jared & i went to kansas city last week. some friends from grad school recommended that we check out the plaza. it was unclear to me whether they were suggesting that it was a cool place to hang out or if they thought it was neat because it had historical significance. all i knew is that it was a kind of fancy, gentrified shopping area, which didn’t sound at all like a cool place to hang out, but jared argued for historical significance. then he reminded me that they just opened an H&M there (the only one in kansas city!). that’s all i needed to hear. i love me some H&M. that’s one of the big things i miss about boston.
i was surprised when we arrived at the plaza because the first storefront i saw was for valentino. that’s a bit rich for my blood. i was also dumbfounded by the fact that the entire area was done up in spanish-style architecture. supposedly it’s riffing off of seville. in kansas city? it seemed anachronistic to me. i speculated that maybe it was a call-back to kansas city being a stop on the santa fe trail? maybe americans brought back ideas about spanish-style architecture from new mexico, along with blankets & spanish-style saddles & such forth? i mean, kansas city is not in a region that was ever a spanish colony, as far as i know.
but what was really weird was that jared was totally weirded out by me being weirded out. he was like, “so it’s spanish-style architecture. who cares?” well, i wouldn’t say i CARE necessarily. i’m not going to, like, flip over tables & set stuff on fire. it was just unexpected. jared tried to argue that it’s the same principle as boston & new york city having a lot of italian-style architecture. which would be true if boston & new york city didn’t also have huge numbers of italian settlers! honestly, i think i’d be over it by now & just chalking it up to a weird gentrification choice if everyone i’d complained to about this (jared, jaimie, & all of my friends in kansas city) hadn’t just cocked their heads & looked at me like i was speaking dutch.
note spanish-style architecture behind jared. now imagine like ten square blocks of this. in kansas city. weird, right?
anyway, we went to H&M & i was happy because they have a better color story this season. the last time i was at an H&M was christmas of 2010 & the color story was all mauve & teal. hideous. this time, there was lots of gray, black, a dark purple-y blue, etc. but i think i might be aging out of H&M because i didn’t understand why there were so many faux-leather booty shorts for sale in january. & the cheapness of the fabric is starting to bother me. i’m finally getting to that point in my life where i’d rather have fewer separates of higher quality than just a whole mess of cheap polyester mix & match pieces. i was also horrified by:
SWEATER PANTS! NOOOOO WHYYYYYYY
after we got our fill of the plaza, which did not take long, we wandered over to a weird little dive bar called buzzard beach.
jared looking punk fucking rock.
me, really not looking punk at all. i never realized how enormous the ruffle drape is on this coat.
we had dinner with ellen & mike & went back to ellen’s house to hang out.
ellen & ferdinand. i told her that she always looks like a proud mom when she holds him.
ellen, me, mike, & ferdinand.
& then we went to a terrible punk show in a scary basement lair organized by oogles.
jared & ellen.
ellen took some photos of me in my 1960s swing coat & boot-cut mom jeans swigging from a bottle of milk while a mosh pit full of kids with spiked mohawks & elaborately studded leather jackets roils behind me, but i don’t have access to them. the show gave jared the opportunity to say, “wow, i haven’t seen a GBH back patch since 1996.” i got to say, “i haven’t seen a nausea ass flap since 2002.” between bands, kids would cue up their favorite punk tunes on a laptop, which culminated in a lot of dudes with splotchy skull tattoos playing air guitar to operation ivy. eventually the cops broke things up & i was very relieved. we went back to ellen’s house & watched ke$ha videos instead.
i started taking the clomid this weekend & so far have not experienced any side effects except for hot flashes. i kicked off my socks & all my blankets last night. but it’s a small price to pay if it results in a baby.
what is not such a small price to pay was the $250 i dropped on progesterone supplements today. usually the pharmacy offers generics when they are available, but they gave me the name-brand this time & i didn’t realize what was going on, or that there are plenty of generic progesterone supplements on the market. i have medicare for health insurance, but no prescription drug coverage (long story). bear in mind that this was $250 for fifteen days’ worth of progesterone. & if i get pregnant, i will have to continue taking it for an additional sixty days (until the end of my first trimester, when the placenta kicks in & starts making progesterone for me; without supplements, i risk miscarriage because apparently my body isn’t great at generating its own progesterone). do the math. that’s another $1000.
so i called my ob/gyn & the nurse was really helpful & was like, “$250? out of pocket? OH HELL NO. i will look into generics & let you know ASAP.” so this is another helpful tip for any ladies who may be out there, trying to get knocked up. always ask your doctor & your pharmacist about generics. i feel like i know a lot about the science of conception & pregnancy, but fuck-all about the nuts & bolts of fertility treatments in terms of what questions to ask or how to budget appropriately for them. i’m flying by the seat of my pants here.
bonus story: i went to the pharmacy to pick up the progesterone. the pharmacist went & retrieved it for me & said, “that will be $251.43.” then she gave me this sly look that totally said, “you don’t have enough money for this.” i repeated the number & said, “HOLY SHIT. i’m puttin’ this bad boy on my credit card.” she looked kind of disgusted. then she called over a colleague for a consult, as i have never taken progesterone before. the colleague was all, “ah…um. yes. um…so, this has an applicator, &…hmmm. i guess it can cause some abdominal discomfort…ah. maybe some cramping?” she was just blatantly reading the info page stapled to the package. it was the same woman who did my consult for the clomid, & she did the same thing that time too. i didn’t ask for a consult, dude, & if you’re just going to read me the info page, i can probably live without it.
anyway. this baby is costing me an arm & a leg & it’s not even conceived yet. it better be the BEST BABY EVER. just kidding. but it better be like, you know, top 98% or so. in terms of awesome.
i’m absolutely dumbfounded that i am the only person who has given this book a one star review so far. although it is pretty new. i’m sure more people will join me as the book circulates & people make the mistake of reading it.
i thought this memoir was absolutely dreadful. i concede that i have a well-documented irritation with stunt memoirs, in which someone tries some stupid bullshit for a year & then writes a memoir documenting their little experiment. but anna david’s experiment also managed to be weirdly anti-feminist, self-loathing, shallow, & disgustingly confessional at the same time.
we open with anna’s embarrassing obsession with a married man (who also happens to be a famous artist, supposedly). she meets him at a party & he pretty much sums up all of the issues that are causing her to remain single into her mid-30s in one kind of misogynistic, extremely patronizing sentence, & this makes her fall “in love” with him because i guess her “type” is dudes that put her down & point out all of her obnoxious neuroses. i can’t tell if she’s a masochist or just staggeringly un-self-aware. i’m thinking it’s a little from column A, a little from column B.
anna spends all of two weeks hanging out with married art dude. they never become physical in any way, but they both admit that they are in love with one another. of course, he is married (& a douche, but i guess i’m the only one who noticed that part), so they agree that they can’t do anything about their love. & listen, i am not really a big fan of he’s just not that into you or anything, but if a dude is actually in love with you for real, he will probably try to be with you. even if he is married to someone else. i know hollywood has sold women this bill of goods about how tortured love affairs exist where two people would be together & have a fairy tale romance if not for some troublesome obstacle like a wife, but that’s really not the way things work in real life. unless you are a douche or an idiot. like these two.
