Le maudit Mo D.

Balloon Arch

Last night, Bob and I attended the "ImProm." I recycled my wedding dress. Here we are under the balloon arch. I married the King of Red-Eye:

Earlier yesterday, the Geegsters auditioned for new musicians. It ran the gamut from highly experienced piano bar guy to hippie bongo dude that reminded me of a toothless street busker. Very interesting. I felt we did a good job running the audition and it most certainly did not have shades of Simon from American Eyeball.

Quite frequently, the Old Gray Lady trots out these ludicrous, borderline-offensive articles on the topic of "women having it all." Their subjects are always squeaky-clean young white women from privileged backgrounds who live in prosperous Northeastern areas and talk about how hard it is to be so damn perfect. These articles always rile me up, because the author of said articles, as well as the female subjects, don't see "privilege" as I see it. I can't expect them to. I went to Smith, walked their walks and talked their talks, I know what this is all about. The giant cross with a Smith decal I carry on my back, the heavy feeling that I'm not being "amazing" enough, and the fact that I'm quickly aging out of what is considered "young."

I mean, come on...these girls are 17. Do they really need a big NYT article on how amazing their college essays and extracurriculars are? At least the author, Sara Rimer, who appears to cover the elite college beat for the Times (she penned an article on LUGs back in '93) didn't ask these young ladies the reviled "how are you going to balance work and family?" question. Well give these girls four years to focus on school before whacking them with that loaded question. And the author goes out of her way to make sure you don't find her subjects to be insufferably perfect and therefore unlikeable. Thank GOD Esther, daughter of a Smithie, is bad at sports, or else I'd find ample reason to hate her, right?

I didn't go to an uppity-ass wealthy high school. I went to good ol' C-Juana High in North TJ. The thing is, while I don't identify with the place at all, I had a good high school experience there, and I credit it with grounding my attitudes about class (I have many attitudes about class, after all). For half of C-Juana, getting a high school diploma and not getting shot or knocked up was success enough. Those of us who got to go away to college didn't make such a huge deal out of it. Few people knew the names of the fancy east coast schools whose viewbooks I pored over with zeal. These schools generally weren't part of the vocabulary of the counseling staff.

So, while my family could afford to back up such fancy-ass approaches to coming of age as SAT tutoring (isn't that cheating?) and unpaid internships (what? they don't pay you? that's legal? no way!), neither my mother nor my high school embued them with any sense of normalcy. They were to be out of reach for me because they were out of reach for everyone else, bank balance be damned. Though my family had the financial resources, the resource of knowing how to get to where you want to go just wasn't there. My mother, bless her poorly-informed little heart, has always had low ambitions for me. But in her mind they were high ambitions. I mean, who doesn't want to be a public school teacher? She had no fucking clue. C Juana had no fucking clue. Faced with the kids who came from households who had the clue I needed to succeed has been mindbogglingly painful. Not a day goes by that I don't try to figure out exactly where I fucked up. Not that the situation is untenable. I'm doing just dandy, but I desperately want a career that I love and enjoy and am proud of. I just wanted to be ____ by now and I'm not.

I made decisions based on bad advice, which it seems that these upstart teens are privileged enough to avoid.

So in order to be "amazing," as Ms. Rimer defines the word, you have to come from a family of Amazings who send you to an Amazing school and also have an Amazing bank account. Why can't you just say that, Sara?

Posted by Zerd at April 2, 2007 12:55 PM