#helen mutterings

[missivesfromtroy]

I am the person who looks at these posed reading aesthetic photos to see if the purported reader is reasonably enough individual pages into the book to be past the table of contents.

At least open it up to the middle, guys.

[missivesfromtroy]

Earlier this year, I was monitoring a visitation for my CASA kids and the eldest one wanted to read a book from the room’s bookshelf. They apparently had never seen any Star Wars movies, but that was the book they chose off the shelf since they were SUPER excited about space that day because the solar eclipse had just happened. So they were sounding out all these made up Star Wars words as best they could while their mother tried to listen without correcting too much and discouraging them.

There were many, many delightful reimaginings of the pronunciations (and seriously, kiddo was doing the best they could not having ever heard them aloud before), but my favorite was pronouncing “Jedi” as “jeddy.” Just, go around and read something - say, a movie review - back to yourself that way. Further points if you, as my kid was, are Southern and so “jeddy” sounds like the pronunciation of “jetty” and now you’re imagining that Star Wars is about Luke joining a mostly defunct order of magical piers.

[missivesfromtroy]

This Isn’t A Story About Carrie Fisher

This isn’t a story about Carrie Fisher.

I never met Carrie Fisher, never held a conversation with her, never got to shake her hand and thank her for decades of inspiring me to be braver than I felt and bolder than I was told I ought to be. So no, this isn’t a story about Carrie Fisher.

This is a story about Debbie Reynolds. And about me, the subject I know simultaneously the most and the least about. Mostly, it’s a story about stories and ripples and voices, both heard and unheard. If you’ll allow me, I’ll tell it to you.

When I was about four or five, I had two favorite actors: Jeremy Brett and Carrie Fisher. I loved plenty of characters and movies, but those were the actors I most adored. I expanded my list quickly enough, but Jeremy Brett and Carrie Fisher endured in a small clutch of most beloved people in my imagination.

I had a near miss of meeting Mr. Brett; my brother did meet him and obtained his autograph once when he came through on a press tour promoting PBS’ airing of his Sherlock Holmes series, but I was deemed too young for a school night press conference in Dallas and had to stay behind. I still remember my mother coming into our shared bedroom and telling us gently that he had passed away in his sleep. I carried that hurt around in my heart for a long time, worried at it and about his friends and family in the way of a child who doesn’t quite know how to wrap their arms around something so big as death.

So too did I treasure Carrie Fisher.

First, of course, as Princess Leia. And how could I not? Leia would have been nothing like the space princess we know and love without Carrie at the helm. Carrie’s Leia stood up to the galaxy’s most sinister villains — to their faces! — and told them to shove it. Carrie’s Leia withstood torture, shot a blaster with ease, shouldered the weight of incalculable loss, got her dress dirty having adventures, didn’t waste time on silly romances or batting her eyes, and was the sole face of a galactic rebellion for two thirds of STAR WARS. She was the rebel in that movie; the boys — her boys — were just trying to keep up. You can’t tell me that 99.99% of the version of Leia we got wasn’t down to who Carrie was herself and the choices she made for the character she read in that script. Truthfully, the only way to bring Leia back in Episode VII was as General of the Resistance, something which delighted me beyond measure. Leia Organa was never going to retire into quiet contemplation of the nature of the universe or become the little wife in Han’s shadow. No, she was going to keep fighting to her last breath for the dignity and rights of the inhabitants of the galaxy she swore to serve and protect. So you’re goddamn right I loved the Huttslayer from the moment my mother first introduced me to Star Wars. She was the first — and last — princess I encountered that I ever wanted to be.

My favorite part of BLUES BROTHERS was Carrie. The only part of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY I really liked was Carrie. I watched THE BURBS on Saturday mornings for Carrie, even if I didn’t get the plot at all as a kid. I was excited when she was one of the presenters for TCM movies, introducing classic films and sharing trivia about how they were made. I thought it was cool that Carrie was the daughter of Debbie Reynolds, who I loved in SINGING IN THE RAIN, as all people ought.

But I liked Carrie the interviewee too. I liked that Carrie wrote, and that the things she wrote did well. Carrie acted, Carrie wrote, Carrie took no shit from anyone. I wanted to act, I wanted to write, I wanted to strive into the future unapologetic but kind, witty but without malice. I admired Carrie and wanted to be like her, even as my mother wondered if it was prudent to let me like her so much, unaware as I was of Carrie’s personal problems.