when anna returns home to new york city, she spends literally months mourning the end of the love affair that wasn’t before finding herself in the self-help section of a barnes & noble bookstore (& seriously? an author that brags about frequenting barnes & noble? wow). she finds a copy of “sex & the single girl” by helen gurley brown. gurley brown founded “cosmopolitan” magazine & wrote this book in the early 60s as a kind of how-to guide for the swinging working single urban girl who may not necessarily want to devote herself to finding a husband & being a housewife. it caused a stir in its day & kind of set the template for “sex & the city”-style culture/everything that is wrong with third wave feminism. it is a revelation for anna. apparently she had never heard of this book or gurley brown before, which indicates to me that she is shockingly uninformed about her own career path, seeing as how she has been self-employed as a romance/sex columnist for several years. does she just not read books at all? it certainly would explain a lot.
anna decides to follow gurley brown’s (antiquated, sexist) advice for a year & see what happens. actually, she wants to see if it will help her land her dream man, although she claims that it is actually just a journey of self-discovery (since–spoiler–no men are landed). what follows is about 300 pages of that one friend you have who constantly talks about how she is totally okay being single, she doesn’t need a man to complete her, women that allow themselves to be domesticated by relationships are cheating themselves, i am woman, etc etc, but whenever she gets drunk or doesn’t get a call back from a man she went on a date with, she calls you up in tears, wondering why she is so chronically undateable. there are DEFINITELY women out there who truly are not on the hunt for a relationship…& then there are the women who employ that rhetoric as a smokecsreen to convince themselves that they are not distraught over not being in a relationship. anna is solidly in this latter category.
she leaves no stone unturned in her quest to get a guy/feel good about herself. she redesigns the interior of her apartment, updates her wardrobe, takes voice modulation lessons, learns how to cook, creates a match.com profile, goes speed dating, takes up rollerblading…i mean, do you see where this is going? on the one hand, it’s shit that you should be embarrassed to admit (rollerblading? is it 1989?), & on the other hand, it’s the “domestic arts” that she claims she has not permitted herself to enjoy thanks to the poisonous influence of feminism. lest you think i am merely inferring, she actually explains several times that feminism has conditioned women to believe that being feminine (by which she means dressing in a sexy manner, knowing how to cook, or liking to have flowers in your apartment) is shameful & frivolous. she is seriously one step away from explaining that she really wants to embrace her femininity because it’s her duty to be a woman who can make a man feel like a man. i guess it’s no surprise that she sounds like a dating handbook from 1962, because she is modeling her life on what is basically a dating handbook from 1962. i’m surprised she didn’t include a chapter on douching with lysol or flying to puerto rico to obtain illegal abortions.
& sprinkled throughout these boring & overly detailed stories about how long her curtains are & the importance of a 35-year-old woman owning a nice pair of ruched leggings are bizarre confessional stories about how she rused to be a raging cokehead, or always felt like “the other woman” in her parents’ relationship because her father treated her like a wife. um. WHAT? i get that anna has been in therapy for a long-ass time & sometimes talking about this shit with a relative stranger every week makes a person lose their sense of appropriate boundaries so they write about their quasi-incestuous relationship with their own father like it’s just no thang, but trust me, it’s pretty jarring to mix a paragraph about your history as a coke addict into a chapter on learning to roast a chicken. & don’t even get me started on the INCREDIBLY graphic story she relates about getting mixed up with a dom who introduced anna to her submissive side. if i’d wanted to read amateur erotica, i would have.
& then, right when i was thinking about how much i disliked anna & this book, i got the section about anna wondering if she was still fertile. she decided to make an appointment with a fertility specialist to “get her fertility checked out”. really. she actually made an appointment with an IVF clini to “get things checked out”. um, anna? you actually get your fertility “checked out” by either your gynecologist or a fertility specialist recommended by your gynecologist. not some random IVF clinic. when she goes in for her appointment, the nurses jump right into explaining what to expect from the IVF cycle & anna is like, “wait, whaaaaat?” i wanted to leap into the book & shake her. no one is born just magically knowing what to expect in an IVF clinic, but the woman is a freelance writer. you’d think she’d have some understanding of research.
she opts not to freeze her eggs for later use, & wonders if all those people out there having babies have really thought about what having babies is all about. she thinks that people treat it as just the next item on the to-do list after getting married, & haven’t stopped to consider toddler tantrums or sullen teens.
how. FUCKING. condescending. can you possibly fucking GET? perhaps ANNA perceives of babies as “next on the to-do list” because she made it pretty fucking clear throughout her entire book that she perceives of marriage as something to check off that same list, but a lot of parents out there have actually stopped to consider that babies don’t stay babies & that every day of parenting is not going to be super magical happy land. but then again, most people who end up in an IVF clinic know what IVF is, so….
this book was awful, anna seems like a terrible person, please don’t read this book.
i just got home home from seeing my ob/gyn. i now have an official diagnosis of infertility. i am not that freaked out because doctors hand down that diagnosis when you have been having sex for more than a year without any hormonal or barrier method birth control in play. they don’t count fertility awareness/avoiding sex during suspected ovulation as birth control, but that’s what i was using for several months after i went off the pill.
i’m actually pleased because an official diagnosis means that we can start getting more aggressive about trying to conceive. jared & i have been trying to make this baby thing happen for six cycles now & i’m still not pregnant. i have been charting as if it is my religion, & i have discovered that my luteal phase (the phase between ovulation & the beginning of the next cycle) is only ten days long. the average for most women is twelve to sixteen days, & women who have shorter luteal phases are going to have a hell of a time getting pregnant, because a fertilized egg just doesn’t have enough time to implant in the endometrium before it starts to break down & slough away in the next period.
a short luteal phase is generally caused by low progesterone, which is generally caused by other hormonal imbalances elsewhere in the cycle. a person can try all kinds of stuff to balance it herself. baby aspirin can improve circulation, which can in turn improve hormonal balance. acupuncture can be used to stabilize & regulate hormones. some people swear by B vitamins to nourish the thyroid & stabilize hormone production. others say that vitex (also known as chasteberry) boosts progesterone production. i tried all these things. my luteal phase is still ten days long.
so now i’m going on clomid. i start on saturday. i’m pumped to actually be trying something that has been, you know, peer-reviewed by actual scientists. maybe some people have had great results from acupuncture or vitamin B or chinese medicine or eating lots of pineapple. but i’m all for trying the drug that results in pregnancy during the first cycle of use in 50% of women who are actually ovulating. (ovulation tests & my fertility charts indicate that i do ovulate, but i’m getting a progesterone level done on cycle day 21 just to confirm.) the clomid will be augmented during the luteal phase with progesterone supplements. if i manage to get pregnant, i’ll keep using progesterone until i’m through my first trimester.
i had to wait two months for this infertility work-up because my doctor is so booked up. only the actual pregnant ladies can jump the line, in order to start getting pre-natal care. jared’s doctor recommended that he go with me so that he can be in the loop for everything, & so i am not running interference & ferrying messages between the ob/gyn & jared. i was so anxious about the appointment because i was worried that the doctor was going to say, “you’ve only been using ovulation tests & obsessively timing sex for six months. you have to wait a year before i can do anything.” then i started worrying that she would say something like, “you weigh 200 pounds. clearly you are too fat to get pregnant” (even though people who are bigger than me get pregnant all the time–it’s just hard for me to exercise because i have a limited range of motion). i am just an anxious person. i’m always trying to foresee the various ways in which i will be thwarted.
instead, she was like, “we can be as aggressive or not-aggressive as you want. if at any point you want me to back off treatments or refer you to a specialist who will be more aggressive, just say the word. i won’t be offended at all.” i was crossing my fingers that she’d say, “the first step is to get you on clomid & progesterone, & let’s try to do that next month,” but instead she one-upped me by saying, “i’d like to start with clomid & progesterone. we’ll call in those prescriptions right now. start on saturday.” because our timing was perfect: i had to wait two months for this appointment, but it fell on cycle day 3, which is PERFECT for starting infertility bloodwork & clomid! i think maybe the way i feel right now is the most excited anyone has ever been to be informed, “we have a diagnosis on infertility. here’s some clomid.” i hadn’t eaten breakfast because i was too nervous about the appointment, which was perfect because the bloodwork needs to be done while fasting. (especially because they are always checking me for diabetes due to my family history.)
