I’ve mentioned before that I have lived my entire life within the same, one-hour stretch of highway.
I lived in downtown Goldsboro for my first 3.5 years and then we moved out to Rosewood. When I graduated, I moved to Raleigh and have bounced around from dorm and apartment until I arrived where I am now on Brent Road.
When I first got to N.C. State, I felt like Raleigh was the perfect location: an hour’s drive was enough to be on my own, but if I needed money/food/medicine (Read: Mommy) it was always less than 60 minutes away.
But now, it’s an annoying distance. With my job in Garner splitting the distance and the new bypass that makes the trip a 45-minute dash (30 with my radar detector) it feels like Rosewood is right down the road.
Combine that with me having no reason to be in Raleigh anymore with no classes and my parents’ constant pressure for me to spend time with them and I’m going absolutely crazy.
I’ve been back and forth between Raleigh and Goldsboro constantly since classes ended Dec. 2 and the longest I’ve been either place has been a week. Most of my clothes are in Goldsboro, too because I did laundry there, so I’m even more fragmented.
I feel like my home has been Highway 70 for the past month. View Larger Map
In yet another example of me stealing ideas from one of my favorite blogs (Though I would prefer mine evoke Seinfeld imagery), here’s a poem that I found in the front of a notebook from my senior year of high school. I would date it March 2006.
Visitors to the “About” portion of this blog may have noticed a comment (two actually) from one of my favorite teachers ever, Mrs. Green.
In it, she mentions that she has a Ty Johnson original work about a student-teacher. Well, I found it in its original, pencil-print form:
A textbook tool of the queerest sort, Phony past a fault and stubborn more. You are impressed by all and know nothing, Of knowledge or self, Agree with everyone. Your anxiety shows your ignorance fully and leaves, no indications of knowledge beyond sense to breathe, and speak. Speak not so I may imagine you gone to the diamond, Come back cynicism! For I long to be challenged again, He murders poetry! and dances in the ruins of art, with a sterile mind.
The student-teacher in question was a baseball player, hence the diamond reference. Mrs. Green was always very cynical, hence her being homaged by cynicism itself.
I have nothing else to say except that reading this poem today caused me to laugh hysterically and run to the computer to transcribe it and share it with you.
It began a couple of months ago when I was talking to my mom about how I want to eat healthier.
I wanted a single, concrete way to feel that I had accomplished something and I decided I wanted it to be something I could give up. That’s when I came up with a “No-McDonald’s” plan.
It was easy enough. There are other fast food options out there if I needed a quick bite, but McDonald’s…I don’t know, have you ever just smelled a bag of that food? It smells like garbage juice, my dad’s affectionate term for the liquid that always seems to leak from trash bags.
I figured I would start weaning myself off of Mickey D’s during the final month of 2010 and then 2011 would fly by no problem. No worries, right? Wrong.
With the McRib back from its 2-year absence, I feel powerless against those arches. I hate it, but I have to embrace the McRib while it’s around. It’s a survival trait I’ve picked up over years of McRibs rotating on and off of the menu at that disgustingly gross restaurant.
So…new resolution: no sodas. This will help me out immensely! Between drinking sodas, beer and whatever else I can get my hands on to keep my liver busy, giving up sodas would give me a lease on my health, letting me at least FEEL like I’m making a single healthy choice even as I pursue my Flying Saucer immortality.
But I forgot and had a soda with lunch on New Year’s Day.
In fact, the only thing I’ve managed to remain consistent with in 2011 has been drinking some form of alcohol every night. Maybe that’s the way to go…365 days of alcoholic consumption? At least I wouldn’t be doing it in 2012 (It’s a leap year).
So now I’m contemplating a 25/25/12.5 plan, whereby I’ll do 25 hours of volunteer work, read 25 books and lose 12.5 pounds. Then, again, I could learn a new language…like American sign language or French. Why? Well because using fake sign language (as I often do) is offensive to people who know deaf people. Trust me, that was the final thing I learned in 2010.