Of course, I learned of Carrie’s struggles as I got older (just as I learned of Jeremy Brett’s). I learned because Carrie never shied away from confronting those things, never minced words about what it was like to live with mental illness, what it was like to live with addiction.

So that’s all great, you say, but I thought you said this was a story about Debbie Reynolds. Astutely observed, so I’ll get to the story.

Until I was sixteen, my mother was a television critic. TCA member, press tour twice a year, the whole nine yards. She worked for a company that syndicated her work to newspapers around the country, a features writer as well as — for a time — the head of her own department. When her company moved to upstate New York, we decided to stay in Texas, so mom started working from home and telecommuting with the New York office.

Because mom watched so much TV for work, for live action television we mostly watched Masterpiece Theater, Nick At Night, or classic movies. Prime time viewing was few and far between, and in truth I’ve never gotten much in the habit since, apart from the occasional season or things like The Daily Show. So I grew up watching a lot of classic films. And as a singer, I had a particular fondness for musicals for obvious reasons.

My mother took and recorded interviews over the phone often. Occasionally, we’d hear that she’d spoken to someone interesting, but mostly it was rote and we kept quiet and out of the way if we were in the house while she was taking a call.

But one afternoon when I was maybe eleven or twelve, my mom called up the stairs, saying someone was on the phone who wanted to talk to me.

That someone was Debbie Reynolds.

See, my mom had been interviewing her about a TV movie she’d been in and they’d wandered off the standard call and response questions a little. Ms. Reynolds was sharing about an upcoming road trip she was going to make and somehow, my mother mentioned in passing that she had a daughter who’d very much liked SINGING IN THE RAIN when we’d watched it together and who had taken to watching old musicals on her own because she had been singing since she was small and liked to learn the songs. And Debbie Reynolds asked that I be called to the phone so she could talk to me about old movies.

I won’t bore you with how shy I was once she introduced herself. She had me write down a list of five musicals she recommended I watch, with a special emphasis on GIGI. She asked me what my favorite musical was and when I asked about making SINGING IN THE RAIN, she said she had worked very hard and still remembered the words to the songs because she liked them just as much as I did. Silly questions and surely ones she’d heard before, but they mattered to me. And she was quite insistent about that list of movies I simply had to see if I liked musicals.

And then she told me, “I have a daughter who likes old movies too. We like to watch them together like you and your mom.”

I never mentioned Carrie to Ms. Reynolds. I knew that Carrie was her daughter, but my mom had trained us young not to be too fannish; everybody was just a person, she emphasized, some good and some bad, but still just people trying to live their lives. Besides, I was talking to Debbie Reynolds. I had plenty of questions and awe reserved just for her. 

She didn’t have to talk to me. I never would have known she was on the phone and my mother never would have presumed to ask. But that’s who she is. She’s the kind of person who decides to take ten minutes to talk old musicals with a twelve year old for fun.

And just as much as the list and the conversation and the encouragement, I held the comparison to Carrie close. It’s not a profound one. Thousands and thousands of people watch old movies. There are two whole cable channels built around the concept. But there was a kind of benevolent, sideways approval in the thought that Carrie and I both liked old films and we both watched them with our moms. Even writing it down, I don’t know why it meant so much to hear that, but I imagine it’s at least partially because approval for being myself was a bit scarce in those days. Also, I just really liked the idea that Carrie was a woman with a mom and that they did mom and daughter things like my mom and I did. She was a person you could talk to just like Ms. Reynolds was a person I was talking to, who’d taken the time to talk to me. There’s a power in that kind of female camaraderie, and in that moment it felt like a closed loop of understanding and inclusion in something big and bright and exciting. I felt like a real person because Debbie Reynolds decided I was worth talking to and I felt like an interesting person with interesting things to say because she told me she and her daughter had similar interests to mine. In some very unpleasant hours, I’ve held that little thread of connection close to me and drawn comfort from the goodness of another person’s ten minutes of kindness to a silly kid who liked to dance around her living room singing “Make ‘Em Laugh” and “Good Morning.”