& jared’s more or less on board with the whole thing! i think both of us are feeling a little “holy shit” because, you know, taking actual fertility drugs makes the whole “let’s try to have a baby” thing a lot more real than just having sex every now & again & then waiting around to see what happens. 10% of clomid pregnancies also result in multiple births, & jared is all, “okay, here’s what we’ll do. we’ll give each baby a medallion. then we’ll set one baby free in the wilderness, & many years in the future, they’ll find each other & match up the medallions & realize they were separated at birth. it’ll be a really beautiful experience for them.” i am definitely hoping for just a singleton, but really, i will be happy right now with any & every baby that comes my way.
so why am i writing about all of this when usually people with fertility issues kind of skulk around & don’t tell anyone & feel like crap? i guess because i don’t get why people with fertility issues should have to feel that way. there’s so much shame & embarrassment around infertility. why? i really don’t know. i’d love to hear some theories.
so maybe people already know about fun-a-day. it’s been going on for a while now. the legends i have heard indicate that it was started like ten years ago by punk kids in philly who were concerned about getting bummed out & losing their motivation to do cool, creative projects during the wintertime. so they challenged themselves to do one fun, creative thing a day & document it somehow (or maybe it would be a document in itself if it was a photograph or comic or song or something), & then they’d have a big weird art show where people could present the artifacts of how they entertained themselves & staved off the winter blahs.
jared lived in philadelphia when the fun-a-day thing started, so i think he has a certain youthful nostalgia for the concept. a few years ago, he tried to do “pun-a-day”. we both thought it was going to be a breeze because he makes so many puns anyway. but making puns on a deadline proved to be rather difficult & pun-a-day was abandoned on the third day, following an especially labored effort involving the word “annapolis”.
this year jared decided to do “pie-a-day,” inspired in part by his new year’s resolution to spend one day in 2012 eating nothing but food in pie form (ie, quiche, chicken pot pie, vegetable pie, tomato pie, etc). he made a pumpkin pie, several apple pies, a lemon meringue pie, & a boston cream pie might happen later tonight (we can eat while we watch the season premiere of “portlandia” & shift about awkwardly, unsure of exactly what the punchlines are). he experimented with a gluten-free crust when we invited some friends over for dinner, one of whom has gluten sensitivity issues. jared came up with a gluten-free oat crust using oat flour he ground himself. (he also made homemade gnocchi & pesto from scratch that night.)
but it is starting to become clear that pie-a-day is a better project for either a professional baker or a member of the 1%. it’s nearly impossible to stay stocked up on things like flour, eggs, & butter when jared is making a pie every day! also complicating issues is the fact that i am very choosy about pie. there are certain kinds of pie i love, like pecan & pumpkin. but i don’t really like fruit or berry pies. apple pie is really not my thing, & he made three of them. prior to two days ago, i had never eaten lemon meringue pie in my life. it was delicious (particularly because jared included just a hint of lemon zest in the crust), but because it can be hard to predict how an enormous mound of potato goo is going to cook down into enough homemade gnocchi to feed four people, we were kind of filling up on pie that night & i over-did it. acidic foods (orange juice, tomato sauce, lemon custard) have been making me feel really queasy lately anyway…eating four slices of pie probably didn’t help matters.
so jared has decided to call pie-a-day off early & maybe try it some other time, perhaps after preparing in advance by opening a separate savings account to pay for butter rations. i foresaw this particular wrinkle, so i decided to make my fun-a-day something that was free & required almost no effort. maybe i am perverting the underlying precepts of fun-a-day by not using it as an activity to hone a new skill. i’ve been wanting to learn how to knit & i probably could have turned that into some kind of fun-a-day. or i could try my hand at pattern-drafting or sculpting miniatures out of clay or making origami out of losing bingo cards or experimenting with new vegetable dishes or something. instead, i decided to take a photo of jared & charlotte hanging out together every day. if nothing else, it will document their relationship. & they are both so photogenic.
i have been posting the photos on facebook, but why not post them here too? jared & charlotte, week one:
january 1
january 2
january 3
january 4
january 5
january 6
january 7
if i accomplish nothing else with these photos, i hope that at least that goofy person who commented on my blog last year & said, “you call yourself a feminist, but all you ever talk about is your boyfriend!” will come back & get all huffy & pissed off again. possible avenues for criticism: “you’re reinforcing negative stereotypes about feminists being obsessed with their cats!” “you say you’re a feminist, but all you ever do is take photos of your boyfriend! & your cat!” “would it be so difficult for you to get either your boyfriend or your cat to look at the camera? what an amateur!” “you say you grew up working-class but look at all the books in that one photo! we all know working-class people don’t read!” & maybe, “you must be a stereotypical ugly feminist if you would rather post photos of some stupid cat as opposed to photos of yourself in cute outfits.”
the weather in lawrence has been ridiculously beautiful lately (please note above photo of jared & charlotte sitting beside an open door) & jared finally lowered the seat on my bike (“you must be a really shitty feminist if you can’t even lower your own bicycle seat!”) so i have been going for bike rides. i rode to the wishing bench the other day. it’s a bench sitting by the side of the road where delaware & 9th st. end, in a kind of industrial hellscape area near the railroad tracks. it’s just a few blocks away from my house, actually; it’s not like a terrifying oil abandoned oil refinery on the edge of town or anything. i sat down & made a wish. it better come true! the sign said, “you will not be disappointed.”
apparently "disappointed"/"disgusted" is my default facial expression. i also never realized until now how very ruffly this sweater is.
i am feeling super-wiped out today for some reason & i just don’t think i have it in me to generate a blog post full of original content, so instead, please enjoy my book review of “modelland” by tyra banks. & bear in mind that this paperweight of horror clocked in at over 500 pages. i know i missed a LOT of horrifying details when i wrote this thing. if you have heard rumors of specific terrible scenes or want more examples of the staggeringly dreadful names that tyra gave her characters (i just remembered that tookie’s sister is named myrracle–yeah, i know), just ask in the comments. i suffered through reading the thing, i might as well get to make fun of it some more for my efforts.
i am also capable of answering pretty much any possible question you could ever have about “america’s next top model,” save for the greatest mystery of all: why was angelea disqualified? the world may never know.
on to the review:
this book is unspeakably, horrifically terrible. it makes me regret having been such a tough grader on every other book i have ever read, because if any book was ever deserving of a single star, it is this one. actually, if i could give negative stars, i would. i have read a lot of awful books in my day, but this one truly may be literally the worst book EVER WRITTEN.
full disclosure: i totally watch “america’s next top model”. i have seen every single episode of all 17 cycles at least once. at this point, i kind of feel like “top model” has taken me hostage & is holding me in an undisclosed location, since the last ten seasons have been so awful, but i still watch. & that’s why i read this book: because i find tyra to be so fucking crazy & i was morbidly curious to see what her attempt at a dystopic YA novel (about modeling! & it’s basically sci-fi as well! what the fuck is going on?) was going to be like.