But in the end, I’ve decided none of it really matters. I’ve gotten at least one year older every year since I learned to count, so that’s an accomplishment. I mean, it’s no Sharapova, but it’s something.
Which makes me wonder: Maybe our lives shouldn’t be constrained to calendar years, but we should look at the bigger picture. Why be vegan for a year when you could just be healthy for a lifetime? Why not try to limit my McRibs while learning survival French and enough sign language to ask what someone’s name is when I’m in a socially awkward situation?
Boom. I just blew your mind.
2011 is going to be awesome. It better, because it may be our last full year left.
But think about it…isn’t that how we should live every year?
What are your resolutions…not just for this year, but for this life?
Editor’s Note: I’m no political scientist and I’m hardly a historian. I don’t pretend to have any answers. What I present here is simply something to consider as you scan the headlines of today’s news-aggregating media…or newspapers for a few of my friends out there. It is an embarrassingly brief synopsis of the French Revolution juxtaposed with today’s governmental crises. I only argue that the connections are clear from a historical perspective and seem to present a nice literary narrative.
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Read this for starters: There Will Be Blood
Mmm…more academic talk.
So in my nine semesters at N.C. State, I’ve been in and out of a lot of history courses.
Some of them I passed with no problems, while others (like the one on modern Russia) have been struggles leaving me wondering whether or not I’ve even learned anything.
Generally I come away with a broader understanding of a culture and historical perspective for the sake of understanding other history topics that I’m already well-versed in. For instance, I didn’t glean much of an understanding about all of the revolutions that befell the Russian state in my class on the U.S.S.R., but I did gather a new perspective on World War II.
There we go. Now that you understand that I learn without really learning, I can move to a juicy little nugget that came up in my France in the Ancient Regime class over the past few weeks.
(For my less-than-avid followers, the following will look a lot like a history lecture/analysis. Please skip down to my conclusion, marked roughly with an *).
France had no representative government in the centuries before the French Revolution, and instead held what was known as an Estates General in which the three Estates (the classes of the population) gathered to discuss taxes and such.
The first estate was the clergy, the second was the knights/nobles and the third was, well everyone else.
It worked out okay (according to the top two estates) because each estate only got one vote, meaning when the nobles and clergy wanted tax exemptions for the nobles and clergy, they steamrolled the third estate’s vote 2 to 1 every time.
The Estates General was something the king called…if he wanted to. Because of this, France went from 1614 to 1788 without ever calling one – that’s 174* years. (Not 114 as originally reported. Thanks Farrell). Imagine two generations of third estaters living and dying without ever having a voice in the government that was taxing them.
Now take into account the numerous wars France underwent in that time (Yeah, the American Revolution as well, if you can call it that…which I’ll get to in a minute) and you find yourself with quite a government deficit.
You’re taxing the poor and fighting wars on more than one continent…then comes a famine and you’re looking down the barrel of a revolution the likes of which the world had never seen.
So because of all the negatives, King Louis XVI calls another Estates General to be run the same way as before, i.e. with a powerless third estate. They get pissed and ask for more power, but by the time XVI gives it to them, they’re irate.
The rest you probably know from history classes (assuming you didn’t go to Rosewood):
Finally, something almost as badass as me on a tennis court.
*I understand summing up the history of modern France in two lines of Wikipedia liks is a foolish way to make this point, but that Revolution in which French citizens beheaded their own king left a power vacuum that led to more terror, Napoleon and several more revolutions before stability was ever reached. (Arguably at the end of the 19th century or beginning of 20th century, though we all remember what happened to France in the 1940s…)
The wisdom from this revolution dictates that if the rulers of a country ignore the governed, revolution can come, and I’m not talking about a glorious “kick out the British” revolution…I mean a French-style revolution where the entire nation implodes and chaos reigns for decades…Think like a long-term Argentinean economy with some dictatorship thrown in for good measure.
