Distraction as a Disease

I’m lost. 

I flounder around every day in a muddle of “parenting”, “housekeeping”, reading, and distracting myself with electronics.  The first two are in quotes, because I don’t think I’m doing either one of them particularly well.  I used to be a pretty good parent, documenting all the semi-relevant occasions with photographs and taking the kids on diversionary field trips, but I have a really hard time caring any more.  It’s not that I don’t love my children; I do.  They are my life.  But I’m slacking on the job.  Probably because they would rather have me leave them alone most of the time.  (That is, of course, until the very second they need something, at which time I need to be immediately accessible.) 

I am the only one who cleans my house.  My roommates are pigs of the first order.  You wouldn’t know it just by walking in my house, because I wander around all day picking up the remains of the things they’ve left behind.  Half-empty water glasses are everywhere, laundry is in piles wherever they stripped off their clothes, dishes are piled by the sink (or washed in a half-assed way so that I have to wash them again), labels and wrappers and containers and set wherever they ran out of product to encase …

A good parent would kick their ass and make them pick all that stuff up, but … I don’t want to fight with them, and I feel like a naggy bitch when I have to tell them over and over and over to do simple things.   And I don’t want to take them places, because I’m the only one who pays, and they’re probably going to complain that it’s boring or too hot or whatever.  So what’s the point?

I read, which is great, but every five minutes or so, I set down my book and pick up my phone to play Words with Friends.  Sad.  How can I chew out my children for sticking their faces in a device (or two) when I tend to do the same thing?!  I have no husband around (and when he’s around … well, if you read the blog, you know he just pisses me off with his face) and no friends to speak of, so I distract myself constantly with bullshit. 

I don’t know if I’ve written about this before (and I’m too lazy to go back and find out), but two of my favorite movies are A Good Year and Under the Tuscan Sun.   (I am also partial to Sideways and Bottle Shock.)  What the first two have in common is beautiful scenery of European vineyards (the second two are Californian), beautiful people, beautiful accents, love, and wine.  I haven’t been in love for so long that I want to have this huge romantic adventure in a place with fabulously brown, foreign people.  I watch these movies and I place myself in the situation and daydream about the possibilities of uprooting myself in favor of sweeping coastlines and fragrant vines and celebratory harvests. 

The truth is that I’m too much of a coward to leave my life here.  BUT:  I truly envy people who live in a place where there are no distractions.  Places where television is sporadic, and maybe has three channels.  Places where WiFi zones aren’t every single place you are.  Places where children still romp around imaginatively rather than gathering in groups to stick their faces in screens and take pictures of stupid shit they happen to be doing.  Places with culture and flavor and ambience. 

I guess I’m being nostalgic or hyperbolic or something; I just long for things to be simpler.  I wish for days when my children weren’t so jaded about life based on the bullshit they see on tv and on the internet.   I wish that Ridiculousness wasn’t a show and that The Kardashian’s would go fuck themselves.  Privately.  I wish that Honey Shit-Face (or whatever that little fat girl’s name is) wasn’t a person who was celebrated by American society so that I could show my children that doing something with your life could be construed as valuable and contributive rather than just stupid and entertaining. 

In that, I guess I’ve failed.  Both for them and for me.  

American Tragedy

                                                                                                                                        

American Indian culture has always fascinated me.  I have a minor in Native American Studies, because once I started taking the college courses, I found all this incredibly rich subtlety in the culture and literature and traditions.  My favorite part was learning about Indians living TODAY, not all the shitty pilgrim stories.  Unfortunately, most people look at Indian culture as being past tense.  They don’t see it existing in 2013, only as footnotes in a history book.

But the one time Americans DO hear about Indians (as least in the mid-west) is a direct tie to liquor.  In a nutshell, settlers brought alcohol to the country, Indians got a hold of it, Americans didn’t like that (they want to keep their alcoholism all to themselves apparently), so Thomas Jefferson barred the sale of alcohol “under any pretense” in Indian country.  Even after the stupid and ineffective national prohibition of alcohol went away (because it didn’t work) in 1933, the federal government still banned it from reservations for another two decades. 

Some tribes have since decided to allow the sale of alcohol, but many do not.  One such staggering example is in Pine Ridge.  The sale of alcohol is banned on the reservation.   The sale of alcohol is NOT banned in Whiteclay, Nebraska, 200 feet from the reservation border.  The four stores in Whiteclay sell the equivalent of about four million cans of beer annually, mostly to residents of the reservation, since the population of Whiteclay is 14 at last official count.  66% of the Lakota people at Pine Ridge suffer from alcohol addiction. 