because i have watched so much “top model,” i feel like i am pretty well-versed in many of tyra’s major modeling pet peeves. for example, she hates dancers. every time there’s a girl on the show who has trained as a dancer, tyra complains that they are posing like dancers in their photos, as opposed to models. only one girl with significant dance training has ever won “top model” (naima, cycle four). she also complains constantly about how models have to be at the top of their games because more & more magazines are putting actresses on their covers instead. tyra has a real disdain for actresses, perhaps stemming from the fact that she tried to make it as an actress & flopped. she also berates the girls whenever they have to pose with male models, telling them not to let the men outshine them in photos–or even look equally as good. female models are paid far more more money & have far more working opportunities than male models. tyra is quick to tell the girls that in the world of modeling, men are one more accessory within a shot. she signs all of her correspondence to the girls “fierce & love, tyra,” & she never misses an opportunity to explain that she started modeling in paris at age 15 even though some people thought she was weird-looking–too tall & gangly with an enormous forehead. all of these elements pop up over & over again in the book.
her gangly weird-looking history has inspired what seems to be her primary goal with “top model”: promoting a kind of beauty that is different than what one might expect from the modeling industry. she has given the top prize to weirdly boxy flat-chested girls (yoanna, who did indeed have an amazing face), short girls (eva & nicole from cycle 13–the petite cycle), girls with gaps between their teeth (danielle–even though tyra attempted to strong-arm danielle into having the gap closed by a cosmetic dentist, only to turn around nine cycles later & send another contestant to the dentist to have her gap enlarged), various girls of color (teyona, naima was mixed race, danielle, jaslene, krista, saleisha, etc), a plus-sized girl (whitney, who couldn’t model her way out of a paper bag), & even ugly girls (ann–she was so monstrous that she actually hurt my eyes).
the theme of modelland seems to be that anyone can be beautiful, even if they are really short (but, you know, still slim & traditionally gorgeous), chubby (but tall & gorgeous), albino (but tall, slim, & gorgeous), or a mary sue stand-in for tyra herself (main protagonist tookie delacreme, who is darker-skinned, with wild untameable hair, skinny, gawky, & tall, with big eyes & a wide mouth, not to mention an absolutely insufferable self-esteem problem).
you see where i am going with this? tyra suggests that her book is a story about empowerment for young girls. tookie & her unusual-looking comrades are admitted to the modelland academy on top of the mountain when an intoxibella (tyra’s obnoxious word for supermodel)-turned-scout goes off-script & specifically chooses strange-looking girls to admit, in an effort to change worldwide standards of beauty. but the girls are only strange in that they are short or chubby or albino. in every other way, they are stunningly beautiful. & ci-L (the intoxibella/scout–isn’t that name just awful?) is harshly punished for her transgressions. she is forced to repeat the first year of modelland training, despite having graduated & gone on to being the toast of the fashion industry. one of her weirder punishments is being forced to attend classes in a too-small uniform. honestly, the scenes in which ci-L’s snug uniform are described read like straight up pornography. i feel like i got more insight into the twisted mind of tyra banks than i ever wanted by reading this book.
i guess i should recap the plot a little bit: so, the world-building in this book completely fucking blows, but as far as i could gather, it’s some kind of future or alternate universe in which models are the only celebrities & have an incredible amount of control & persuasion over the general populace. each year, seven new intoxibellas graduate from modelland. every girl is eligible for admission to modelland. they must simply walk in this big weird day of discovery event that happens every year & be chosen by a scout. their chances are boosted if they discover a smize, which is some kind of weird eye mask thing. tookie doesn’t even bother to hope she’ll be chosen. but her little sister has been groomed for modelland since birth, basically.
tookie’s self-esteem is non-existent. she completely hates herself & doesn’t think she is worth anything. why? because she feels that she is unattractive & therefore unlovable. what a totally awesome message for young girls! especially because tookie’s journey of transformation (such as it is) hinges on discovering that she is beautiful & is therefore lovable! this is fucked up. this is SO fucked up.
tookie is selected over her sister on the day of discovery, along with her slightly off-brand cohorts. they are constantly picked on up at the school because no one thinks they are pretty enough to be there. they wonder if they were only selected in order to be experimented upon or perhaps sacrificed, because i guess there are stories about these kinds of things happening at the school. gee, i can see why everyone wants to go there. there’s a brother academy made up of staggeringly attractive bro-hunks who mostly wander around doing maintenance work on the girls’ school, giving them lots of opportunities to perspire shirtlessly. one of the dude models falls for tookie & they have an illicit romance (as modelland girls are not to fraternize with the men). tookie investigates ci-L’s punishments & discovers something about some dead girls & ci-L taking the blame for them. she becomes convinced that ci-L is a crazy lady who is going to kill tookie & her friends.
so, tookie & her friends decide they have to escape. & then they do. (you see how little dramatic tension i’m putting into this recap? there’s perhaps even less in the book.) two seconds after they escape, ci-L comes after them. after a really inconsequential chase scene in which tookie briefly reconnects with her one friend from home, lizzie (a homeless girl with mental health issues who is constantly self-injuring, despite tookie’s mild requests that she stop), ci-L explains that she is actually looking out for them, has no plans to kill them, is trying to show that modelland can accept all forms of beauty (provided of course that it is beautiful! because that’s what matters!), & needs to get them back to school before anyone realizes they’re gone. the girls are like, “oh. cool. let’s jet.”
god, this book sucks.
& then–surprise! tookie’s mother & sister have managed to scale the mountain & break into the school. they are the first people to have ever managed this, since the mountain is fraught with all kinds of dangers, like a loch ness monster-esque creature made up of dismembers arms & legs that eats people, & sentient fireballs that track & kill people. tookie’s mother, creamy, demands to see the primabella or whatever the fuck the leader of this school is called. & then it all comes out: creamy was once a student at modelland. the primabella was her best friend, & the primabella’s current right hand woman, persimmon, who has been cursed to a life as a living plastic mannequin, was their other best pal. the primabella was decsended from modelland royalty. & she turned up pregnant. but she didn’t know it until she gave birth into a toilet, because one of modelland’s superpowers is apparently to make it so no girl gets a period & pregnancies don’t show. the father is some random cobbler dude from back home. the primabella gets into big trouble with her mom. persimmon tries to help & is turned into a mannequin for her trouble. the primabella & creamy bust out of modelland to go see the primabella’s sweetheart & baby & become instantly wrinkled for their transgressions. back at the cobbler’s place, the primabella is like, “i don’t care about being an intoxibella! i will stay here all wrinkled with you & our baby!” & the cobbler is like, “that sounds good to me!” the primabella then goes out for milk & when she does, creamy runs it & tries to bone the cobbler. he’s all, “HALP!” & the primabella walks in & thinks her man is cheating with her friend. she won’t listen to her protests. she & creamy return to the school, where they are in BIG TROUBLE for leaving. the primabella’s mom offers to take away primabella’s wrinkles if she agrees never to see the cobbler or her baby again. primabella is like, “do it. he’s a cheating hound dog.” creamy then asks to have her wrinkles reversed & primabella mommy refuses. primabella junior refuses to intercede on her behalf & creamy is kicked out of school. before she goes, she’s like, “by the by, i totally molested your man & he really loves you! kthnxbai!” the primabella is devastated that she chose her beauty over the true love of a man & their baby, but her mom says the decision is final. & to top it off, ci-L was the baby in question. all is revealed & then the primabella & creamy are put in modelland prison forever. ci-L takes over the school. tookie’s sister gets lost in catwalk corridor, i guess to be scratched by models that have been turned into cats forevermore (yeah, that’s really in the book).
i guess the moral here is something about being true to your friends & not sacrificing your career for a man (another one of tyra’s big passions), but as you can see, IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE.