Our political compass in the U.S. is so skewed…we think we’re a superpower and we always will be, but guess what? That’s how people felt in France and England and Germany in the early part of the 20th century and a war nearly bankrupt them all, leaving an upstart power (the U.S.) and a country that ignored human rights (U.S.S.R) to emerge as the powers in the world. Where is the U.S.S.R now?
The connections between our country’s current state and France’s are many, and I won’t make them all for you, but the tax cuts one just drives me up the wall.
The Bush tax cuts are exactly the type of tax agenda the clergy and nobles had for themselves in the 18th century and with people like Former Senator Alan Simpson running things, it seems like we’re bound for a scary revolution just like France.
Now, to clarify my thoughts on the matter: France’s revolution is today heralded as one of the greatest moments in Western civilization. It typically marks the beginning of the modern era for history and it’s one of the most badass moments in history as far as I’m concerned. Any country that would rather rip itself to shreds than be ruled by an oblivious monarch is truly a martyr nation that should be commended.
What I’m saying is, 221 years from now, someone may look back at whatever is transpiring within the United States as a milestone, but I’m just not sure if the American populace knows what could await on the other side of this “revolution.”
Editor’s note: This post was postmarked Nov. 9. I blame Newman.
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So to take you back to one of my more confusing posts (here) the dinner for my grant-funded history class was Sunday, Nov. 7.
This meant, for the first time since 8th grade, I was going on a field trip!
This meant my classmates and I had to be in Davidson at 5 p.m. Because it’s a three-hour drive, this means we left at 2 p.m. Because the dinner agenda let out after 8, it pretty much meant my entire Sunday was shot.
Sunday..that day when you worry about Monday and relax a little bit and get yourself semi-pysched up to drag yourself through another week…yep mine was gone all for the sake of the rule of law from a historical perspective.
I was afraid I would end up in the professormobile…two of my professors were picking up a third from Duke…but luckily I hopped into the car with my peers.
Understand that this course I’m in is a 2 hour and 45 minute snooze fest every Wednesday and the job I appointed for myself was to keep everyone awake. This is how you end up seeing so many Boy Meets World references in my Tweets…it was such a long class.
But outside of that classroom, I realized the people in the seminar with me were actual real people! Imagine that…a three-hour car ride peppered with references to Disney Channel Original Movies (Cadet Kelly for example) and the recognition that we all were thinking the exact same thing during every second of every too-long class led me to thinking that this was the best waste of a Sunday ever.
But then we got to the dinner, where a lecturer was supposed to give us a special presentation and this is where I learned more about me and my future than any number of advisers and counselors could teach me.
First, the dinner was awesome. I drank more merlot than ever bef…well I drank a lot of merlot, especially considering I was across the table from my professor…though I found he’s also a bit of a wino too.
So I downed some wine to dull my senses before the lecture…it wasn’t hard since I hadn’t had anything all day…and then came the introduction.
This woman was a dynamo. Here’s her biodata from a symposium in 2006:
Leia Castañeda is a doctoral student in the SJD program at Harvard University. After completing her law degree at Ateneo de Manila University, achieving the highest score on the Philippines’ national bar exam, and working for a leading Manila law firm, she completed an LLM at Harvard University, specializing in legal history, before moving on to the SJD doctoral program there. She is the author of “The Origins of Philippine Judicial Review, 1900-1935,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “Making Sense of Marbury,” Ateneo Law Journal (2001); “From Merit to Disclosure Regulation: The Shifting Bases of Philippine Securities Law,” Ateneo Law Journal (1998); “Philippine Elections: The Right to Political Participation in an Elite Democracy,” Ateneo Law Journal (1997) and, “From Prerogative to Prohibition: Article 2(4) as Customary International Law in Nicaragua v. United States of America,” Ateneo Law Journal (1994).
But as she stepped up to the podium that she could barely see over, she took a deep breath and began her lecture/talk/discussion/essay that would forever set me apart from overachieving smart people.
She read the entire paper to us. She was lucky someone taught her to take the time to look up from her sheet every now and then to make faux-eye contact with the audience, because otherwise I’m sure everyone would have left.
