even during my high school years, i didn’t engage in many drag-out battles with my mom. i’m not much for confrontation to begin with, and both of my brothers led very dramatic lives (one unintentionally, through health problems, the other just by being a rebellious drama queen). i figured out early on that if nodded, smiled, did well in school, and came home on time, i could get away with quite a lot and avoid the entire need for a fight.*

but, you know, i am also a terribly stubborn person, from a family of terribly stubborn people, and so altercations were impossible to avoid entirely. there were the small, long-running battles: whether i would ever put on a slip without being argued into it first (no), whether she would ever let me have my hair the way i wanted (not for a long time), whether i could wear shorts to school (not until i wised up enough to start changing at school). but then there were the few, the proud, the blowouts. some of the more memorable below the jump.

incident: i neither return home immediately after school nor call my mom immediately to apprise her of a change of plans. during a rain storm. she completely flips her lid.

okay, this is how things worked when i was in high school: my cousin and i went to school together, and she had a car. so we would come home together, and i would call my mom to check in, and then do my homework/chores or go out somewhere. if we were going somewhere right from school, i had to tell her this in the morning or call her from the pay phone at school with an update. on this particular occasion, when we left school (during a perfectly normal late-winter storm, not a fucking hurricane or anything), my cousin informed me we needed to stop in and pick up her paycheck and then get some office supplies. we got home like half an hour late. when i called my mom, i got an earful about the weather and how no one had heard from us and blah blah blah terror! when she got home later, she laid into me even worse. i, of course, felt like she was blowing things way out of proportion and instead of just tolerating the lecture as i normally did,** i got quite snarky with her. in fact, i think i said something along the lines of “yes, there was a horrible crash and nobody bothered to call our parents. that’s a completely reasonable scenario!” my mother does not appreciate back talk of this nature.

winner: mom. i don’t think i got punished beyond the lecturing, but i’m also pretty sure i was religious about checking after that.

incident: my entire relationship with a high school boyfriend, m., culminating in a huge fight after we broke up. see, here’s the thing. my mother expressly forbid me to date before i turned 16. i thought this was ridiculous. i tried to talk it out with her, but she refused to budge. so i just lied about what i was doing. she suspected, but couldn’t prove anything. anyway, this particular relationship was my most serious and also my most troubled and dramatic. m. had issues, let’s say. there was the day i found out he was using meth again, and i was really stressed out about it, and my mom and i argued about why i wouldn’t tell her what i was moody about. but that was nothing compared to the day that m. and i broke up. she was out during my cry-a-thon, but my face hadn’t fully recovered when she got home. so then we spent 4 hours arguing about what i was upset about and why i wouldn’t tell her (“IT’S OBVIOUSLY NOT NOTHING, [SLIMLOVE]!”). this culminated in my shouting “IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!” this, you can imagine, did not go over well.

winner: me, incredibly. i never did tell her what i was upset about. this was one of my first lessons in simply brazening something out and hoping that whatever trouble you get into, it will be less than what you’d get for confessing the truth.

incident: i, for some reason, try to go goth. well, okay, i never owned enough black for that. but i did go through a phase of enjoying heavy black eyeliner. i emerged from the bathroom one friday evening with heavy eyeliner (drawn out past my eyelids in little curlicues; very dashing, i thought), ready to go out with my friends. she took one look at my face and promptly ordered me to go wash it off. i tried to insist that i was old enough to do as i wished and god, mom, it’s just some eyeliner what is your problem? she told me i looked like a raccoon, that black was far too harsh and heavy for my coloring (i still maintain that she was kind of missing the point there). we argued, she refused to let me leave the house like that, and finally i stomped off to the bathroom and washed my face.***

winner: mom, in the short term. after that (in fact, starting that evening), i would just get ready at a friend’s or do my makeup in the coffee shop bathroom. or even on the street corner, on occasion.

incident: where i would go to college/who i would live with when i got there. mom didn’t want me to go to berkeley, because my grandmother convinced her it’s in a bad neighborhood. then she didn’t want me to live in a co-ed dorm, an argument i found ridiculous considering i had grown up in a trailer with two brothers (mom: “it’s not the same thing!”). the answer to both of these was pretty much “too bad, that’s where i want to go and i’ll be 18 and you’re not paying for it.” i had never found poverty so freeing. by the time i was living in off-campus apartments (WITH BOYS) she had given up even trying to argue with me about my living arrangements.