& the writing. oh, the writing. it couldn’t be any worse. one of tookie’s friends comes from a dimly-lit country called canne del abra. the very first page includes the line, “the fog lifted like a push-up bra.” there are a gazillion other terrible lines or names (i think tyra was going for a harry potter-esque “the names have a hidden meaning” thing, but she was just way too obvious &/or cloying with everything), but i have blocked them out because this book gave me some weird form of PTSD.
the worst part of all of this is that this is only the first book is a trilogy! NOOOOOO WHHYYYYYYY i doubt the reality of a merciful god! this book is UNSPEAKABLY BAD. i feel that everyone who has read it should come together to file a class-action lawsuit against the publishers. i know i suffered much emotional distress & deserve some kind of compensation. i know that every time i write a terrible review, a few masochistic people who follow my reviews go out & read the books to see if it’s really that bad. PLEASE don’t do that this time. this book actually caused me REAL SUFFERING. learn from my mistakes, i beg of you!
1. what did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
stayed at a bed & breakfast.
passed my driver’s license test.
ate bok choy.
TRUCK POOL.
threw a snowball at a cat.
made soup from scratch.
lived in my very own (rental) house as an adult! no sharing walls/floors/ceilings with neighbors or roommates (besides jared)!
joined a book club that met more than three times.
allowed jared to cut my hair (big mistake).
saw a red sox game at fenway stadium.
2. did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
i always make ten new year’s resolutions. i have them all written down & tucked away in a secret hiding spot dating back to 2002. every year i get them out & review how i have done & how i have changed. all i will say about some of the older resolutions is that i have grown up A LOT in the last ten years.
last year i managed to keep a handful of my resolutions. i got my driver’s license & quit smoking. i stuck to my budget & i at least tried to get pregnant, even if i have not yet been successful.
among my resolutions for 2012: keep trying to make the baby thing happen. make the bed every day. be nicer to jared. (note that there is a difference between being nicer & actually being nice; i told him last night that i was just going to throw away the voodoo doll i made of him & call it a day. kidding! just kidding. i’m totally not getting rid of the voodoo doll.)
3. did anyone close to you give birth?
i am acquainted with a few people who gave birth, like one of my old roommates from boston who happened to go to high school with jared. but none of my super-tight buds had a baby this year.
4. did anyone close to you die?
apparently my uncle–one of my dad’s brothers–died a few days before christmas. but i hadn’t talked to him in almost ten years, so i won’t pretend we were close.
5. what countries did you visit?
i stayed put. maybe i should resolve to get a passport this year. jared thinks we should vacay in australia if this baby thing doesn’t pan out (hence devouring all of our money).
6. what would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
well. A BABY. my baby rabies is completely out of control. but i would also like to have jeans that fit & have not been patched beyond recognition, healthier & more functional friendships, less anxiety, & less chronic pain.
7. what dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
august 12 was the day of TRUCK POOL. i was going to go camping with some friends in missouri, but the weather turned really shitty. there were huge thunderstorms predicted for the area where we were intending to camp. i was bummin’ hard because it the last weekend of spinster summer & i really wanted some quality time with punks. i decided to go to kansas city instead, & after sitting around, doing nothing & chainsmoking for a few hours, we suddenly hit upon the idea of TRUCK POOL. one of the kids had a pick-up truck, & we lined the bed with a tarp & connected a hose to the upstairs bathtub & threaded it out the window. we filled that baby up with warm water & truck pooled for hours, even after it started raining. at one point, we turned it into a bubble pool with dish soap & drove it around kansas city.
fill 'er up. that's me in the baby blue tee next to the dude in the leather jacket.
we also made a chopack, which is a backpack filled with nachos. let’s go to the video:
8. what was your biggest achievement of the year?
learning how to drive, maybe? i tried to get my license when i was 16 years old & still living in ohio, but i failed the driver’s test three times. it really undermined my confidence & i thought i would just never learn how to drive. it wasn’t easy to learn & i don’t have a lot of incentives in my life to keep trying to do things at which i don’t naturally excel, so it was a pretty big deal for me to actually pass the test. & now i am learning how to be a responsible car owner, which is also a really intimidating responsibility.
i was also totally stoked to finish reading & recapping every single babysitters club book on goodreads.
& i’m very proud that i finally fulfilled my dream of dressing up as a sexy hamburglar for halloween (i think saying “a sexy hamburglar” is funnier than saying “sexy hamburglar,” because being “a” one among many implies that hamburglars may be a separate race of people).
sexy?
9. what was your biggest failure?
i wouldn’t call it a “failure” to still not be pregnant after six months of trying, but it was a little bit of a failure to have let the whole thing affect my emotions so much. after every disappointment, i would just completely lose it & spend entire days crying. i am handling my business a lot better now, but it’s still a challenge to not allow myself to get on the emotional rollercoaster over something i have so little control over.
10. did you suffer illness or injury?
the arthritis or fibromyalgia or evil confluence of the two is worse than ever. other than that, i’m good.
11. what was the best thing you bought?
i bought a fucking wood-paneling patterned bathing suit! i have been getting into water aerobics for the whole arthritis thing, & i figured, why not look as much like a rec room from 1974 as possible?
grainy photobooth cheesecake shot.
12. whose behavior merited celebration?
i dislike these questions. so i am going to give the prize to ellen for attempting to cheer me up by sending me weird pornographic art of dragons having sex with cars. it definitely distracted me from my troubles.
13. whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
SO MANY PEOPLE. but because i am trying to have healthier, more functional relationships with people, i am going to refrain from going into detail. i am just thinking of one person in particular who seems to find constructive criticism really difficult to handle, struggles with appropriate boundaries almost all the time, sucks at making her friends feel valued, & instead excels at making her friends feel like they are in competition with one another.
14. where did most of your money go?
moving, flying to boston to see jared while he was doing research, gas for driving to kansas city all summer, & the endless consumption of sandwiches.
15. what did you get really, really, really excited about?
well, truck pool. & bingo! i started playing bingo this year & i love it. it’s this awesome mix of pulse-pounding action without having to leave your seat, mega-depression as you look around at the all the oldsters pissing away their social security checks & youngsters wearing sweat pants & dentures, & nachos. plus i have won $210 to date (not bad for only five games of bingo).
& i got beyond pumped about my amazing new house!
isn't it beautiful?
16. what song will always remind you of 2011?
i’m sorry, i really only listen to music when i am in the car. which is a fairly infrequent occurence. i got pretty into this song for a while though:
17. compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? about the same, maybe?
b) thinner or fatter? fatter, for sure. having compromised mobility really impairs a person’s attempts at weight maintenance.
c) richer or poorer? richer. thanks, bingo!
18. what do you wish you’d done more of?
writing! i barely wrote at all this year. i also wish i would have read more adult books (& not just memoirs) & started going to bingo in the summer while jared was in boston.
19. what do you wish you’d done less of?
reading so many young adult books. of the 238 books i read in 2011, 140 of them were young adult books. that is crazy! i am so relieved to be done with the babysitters club recap project. i also wish i wouldn’t have spent all summer playing solitaire & watching “hoarders”. what the fuck?