Ten years later, when I was twenty-three, I worked at Borders for the holiday season and the book Wishful Drinking came out. At the time, I was in the hardest stretch of my thyroid and adrenal problems, had left an office job I wasn’t able to keep up with only to flounder when the 2008 financial crash brought grand schemes of self-employment into rude focus, and I was (unbeknownst to me) halfway through about eight years of intensifying and unrelenting depression and anxiety, which would spit me out around age twenty-seven having lost a lot of time with not much to show for it except for burned bridges, a pathetic bank balance, and a need to start all the way over.

The cover of Wishful Drinking — which I frequently adjusted in the “New Books” shelving to reach maximum visibility — gave me strength to get through my day. A little ironic since the cover is of Princess Leia passed out, loosely gripping a martini glass while her head rests amongst scattered pills, but I never said the way my brain makes connections makes sense. The contents of the book gave me strength to remember these beasts of the brain can be wrangled and that you shouldn’t allow yourself to be shamed by the road you take to wellness. (I still struggle with that and I imagine Carrie’s words on that score will keep helping me long into the future.) Carrie’s voice helped to give me a bright pinpoint of light to focus on when I couldn’t sleep (one night literally, when HBO was re-airing her Wishful Drinking special), when I couldn’t pierce the mental fog I was swamped in, when I wondered if laying down until it all went away forever was the answer to how lost I felt. And when I was ready to hear it, Carrie reminded me that there’s no such thing as wasted time, a ruined body, or laughter more powerful than your own.

You may be wanting to remind me that I said this wasn’t a story about Carrie Fisher. It wasn’t. It was a story about a small kindness and the ripple effect it had on my life, the protection it provided from being overwhelmed by my own mind, the way it finally circled back and coalesced into the inspiration to keep pushing through. It was a story about how much knowing people like Carrie Fisher were out there in the universe pushing back the darkness, being themselves, and rebelling against the status quo for the good of others meant to me. It was a story about seeing a version of a woman out there in the world that made sense to me as a kid, a kind of person I could imagine myself wanting to be.

I don’t pretend my grief is a fraction of that of Carrie’s family and friends, especially not her mother’s, the woman who was so kind to me and for whom Carrie Fisher was first and foremost her daughter. But Carrie, if you’re listening, know that you were loved and that your example meant the world to those of us who needed it. Know that we will keep trying to fight the good fight, and that we will appreciate what we had in you with unending thankfulness for having experienced it in any way at all. Enjoy the stars and I hope wherever you find yourself, you find laughter there that never ceases.

[missivesfromtroy]

Ten Things Update

In case the few of you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been away for a spell. This is because a confluence of RL stuff has kicked my ass the last two months, the most notable event being the death of my grandmother and the extra-gig scramble to put together the cash to go to her out-of-state funeral.

I’ve been watching movies and keeping rough drafts of Ten Things in the meantime and this last weekend I started cleaning up the drafts and back posting them on the appropriate dates. I’m only about 40% caught up, but I hope to be 100% by the beginning of next week. 

That said, Sunday morning’s shooting in Orlando took the wind a bit out of my sails the last two days and I worked on an essay instead. So, the rest will instead trickle up between work projects this week and I’ll make another update post when we’re back fully on track

For those who haven’t seen any of the new posts from this weekend, they’re all available here.

Posted last Tuesday through Saturday:

Love & Friendship

Lady In The Van

Inside Llewyn Davis

Elstree 1976

On the way:

Macbeth (2015) - because there is not a single version I will not watch

High-Rise

Captain America: Civil War - Spoiler Version

X-Men: Apocalypse

Tale of Tales

Coming later this month:

The Lobster

The Nice Guys

Hello, My Name is Doris

The Neon Demon (hopefully)

Finding Dory

The Shallows

[missivesfromtroy]

Dear Tumblr:

Please, please, please stop recommending blogs and blog posts to me that are for torrenting movies. While space piracy remains the dream, movie piracy is not my jam.

Exasperated but still somewhat fond,

Helen

[missivesfromtroy]

Gender & Social Currency On Campus

A couple of weeks ago, the question was asked in one of my alma mater’s closed communities whether any of us had found that the community of the place reinforced gender roles — specifically, male gender roles — in a toxic manner. The asker said her husband had denied pressure toward gender role conformity at the college, saying he had never experienced any influencing toward restrictive gender coding at the school, and we can assume by extension that he would similarly conclude that there is no general tendency in the college’s culture toward the types of behaviors and attitudes that fall under the label of toxic masculinity.