Well, except for the Davidson people. It quickly became a drinking game for me…I took a sip of wine every time a Davidson person acted like a tool. (Their professor accounted for half of my glass). They laughed at things that weren’t funny, as historians do, and asked questions that were truly lectures with question marks at the end…as in:
I feel like the impact France had in the American Revolution is very much downplayed in more contemporary works, including textbooks at the high school level, as well as in more modern mediums ranging from film to television and this has somehow allowed the American psyche to forget the international relationship we have with the French, allowing an anti-French sentiment to settle in and displacing what could be our most trusted ally in Europe in the forefront of popular opinion in the states…don’t you?
That’s what happens when everyone wants to teach…you can’t have a question and answer session with history majors without getting a lashing from those who have stuck their noses in so many books they feel like they’ve actually been to the Phillippines…
But back to the speaker: she lost us. She had no control over the room and never ever tried to teach us anything…it was one, long sentence with periods thrown in for good measure (and so she could breathe).
So while I sat there taking sips every time my Davidson classmates giggled or spoke, I reminded myself what sets me apart from people like her.
Besides 1.25 grade points, world traveling experience, a few doctorates and a full-time job…I like to create connections with people.
When I tell stories, I’m almost forceful in how I try to make the listener connect with what I’m saying…and maybe, just maybe that will be enough to set me apart in the workforce.
So after the epiphany I immediately began to…you know what I did…I drank more wine and grabbed a couple extra bottles on my way out.
Riding high on our wine buzz, we piled back into the car and my new best friend Andrew plugged his iPod in.
This next portion of the story can best be explained through these links: Now 3 Now 5 Now 8
Because I know you’re curious now…they’re up to 36.
Interspersed between our audio trips down memory lane were “pit stops” that Andrew and I commissioned…mostly so we could buy whatever the cheapest alcoholic beverages were (this…twice…painful, but the best bang for our bucks) and chugging them in the parking lot before continuing the mobile dance party.
And so, to sum up, it’s the little things (cheap alcohol, music from way back) in life that get us through.
The song was originally two songs, one by Paul (the middle) and one by John (the bookends).
The two were meshed together, and this happy sounding song about day-to-day life was sandwiched between John’s sarcastic, dreary view of day-to-day life. It’s awesome.
One more note, and probably the most fascinating thing about this song: the weird part that separates the middle from the two bookends that sounds like an entire orchestra just doing whatever the hell they feel like is just that.
They marked the beginning and end notes on the music sheet and drew a squiggly line between the two. It was up to each individual musician how he or she arrived at the final note, so long as they hit it on time and on key.
And that, my friends, is how you shatter the world of music.
At this point, I’ve been growing my hair out long (as I consider it) since January 6, 2004. That was the first day since sometime in elementary school that I didn’t put product in my hair that made me look like the picture to the right.
Back then, I was as synonymous with that spiky hair look as I am now with my “golden locks”…something I’ve never had a problem with as it seems more people recognize you and remember your name when you have hair that makes you stand out.
So when I got to college and haircuts started seeming really expensive, my hair just kept growing and the attention just kept coming. I’ve had people stop me on Bourbon Street just to touch my hair, and among friends it’s become the subject eternal jokes, either as it makes me look or act feminine or whatever.
But now I’ve come to a crossroads and I’d like to put it to the Internetverse to help with a decision about my hair.
Typically, I wait until I’m mistaken for a girl or someone hits on me in a weird manner before I consider a haircut. Here’s exhibit A:
In 2006, I was in Philadelphia with my family where I approached an old fireman (55+) outside his station in Chinatown (House of DragonsFire Department) to ask if they sold T-shirts.
For those of you who don’t know, my dad is a firefighter in Goldsboro and likes to pick up T-shirts from obscure fire departments, so I typically grab him one anytime I’m somewhere cool. If there’s a fire department near you that has an interesting logo/location then let me know because he’s impossible to Christmas shop for. I’ll send you money/shipping and I’ll even put your name on the card alongside mine! Size XXL, please.