20. how did you spend xmas?
jared & i went to boston to see his family. we stayed in bed & breakfast in cambridge. i ate an entire plate of cheese cubes every morning for breakfast. seriously. sometimes with sourbough toast slathered in goat cheese. in fact, i had one day where i ate nothing but food in cheese form (cheese cubes for breakfast, mozzarella sticks for lunch, four-cheese ravioli for dinner). that was a great day.
we drank a fair number of beers. bart came up from philadelphia to hang out with us. we had brunch on xmas eve at david’s house (jared’s brother) & this girl who once stole my bed & threatened to call the cops on me if i tried to steal it back was there. kind of awkward. we went to quaker meeting that night & jared’s mom asked me, “how are you feeling?” when i expressed an interest in sitting down during the hospitality cookie hour, she said, “yes! sit down!” it was super-awkward because she obviously thought i was pregnant. which i was not. but i did decide to throw that sweater away.
we spent xmas day in newton with jared’s family (including david & his girlfriend, alana). we had roast beef & mashed potatoes for dinner. i ate almost an entire tupperware contained full of rosemary shortbread. david & alana gave me the most amazing claudia kishi-themed novena candle:
evidence that you should be open about the dumb shit you're into because you might get awesome gifts out of it.
jared & i went to see “mission: impossible 4 ghost protocol” because jared is obsessed with simon pegg. there were no ghosts. we also started working on what we were calling “ciara & jared’s 2011 snoozeletter,” but i don’t know if we’ll ever finish it.
21. did you fall in love in 2011?
yeah, but i decided to stick thing out with jared anyway. kidding! we broke up. kidding again! i hate this question.
22. how many one-night stands?
zip.
23. what was your favorite TV program?
i am still watching “america’s next top model” & “project runway,” even though they have become torture. i am also still watching “dexter” even though the last season was unspeakably dreadful. i feel like i need to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who was subjected to it. over the summer, i got into “mad men”. it’s not bad. would watch again. jared & i also liked “portlandia,” although it sometimes made us uncomfortable because it can be difficult to tell if we’re laughing at what we’re supposed to be laughing at.
24. do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
there are some peeps who make me feel very wary, but no hate.
25. what was the best book you read?
“poser” by claire dederer! it was so amazing! i also really liked “beauty queens” by libba bray. but, i mean, we could be here a while because i read A LOT. just follow my goodreads reviews & save us all some time.
26. what was your greatest musical discovery?
i have not started listening to music in the time since the last music question.
27. what did you want and get?
my driver’s license, a beautiful HOUSE as opposed to an apartment or duplex, financial self-control, a book club, & some other stuff i don’t want to talk about.
28. what did you want and not get?
a baby & a truly excellent pizza restaurant in lawrence. a hip replacement. also, an elephant sanctuary in my backyard.
29. what was your favorite film of this year?
i really don’t watch a lot of movies. nor do i keep track of the few i watch. i had fun seeing “harry potter & the deathly hallows, part two” in 3D with jared. i ate an enormous platter of nachos during the movie. i don’t know how i’ll answer this question in the future, now that the harry potter movies are over.
30. what did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
i turned 32 & i was in boston visiting jared. he, bart, & i went out for breakfast in the morning. bart enraged me by insisting on a trip to the laundromat as well. isn’t that where every girl wants to spend her birthday? after we dropped bart off at work, jared & i drove up to salisbury beach where we played skeeball until our arms fell off. we used our winning tickets to get a plastic shark, a plastic lizard, & a gaudy ring with a huge pink rhinestone. we drove back into the city & i communed with the seals in the enclosure outside the aquarium. then we met up with bart & ate the best italian food i’ve ever tasted at monica’s tattoria in the north end.
me with some seals.
31. what one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
not to be a broken record, but: baby. & maybe if jared had not been in boston all summer.
32. how would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
jeans or cut-offs or plain black cotton skirts topped by either a t-shirt or a thermal layered under a sweater. the shirts are generally unadorned & pink, blue, or purple. all summer, i wore glittery pink toms. the rest of the year was just sauconys (gray & blue). glasses. lipstick. that’s it. i wouldn’t call it a “concept”.
33. what kept you sane?
logic puzzles, coffee, to-do lists, tidying up the house, petting charlotte, jessika rae, & the library.
34. which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
i am not into this question so i will say taylor swift’s kitten.
35. what political issue stirred you the most?
okay, it’s not that i don’t care about political issues anymore. i do. it’s just tough for me to feel the passion i may have felt ten years ago. though i always follow any stories about politicians wanting to privatize social security really closely. ditto this whole fucked up medicare voucher plan.
36. who did you miss?
i missed jared a lot when he was in boston. i have been missing jessika rae all year. i miss some other zine friends i seem to have fallen out of touch with since i closed the distro & have been making myself kind of scarce on the zine front. i also became very nostalgic this year for my younger self.
37. who was the best new person you met?
i met jaimie this year through book club & we had an awesome summer of bonding through feminism & water aerobics. she is also the person who took me to bingo for the first time.
38. tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
the rudy at rudy’s pizza is pretty good if you order the thin crust. punks are rarely on time so don’t worry about being punctual. you can’t call bingo until the caller reads the number you have bingoed on. if you just put your head down & work on your most reviled tasks for twenty minutes at a time, they will be done in no time.
39. what did you devote most of your energy to?
trying to make the time pass faster, & then reminding myself not to wish away my life.
40. quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
she looks me over as if she really knows me
as if she thinks she knows what i’m thinking
if she would only ask the right questions
i’d tell her everything
but she only asks the things that she already knows
she can’t take this as a sign of change and moving on
a little plea of something to be remembered
when it’s gone
…
every secret longs to be disclosed
every love yearns to be betrayed
that’s a quote and so is
love is more difficult to escape than hate
its not true, but both take their sweet time to go away
jared & i are flying to boston tomorrow to visit with his family for the holidays. so today i have to do laundry, pack, clean up the house so i am not embarrassed in front of my cat-sitters, etc etc. i am not saying that i definitely won’t be posting any more blog entries in 2011…but i’m not saying i will either.
i’m hoping to get back into the groove of writing for an audience in 2012. i have become very out of practice. i haven’t written a new zine in a year & a half, & i have definitely fallen down on the job of keeping this thing updated in the last few months. i have found it challenging to find my creative footing since i shut down the zine distro in early 2010. i know! that was almost two years ago! it was just a lot easier to keep up with my mail & feel like i had a legitimate platform when i was going to the post office everyday & maintaining a huge website (even if there wasn’t really any personal content on it).
the only “project” that i have really come up with to replace the zine distro is this whole trying to get pregnant business, which is turning out to be a lot more difficult than i anticipated. i wish it had been this hard to get knocked up when i DIDN’T want to have a baby. i had four dreams last night in which i did a pregnancy test & it was positive. in every dream, i was like, “no way. this is totally a dream, i’m going to wake up & not be pregnant. or is it real? maybe i’m pregnant!” but of course, i am not. i do have an appointment set for a fertility work-up after the holidays though. maybe my doctor will take pity on me, prescribe clomid, & at this time next year, i’ll be writing about how difficult it is to maintain a blog when i am caring for a newborn. or maybe i’ll just luck out & get pregnant without intervention. i can’t even work up any feelings about it anymore. the stress has been too exhausting.
i am a little bit anxious about boston because seeing people you haven’t seen in six months to a year always want to know, “what’s new? what’s going on?” & literally all i have to say is, “well, i’ve been trying to get pregnant & that’s not really going anywhere. but i know that you really wanted any information at all about my sex life, so let’s move on. i’ve gone to a bingo a few times & have won $210 altogether, which is pretty cool. that pays for like half of my share of the bed & breakfast we’re staying at. bingo is a little depressing because it’s a lot of oldsters blowing through their social security checks & a sprinkling of younger people in sweatpants looking like they probably make meth. but you know. i get social security too & would definitely just wear sweatpants if i didn’t think jared would break up with me because of it, so maybe i have found my people. i’m thinking about signing up for another water aerobics class in january because my arthritis has become increasingly crippling. i now struggle to button the snaps on my coat, & am sometimes in too much pain to drive or use utensils, keys, or my squeezy water bottle. i don’t know if this is a permanent aspect of the degenerative condition or if it’s just a temporary slump due to the cold, damp weather. & i’ve been reading a lot of library books. mostly children’s books. mostly the american girl historical books, truth be told. which i then recap over on goodreads in foul-mouthed, sarcastic, political reviews that are probably not suitable for children. how are you doing? what’s new with you?”
