtupping) has gone fundamentalist, Christian Fundamentalist (of course!), and now, Mr. F-bomb dropper does not want to use the word “slut” in describing another character. Okay I sympathize, let’s change it; I wish he had spoken to me about it first rather than having his (asshole) dad call the principal but there y’go. The fundamentalists run a school in Margaretville, a school that I suspect Kid B would be attending if he didn’t love sports so much, given he has played baseball, soccer and basketball in this his senior year. Since they can’t get him into their school, they will try to do whatever they can to influence him, and his (asshole) father in whatever way they can, including his experience in this sweet, wonderful show, my favorite of the Rogers and Hammerstein canon. The principal asked me to meet with her and the superintendent of the school to review the entire script (written in 1945), which I invitation I declined, saying instead that I would make a copy of the script for them both to review on their own time. I think they are making a mistake to, as I see it, give in to the pressure of this (asshole) person, his (asshole) church, and his fear-mongering ways which are being prompted by a very ambitious (asshole) pastor who is, in fact. doing everything he can to undermine our tiny rural public school. But that’s just my opinion (the fucking assholes). The good news is my dad is feeling better after doing nothing but resting for four days. Leaving his house Monday to see his GP exhausted him. In other good news, yay, one of my students will bring him his breakfast and walk his dog this Sunday so I can get some rest and enjoy a long slow morning. Simple pleasures are the best, and thank goodness for adolescents in need of pocket money!!
