here is sweetheart #4, put out in May 1994. Enjoy. xox princess robin
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
December
No matter what, it seems, the holidays are cataclysmic. people are usually surprised when i say that December is my favorite month, but what i love about it is that it's so different, i can expect to drive down the street and see decorations, and when i was in school, it felt like you could sort of just screw around the whole month, and frankly that's how it's felt at my millions of jobs i've held by now, too, like everyone was taking work less seriously and being distracted by decorations and whatnot. in a way, i even like the depression factor of the holidays, because it's almost like sad people are understood when they get particularly agitated by their loneliness in December -- there are special resources, it seems, for depression, in december. but it's also so much pretending for me, and that gets tiring sometimes. there's a famous (famous to me, at least) craft store in Pasadena, where i spent my formative years, called Stats. they have a whole huge room that displays their pre-decorated xmas trees for sale -- basically, an amazing room packed full of little lights. when i was a kid i would stand there and pretend that was where i was going to stay forever and that there was no reality outside of that room. when i went there the other day and did the same thing it felt sad because i was too aware that i couldn't stay frozen in that moment. geez, this is getting sappy.
anyway, i more wanted to make this a forum for people to share what december makes them feel.
oh, and i have to make very clear that i am in no way religious, and if i were to be religious i would be jewish not christian (but i don't believe in organized religion at all, i'm just interested in jewish culture, like the jewish involvement in the civil rights movement, the jewish religion's focus on books and reading, woody allen movies, yiddish, etc.). i think you all know how i feel about christianity -- annoyed beyond belief. my interest and emotional turmoil over the christmas season has to do with childhood, sentimentality and all that jazz. anyway, what do you guys think of december?
anyway, i more wanted to make this a forum for people to share what december makes them feel.
oh, and i have to make very clear that i am in no way religious, and if i were to be religious i would be jewish not christian (but i don't believe in organized religion at all, i'm just interested in jewish culture, like the jewish involvement in the civil rights movement, the jewish religion's focus on books and reading, woody allen movies, yiddish, etc.). i think you all know how i feel about christianity -- annoyed beyond belief. my interest and emotional turmoil over the christmas season has to do with childhood, sentimentality and all that jazz. anyway, what do you guys think of december?
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Sweetheart #3
hello again. i'm putting up some pages from Sweetheart #3 today, put out in November 1993, when i was 14 or so. this one has an interview w/ the lead singer from Bratmobile in it, and lots of misspellings and drama i am sure. you can make the image bigger by clicking on it, by the way.
xox robin
Monday, November 2, 2009
yesteryou
last night at a show i ended up speaking with an acquaintance who'd hear of my friend Bill Tunilla, and had even worked with him for awhile. Bill was my mom's best friend my entire life, helping her to function and protecting me from having too much to bear, as far as taking care of her. he was also one of the best people ever, with the type of shitty like that truly kind people end up coming up with, especially with a pretty cut-throat version of capitalism in place the way it is. he owned a used bookstore for years, because he loved books, and wanted people to be able to read books. he would give a book away to a homeless or crazy person if they got their heart set on it. me and mom were really his family. he did so much for me. he died of renal cancer in the bedroom of mom's apartment, this past June, penniless and truly tired of being so sick. he was well known in the used book world, dare i say a bit legendary (for his kindness, and maybe his sloppiness and love of baseball and cats too) and the acquaintance i was talking to knew him through the used bookstore world.
I started using Bill as a character in my fiction a lot more than previously once i found out he had cancer, which didn't kill him for a few years. usually i'd call him George. "When We Meet in Heaven," a story posted earlier, is inspired by him in a roundabout way. I wrote the first draft of my novel about him at lightning speed, because i was really inspired to honor him once he died -- he died, then a day later i got this shitty job that was very depressing to be at, and so on my breaks and at lunch and, admittedly, during downtime, i scribbled away at a draft, and i didn't realize how rough it was until i gave it to geof to read. i have been lazy about reworking it, though. it needs a major overhaul, and i've just been truly uninspired. so this shit could end up taking years to have a true "the end."
i dream about him every night, almost. in my dreams, we are hanging out, and then i say something like, "you are really dead, aren't you? this is just a dream." and he invariably cops to it, admits it to me with pity in his voice that yes, in real life he's dead.
i just felt like posting chapter one of the novel in progress today.
xo robin
1.