winner: me, obviously.

incident: i (try to) go walking after dark. sigh. especially those first couple years of college, nothing made me act like a child more than being at home. suddenly i would be sneaking around, trying not to curse, hiding things. i felt like i was regressing. nothing proved this so much as the arguments about when i could and could not walk by myself. since i didn’t drive in those days, i had grown up walking around town, and my mom had always insisted that i never walk anywhere after dark. i usually abided by this, but if i couldn’t get a ride home, i’d just walk and lie to my mom about who had dropped me off. but my first christmas home from college, i had decided i was Too Mature for such behavior, that i was an adult and i would act like it. so i had to finish up some christmas shopping one night and i was going to just walk over to kmart. my mom and i got into a big argument about whether i could walk, by myself, to a store less than a mile away, at 7 p.m. she argued that it was a bad neighborhood and that it had changed since i’d been gone. (in 3 months? i don’t know.) i replied that i lived in a freaking city, and that i walked around after dark all the time.

winner: mom. it took us a few years to find the right adult/child balance. most of the time i was in college, she would drive me places after dark. it was kind of embarrassing, and i definitely saw it as an infringement on my adulthood, but at least i wasn’t going to bars in those days, so i was spared the humiliation of being dropped off at a bar by my mother.

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*one of my ex-boyfriends once told me that this propensity meant that i was not so much rebellious (i never maintained i was) as i was devious and sneaky. i don’t think he meant it as a compliment.

**my system involved staring at a point on my mother’s forehead and zoning out. it works surprisingly well, plus it irritated her: “stop giving me that look!”

***nothing says “sulky teenager” like stomping off, except maybe slamming a door. after the time i broke my bedroom door, i didn’t slam them anymore, though, so i had to content myself with stomping.

[Waylon Jennings] had the kind of upbringing that tends to breed either convicts or country legends.

I would argue that it’s not an either/or thing, but otherwise…

i’ll still post here, of course, but this will continue to be my “personal” blog, with no names but lots of whining and muppet videos.

which is weird, right? because i write all kinds of things. i write this here blog (with a blatant disregard for consistent capitalization, even). i write a regular column, and i’ve written a whole book, and my resume even has a whole section for “publications.” most people would probably call me a writer. so why don’t i?

growing up, i did actually want to be a writer. oh, the bad high school poetry. the failed attempt at a novel. i am cringing just thinking about these things (seriously: SO BAD). when i was a senior i joined the high school paper; once it was established that i could turn in a story that didn’t require vast amounts of copyediting, i was frequently tasked with editing the articles of younger reporters. so although i had a couple of articles to my name, i spent most of my time editing, writing headlines (badly), and assisting with layout.* this was fine with me: turns out that while i’m a solid writer, i’m a terrible journalist, since i don’t really enjoy randomly seeking people out and asking them questions. i agonized over every source i ever had to contact, even though it wasn’t exactly watergate and everyone was always perfectly nice to me.

by the time i finished high school, i realized that i was good at writing, in a technical sense: i could construct sentences and paragraphs and put all the punctuation in the right place. i could whip out a 3 page paper over lunch break, and i’d much rather write an essay than do anything involving math or science. but my writing had no soul. my attempts at fiction never really went anywhere; i could never figure out what i wanted to say or how to translate the images and emotions in my head into something concrete and readable on the page.

and then i went to college and wrote a history paper for the first time, and everything fell into place. this was a kind of writing that i could understand, that i could make happen for me. writing papers for my history classes, i could rely on those technical skills i possessed and use them to construct logical arguments, to support those arguments with evidence, to make sure the thread of the argument carried through the entire paper. i didn’t need to translate emotion and i sure as hell didn’t need to write dialog.

here, then, is when i stopped seeing any sort of future for myself as a writer. in my worldview, writers simply wrote, as an exercise in and of itself. but that’s not what i was doing. i was writing as a byproduct of research. i was writing to critique a book or to argue for my version of a historical moment. the history was important, the writing simply the vehicle by which i communicated my findings. and i carried this idea with me, buried at the back of my mind, through undergrad and grad school, through publications and blog posts.