 

66%.  Holy shit.

Indians walk to Whiteclay and buy beer.  It’s pretty fucked up that the business owners in Whiteclay prey on a demographic so susceptible to alcoholism.  But this IS America, after all, and the economy is driven by supply and demand.  There is a demand for beer on the reservation.  Business owners supply it.  Nobody is forcing these people to walk down the highway to buy beer.  They do it willingly and often.  They are also not being forced to stay on the reservation if that life is not to their liking.  It’s not a concentration camp; they can walk away at any time.  OR…

The Indians could provide a support system for the people suffering from debilitating alcoholism.  When a Lakota tribal elder came to Lincoln, NE the other day to talk to the governor about the Whiteclay situation, he walked out almost immediately when it was suggested that the tribe take some responsibility and provide treatment programs.  That’s pretty ridiculous.  The U.S. government is not in the position to shut down stores just because some people make bad choices with what’s being sold there. 

I would think the Indians would know by now that Americans kind of suck in terms of caring about other people’s problems.  Every man for himself, and all that.  So maybe this is a test of the Lakota people – not as victims of a bloody war, like in the past – but rather as a step toward becoming independent and strong in the face of struggle.  To become the stereotypical “warrior”, defending their pride and strength as people. 

It may sound harsh, but these Indians need to sack up and run these stores out of business by NOT BUYING THEIR PRODUCT rather than holding protest signs and complaining to the Nebraska legislature.  Their ancestors certainly didn’t fight and die for a future that looks like Pine Ridge does right now.  

Abort Your Laws, First

Sex is cool, right?  Sex feels good.  Sex sells products.  Sex inspires people.  Sex is the social taboo, which is somehow also a cultural zeitgeist.   How can it be both?  How can rappers talk about skeeting all over bitches, (and that song is a party song), and skeet is radio-friendly, but bitches isn’t?  Really?  Are we all going to pretend that the radio DJs don’t know what those two words mean?!

Abrupt transition:  abortion.  I tell my students all the time that they can’t do persuasive speeches about abortion.  There are really a variety of reasons for this exclusion.  #1 is that they aren’t going to change anyone’s opinion in a 3-5 minute speech.  #2 is that I don’t want to listen to the incessant rambling of people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. 

I have never had an abortion.  I had two children prior to being married, a detail which is really no one’s business, but which is relevant to this argument.  I had wonderful parents who assisted in the child rearing, and my finances were fairly stable.  I am not every woman.  I am a woman.  One.  I do not, nor can I, speak for every woman.  For that reason alone, I am sick to death of this ignorant, irrelevant, vestigial, asinine, and ongoing legal argument about abortion. 

Are we STILL arguing about this?  How many people are in the world?  What number of people do the earth’s resources sustain?  How many countries allow rape as a legitimate recreational or penal activity?  How many men “accidentally” have growing fetuses in their innards?  How many unwanted, abused, neglected, malnourished children do we already have in the world?  Are we willing to support all of these unwanted children, financially, emotionally, and indefinitely?  Can we just stop this nonsense already and allow women the choice to evacuate a clump of cells (which, yes, of course, has the potential to become a child), if the women acknowledge that they neither want nor are willing to care for an impending child?  The very nature of these fucking ridiculous and prohibitive laws are an embarrassment to an enlightened culture.  

I have children, because I chose to have children.  As a mother (and a person of intellect and compassion and rationality), I would never impose my choice on someone else.  It was mine.  I will own it, and I will deal with the repercussions and responsibilities for the rest of my life.  We should expect nothing else from other people, than that they choose, they accept, and they act accordingly. 

If certain states make abortion prohibitive and illegal (again), it will result in the death of mothers, who already have a full and developed central nervous system, a family, and a life.  The difference between that woman and a clump of cells with potential is enormous.  As hyperbolic as it sounds, the slippery slope here allows for the banning of masturbation by men, simply because their sperm has the potential to become a life.  Potential is not actuality.

The ultimate irony is that the drum-thumpers of this procreative policy are Republican:   People who constantly run their mouths about how the government should stay out of the daily lives of its constituents!  Apparently, only in cases involving stealing large caches of money from people or leading them into a costly, deadly, endless series of wars.  The premeditated murder of war is seemingly okay, but preemptively eradicating a mass of cells is unthinkable.  What hypocrisy.  