Imagine the sun beating down on you, on a day in the year in which you feel the most youthful you will ever feel. There is a breeze. You extend your bent arms out a little further along the arms of the porch rocking chair so you can feel the jewels of sweat that have been forming slow as a drugged breath along the curves of the caves of your armpits, every inch of you radiating unshakable confidence, for once. It is 1956, George. Shhh. You are not dead yet, you are still alive and I am still just the ephemeral glow surrounding fireflies or the particles of dust that drift visible across shafts of sunlight through the curtains on a Sunday afternoon, I am not yet born. This is one of your birthdays. This is the day on which you feel your absolute youngest. Does it feel good? Yes, of course, but not too much better than later birthdays on which you will feel old. No better, really, than being 45, when it is painful to walk but you are gifted with love.
George was born in 1943. He was 25 when "Yesteryou," a song sung by Stevie Wonder, was out and being played on radios. This was his all-time favorite song -- for the most part he didn't notice music, though he was often mistaken for a music-lover. But he loved the way this song captured the melancholic, sunsetty feeling of nostalgia. There's a part where the lyrics ask: "Where did it go, that yester glow? When we could feel the wheel of life turn our way?" When someone asks a question like that, it sounds like they are scared, of the way time moves and the way it feels to get older, and this was the anxious way George felt about the passing of time as well, the pure inevitability of time. But he also appreciated the song for itself, for the way it sounded. Like I say, there's something of the sun in that song. The beauty of it agitated him, even, made him ache for an omnipotent knowledge of how other people felt about the passing of days.
When he was a child, he and his family moved from a mostly black suburb of Connecticut to a mostly black suburb of Los Angeles, called Inglewood. He would remain in Inglewood several years into his adult life, before settling in a different sort of Los Angeles suburb, a place called Pasadena, where he would eventually open a used bookstore that would be like heaven to spend his afternoons in, friends and customers drifting in and out all day long, and only one robbery in all the years the store was there.
On this one birthday of his childhood, the day he feels the youngest he will ever feel, he has a broad, bespectacled, homely face, and he always will.
Beth, on the other hand, was born sleek and slender and night-visioned and falsely inviolable-seeming as a young tomcat. That might have been the most power Beth ever had, sadly -- when she was a beautiful baby girl.
I started using Bill as a character in my fiction a lot more than previously once i found out he had cancer, which didn't kill him for a few years. usually i'd call him George. "When We Meet in Heaven," a story posted earlier, is inspired by him in a roundabout way. I wrote the first draft of my novel about him at lightning speed, because i was really inspired to honor him once he died -- he died, then a day later i got this shitty job that was very depressing to be at, and so on my breaks and at lunch and, admittedly, during downtime, i scribbled away at a draft, and i didn't realize how rough it was until i gave it to geof to read. i have been lazy about reworking it, though. it needs a major overhaul, and i've just been truly uninspired. so this shit could end up taking years to have a true "the end."
i dream about him every night, almost. in my dreams, we are hanging out, and then i say something like, "you are really dead, aren't you? this is just a dream." and he invariably cops to it, admits it to me with pity in his voice that yes, in real life he's dead.
i just felt like posting chapter one of the novel in progress today.
xo robin
1.
Imagine the sun beating down on you, on a day in the year in which you feel the most youthful you will ever feel. There is a breeze. You extend your bent arms out a little further along the arms of the porch rocking chair so you can feel the jewels of sweat that have been forming slow as a drugged breath along the curves of the caves of your armpits, every inch of you radiating unshakable confidence, for once. It is 1956, George. Shhh. You are not dead yet, you are still alive and I am still just the ephemeral glow surrounding fireflies or the particles of dust that drift visible across shafts of sunlight through the curtains on a Sunday afternoon, I am not yet born. This is one of your birthdays. This is the day on which you feel your absolute youngest. Does it feel good? Yes, of course, but not too much better than later birthdays on which you will feel old. No better, really, than being 45, when it is painful to walk but you are gifted with love.
George was born in 1943. He was 25 when "Yesteryou," a song sung by Stevie Wonder, was out and being played on radios. This was his all-time favorite song -- for the most part he didn't notice music, though he was often mistaken for a music-lover. But he loved the way this song captured the melancholic, sunsetty feeling of nostalgia. There's a part where the lyrics ask: "Where did it go, that yester glow? When we could feel the wheel of life turn our way?" When someone asks a question like that, it sounds like they are scared, of the way time moves and the way it feels to get older, and this was the anxious way George felt about the passing of time as well, the pure inevitability of time. But he also appreciated the song for itself, for the way it sounded. Like I say, there's something of the sun in that song. The beauty of it agitated him, even, made him ache for an omnipotent knowledge of how other people felt about the passing of days.