the problem, of course, is that this split i’ve constructed is false. writing for a specific purpose doesn’t make me any less a writer than a novelist.** and i’ve come to realize that the major effect of this false split is that i have never considered my writing in a serious way. i’ve never worked at writing.*** i’ve never forced myself to sit down and really go over the words i’ve placed on the page, to think about structure and style, to consider how i want to develop the way i write. i’ve edited my own work, certainly. but i have rarely thought beyond “does this convey my desired message in a relatively clear and concise manner?” or beyond the structural technicalities of grammar and usage. when i read other people’s work, i frequently critique it (“good lord, what is with the adverb placement in this book?” “did no one copyedit this?”), but i rarely try to learn from the writing itself. i absorb facts, but not usage. even when i read something beautiful, or perfectly put, something that moves me, i note it and i wish that i could do it, but i never contemplate how i could make something similar work for me.

so as of today i’m going to resolve to stop shying away from being called a writer. this doesn’t just mean that i accept that writing isn’t just a lesser included part of being a historian (or so-called historian, as it were); it means that i accept that writing is a skill. writing is one of my skills. and like any other skill, it requires honing. i accept that i actually have to work at writing.

and maybe, one day, if i work very hard and am very, very lucky, i will learn how to write a conclusion that doesn’t suck.

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*i also once got into an argument with the journalism advisor – an English teacher, mind you – about the proper placement of a question mark in a headline that included a quote. an argument that i won, thank you very much.

**also, a novel seems like a fairly specific purpose to me.

***except in a certain grad school class, when i was basically forced to. and yes, i’m a better writer for it.

Now Betty White, who is enjoying a career resurgence late, is the only member of The Golden Girls cast still alive. Estelle Getty died in 2008 and Bea Arthur passed last year. These deaths seem harder than when most actors of celebrities pass away. Maybe it’s because the characters they played were close to the actresses’ personalities, that we feel like we were so close to them. Their infamous theme song wasn’t so much about the women’s relationship to each other, but thanking us for being their friends and sharing in their adventures.

For younger people who grew up watching the sitcom—or discovering it in syndication, where it still lives today—these were like our surrogate grandmothers. Funny ladies who were at turns gentile, kind, funny, and daffy. Ones that lived a full life of friendship, dating, multicolored caftans, and lots and lots of cheesecake. Yeah, it was a TV show, but thanks to the wonderful actresses who inhabited the roles, it always felt like the real thing.

i’ve already discussed my love of the golden girls. i was watching the show last night, actually, and thinking about how part of the reason i’m hesitant to get rid of my cable – even though it’s ridiculously expensive (ugh, seriously, how can television cost that much?) – is that i love knowing i can watch golden girls every night at 11 while i’m puttering around, getting my shit together for the next day. it’s a good way to end the day.

let me show you how i feel about this development:

okay, while i was looking for a good blanche clip i found this and now i’m trying to keep myself from crying at my desk:

we need to seriously ramp up the betty white comeback. she’s the only one we have left, and we need to treasure her while we can.

Like The Byrds did with Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, the brothers Ween recruited an all-star team of session musicians to give their smartass foray into country an authentic sheen on 12 Golden Country Greats (true to form, the album is only ten songs long; the album title refers to the session musicians). That’s the album’s most inspired joke: having country legends like Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Elvis’ longtime back-up singers The Jordanaires, and Buddy Harman dress up Ween’s puerile humor in a sparkling, rhinestone-studded Nudie suit.

i started listening to ween in college. their 1999 concert at the warfield was an epic event in my early adulthood. for a while there, T and i were both completely obsessed with 12 golden country greats. we listened to it in the morning before going off to class/work. we tried to convince everyone else we knew to listen to it. we could not understand why they could not see the humor in “piss up a rope,” which is so intentionally offensive it’s hysterically funny (i stand by that opinion, but your mileage may vary):

in recent years, ween has kind of stuck with the neo-prog rock sound they began with the mollusk (a brilliant album, incidentally). and while i still like their newer stuff and i find it, generally speaking, more listenable than godweensatan the oneness or the pod, it’s also not nearly as surprising or crazily awesome as the older albums. but then again, i guess that’s what happens when you stop huffing scotch guard.*

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and yeah, i know that scotch guard thing was a joke. but at the time, if you’re listening to the pod while under the influence, it seems not only plausible but eminently reasonable.

RIP Chris Haney, photojournalist and creator of Trivial Pursuit.