Some Ramblings
I have a lot of stuff rolling around my head. A lot of angst is inside. A lot of processing needs to occur.
Only trivial shit is ready to come out:
My room was getting out of control. I spent three hours this morning cleaning. Not the kind of cleaning/hiding people do when company is coming, where piles are created and straightened and things are shoved in closets and under beds. But the purging kind. Many bags were thrown out. My soul is more at peace now.
I had a big pile of bills to pay this morning, only to realize I have lost my checks. No, not my checkbook, but that box of checks the bank sends that you put into your checkbook. For almost two years that box have lived in the same spot. It seems to have run away from home.
Although its terrible, my loss inspired me to join this century and pay some bills online. This whole concept of not using stamps fascinates me. I just may do this again next month. Though hopefully by then I will have found my checks for no other reason than it bugs me to not know where they've gone.
Tomorrow is Bay to Breakers and it goes right past my house. I have The Best. View. Ever. I really wanted to take pictures and post them on here, but I don't have a digital camera. Or any real camera. This is a HUGE race. I will have views that even people with press passes won't be able to get. So, I'm going to take pictures with my lame Walgreens disposable camera, get them developed this week, and maybe I'll post them. You know, after you've completely forgotten about this and all the excitement has died down. So bummed.
My hairdresser gave me a free haircut today. My hair is getting so long that she knelt on the floor to make sure it was even (I was waiting for her to ask me to stand). There was almost an awkward moment when she mentioned her roommates. I could have sworn she lived with her boyfriend, and I wondered if they'd broken up. Turns out they're still together, and I managed to find that out without either of us getting embarrassed. I like my hairdresser a lot. Not just for the free haircuts. She's really smart. I am drawn to smart people. The only thing that's mildly disappointing is that you'd think, of ALL people, you'd be able to talk with your hairdresser about the Bravo show Blow Out. But no. She doesn't watch tv.
But that's okay. She reads a lot of books instead of watching tv, so we talk books. We had a nice chat. I told her what salon I went to when I first came to San Francisco. She said it's where society ladies go, where people go to be seen. I told her they were nice and did a good job, but it was very expensive and I wasn't entirely comfortable. She nodded and said she could see that.
Can we talk about deserving things? Oh yeah, it's my blog. Of course we can. I was flipping by MTV and they were doing a show on proms. One of the kids MTV was profiling was a girl from New Orleans, whose high school (among other things) was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. She said something about deserving a nice prom, because of how horribly her city was ruined. While I absolutely agree that what happened is AWFUL, and disagree with how long it took and to what extent FEMA got involved, something about that girl saying she deserved a nice prom rubbed me the wrong way. I know, I KNOW. I'm a horrible person for saying that. It hasn't even been a year. But please, read me out. I think it would be great if she could have a beautiful prom. I'm not saying she shouldn't. I think it was the word deserve that rubbed me the wrong way. In the back of my head, I was wondering "For how long will she deserve things? At what point will she stop feeling owed?" Hopefully I'm just being an asshole thinking this, and of course she won't go through life thinking she deserves everything because of Hurricane Katrina. Really, I think it was just the word "deserve" that is nagging at me.
Now I must go fry in hell for thinking such thoughts.
Only trivial shit is ready to come out:
My room was getting out of control. I spent three hours this morning cleaning. Not the kind of cleaning/hiding people do when company is coming, where piles are created and straightened and things are shoved in closets and under beds. But the purging kind. Many bags were thrown out. My soul is more at peace now.
I had a big pile of bills to pay this morning, only to realize I have lost my checks. No, not my checkbook, but that box of checks the bank sends that you put into your checkbook. For almost two years that box have lived in the same spot. It seems to have run away from home.
Although its terrible, my loss inspired me to join this century and pay some bills online. This whole concept of not using stamps fascinates me. I just may do this again next month. Though hopefully by then I will have found my checks for no other reason than it bugs me to not know where they've gone.
Tomorrow is Bay to Breakers and it goes right past my house. I have The Best. View. Ever. I really wanted to take pictures and post them on here, but I don't have a digital camera. Or any real camera. This is a HUGE race. I will have views that even people with press passes won't be able to get. So, I'm going to take pictures with my lame Walgreens disposable camera, get them developed this week, and maybe I'll post them. You know, after you've completely forgotten about this and all the excitement has died down. So bummed.
My hairdresser gave me a free haircut today. My hair is getting so long that she knelt on the floor to make sure it was even (I was waiting for her to ask me to stand). There was almost an awkward moment when she mentioned her roommates. I could have sworn she lived with her boyfriend, and I wondered if they'd broken up. Turns out they're still together, and I managed to find that out without either of us getting embarrassed. I like my hairdresser a lot. Not just for the free haircuts. She's really smart. I am drawn to smart people. The only thing that's mildly disappointing is that you'd think, of ALL people, you'd be able to talk with your hairdresser about the Bravo show Blow Out. But no. She doesn't watch tv.
But that's okay. She reads a lot of books instead of watching tv, so we talk books. We had a nice chat. I told her what salon I went to when I first came to San Francisco. She said it's where society ladies go, where people go to be seen. I told her they were nice and did a good job, but it was very expensive and I wasn't entirely comfortable. She nodded and said she could see that.