Anyway, I ask this middle-aged man if I could buy one of his T-shirts. He turned to me after helping his engineer back into the station and said: “Anything for you Fabio.”
He makes small talk, as firefighters do, about why I wanted the T-shirt and where my dad worked and such, and eventually I got the shirt, but as I was walking away, he stopped me again, saying “I’m serious, son. Don’t ever get thrown in jail in this city.”
That advice coming from an old man who was clearly impressed by my tresses was enough to get my hair cut that time. Encounters at On the Border in Cary and a Chick-fil-A in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta have also convinced me to cut the mane, but now I’m kind of looking for some advice:
Ordinarily, my mom and/or significant other are the only opinions that matter concerning my follicles, but since my mom has given up and I’m single, I thought I would at least solicit some views on it, even though it likely still won’t matter.
So…take my poll!
Just ignore the goofy smile...I was ice skating!
To be honest, I have an idea in mind and all I need is a little encouragement, so don’t worry about actually altering my plans…you can only confirm them.
The honor of being the first inductee into the Ty Johnson holy trinity of dark-haired lyricists belongs to Vanessa Carlton.
You likely know her as the “Thousand Miles” singer, but as I mentioned before, piano-infused pop music is a weakness of mine.
This means that in a CD-driven world (early 2000s) I bought her album “Be Not Nobody” and proceeded to memorize every song on it, including Ordinary Day.
I just stumbled through Wikipedia and learned that Ordinary Day actually charted in the U.S., but that wasn’t on any radio stations I was listening to.
I just really like her strains and the simplicity of the song. It’s just a piano and a voice. Plus it’s kind of an uplifting tune that’s fun to belt really loudly in the car.
TJHTODHL honorable mention #2: Regina Spektor
Sonja suggested Spektor to me when she learned of how much I loved Kate Nash. The two have very similar musical styles, but I wasn’t buying it…until I became the editor of Technician.
My managing editor, Ana, was the DJ of our shared office, so I was submitted to her music often and one of the songs I fell in love with was Fidelity, mostly due again to the simplicity of the song.
It became an audio sanctuary for me during rough nights. Sometimes I needed only to call out “Ana, play me a song” and Fidelity would fill the room in seconds. It soothed my head and allowed me to collect my thoughts…I don’t think I ever accomplished anything while that song was playing, but I also never murdered a writer/editor/designer during that song either, so that’s a plus.
That’s how my dad always referred to any non-family oriented holiday. This meant St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Day, Columbus Day…you name it…were all just days when mail delivery was questionable and some workplaces were closed.
It’s important to note that my dad is a fireman, so his schedule doesn’t take into account holidays. Idiots with dry, unwatered Christmas trees light them up with candles on Christmas Eve, Day and any other day of the holiday season, so in his line of work there isn’t really a day off.
It’s also important to note that he doesn’t drink, so these Cinco de Mayo-type excuses to get plastered on a weekday never appealed to him either, but I think more than anything he recognizes holidays where families come together. Christmas, Thanksgiving and a few family cookouts complete his recognized holidays, which brought me to the way I feel about my birthday.
It’s just another day.
I love birthdays, just not mine. It’s always so much fun to make a big deal about people on their birthdays and buy them presents and drinks, but on my birthday I can’t help but feel narcissistic.
People sing TO you…you can’t sing with them. I’m too self-aware to just let go and be pampered, so every year since I can remember I’ve found a way to get upset about my birthday.
I laid awake the night before my 16th, wondering if I would die. I was convinced God would never let me drive legally.
The night before my 18th, I laid awake knowing that any crimes I committed the next day could result in me being lethally injected…yeah it gets that dark.
The birthday, to me, is just a reminder of how far I haven’t come in so long. It comes with the territory of living within the same one-hour stretch of highway for your entire life…plus the knowledge that Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon at age 17.
But I did have one great birthday. Two, actually. One was my eighth. Cal Ripken Jr. was my favorite baseball player and I had seen him play just THREE games before he broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak in early September. His number, of course, was 8.