When he was a child, he and his family moved from a mostly black suburb of Connecticut to a mostly black suburb of Los Angeles, called Inglewood. He would remain in Inglewood several years into his adult life, before settling in a different sort of Los Angeles suburb, a place called Pasadena, where he would eventually open a used bookstore that would be like heaven to spend his afternoons in, friends and customers drifting in and out all day long, and only one robbery in all the years the store was there.
On this one birthday of his childhood, the day he feels the youngest he will ever feel, he has a broad, bespectacled, homely face, and he always will.
Beth, on the other hand, was born sleek and slender and night-visioned and falsely inviolable-seeming as a young tomcat. That might have been the most power Beth ever had, sadly -- when she was a beautiful baby girl.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Lunch Time
here's a piece of fiction i wrote a few years ago that never got published.
xoxo robin
Lunch-Time
By Robin Crane
Later, for at least a couple years after the surgery, I felt so bitter. And despite the gang of neighborhood cats that often followed behind me on my daily strolls as though I were their giantess captain, and other bizarre examples of enchantment, all I could do was obsess about swallowing poison, or being fucked by so many men I would eventually turn into a doll, and be left in peace in the warmth of a child’s bed, finally safe. All these damning thoughts came after they performed the operation on my heart, but before the operation, it was the fear of dying on the operating table that obsessed me.
“Maggie, do you want to go home, or take some extra time for lunch?” my boss asked me. He was standing at the opening in my cubicle, gazing kindly at me, in all probability trying to telegraph the thought: “You Should Believe in God.” It was the day before my heart surgery.
I did take extra time for lunch, walking down the block to a bus bench where two nine or ten year old Hispanic girls in school uniforms were sitting, and I sat down on the bench as well. I have a childish mind, and envied the children for having the companionship of one another, while I believe that a normal adult wouldn’t even have noticed them, or would have noticed them but only to wonder what two children were doing outside of a classroom unsupervised on a Tuesday afternoon. I was trying to make myself think like a grown-up and to stop feeling that I would rather die tomorrow, after all, than to not be able to go back to when I was nine or ten, and relive all these years, this time not wrecking everything on purpose. But I couldn‘t stop the way I was thinking, it’s just how I am. I am me. Maggie Sheppard. Twenty seven. Overeager, fragile, twice-suicidal white middle class me. Me. It was hurting to breathe. My lungs were aching. It was hurting for my heart to beat. I leaned back on the bus bench and watched the girls in their brandnewness and amazement at the world.
The taller girl’s family lived on a hilly street, in a shaded white house with aqua-painted steps leading up to the porch and a cage of canaries hanging near one of the pillars, a house which belongs in a nostalgic dream. Or else the two girls were sisters, and they lived in a large brick apartment building near downtown. All the women in their family had hair that fell past their shoulder blades, in pony tails or wispy brunette streamers. White women would see the two girls walking back from a nearby convenience store where the girls had spent forever just deciding what pieces of candy to buy, and the long hair would seem to these women something extraneous or religious, like a nun’s wimple.
At this moment, while the girls sat and waited for the bus, one of their mothers was trying to take a nap, and was watching the gauzy pink curtains dance drunk on their own weightlessness in the breeze from the open bedroom window; she thought for a moment that everywhere in this city, on second floors of different apartment buildings, curtains were doing this same dance and strangers were distractedly watching it all. The mother kept an ironic smirk on her mouth but her eyes were kinder and seemed to be saying, “It’s all a sort of wry joke. I do not really hate anybody- I am only disappointed with my life.” And at this moment, one of the girls’ younger brothers was playing with a plastic giraffe in a day care center. One of their fathers was having lunch with his oldest friend at work, he was tasting the wet taste of tomatoes soaked through the bread of his sandwich. A cloud drifted across the sun and blocked out the light. He stopped squinting for a moment.
Then, there is my own life. During the time I was sitting at the bus bench, my boyfriend had a break between classes at the community college, and had come home to our apartment, to eat his lunch. He was sitting with his food at our computer, thinking about a girl in his Life Drawing class who he was falling in love with. After a few minutes of this, he wrote her a love letter:
Michelle,
You are Wonder Woman, Joan Didion, Aphrodite, Peter Pan, a rhododendron and The Supremes, all rolled into one. You are magnificent.
This is the letter I found saved as a file on our computer a few weeks after I was released from the hospital, my bony chest now accented with a bumpy, pink vertical line of scar tissue; before packing my things or mourning the end of love, the resentful thought I had was that he had plagiarized my irreverence and my style of writing letters that were lists.