One of my friends from the old bad years knew I was mulling this question over in my mind as to how I might respond based on my own experiences. I am posting these my somewhat discombobulated findings for them.

Many of the women of the group said they found the husband’s response odd because they had found themselves more inclined toward “girly” things while attending the school as a sort of reprieve from the day-to-day culture of the place, while others merely pointed out that it’s a difficult thing to see something negative on first blush when it benefits and otherwise reaffirms your own place in life.

It’s hard to make an all-encompassing argument on this subject for two reasons: the school has two campuses with wildly different cultures, and some allowances must be made for when the asker and her husband went to the college. For instance, my parents are both alumni, and in my mother’s class of ‘79 — many of whom were Vietnam veterans — never to her knowledge did anything as alarming happen as what my own experiences have been.

She remembers some people privately dabbling with drugs behind closed doors and some people being known to pair off either romantically or sexually, but she never felt threatened by her classmates or particularly shunned for being a woman in class. If anything, she remembers that she was mostly struggling against an impression of her as overly quiet in class. As a matter of fact, one of her favorite stories is of a seminar in which the tutors split up the “loud-mouths” from the “quiet ones” for an evening to give the quieter group a chance to get a word in edgewise. When the “quiet ones” returned the next seminar, the louder group expressed absolute delight to see them because apparently being on their own was a bloodletting none of them had enjoyed without the quieter group to occasionally wade in and redirect.

She did share with me one story about a female classmate whose new husband and father of her expected child -- who was himself a year behind her in school -- felt he needed to tell her she would fail to pass her senior oral on the grounds that she wasn’t “analytical” enough. More detail and unpacking on that particular anecdote here.

Most of the handful of negative male interactions in her stories from college are in relation to my father, which doesn’t provide a good data point as he was only a member of her class for a year, having taking time off and jumped between campuses. Certainly, there are conclusions to be mined from things like him dumping her the day before graduation when he had an invitation to stay over at the home of another female classmate on his road trip back to Chicago for break, leaving my mother’s living arrangements — with her now ex-boyfriend’s mother on her ranch in rural NM — somewhat bleak and unappealing, but I’m not prepared to say that wasn’t just my father’s own foibles at play. No other story of being looked down on or subjected to harassment because she was a woman comes to my mother’s mind, though she has had occasion to despair of a few of her former classmates once or twice getting their mansplaining pants in a twist in her direction on Facebook, especially when she makes a wry joke that they don’t immediately get.

Too, I should say that my own January Freshman class of roughly two-dozen people was rarely so self-destructive or terrifying as I found the wider student body to be, and anyone who seemed to fit the mold of abuser or disrespectfully biased was either gone within weeks or had been grafted in from the regular freshmen to retake a class they were deemed to have failed in the main school year. Our JF class was a mixed bag of people who already had degrees and varied life experience, who were older and a little more worldly in ways that weren’t put on, kind of similar to my mother’s older male classmates who were pushing the end of their twenties and were at the school via the GI Bill.

Most of the student body now is young, straight out of high school or close enough. I won’t argue that the Program isn’t accessible to that age group, but I think it is worth acknowledging that the majority of people I’m talking about in the following anecdotes are white, middle class or upper-middle class, and under the age of twenty-five, with little to no work experience under their belt; not a broad mixture of ages or experiences, and certainly not of ethnicities. There were people attending who did so while shouldering hefty loans, or on the grace of government grants, and even the rare needs-based scholarship from the school itself, but I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t already know when I say that those students who worked and those who didn’t seemed to exist in separate universes with very different rules and expectations.

As for myself? I was seventeen when I went to the college in the spring semester of what would otherwise have been my senior year of high school. When I attended the school, it cost $30K+ a year and it showed in the population of its students. Since I left, the tuition has risen another $20K at least, so I rather bluntly assume the culture of the student population has not diversified overmuch in the intervening decade and that my observations are not entirely out of date.

I was seventeen and a few weeks settled into my triple (three-person dorm room; one middle room — my own — and two more rooms connecting to each side of the middle) when I first heard the term “asexual” in relation to human sexuality. It was being applied to myself and one other person -- a male, Asian classmate to double-down on the terribleness of the comment with a little light racism, I suppose -- by one of my two roommates at the time.