So my mom made a white, circular cake with orange baseball seams and an Orioles font 8 in the middle. Oh. My. Gosh. It was the best cake ever!
Fast forward 13 years to when I met Sonja Jones. Her birthday (March 12) is the best day ever, and if you don’t agree…well she doesn’t care.
Sonja learned of my disgust at my birthday and sought to change it. She arranged a day-long scavenger hunt that ended with my parents and all of my friends at a party complete with two replica cakes of my favorite birthday ever! (And, in a throwback to my Kate Nash post: Mouthwash defines this birthday in my head. Not because it was a Friday night, but because it was a Saturday night and I recall being drunk and singing it with the actual night tweaked in very loudly).
EDITOR’S NOTE: There was another Orioles cake produced by Kate Shefte, Ana Andruzzi and my friends at ‘Technician‘ last year on my birthday. Its significance was not lost on the author of this post, but the cake decorations were more coincidental than on his 21st birthday. Nevertheless, the cake should have been mentioned at this point, and the author failed to do so. It was delicious.
Of course 21 is a special birthday in the United States, but this one I set apart because of what it taught me: birthdays aren’t necessarily for those who celebrate them. Sometimes they’re for your friends.
Me with my two replica cakes courtesy of Sonja. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Fowler. Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008.
Sometimes it gives them a chance to spend money on you. Sometimes it gives them an excuse to get you drunk. Sometimes it’s just a time when they take a Facebook post and use it to show you they still remember you and cherish whatever friendship you have or have lost.
That’s why I like birthdays so much…I can celebrate someone for no other reason than their existence.
That’s when I realized that the truly narcissistic thing about a birthday is when you don’t allow OTHERS to make a big deal about it. Saying “It’s just another day” or posting a ridiculously long rant on your blog about how much you don’t care for your birthday is the selfish move. Acting like the U.S. Government decided to place Columbus Day on your birthday simply because Ty Johnson Appreciation Day is difficult to fit in a calendar square allows your friends the opportunity to make your day special. Not embracing a birthday is like refusing to accept compliments…nobody feels good about it.
So while I still hesitate to tell people about my birthday, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: an excuse to live one day like you would like to live every day.
For me that means I’m doing a lot of illegal parking and pushing a lot of yellow lights. Woo hoo!
Kate Nash is the most recent addition to the Ty Johnson holy trinity of dark-haired lyricists. The other two will be announced in following posts. (Hint: Sara Bareilles is an honorable mention, mostly because of her cover of one of my all-time favorite songs).
I discovered Kate back when Conan still had his show (Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Jan. 15, 2008 She performed this song) though it really doesn’t seem that long ago.
Call it an obsession with the piano, (Fur Elise is the most sensual song ever composed) but I just fell in love.
To date, her album, Made of Bricks, is the only album I’ve ever purchased on iTunes, meaning after my hard drive crashed about a month ago, I couldn’t reclaim the files because I couldn’t remember my password or whatever.
Anyway, I found different means of reclaiming my Nash collection and came across Habanera, which wasn’t on my album but was so effing awesome I’ve been listening to it over and over.
Now, following my epic weekend which should be discussed in a future post, I’ve rekindled my love for Kate and am considering buying her album…again.
For a self-professing pirate to purchase any music, let alone consider purchasing it again, should say something: give Kate Nash a listen!
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I also highly recommend Rikki’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” cover from last week’s Music Monday post. I do a lot of driving on Mondays, so I’ve begun using my new-fangled phone to listen to her posts en route to class/work on Mondays and last week’s was definitely sing-a-long friendly…except for the demon part…that’s best to just listen to.
Anyway, here’s her most recent Music Monday post. I’ll let you know if it’s worth it or not after my class commute.
UPDATE: The audio quality of YouTube punk rock playing out of a phone through a cassette deck adapter to my car speakers was poor, but it’s definitely worth the 90 seconds it takes to listen to it. The Germs found a way to get an inordinate amount of notes and noises in that minute and a half.