so. that will be fun.
but hopefully i will get with the program in 2012 & come up with some interesting things to say. same bat time, same bat channel.
i have been incommunicado mostly because the colder weather is making my pain/mobility issues flare up. there are often times when i am literally in too much pain to sit in front of my computer & type anything. sometimes the only thing that helps is laying flat on the floor with my legs elevated on a footstool or the bed. i wonder how long it will be before i’m wandering around town with a walker or recovering from a double hip replacement. i’m not even employing hyperbole here.
i have also just been less interested in spending time on the internet. but when i am on the internet, i am obsessed with this tumblr. i know! i never thought i would actually sincerely like a tumblr either! & of course sometimes there is annoying shit on here, mostly from college students who write in to say, “i have four papers to write & my dorm room looks like the city dump, but i am too lazy to do anything but lay on the couch working on ‘glee’ fan fiction. halp?” luckily, the blog maintainer’s response to everything is, “just do it. NOW. stop being lazy!”
this tumblr (which i found after a friend linked it on facebook) is not the first time i have ever heard of 20/10s (where you work on something for twenty minutes & reward yourself with ten minutes of dicking around, lather, rinse, repeat until you’re done). they pop up all the time in articles, books, & magazines about how to get shit done (tedious shit, like housework or other tasks a person may be inclined to avoid). but it was not until i found this tumblr that i decided to actually give the 20/10 method a spin & see if it did anything for me.
i wasn’t expecting much because i am already a pretty tidy, organized person. i keep color-coded daily, weekly, monthly, & yearly to-do lists, okay? i have a spring & a fall cleaning routine. i write down every penny i spend & what i spent it on, & then i make spreadsheets detailing my expenses so as to better fine-tune my budget. i have actually lived the monopoly dream of catching bank errors in my favor because i so obsessively balance my checkbook down to the penny & compare my records against my statements.
but i was delighted to find that 20/10s actually boosted my productivity & simultaneously lowered my anxiety levels! this method is fucking amazing. in the first week that i started employing it, i cleaned out my entire bedroom closet, including a bunch of random unpacked boxes jared had asked me to store in there from the last time we moved. (we are seriously like “the odd couple”. jared has an organizational system that works for him, but it says a lot that it is called “the random teetering piles of crap on every surface” system. our living room is bisected by french doors. i consider the westerly half mine & the easterly half jared’s. my half generally appears ready to be shot for a home decor magazine, save for the end table next to the couch, which is piled with jared’s crap. there are no words to describe jared’s half. it’s like a history archive & a bike shop collided & exploded in there. but he says that he knows where everything is, which is all that really counts.) i unpacked the boxes, threw out what needed to be thrown out, put away what needed to be put away, re-organized the bibs & bobs that remained in order to store sheets with sheets, curtain with curtains, pieces of halloween costumes with pieces of halloween costumes, etc. everything that could be put into long-term storage was put into long-term storage.
i cleaned out my dresser as well, ruthlessly casting aside items of clothing that don’t fit, don’t get worn, or are beyond repair. items in good condition that didn’t fit or that i now consider ugly went into bags for donation to a thrift shop. everything else was tossed. that left me with two completely empty dresser drawers, into which went special occasion shoes & art supplies.
i cleaned out my dresser too, throwing out tons of paper recycling, organizing my pile of unanswered mail, corralling bits & pieces of electronic equipment (i didn’t even know i had a memory stick! weird!), & consolidating more frequently used art supplies. i was left with two empty desk drawers, & i loaded my considerable collection of old journals & half-used notebooks into them. which opened up an entire small bookcase, so i unpacked the crates that had contained DVDs & zines. the bottom shelf was piled with library books that has been stacked on my desk.
& the vast majority of this was accomplished in twenty-minute bursts, followed by ten minutes of doing something mindless, like looking up otherkin-themed tumblrs & laughing at them. (apparently there’s a dude who thinks he’s a rocketship? WTF?)
maybe reading play-by-plays of how someone cleaned their house is not that exciting to the average person, but i love it! the new year is right around the corner (i’m sure i have mentioned before that new year’s day is my favorite holiday, just because i love fresh starts) & this feels like the perfect time to clean, tidy, organize, & start 2012 out properly. i am hoping to really be on the ball in 2012. but those resolutions are for another post. in the meantime, please enjoy this adorable photo of christmas kittens posing in the window of doodlebugs, the baby/maternity consignment shop in downtown lawrence:
when we last left addy, she was fleeing from slavery. this book picks up with addy & her mother arriving in philadelphia. they are met on the dock by mrs. moore & her daughter sarah, who are also escaped slaves who have been free for a while. sarah is just about addy’s age & promises to help addy adjust to philadelphia (which is understndably culture shock for addy, who spent her entire life living on a tobacco plantation & has never seen a city) & go to school. addy is very excited about the prospect of learning how to read & write.
somehow they all end up at a little sewing shop. i think the quakers had something to do with this. the woman who runs the sewing shop agrees to hire mrs. walker (addy’s mom) as a seamstress & allow the walkers to live in the garret apartment upstairs. mrs. walker agrees to let addy go to school.
addy is amazed that her teacher is a black woman because she never knew any black people back on the plantation that could read or write. sarah explains that there is a special school in philadelphia for black people who want to become teachers, & says that maybe when she & addy are old enough, they can go there together. but addy is concerned that she’s too old & that she will never become literate. sarah promises to help her & says that you’re never too old to learn something new.
addy notices another girl in class. her name is harriet & she is wearing a really fancy dress. addy asks sarah about harriet & sarah explains that harriet is the richest girl in class–& the snobbiest. she says that it’s not really worth addy’s time to try to get to know harriet because she doesn’t have time for any of the poor (ex-slave) girls. but addy is still very impressed by harriet’s perfect ringlets & expensive dress.
the next day, the teacher shuffles up the desk assignments & asks addy to sit next to harriet in the front row. harriet is one of the best students & she wants harriet to help addy catch up in lessons. addy is breathless over harriet’s dress. she herself has only one dress–a pink striped number given to her by the woman who helped addy & her mother escape from slavery. harriet is helpful with lessons, but she’s definitely a little snooty. she explains that her family has always been free (is that something to brag about?) & they have plenty of money. addy is in awe. she thinks that harriet has the life she thought she would have when she was free. & i just have to ask…really? because addy’s only exposure to people was the other slaves on the plantation & the master & his guests. did she really think freedom meant that she would just *poof* be rich? i don’t know. maybe she did, since the only free people she knew were also rich. but this is straining my credulity a little bit.
anyway, sarah is not wild about how addy is acting so impressed with harriet. but she keeps her word to help show addy around philadelphia. addy starts doing deliveries for the sewing shop her mother works at, & sarah tags along to help read & find the addresses. addy also starts teaching her mother how to read & write by forming letters with biscuit dough while cooking & spelling words. i wonder how grimy the dough got in the process. seems like it would aldo overwork the gluten, making for some pretty tough biscuits. but it’s a nice image, so let’s move on.