Two weeks earlier, that same roommate had told a guy from the main freshman class who was leaving the school and throwing a party in the Uppers student lounge to commemorate his departure (my January Freshman class would not share classes with any of the regular Freshman until the classes merged at the beginning of Sophomore year, creating something of a strange dynamic between the two groups that never really went away) that I was a “good Christian girl from Texas,” with an emphasis on “good” that meant “virginal.” I spent that whole night trying to avoid his overly-genial advances until he gave up on popping a promised cherry and found someone else to bang as a going away present to himself.

“Good Christian girl” went away fairly quickly when I demonstrated that I could handle my liquor, swear like a sailor, and was decidedly not of the cute and wide-eyed persuasion. My room mate no longer declared me a virgin to anyone who would listen, but that damage was done. The saving grace was that “asexual” also stuck around, nearly a decade before I really came to terms with the appropriateness of the label.

I’ve never had the nerve to ask what other names I managed to pick up behind my back while at the college. I know they must exist — every woman on campus was rather ruthlessly evaluated on a sliding scale of sexual attractiveness and availability — but given how far into my own head I crawled by the end of my sophomore year, it is unlikely any of them were generous in nature. After all, I already know what many of my far more more affable friends were called by the community: “ice queen,” “slut,” “sex kitten,” “used goods,” “townie trash,” “campus bicycle.” And those were the charming, pretty women with excellent heads on their shoulders and outgoing personalities. 

Meanwhile, I’d allied myself early on with a universally hated male classmate, refused all advances in increasingly standoffish manner, wore ill-fitting men’s clothing, was often informed that I looked “like death” (by men and women alike) because insomnia was eating me alive, couldn’t find community to save my life, had depression that interfered with my hygiene routine, and skulked about wearing headphones at all hours. To the men of the college, I was worse than unavailable: I was worthless even as an object of fantasy except for the very, very determined. For all that the term “asexual” wasn’t one I knew much about or identified with yet, my roommate’s unkind-but-not-mean assessment of my sexuality found me when I needed it to combat what seemed a deluge of aggressive and invasive male interest in the sexual availability of every woman on campus.

Guys I knew — guys with whom I was friendly, if not friends — offered themselves as convenient no-strings-attached fucks for “stress relief,” suggested that what I needed to relax was more bondage play in my life, negged me or tried to “nice guy” their way out of the “friend zone” (two loaded phrases I hadn’t much encountered in the early aughts, but certainly describe how those interactions went down) months after I turned them down the first time, often by forcing themselves into my time and space despite resistance on my end. My general prickliness and nearly non-existent presentation or embrace of womanliness at that time meant that even the worst of my experiences were as nothing to some of the ways the women around me were forced to navigate the college community.

My other freshman year roommate, for instance, had committed the dual crimes of being quite pretty and tremendously non-confrontational and obliging, to the point of letting people walk all over any boundaries she tried to establish. She was constantly being stalked by an assortment of men who would not take the existence of her boyfriend at home or her soft no-s for an answer on whether they had a chance with her. One was asked to leave the school to receive psychiatric treatment before returning when his obsession began to manifest as self-harm and threats of suicide. His last night on campus, early in my first few weeks at the school, he parked himself on her bed in her room and refused to leave for hours and hours. Another guy a few years ahead of us thought he had such a right to see her whenever he wanted that more than once, he woke me up at two or three in the morning demanding access through my room to hers. When she caught the flu one week, she asked me to lie about her whereabouts or forcibly repel her various self-styled suitors just so she could get some uninterrupted rest. For the mortal failings of her appearance and her fear of offending, my roommate was forced to be constantly available to gratify others with her time and attention, while also constantly in the position of rebuffing their persistent demands for physical intimacy they felt they had a right to.