Also, while I sat at the bench, with the two girls sitting next to me, my father sat in his office, gazing at the Bank of America skyscraper he saw in the distance and thinking dotingly of my stepmother. The phone rang and he thought it might be me who was calling. My mother sat in her apartment with a cat on her lap, seeing but not really watching the news on TV. My closest friend was on a break from her job at the mall and was standing in line for a coffee. My grandparents were three hours later in their day, on Eastern time. My first boyfriend from college was shooting up heroin in an alley, thinking of nothing, just feeling anticipation. My sister was sitting in a library in Portland, taking a break from reading, doodling a rose in the margins of her notebook. My mother turned the TV volume down and went to stand at the window, where she could see all the bunches of little flowers another tenant had planted in a strip of dirt that used to be ignored and unadorned. This is love.
The girls caught their bus, and I sat at the bus stop for a long while, feeling uncomfortable to be out in the open like that with drivers and passengers absentmindedly staring at me, but unwilling to get up and walk back to work.
I didn’t die from the heart surgery. I lived, and still looked like a healthy, leggy twenty-something year old to the naked eye. But under my blouses, I was a plowed stretch of land, and it didn’t feel good. I went a little crazy. I was hospitalized at a sort of famous mental health and rehab place; you may have heard of it. One day, it was a Friday afternoon, we were having our weekly Friday music group therapy session, and a shaky, weepy older woman brought in a Led Zeppelin cd. She played this one slow Zep song I’ve always liked. The facilitating therapist turned off the lights, us nine crazies closed our eyes and practiced our deep breathing like we were supposed to, and then, like some weird magic, we all began to sob, all at once and for a long time. I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason, life has just seemed better and easier since then.
xoxo robin
Lunch-Time
By Robin Crane
Later, for at least a couple years after the surgery, I felt so bitter. And despite the gang of neighborhood cats that often followed behind me on my daily strolls as though I were their giantess captain, and other bizarre examples of enchantment, all I could do was obsess about swallowing poison, or being fucked by so many men I would eventually turn into a doll, and be left in peace in the warmth of a child’s bed, finally safe. All these damning thoughts came after they performed the operation on my heart, but before the operation, it was the fear of dying on the operating table that obsessed me.
“Maggie, do you want to go home, or take some extra time for lunch?” my boss asked me. He was standing at the opening in my cubicle, gazing kindly at me, in all probability trying to telegraph the thought: “You Should Believe in God.” It was the day before my heart surgery.
I did take extra time for lunch, walking down the block to a bus bench where two nine or ten year old Hispanic girls in school uniforms were sitting, and I sat down on the bench as well. I have a childish mind, and envied the children for having the companionship of one another, while I believe that a normal adult wouldn’t even have noticed them, or would have noticed them but only to wonder what two children were doing outside of a classroom unsupervised on a Tuesday afternoon. I was trying to make myself think like a grown-up and to stop feeling that I would rather die tomorrow, after all, than to not be able to go back to when I was nine or ten, and relive all these years, this time not wrecking everything on purpose. But I couldn‘t stop the way I was thinking, it’s just how I am. I am me. Maggie Sheppard. Twenty seven. Overeager, fragile, twice-suicidal white middle class me. Me. It was hurting to breathe. My lungs were aching. It was hurting for my heart to beat. I leaned back on the bus bench and watched the girls in their brandnewness and amazement at the world.
The taller girl’s family lived on a hilly street, in a shaded white house with aqua-painted steps leading up to the porch and a cage of canaries hanging near one of the pillars, a house which belongs in a nostalgic dream. Or else the two girls were sisters, and they lived in a large brick apartment building near downtown. All the women in their family had hair that fell past their shoulder blades, in pony tails or wispy brunette streamers. White women would see the two girls walking back from a nearby convenience store where the girls had spent forever just deciding what pieces of candy to buy, and the long hair would seem to these women something extraneous or religious, like a nun’s wimple.
At this moment, while the girls sat and waited for the bus, one of their mothers was trying to take a nap, and was watching the gauzy pink curtains dance drunk on their own weightlessness in the breeze from the open bedroom window; she thought for a moment that everywhere in this city, on second floors of different apartment buildings, curtains were doing this same dance and strangers were distractedly watching it all. The mother kept an ironic smirk on her mouth but her eyes were kinder and seemed to be saying, “It’s all a sort of wry joke. I do not really hate anybody- I am only disappointed with my life.” And at this moment, one of the girls’ younger brothers was playing with a plastic giraffe in a day care center. One of their fathers was having lunch with his oldest friend at work, he was tasting the wet taste of tomatoes soaked through the bread of his sandwich. A cloud drifted across the sun and blocked out the light. He stopped squinting for a moment.