a spelling bee is coming up at school & harriet brags that she’s the best speller in class. she tells addy she is having friends over to study & kind of semi-invites addy to join them. addy is ecstatic, but worried about how to tell sarah that she’s walking home with harriet instead. this is all so awkward because harriet & sarah are both kind of forcing addy to choose between them & i always think that’s a dick move. addy should ditch ‘em both. but he chooses harriet because she is still in awe of harriet’s fancy wardrobe. “she must have ten or fifteen dresses!”
but when they start out on the walk home, harriet & all of her rich friends pile their books up in addy’s arms & make her carry everything. addy thinks to herself that all those books weigh just as much as the water bucket back on the plantation, but it’s worth it to hang out with harriet. &…really? she’s not having any slave-related PTSD flashbacks? harriet & her friends say that addy makes a great “flunky,” & then they take their books back & rescind the invite to study for the spelling bee. addy doesn’t get it & accepts harriet’s invitation to walk home the next day too. the same thing happens. addy finally realizes that harriet wants addy to “be her slave” (those are really the words the book uses), & addy won’t play that game.
whne she gets home that night, she finds that her mother has made her a beautiful new blue dress out of some scraps in the sewing shop, to wish addy good luck on the spelling bee. i have to say, these earlier american girl books really do a stellar job of weaving the outfits & accessories available for sale into the stories. & i’m not being sarcastic about that. this was addy’s school story, & the related items for sale included this blue outfit, addy’s school desk, her lunch pail (complete with pretend biscuits that spell out the word “love”), & her school supplies, which included a spelling book & an abacus. very cunning.
the next day at the bee, sarah fumbles in one of the early-ish rounds & misspells a word. addy is up next & has to spell that same word correctly to stay in the bee. she considers misspelling it on purpose in solidarity with sarah, but then she sees harriet smirking over sarah’s mistake & decides to try to show harriet up. it all comes down to just addy & harriet…& then harriet gets cocky & makes an asy mistake because she’s spelling too quickly. addy spells the word properly & wins the bee, she also apologizes to sarah for ditching her for harriet.
can i just say that this book was totally weird? maybe it’s difficult for me to imagine a little girl (harriet, in this case) being such a smug asshole about having never been a slave because from where i sit in 2011, slavery is a horrifying, shocking thing. this story takes place during the civil war, when slavery was still widespread. obviously many people found the institution abominable, but maybe it wasn’t this totally taboo thing like it is now? i don’t know. it’s just really difficult to imagine someone now crowing about not being descended from slaves, like that makes them better than someone who is descended from slaves. & the fact that harriet wants to treat addy like a slave…i get that the point of the book is that addy learns a lesson about sticking by the friends that accept you for who you are (like sarah) than chasing after the shiniest bauble on the block (harriet), but i feel that the book made me loathe harriet to the point that it was difficult for me to appreciate the actual story. this book originally came out about twenty years ago & is geared for children. i wonder if being an eight-year-old reading this book in 1993 would have made me feel differently. maybe moral lessons need to be painted in broad strokes like this so kids will get it? i don’t know.
so, it’s wintertime, it’s getting chilly outside, & that is perfect weather for staying at home, curled up on the couch, reading my way through big stacks of library books. recently i have become somewhat obsessed with reading american girl books, especially the canonical six-book series that accompanies each historical character.
american girl is a toy company that is now owned by mattel, but was originally started in the mid-80s by an entrepreneur named pleasant rowland. she wanted to create dolls that actually looked like little girls (as opposed to the omnipresent baby doll or a fashion doll representing an adult woman, like barbie). each doll would be a character based in a different historical era, with a series of six books telling the character’s story. each series started with a basic “meet so & so,” introducing the character & the unique historical circumstances of her time period, followed by a school story, a holiday story, a birthday story, a story about the character doing something dangerous & helpful, & a story that sets the character on a new, more grown-up path. various accessories were also available for each doll, corresponding to her stories. for example, you could buy a replica school desk that was historically accurate for the character’s era, or a dress that matched the dress she is depicted as wearing in her birthday story, or even tiny miniatures of the toys she plays with in her stories. it’s all very cunning: catnip for adult collectors & little girls alike, & a perpetual moneymaking machine. wish i’d thought of it first!
the first three characters were kirsten, a swedish pioneer girl growing up in 1854 in minnesota; samantha, a posh edwardian-era orphan being raised by her rich grandmother in 1904; & molly, a spunky girl with glasses growing up during world war 2 (her father is off treating wounded soldiers on the home front). allow me to add, molly’s father is not an attractive man:
though he was rocking harry potter glasses 50 years before his time. hipster dads strike again.
the fifth character introduced was addy walker. growing up in 1864, she was born into slavery & ran away to freedom in philadelphia with her mother after her older brother & father were sold to another slave master. she was the first historical character of color, & until this year, the only black historical. (cecile rey, a free person of color growing up in new orleans in 1853, was released this past summer.)
as children, my sister & i were OBSESSED with the american girl catalogue, which must have been mailed to every little girl who happened to be between the ages of 6 & 10 at any point between 1987 &…i don’t know, NOW, i guess. my sister loved samantha because her collection was full of frilly dresses & clever little accessory sets like a butterfly-catching set that comes with faux-butterflies, or a doll-sized watercolor set with real watercolors. my sister has always been a major girly-girl. let me just tell you that she has enough nail polish that it requires an organizational system & we’ll leave it at that. (i’m 32 & still bite my nails.) i liked kirsten & felicity, the redheaded colonial character who rises up against the british circa 1774 (she was released fourth). i’ve always had a soft spot for both the revolutionary war & the “little house on the prairie” books, so it was a tough choice for me. but the dolls cost something like $70 at the time, & each little dress or accessory set was at least $15 more, & it all just seemed like a money pit to my parents, who said no way.
which set the stage for an adulthood of being weirdly obsessed with these dolls that i was not allowed to have as a child.
i thought i had read addy’s books ten years ago when i started researching american girl again, but i guess i didn’t, because i checked them out of the library last week & read them over the weekend & HOLY SHIT. i knew on some level that she was an “escaped slave,” but her first book is all about the work she has to do on the plantation, her brother trying to run off & getting hunted down by dogs & hauled back to the plantation to be whipped, addy getting whipped for saying goodbye to his father while he is manacled on the ground after being sold to another slave owner…i mean, JESUS. there’s a scene where addy is helping serve lunch to her master, who is hosting a fellow slave owner. the other slave owner asks if addy’s master would be willing to sell her, & then he pets her head. if you are an adult who is aware that female slaves of all ages were routinely raped & sexually exploited by their masters, you will definitely pick up on those undertones in this scene. god only knows how it reads to a child. there’s another scene where addy is distracted while working in the fields because her brother & father have been sold. she misses a few worms that she was supposed to be picking off the tobacco plants & the overseer forces her to eat them. GODDAMN. i felt traumatized reading that, & i am four times older than the target demographic. when addy & her mother finally decide to run away, addy’s mother explains that they have to leave behind addy’s one-year-old sister esther. they have to run too far & too fast to make it to the safe house before being re-captured, & carrying a baby will only slow them down. plus she could cry at any time & give them away. i mean, it is beyond imagining.
i feel like most of the american girl books are heavier than i expect them to be when i am just looking at their plastic smiling doll faces & their cute little accessory sets, but addy’s really blew me away. i feel like most of her collection is quite fetching (especially the retired stuff), but really? no one at american girl stopped & had a moment where they were like, “hmmm…we have created an escaped slave doll…& now we are going to SELL HER.” it’s a bit tone-deaf, no?