Another friend was similarly and relentlessly pursued, and when she did try to set boundaries, was called vicious names by women and men alike, ostracized by some of the wider community, and earned an undeserved and repugnant reputation as a cock tease and “homewrecker,” to borrow the closest applicable term, despite her actually never dating or even seeking to date anyone at the school. One particularly delightful asshole wrote her a letter after she declined to date him which brought her to panicky tears, in which he made clear that his intelligence deserved to be rewarded by her sexual attractiveness, despite her own disinterest in him romantically and sexually. Another time, she recounted nearly needing to break a man’s wrist to get him to let go of her at a party at which he had propositioned her with no intention of being refused. The situation was only defused by another female acquaintance shaming him for holding on to her in such a manner. I still recall the discomfort of an encounter I had when I was staying in her off-campus bedroom before dorms opened again after winter break, when a male classmate and housemate of hers burst in unannounced after midnight because he thought she had returned from visiting home. Finding me instead, he left without another word of explanation or apology. The encounter unnerved both because he was clearly expecting to find her in bed and because I knew the two of them were not close.

A friend and brief boyfriend of one of my roommate’s felt sleeping with other women without discussing it with her was okay because he “slept with all of his [female] friends” as a means of expressing his connection to them and facilitating intimacy or some such absolute rot. He also liked to assert that you didn’t really know yourself until you’d tripped on hallucinogens, so his bullshit was a little more commonly agreed to be bullshit than most. [This particular character was one of many who routinely went to class unprepared and high, drunk, or both, proceeding to dominate discussions from that lofty perch, self-assured that he was clever enough to navigate the conversation without needing to either prepare or show up sober. My time working in the Treasurer’s Office gave me the further insight that he had secured an uncontested, full needs-based ride to the school.]

That aforementioned male friend of mine who was so widely disliked? He was run off from the school for the combined offenses of looking like a jock and for being tangentially involved in the sting that took down one of the campus’ most popular drug dealing students, who had been raising money for the big end-of-year bash the sophomores throw for seniors called Reality through her dealing. All the money was confiscated in the bust and the sophomores, who’d had no other plan for how to raise the cash, turned on him for having nodded — while high and being stopped by the police — when asked if he knew the girl in question. (To be clear, he was a dumbass for a lot of reasons, but the cops already knew who she was and he never gave a verbal reply. What community retributions followed for him were out of all bounds of proportion and reason.) He had to change rooms multiple times — finally buddying up with another of the school’s dealers and one of the school’s favorite people as a buffer between him and the rest of the community — after repeated ransackings, vandalizations, and the destruction of his personal property, including the complete loss and violation of a photo of his younger sister. He never gave out his room number or confirmed where he was staying from night to night. Finally, he allowed the sophomore class to pick their biggest and strongest guy to literally beat the crap out of him during the supposedly-tame boxing matches put on during Reality that spring, in hopes of finally burying the hatchet over the initial incident before leaving the school permanently, still reviled because he didn’t look or act like a philosopher king with his deliberate tan and his interest in body-building and then had gone and tripped his way into being a snitch. The rejection of him as a man on campus was total because he could not be redeemed from his perceived failings through the application of sexual currency, and was instead -- on top of everything else he represented as a not-acceptable man for the mold of the school -- in competition for the same pool of women the rest felt were in some sense theirs. 

On the bias of personal trauma — in that it occurred at one of the lowest points in my life, when it became evident that I would not be able to return to school for my junior year — what takes the cake for me was of being then subjected to a male acquaintance (not a close friend, certainly not a boyfriend, and someone I’d turned down nine months previously) getting himself high on mushrooms and then forcing his way into my dorm room to detail how we’d both take a year off together, live with his family in the Great Lakes region, get married, come back and finish school so that he could go on and get his law degree to start our lives together and thereby bounce back from this personal crisis of mine. The violation of his presumptions — which I was later assured he would never have shared had he been sober, so why was I being so unreasonably upset? — that my personal upheaval in needing to take time off from school was instead an opening for him to determine the course of the rest of my life in relation to him as a romantic and sexual partner is one that I still occasionally find sending a chill down my spine.

There were good, respectful men at my college. In fact, the best words of comfort about the end of my sophomore year came from a male classmate I’d tentatively gotten to know as a kindred spirit in our more ridiculous class discussions throughout the previous year. I’ve often wondered how to possibly thank him for taking the time and for being the sole voice in my life at that point counseling patience and calm, for essentially being the one who kept me from making very permanent mistakes out of desperation and despair at my own situation.