Then, there is my own life. During the time I was sitting at the bus bench, my boyfriend had a break between classes at the community college, and had come home to our apartment, to eat his lunch. He was sitting with his food at our computer, thinking about a girl in his Life Drawing class who he was falling in love with. After a few minutes of this, he wrote her a love letter:
Michelle,
You are Wonder Woman, Joan Didion, Aphrodite, Peter Pan, a rhododendron and The Supremes, all rolled into one. You are magnificent.
This is the letter I found saved as a file on our computer a few weeks after I was released from the hospital, my bony chest now accented with a bumpy, pink vertical line of scar tissue; before packing my things or mourning the end of love, the resentful thought I had was that he had plagiarized my irreverence and my style of writing letters that were lists.
Also, while I sat at the bench, with the two girls sitting next to me, my father sat in his office, gazing at the Bank of America skyscraper he saw in the distance and thinking dotingly of my stepmother. The phone rang and he thought it might be me who was calling. My mother sat in her apartment with a cat on her lap, seeing but not really watching the news on TV. My closest friend was on a break from her job at the mall and was standing in line for a coffee. My grandparents were three hours later in their day, on Eastern time. My first boyfriend from college was shooting up heroin in an alley, thinking of nothing, just feeling anticipation. My sister was sitting in a library in Portland, taking a break from reading, doodling a rose in the margins of her notebook. My mother turned the TV volume down and went to stand at the window, where she could see all the bunches of little flowers another tenant had planted in a strip of dirt that used to be ignored and unadorned. This is love.
The girls caught their bus, and I sat at the bus stop for a long while, feeling uncomfortable to be out in the open like that with drivers and passengers absentmindedly staring at me, but unwilling to get up and walk back to work.
I didn’t die from the heart surgery. I lived, and still looked like a healthy, leggy twenty-something year old to the naked eye. But under my blouses, I was a plowed stretch of land, and it didn’t feel good. I went a little crazy. I was hospitalized at a sort of famous mental health and rehab place; you may have heard of it. One day, it was a Friday afternoon, we were having our weekly Friday music group therapy session, and a shaky, weepy older woman brought in a Led Zeppelin cd. She played this one slow Zep song I’ve always liked. The facilitating therapist turned off the lights, us nine crazies closed our eyes and practiced our deep breathing like we were supposed to, and then, like some weird magic, we all began to sob, all at once and for a long time. I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason, life has just seemed better and easier since then.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
a story about a facebook fight
So, the thing that's kind of annoying about people's status posts on Facebook is that they are so often elusive/coy/vague. i'm guilty of it myself. i'll write something like "the movie made me puke and now i'm in jail" or something like that, leaving everyone to be all, "What happened? what movie? can i post bail?"
recently i have been particularly active, and maybe annoyingly so, on my facebook posts because i got my feeling really hurt on facebook and it just really devastated me. I feel the need to share some of what happened. i will try to keep names out of it.
it all started with a thread (that is when someone includes a whole bunch of people in a message, so that everyone included can respond) that someone I'd always tried to be a good friend to sent out, inviting people to an event. when people said they couldn't come, she responded with something like "you guys are retards."
I have deleted a lot of the exchange and can't get it back, but i'm going to include the parts of the thread that i was able to retrieve from my email account's "sent" box, etc. I will use made up names for people.
joe
"hey maybe you are the retard for not thinking of us retards sooner!"
jimmy
"ya retard"
joe
"ok, ur mentally challenged! there is the obama version of retard better?"
i asked, "what is the obama version of "retarded" supposed to be?"
I'd also asked, either before or after asking what this obama comment was supposed to mean, if people could stop using the word retard as an insult. i said it so nicely, like 'hey, i know you guys are just having fun but can you use another word? it really hurts my feelings to hear retard used as an insult. then he replied with:
Joe
"mentaly challenged. obama makes everything all gay politically correct crap"
so i said that obama is amazing, disabled people are amazing, and gay people are amazing, and that i thought what he was saying was really fucked up.
Joe
"if u think obama is amazing your ignorant, my cousin is gay and i have gay friends. if u think using a name is hurtful because it has another meaning than ur ignorant. thats like saying when u call someone an asshole all the assholes around the world are gonna be upset. its just a word and should be treated as such."