Can we talk about deserving things? Oh yeah, it's my blog. Of course we can. I was flipping by MTV and they were doing a show on proms. One of the kids MTV was profiling was a girl from New Orleans, whose high school (among other things) was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. She said something about deserving a nice prom, because of how horribly her city was ruined. While I absolutely agree that what happened is AWFUL, and disagree with how long it took and to what extent FEMA got involved, something about that girl saying she deserved a nice prom rubbed me the wrong way. I know, I KNOW. I'm a horrible person for saying that. It hasn't even been a year. But please, read me out. I think it would be great if she could have a beautiful prom. I'm not saying she shouldn't. I think it was the word deserve that rubbed me the wrong way. In the back of my head, I was wondering "For how long will she deserve things? At what point will she stop feeling owed?" Hopefully I'm just being an asshole thinking this, and of course she won't go through life thinking she deserves everything because of Hurricane Katrina. Really, I think it was just the word "deserve" that is nagging at me.
Now I must go fry in hell for thinking such thoughts.
posted by Green at 5/20/2006 09:50:00 PM
8 Comments:
Nonononono - I'm totally with you. But what bothers me isn't the "deserve" part, it's the "deserve a nice PROM" part. I mean, hello - a PROM? Not a house or a library or a school but a PROM?! The fact that she said that raises a lot of questions in my mind, because frankly, it's a luxury in New Orleans to be thinking about the prom.
And then I'm just annoyed by anything to do with proms, anyway, but that's probably just because I'm getting old.
I don't know. I've been there a couple of times since Katrina. Those people have been through more trauma than you or I can ever imagine. And they're still going through it. The media has moved on, but New Orleans is still a wasteland, and many people are struggling with depression. There have been a lot of suicides. I'm no fan of the prom, and I don't know if she "deserves" a prom, but if it makes her feel a little better then what the hey?
here, let me make you look good. Life does not work that way at all. People suffer from horrible tradgedies all of the time. It does not mean that they deserve something pleasant to happen to them in order to make up for the unpleasnt thing.
There is no divine fairness tally being kept anywhere. She is just a kid, I can see why she might reason this way. And in our culture this type of simplistic thinking is accepted with all of the "everything happens for the best " kind of rubbish. But she is gong to have a life of dissapointment and confusion if she thinks that she deserves something good to balance out something bad. It was a natural disaster. Granted, the government failed horribly both to prevent it and to help when it happened. Which is also a lesson about the ill logic of many things in life, how something so obviously seems as if it should be one way, yet is another.
I know that you don't mean that she should be denied a small happiness, but are more confounded by her reasoning that everything has to even out . What do Holocaust survivors get ? As I have written elsewhere, it is weird to me how people have this really skewed view of the human condition. Thinking that life should be ever so lovely and feeling wronged when it is not. When in fact, life is brutal and cruel and people should learn to be grateful and derive happiness from smaller things. I actually think that is why so many people complain about depression. They do not understand that it is normal to have a certain level of unhapppiness and also have not been taught and do not have skills to cope with the sad things in life, because we are taught to ignore them. Like death and illness and destruction are some abberation when in fact they are part of the natural order. And also that the pursuit of happiness in the human soul has to do with working as a being to better our nature and embrace kindness and empathy and to remove the focus from our self.
So how was the race?
The race was not as packed as it was last year, probably due to the rain. They started promptly at 8am, and by 8:25am everyone had passed my house. The race is more about everyone dressing up (or, not dressing at all) than it is about running like the Boston Marathon. The streets were cleaned before 9am. I saw the same pink bunny guy I saw last year.
People get "rights" and "privileges" confused these days. Too many kids also think they "deserve" a cell phone as soon as they can talk and a new car when they turn 16 - whether something bad happened to them or not. And you'd be amazed at how they manage to justify it in their heads.
My thoughts on this fall right between weigook's and amanda's. I think to be a teenager and have your life ripped out from under you must be incredibly traumatic, and so, yeah. That part of me agrees she DOES deserve to go to prom. Having said that, there are a lot of people affected by the hurricanes that have taken advantage of people's generosities and aren't doing a lot to invest in their own futures, and I think it's wearing thin in the minds of many. Houston's seeing A LOT of this - it's called Compassion Fatigue.
I'm raising an 11-year-old daughter in a time when young adults don't seem to have to work for the things they want. She's been asking for an iPod for a year, and now we're getting her one for her birthday, as kind of a moving-to-middle-school/it's your birthday gift. I think making her wait or giving her the option to buy her own was the right thing to do. DH and I are on the same page as this - need vs. want has become greatly confused in our society - at all ages.
I think that you were watching a teenager reasoning like a teenager. Her life as she knew it was destroyed by that storm. I don't think her attitude was based on a sense of entitlement, but just a child wanting something to help take away the sting of what happened.
I hope she does have a great prom, then she'll always have something positive to conteract the obvious negative thoughts that will arise throughout her life when she thinks of Katrina and it's devastation.
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