But there were also an awful lot of guys doing things like loudly counting down the days to the Olsen twins’ eighteenth birthday on the communal chalkboards alongside math props, and there never felt like there was any protection from or recourse attempted in the face of this pervasive, toxic masculinity in the college’s student culture, widely known as it was that no resident tutor or adviser was interested in the day-to-day goings on, that the administration couldn’t care less so long as nothing too publicly scandalous took place (the handling of the busted drug dealer was mostly hushed up in an agreement with the police), and that one should avoid the campus nurse/counselor at all costs (when there even was one). We were all feral children left to our own devices, and many of us found ourselves being eaten alive.

At the same time, we were also all meant to be learning from the greatest thinkers and philosophers in the Western canon. We were the “smartest school,” the “most challenging undergraduate program,” with the “most inquisitive minds” America had to offer. And yet, one of my roommates declared you couldn’t be a Johnnie without also being a druggie or an alcoholic. Great thinkers, it seemed mutually agreed, were tortured, violent, and fueled by the aggressive satiation of carnal desires. They were never “other,” unless “other” was a disengaged white man with enough cash and enough Hume in his pocket to buy a couple of forties and drink away the middle of a weekday with total self-satisfied conviction. We were whole classes of the cleverest minds from classrooms all over the country and even from across the world, and we talked about beauty and perfect forms and ideals and truth high and drunk and planning to as passionately tear each other apart emotionally and physically as we dispassionately tore into one another’s ideas in the classroom.

[What a joke, too. I know of at least one graduate from my class’ year who got through enablement without seeing the point of including a thesis in her papers. What rigor.]

Women who argued without apology were shrill and disliked. Women who argued with the men considered to be most desirable were turned on by other women. Women who didn’t bother to talk were considered dim witted and foolish, but no one could remember who had made what salient point moments before if that person happened to have been a woman. Women worked on dreadlocks, grew out body hair, didn’t wear makeup, slouched and sniffed and snorted, held off on bathing, talked openly about bodily functions, and raged and raged, but they were still evaluated by who would or could bang them. The only relief from the constant speculation and scrutiny was to pair off for an extended period of time or to promote such an image of sexual looseness that you were no longer as desirable because of your “used goods” status. Certainly never believe identifying as bisexual, lesbian, or trans will turn down the heat; then you’ll just end up in the pit of “hard-to-gets” like me, either scorned for being “worthless” on a campus where men vastly outnumbered the women or in need of convincing to come around. And anyway, many of the men preferred picking off the freshman girls to women from their own classes, forming skeevy and deliberately unbalanced relationships with those who literally did not yet have the reading under their belts to argue with them.

I only attended freshman and sophomore years of college, by a combination of medical, financial, and scholastic ill winds. Perhaps once you hit junior and senior year, these things abated. Perhaps I just had a particularly terrifying class, although it is worth mentioning that the incoming freshman classes after my own were compelled to take an Alcohol Awareness and Safety course, which still didn’t keep them from doing things like lobbing empty bottles off my sophomore year dorm’s balconies at passersby.

I don’t know when the asker’s husband graduated, but I can say that while I’ve met some real shitheads in every institution I’ve ever been involved with, nowhere in my life has it seemed more precarious to be a woman or an “other” than at my alma mater in the early aughts.

Were toxic gender roles reinforced at the school? I never could find that there was anything non-toxic about the relation of the genders to one another on campus, but I never found a place I felt like I could breathe in the community either. Maybe there were places and people I never knew about. Certainly there must have been. But I was “other” without even trying, merely because I didn’t dress or present myself to please anyone with my femininity and because I was not interested in using sexual overtures as a social lubricant. And what I found as a woman on campus was that rejection of womanliness and rejection of sexual advances made for isolation from the student population at large, even within the classroom where ideas were supposedly weighed on their own merit and not on biased perceptions of the individuals engaged in the conversation. And if that isn’t indicative of a wider toxicity and reinforcement of strict gender roles in the culture of the college, then I’m gonna need somebody to start defining their terms.

[missivesfromtroy]

Favorite overheard parenting of the day: “Aw, honey, no. We don’t lick the glass. Your auntie is never going to let us come back.”

[missivesfromtroy]

No Winning

In a recent interview, the interviewer noticed that I used the long explanation of the St. John’s degree -- y’know, the “double major in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Science, double minor in Comparative Literature and Classical Studies” one? -- because just saying Liberal Arts is pretty toxic for the most part anymore.

Her response to reading the long explanation was: “Oh, does this mean you had a hard time deciding what you wanted to do?”