I wrote that words are hurtful.
then the person i'd assumed was my friend, who at no point decided to ask these people to stop picking on me (there were a looooot more things said to me than what i'm including), put her 2 cents in, which were "god, stop ruining my thread, i'm fucking pissed" or something like that. and to me personally she wrote that she didn't appreciate people spouting off politics on her threads but that hopefully we could get past this.
shortly after the girl i'd felt was my friend, i'll call her mary, told everyone "stop it!" this girl who i'd been really nice to when i'd met in the past, I'll call her Connie, wrote this really long piece of shit about how wrong i am to take offense at the word Retard being used as an insult, and she had all this like .... wikipedia knowledge or something to back up why i was so wrong. then she sent me this personal message:
Connie
The only reason I spoke up was because I'm sick of having this crap forwarded to my phone every 10 minutes and my response went out before I received Mary's message about the thread being closed.
Mary closed this thread for a reason. There are other people on this thread who haven't spoken up, who are probably just as sick of hearing about this. ___ and Mary are great people, and it looks bad on them to have this kind of garbage being forwarded to the rest of their friends.
Please at least be respectful of their wishes and don't continue this stupid argument on this thread.
and i wrote back:
it was their choice to include several people in this thread. i don't personally like reading everyone's comments to questions/invites they send out as threads, either, but i just delete them. i don't appreciate being scolded by you. i met you at a party and i thought i was very kind to you and i really don't understand why you would take such an unkind tone towards me in this email nor in the thread, during which all i was doing was expressing my personal feeling about the word "retard," when being used as an insult, feeling hurtful to me. instead, i got this huge hatefest, which, by the way, you contributed to with your very long comment, so if you are worried about ____ and Mary looking bad (to who? they sent this thread out to their friends? i can't imagine ____ and Mary's friends being like "well, i used to respect them, but now that i've gotten all these responses to this thread i've been included in, i don't like them anymore), you shouldn't have contributed (such a long) comment in the thread.
so, why don't you "please be respectful" (as you say) of me, a person who was very kind to you when we met, and not refer to my feelings as "a stupid argument." I mean, who do you think you are, writing to me in this scolding tone? my husband has known _____ since they were 2, and i hang out with them at least twice a week. why did you decide you had to come to their defense, and insult me personally by calling my expression of my feelings "garbage" and shit like that? i really, truly don't understand why you felt the need to send this email to me or why you thought you had the right to. If you were so "sick of this crap" you would have deleted it (like i do whenever Joe and everyone else responds copiously to their threads) instead of jumping on the bandwagon of making me feel like total shit for expressing my feelings. what the fuck?
at this point, i just couldn't believe that everyone was MAD at me, for saying my feelings had been hurt. things died down then started up again, between me and someone I'll name MAX.
MAX
wait whats this talk about a thread? who here is a seamstress? i thought this was an email between a bunch of people? OOH like a conference email! oh wait no i get it its a series of newsgroup messages dealing with the same subject. man i am such a gay homo pirate retard.
& then I said something but i don't know what. and then:
MAX
no just too liberal. i like keeping the money i earn instead of it going to people in line for welfare that are too lazy to get a job because they know the "gov'ment" will provide a monthly check for them for free. in the timeless words of garth brooks, "if uncle sam dips in your packet, for most things you dont mind, but when your dollar goes to all of those standing in the welfare line, rejoice you have a voice if you're concerned about the destination of this great nation."
ME (robin)
well everything you just said was absolute bullshit, and if you ever become homeless, you are gonna thank god for welfare (like my mom, who is not lazy but too mentally ill for most people to want to hire her). but I just got torn a new asshole by Mary for continuing this thread after her directive to stop with the thread. i'm not sure if she's scolding everyone who continues the thread or just me, but in any event, i'm tired of reading your type of conservatism, and tired of getting bitched out by Mary everytime i respond to one of yr guys's responses. So ... could you please stop ruining my day? this is day two of me crying from being ganged up on and then told that all this dialogue is my fault, and believe me, i don't need any of this shit. ok? can you please have some gentlemanly mercy on me?
MAX
you started it. everyone was joking around having fun then you just came in here all high and mighty on your pedestal telling people that they were horrible for joking around. its just like when something you dont like comes on on tv, you change the fucking channel. do you call the tv station saying they need to stop putting it on tv? no you just pick up the remote and change the fucking channel. so if you dont like it when people disagree with you and you cant handle opposing views then dont come in on the conversation in the first place. retard.
ME
I didn't start acting high and mighty. i said "hey guys, i know you mean no harm but it kinda hurts my feelings to hear the word retard used as an insult. can you use another word?
what the fuck is wrong with me asking that, as a favor, after expressing the fact that it hurt my feelings. it wasn't a demand. it wasn't "what's wrong with you people?!" it was just me asking a favor. i can handle opposing views just fine, and i have to do so on a daily basis. i'm a pragmatist. but what happened was sean started making a joke out of something that was so clearly special to me and then he kept pushing my buttons. i cannot believe you called me a retard. there is something seriously wrong with you.
