How Did You Turn Out?

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FYI, the Google image search words I chose for this post was "Indecision." This is what came up.


So, I finally got Soulseek to work and have been crazily adding all of this music to my i-Pod, including "Hazy Shades of Winter," a song by the Bangles that was also featured in the movie, Less Than Zero, based on a book by the 80s writer, Jay McInerey. Can't exactly remember the movie or the book, except that I think it was about these sort of jaded rich white kids who were trying to find themselves. As far as I recall, the whole point of the movie was that some of the characters never snapped out of their high school personas. The movie charts their lives after college, including a guy (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) who never stopped taking drugs and so he was a loser. A nobody. Washed up at the age of 23. He died at the end, I think. The message seemed to be that however you were at 23 was a sign of how you would be for the rest of your life. If you were a washed out druggie then, it was implied that you could envision the entire trajectory of your life from that moment on and so addicts were totally fucked. And that made me imagine my own life at that time. Okay, so at 23, I was just about to move to Chicago to escape my boyfriend at the time, a very sweet, still married man eight years older than me. He was the second person I ever slept with until I left for college. At college, I slept with three other people (hi, Mom!) mostly theater majors. He didn't like that I did that, but I guess he was trying to be accommodating or maybe I never told him. I can't remember.

But I knew I had to get out of Florida, and so I moved in with my former college roommate who was going to LA at the end of the summer to become famous. I promised him I would return in 2 months. But I never did. Instead, I stayed and found a new roommate through the free weekly newspaper and got a job as a waitress at Planet Hollywood and then a job at Northwestern University, where I took writing classes and met a professor, Rob Fromberg, who encouraged me to send one of my stories to University of Alaska's journal, Permafrost. I sent it and it got published. Then I got a job at DePaul and my Master's degree and wrote more stories and that led me to apply for grad school at Penn State. And they accepted me and gave me a scholarship. But...my whole point is that if you had looked at my life at age 23, you might have thought I was destined to live in Florida forever with a man who couldn't decide what to do.


On an unrelated note, I don't think Barack will win. We are destined to have another crazy Republican president. This country is still so ignorant and racist; I would be shocked if they would elect a Black man for president. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. When we look back at this time in history, I think, like Umberto Eco, we will mark it as the modern Dark Ages. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. Lots and lots of peeps in Philly love Barack, but I don't think that's indicative of the rest of the country.


Aside number 3: I haven't had dinner b/c I can't eat anything with substance. And for lunch today, I had chicken fingers, which seemed fine at the time, but made me ache later. Please send pudding. Chocolate, preferably.

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