Toxic

David Matthews asks in one of his songs, “do you remember when everyone wanted to be us?”  I remember.  We were far from perfect, but god, could we have a good time.  We partied like there was no tomorrow, all the time.  A rollicking good time.  For a while, at least.  At some point, years had passed, and my man decided it was still party time, but by then I was living in the world of grownups.  By the time he surfaced and took responsibility for his life, the rest of us had moved on to something different.  When your learning curve is too long, people stop waiting.  Somebody has to pay the bills and raise the kids and learn the everyday basics of home maintenance.  It’s called functioning.

And then when you wake up one day and decide to be responsible and adult (after you’ve already burned down the house, so to speak), the party is over.  You don’t get my sympathy, hanging out the 14^th floor (thank you, Radiohead).  Because you did it to yourself.  We all do.  We have to accept the product of our choices (since we made them), even when we don’t want to.  And due to all the personal baggage and compromises and bullshit we both create for ourselves and endure from others, we then accept the love we think we deserve (to pilfer from another better-than-me writer named Stephen Chbosky).  So I accepted this shitty, watered-down version of love and life, knowing all along that it wasn’t what I wanted.  More stealing?  Yes.  Albert Einstein this time:  “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”  Einstein knew what he was talking about there.

I changed because someone had to grow up and raise children and pay the mortgage and have a real job.  He wanted me to be the same crazy, happy, fearless girl I was at 21.  I truly believe that it is unhealthy NOT to change.  People are supposed to grow and change and amend and adjust their lives to fit the circumstances which surround them.  To not change is to stagnate.  Not changing also leads to pretending  – because whether you like it or not, life morphs around you. You can make-believe it’s not happening, or you can acknowledge and act accordingly.  To not acknowledge is toxic.  The very action of ignoring something shows your inability to deal with it appropriately, which in turn shows childish naiveté.

 tox-ic-i-ty (noun) 

1.        the degree to which something is poisonous

2.       the state of being poisonous to somebody or something

Our relationship became this thing.  Poisonous.  Venomous.  Don’t get me wrong; the venom took a very long time to work its way through the veins.  A long period of denial and compromising, which amounted to nothing in the long run.  Now, when I am around my husband of 15 years, I feel like I’m having a root canal.  I am anxious and angry and fucking annoyed (accidentally all A-words).  I asked him about five years to go away so that we could have time to regroup and get it together, and he refused,  I told him that we could maybe fix it if we could have some time apart, but he insisted that pretending everything was okay was the better route.  And now? 

in-ter-nec-ine (adjective)

1.       relating to or involving conflict within a group or organization

2.       damaging or injuring participant on both sides of a conflict

a.       mutually destructive

Now this word has happened. 

When your significant other tells you that they have thought about killing themselves to alleviate the mental angst, and your response is … “oh” … then the relationship has failed.  It’s dead.  Stick a fucking fork in it.  This is your own personal Waterloo (to steal from Andrew Bird, the best intellectually musical snob of all).  No one wins.  Guess who else loses (over and over and over)?  The kids.  As much as you pretend that shit is fine; everyone else knows it isn’t.  My niece said the following sentence to me the other day:  “You better not do anything – you know he lost his dad too.”  WTF?!  She is six.  When I asked her what she meant, she said, “I don’t know!” and skipped away.  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she’s only parroting something she heard her parents say at home, and my face probably reminded her of it. 

How lovely to know that other people are talking about your relationship as if they have any idea what’s going on.  How inappropriate to even have an opinion on something so personal that has nothing whatsoever to do with you.  And how ironic that your brother seems to have no opinion on the whole matter, since talking about things is completely out of the question.  Talking = bad feelings.  Conversation about reality = arguing.  (Apparently, in his particular family, that’s the order of things.)

It didn’t have to be this hard.  Sometimes, the only way to repair something is to release the stranglehold you have on it.  I used to think that we could be cool, divorced parents who get along, but every day we are trapped in this “No Exit”, Satrean hell, the anger and bitterness and animosity and anxiety blooms into a palpable wall.  His insistence on pretense has created such a deep division of priorities, that I don’t see how it can ever be fixed.  His approach to the problem backfired in such a profound way, that I can’t even stand to look at his face anymore.  He is making me physically ill. 

Mostly, I blame him (obviously, based on the ranting…), but I also blame society’s ridiculous insistence that marriage has to be forever.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, lasts forever.  Things might change and grow, but everything changes.  You can either go with it or drown in the riptide of the past.