MAX
no no, you are actually misquoting yourself. in reality you said "hi, i know you guys aren't meaning any harm, just joking around, but I really feel I need to tell you that it can be very hurtful to use "retard" as an insult." thats a somewhat different meaning that what you just said. all i had to do was look further up in the "thread" as you people call it. and obviosly you cant handle when people feel differently about a subject because you said we were ganging up on you. remember, just change the channel. and i feel very offended that you say there is something seriously wrong with me, what are you trying to imply miss high and mighty? hmmm i think im gonna change the channel, you should do the same so you dont get your feelings hurt anymore.
then he added:
oh and Buck Ofama
and i quipped:
oh... too black for you?
at which point, I got scolded again for continuing on this thread instead of letting someone boss me around by telling me i'm not allowed to respond to people's shit.
I feel so upset.
this has ruined a lot of shit, including possibly the lifelong friendship of my husband and the husband of the girl who throws "retard" around all the time and who fixated on trying to get me to shut up instead of defending me like she should have.
stuff like this always happens to me and people always make me feel like it's my fault for getting too sassy or whatever.
i don't know, hopefully it's not libelous to have publish these people's facebook comments, i just really needed to get this all off my chest. it really hurts.
recently i have been particularly active, and maybe annoyingly so, on my facebook posts because i got my feeling really hurt on facebook and it just really devastated me. I feel the need to share some of what happened. i will try to keep names out of it.
it all started with a thread (that is when someone includes a whole bunch of people in a message, so that everyone included can respond) that someone I'd always tried to be a good friend to sent out, inviting people to an event. when people said they couldn't come, she responded with something like "you guys are retards."
I have deleted a lot of the exchange and can't get it back, but i'm going to include the parts of the thread that i was able to retrieve from my email account's "sent" box, etc. I will use made up names for people.
joe
"hey maybe you are the retard for not thinking of us retards sooner!"
jimmy
"ya retard"
joe
"ok, ur mentally challenged! there is the obama version of retard better?"
i asked, "what is the obama version of "retarded" supposed to be?"
I'd also asked, either before or after asking what this obama comment was supposed to mean, if people could stop using the word retard as an insult. i said it so nicely, like 'hey, i know you guys are just having fun but can you use another word? it really hurts my feelings to hear retard used as an insult. then he replied with:
Joe
"mentaly challenged. obama makes everything all gay politically correct crap"
so i said that obama is amazing, disabled people are amazing, and gay people are amazing, and that i thought what he was saying was really fucked up.
Joe
"if u think obama is amazing your ignorant, my cousin is gay and i have gay friends. if u think using a name is hurtful because it has another meaning than ur ignorant. thats like saying when u call someone an asshole all the assholes around the world are gonna be upset. its just a word and should be treated as such."
I wrote that words are hurtful.
then the person i'd assumed was my friend, who at no point decided to ask these people to stop picking on me (there were a looooot more things said to me than what i'm including), put her 2 cents in, which were "god, stop ruining my thread, i'm fucking pissed" or something like that. and to me personally she wrote that she didn't appreciate people spouting off politics on her threads but that hopefully we could get past this.
shortly after the girl i'd felt was my friend, i'll call her mary, told everyone "stop it!" this girl who i'd been really nice to when i'd met in the past, I'll call her Connie, wrote this really long piece of shit about how wrong i am to take offense at the word Retard being used as an insult, and she had all this like .... wikipedia knowledge or something to back up why i was so wrong. then she sent me this personal message:
Connie
The only reason I spoke up was because I'm sick of having this crap forwarded to my phone every 10 minutes and my response went out before I received Mary's message about the thread being closed.
Mary closed this thread for a reason. There are other people on this thread who haven't spoken up, who are probably just as sick of hearing about this. ___ and Mary are great people, and it looks bad on them to have this kind of garbage being forwarded to the rest of their friends.
Please at least be respectful of their wishes and don't continue this stupid argument on this thread.
and i wrote back:
it was their choice to include several people in this thread. i don't personally like reading everyone's comments to questions/invites they send out as threads, either, but i just delete them. i don't appreciate being scolded by you. i met you at a party and i thought i was very kind to you and i really don't understand why you would take such an unkind tone towards me in this email nor in the thread, during which all i was doing was expressing my personal feeling about the word "retard," when being used as an insult, feeling hurtful to me. instead, i got this huge hatefest, which, by the way, you contributed to with your very long comment, so if you are worried about ____ and Mary looking bad (to who? they sent this thread out to their friends? i can't imagine ____ and Mary's friends being like "well, i used to respect them, but now that i've gotten all these responses to this thread i've been included in, i don't like them anymore), you shouldn't have contributed (such a long) comment in the thread.