Apologies for the past two incredibly personal funeral/death posts, but, as you may imagine, I have had some unbelievably complicated thoughts I needed to put into words. Not sad. Not angry. Just…complicated.
As I walked past my chain-smoking relatives the irony hadn’t yet set in for me that the woman whose death had brought us all together had died at the age of 69 from complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease brought on undoubtedly from her constant cigarette smoking for the majority of her adult life.
That’s because I didn’t know what had actually led to her death, but it was also because I was trying to approach the entire funeral experience with tact. I wanted to be open-minded to the woman and family that never seemed to embrace me, if only for my mom’s sake.
But then I met my aunt/cousin Rulinda (see previous post for explanation) and she walked toward me smelling of smoke and tears. She hugged me and said as she was pulling away “Thank you for coming.”
And I think I gave her the most horrid face that I’ve ever made at a woman above the age of 50 (who wasn’t an educator), saying with my expression “Why the fuck wouldn’t I be here? This woman was related to me through blood. It’s a matter of respect and she and I were family.”
She was taken aback and I immediately regretted my expression. Sheepishly she said “I don’t know what to say, I just say what I think,” showing she knew exactly why I had scowled and, unbelievably to me (the asshole) that she was human.
I vowed to be more understanding from that moment on because, in truth, no one ever knows what to say at funerals. “It was a lovely ceremony.” “He/she looks great” referring to whoever’s in the casket. What? And that brought me back to the truth I’ve always adhered to concerning funerals: the fact that everyone ends up going to more funerals in their lifetime than they ever want to.
So I adjusted my tie and prepared to meet and speak with family members, because lo and behold, it turns out I am related to the deceased! My name was listed first as her grandchildren (nearly solving the mystery of whether I should follow legal or biological genealogy to know my place in the family), and I was expected to stand and receive friends and family.
And so began a parade of people that used to know me when I was this big. The fact that these people live less than an hour from where I’ve lived my entire life and haven’t seen me in more than 10 years only compounded my anger that these idiots were assumed relatives of mine. Some gems:
“Are you a rock star?” – from an uncle(?) who lives in Raleigh, no less. Clearly he wanted to say something about my hair, but he just choked.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time. We’ll have to do something about that.” – from a great uncle that used to visit us twice weekly when my granny was alive but since 1999 has visited my mom perhaps a dozen times. Oh and he married a woman who was accused of killing her husband, lives 10 minutes from my house and my mom changed his gauzes daily for him following his surgery in the early 2000s.
My response? “We just did.”
Then Rulinda comes by with a friend of hers to introduce to my sister. “This was her…granddaughter…I guess…”
What the fuck? You can’t read the program? Let’s just go with what’s printed there to keep things clean today…
So after hugs, handshakes and two trips to the bathroom to wash my hands because the idiot pastor insisted on shaking my hand after my first sanitation trip (even as I shoved my hands into my pockets and made it clear I didn’t want to shake) it was time for the ceremony at which the idiot pastor preceded to talk about how hard Faye worked for her family.
I laughed. Silently, of course, so I didn’t disturb those grieving, but it was hard to keep it quiet as I leafed through the program, complete with a bio indicating that Faye graduated in 1959…yes, a year before my mom was born. She began her work career as a high school graduate (no college) to begin saving enough money to provide for her other three daughters while my mom was being raised across town by her biological grandmother. (Though, as noted in my previous post, I have accepted this was for the best).
So my complications with that side of my family were compounded today though my ride back to Raleigh with Taylor let us both vent.
Big surprise: we were thinking the exact same thing at every stage of the funeral.
The closest we came to crying was when we imagined our other grandparent dying. We got pissed off every time someone brought up how long it had been since the last time we had been together. We talked about how disconcerting the entire affair was and which songs we wanted played at our funeral. (Friends: please assure this is played).
And so while the entire weekend has muddied my emotions about my mom’s side of the family and complicated further my understanding of my family tree, I came out of it with even more understanding about my connections within my immediate family: my sister is my best friend.
Ty W. Johnson 