so, why don't you "please be respectful" (as you say) of me, a person who was very kind to you when we met, and not refer to my feelings as "a stupid argument." I mean, who do you think you are, writing to me in this scolding tone? my husband has known _____ since they were 2, and i hang out with them at least twice a week. why did you decide you had to come to their defense, and insult me personally by calling my expression of my feelings "garbage" and shit like that? i really, truly don't understand why you felt the need to send this email to me or why you thought you had the right to. If you were so "sick of this crap" you would have deleted it (like i do whenever Joe and everyone else responds copiously to their threads) instead of jumping on the bandwagon of making me feel like total shit for expressing my feelings. what the fuck?
at this point, i just couldn't believe that everyone was MAD at me, for saying my feelings had been hurt. things died down then started up again, between me and someone I'll name MAX.
MAX
wait whats this talk about a thread? who here is a seamstress? i thought this was an email between a bunch of people? OOH like a conference email! oh wait no i get it its a series of newsgroup messages dealing with the same subject. man i am such a gay homo pirate retard.
& then I said something but i don't know what. and then:
MAX
no just too liberal. i like keeping the money i earn instead of it going to people in line for welfare that are too lazy to get a job because they know the "gov'ment" will provide a monthly check for them for free. in the timeless words of garth brooks, "if uncle sam dips in your packet, for most things you dont mind, but when your dollar goes to all of those standing in the welfare line, rejoice you have a voice if you're concerned about the destination of this great nation."
ME (robin)
well everything you just said was absolute bullshit, and if you ever become homeless, you are gonna thank god for welfare (like my mom, who is not lazy but too mentally ill for most people to want to hire her). but I just got torn a new asshole by Mary for continuing this thread after her directive to stop with the thread. i'm not sure if she's scolding everyone who continues the thread or just me, but in any event, i'm tired of reading your type of conservatism, and tired of getting bitched out by Mary everytime i respond to one of yr guys's responses. So ... could you please stop ruining my day? this is day two of me crying from being ganged up on and then told that all this dialogue is my fault, and believe me, i don't need any of this shit. ok? can you please have some gentlemanly mercy on me?
MAX
you started it. everyone was joking around having fun then you just came in here all high and mighty on your pedestal telling people that they were horrible for joking around. its just like when something you dont like comes on on tv, you change the fucking channel. do you call the tv station saying they need to stop putting it on tv? no you just pick up the remote and change the fucking channel. so if you dont like it when people disagree with you and you cant handle opposing views then dont come in on the conversation in the first place. retard.
ME
I didn't start acting high and mighty. i said "hey guys, i know you mean no harm but it kinda hurts my feelings to hear the word retard used as an insult. can you use another word?
what the fuck is wrong with me asking that, as a favor, after expressing the fact that it hurt my feelings. it wasn't a demand. it wasn't "what's wrong with you people?!" it was just me asking a favor. i can handle opposing views just fine, and i have to do so on a daily basis. i'm a pragmatist. but what happened was sean started making a joke out of something that was so clearly special to me and then he kept pushing my buttons. i cannot believe you called me a retard. there is something seriously wrong with you.
MAX
no no, you are actually misquoting yourself. in reality you said "hi, i know you guys aren't meaning any harm, just joking around, but I really feel I need to tell you that it can be very hurtful to use "retard" as an insult." thats a somewhat different meaning that what you just said. all i had to do was look further up in the "thread" as you people call it. and obviosly you cant handle when people feel differently about a subject because you said we were ganging up on you. remember, just change the channel. and i feel very offended that you say there is something seriously wrong with me, what are you trying to imply miss high and mighty? hmmm i think im gonna change the channel, you should do the same so you dont get your feelings hurt anymore.
then he added:
oh and Buck Ofama
and i quipped:
oh... too black for you?
at which point, I got scolded again for continuing on this thread instead of letting someone boss me around by telling me i'm not allowed to respond to people's shit.
I feel so upset.
this has ruined a lot of shit, including possibly the lifelong friendship of my husband and the husband of the girl who throws "retard" around all the time and who fixated on trying to get me to shut up instead of defending me like she should have.
stuff like this always happens to me and people always make me feel like it's my fault for getting too sassy or whatever.
i don't know, hopefully it's not libelous to have publish these people's facebook comments, i just really needed to get this all off my chest. it really hurts.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Sweetheart Zine #1
I used to do a zine called sweetheart, from 13 to 18, and now that I have a scanner, I thought I'd share a bit of it. Published December 1992.
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