thoroughly predictable
I believe that the developers of web technology had one particular group of people in mind, perhaps finding themselves among this group...
It is marvelously trite that I should be writing here in my bouts of insomnia, along with the myriad others, alone, madly fingering their keyboards in midnight melancholy... actually though, I am far from melancholy, and no, I am not pretending to be happy for the sake of the world today. I discovered a stockpile of things that I had written, things I thought that I had lost. Tis a bit embarrassing to read oneself out of context, and also a bit amusing.
So, since I can't sleep I will tell myself a bed-time story and you, dear readers, get to hear it too. We watched a Brittish film "Once upon a time in the Midlands" which was funny enough, in that it made you feel that awful sense of "pena ajena" that "other embarrasment" that you feel for someone else, a character, it was so well done, or I am so willing to temporarily suspend disbelief, that I actually had to cover my face with the pillow to not see the embarrasing scene. I tend to over-react... What was most striking is that the white-trashy suburb in the movie reminded me tremendously of (no, not my youth) but the northeast philly neighborhoods where I would play soccer, the ones with brick rowhouses and dangling clothing-lines and neighbors in eachother's business. I never spent much time actually in the neighborhoods, save for one time that I stayed over with Tracy McAnn, the lovely Irish girl with long, long hair and high, high teased bangs. She was really sweet, but after one night on the town (we were 12) with her friends in their Starter jackets and tapered acid wash jeans, I was glad to be a product of the bourgeious suburb from whence I came... after going to a movie we were walking home in the dark with some of her guy-friends and in a parking lot, a kid who couldn't have been more than 16 started picking a fight with "our" boys... Then he pulled out a gun... we all ran like hell, but man, that was enough to squelch any inner-city curiousity I had for a long time... in fact, save for this episode, the next time I went back to Northeast philly was in college when I was doing a volunteer tutoring gig and I would drive in my big old Ford Taurus with NH plates along with three other "women" to work on Spanish literacy and literature with a group of puerto Rican and Dominican high school girls.
But I was supposed to be telling a story...The rowhouses reminded me of my first boyfriend, whose name, believe it or not, I was having a hard time remembering, but I decided that it was Bill, Bill Bradley, I think... I know it was a politician's name too.
He was my first "official" boyfriend, though if you were to ask my mother, she would say I never made an official announcement. I was rather secretive at 13, (aren't we all?) but he would come over on occasion, I think maybe mostly when my parents were out. Most of our courtship involved the telephone and it evolved from the basic "getting to know you" stuff to talking dirty... or at least my limited 13-year-old idea of what talking dirty was, having very few actual referents with which to compare, because he lived in the next town over and I, of course, was too young to drive. What can we expect from a first boyfriend? Well, of course he had to be older, for any number of reasons, but mostly beacause at 13, girls look like women and boys... well, I do like skinny boys, but let's not exaggerate, they should not break in your hands... Bill was 18 and he was a senior, very exciting, only problem was that when he wanted to be together, all I wanted to do was sleep over at Noelle's house and go hiking up to our study rock and do biology homework. I mean, having a boyfriend "in theory" was a status symbol and a senior, well that was even better, but actually having to _deal_ with him? Too much trouble... Now poor Bill had a few things going against him... and here is where the row houses come in... This is where you are going to think me a horrible classist witch, which at the time I probably was and may well still be, I just hide it better? But his family was so terribly crass, so astoundingly Americanly uneducated. The one, and only, time that I went on a family "date" to his grandmother's house in North Philly I ended up in a heated argument with his horribly sexist uncle, cringing next to his hopelessly obese and opinionless mother... Those things separately would be fine and acceptable, but the whole experience was so very _foreign_ and uncomfortable to me, that I wanted to run screaming, instead I was paraded around for the family to see that Bill finally, after how long? had a girlfriiend and she was even smart and pretty (if opinionated)... Needless to say that relationship was doomed to a short life, but not without its traumatizing climax (or anti-climax?)... So Bill and I went on a few more weekend dates (this is where I learned the trick that "long-distance" relationships are the _best_ kind because you don't have to see the person daily... much more bearable) and the last time we actually were together was a month before we "broke up". We had been talking up a storm on the phone and I think that he must have gotten too many ideas, but the night ended badly... and in fact poisoned me against oral sex for a good four years... with a very inexpert tongue on a fishing expedition that was leading nowhere, with my pants only halfway down around my knees and him on top, and me praying "please just get off, please just get off..." but of course, saying nothing... (what did I know, I was 13 for chrissake?) I just assumed that you had to grin and bear it... Now it is rather amusing... and public opinion has shifted back and forth on the whole oral sex issue... but the really sad part or funny, depending on whose POV you take was how it all ended. So, after that night, I made every excuse to not be alone in a darkened room together, but I was supposed to be his date to Senior Prom, so I kept talking to him... Well, the week before he went on a band trip and there was a girl that I can only imagine he had lusted after for several years, that had just been dumped by her prom king boyfriend, and so Bill became her consolation target-date, and like a teenage boy, he caved almost instantaneously, only to be heartlessly ignored by her at the dance. Was I the poor jilted freshman? Never... when he called to tell me I was so relieved I almost cried, and instead I went out with my girlfriends to the freshman dance... These things must be so amusing to an outsider, they are such false constructions, bizarre social conventions imposed on generations of students in the public school system. It would happen that I never would go to a Prom, nor would I ever be sad about that, my life is perfectly complete without a photo of me and some uncomfortable tuxedo-wearing boy who thinks he's going to get lucky in a ridiculous dress... ah well. Of course the epilogue is the best part. Two days later Bill called me to say that he had made a horrible mistake and my reply was "sorry, you had your chance," and with that, I hung up the phone, never to see or hear from him again. How is it that 13 (almost 14 then) year-old girls can be so cruel and callous? Are we still heartless in different ways as we grow? God, I hope I am a better person now than I was then, but sometimes I have my doubts.
It is marvelously trite that I should be writing here in my bouts of insomnia, along with the myriad others, alone, madly fingering their keyboards in midnight melancholy... actually though, I am far from melancholy, and no, I am not pretending to be happy for the sake of the world today. I discovered a stockpile of things that I had written, things I thought that I had lost. Tis a bit embarrassing to read oneself out of context, and also a bit amusing.
So, since I can't sleep I will tell myself a bed-time story and you, dear readers, get to hear it too. We watched a Brittish film "Once upon a time in the Midlands" which was funny enough, in that it made you feel that awful sense of "pena ajena" that "other embarrasment" that you feel for someone else, a character, it was so well done, or I am so willing to temporarily suspend disbelief, that I actually had to cover my face with the pillow to not see the embarrasing scene. I tend to over-react... What was most striking is that the white-trashy suburb in the movie reminded me tremendously of (no, not my youth) but the northeast philly neighborhoods where I would play soccer, the ones with brick rowhouses and dangling clothing-lines and neighbors in eachother's business. I never spent much time actually in the neighborhoods, save for one time that I stayed over with Tracy McAnn, the lovely Irish girl with long, long hair and high, high teased bangs. She was really sweet, but after one night on the town (we were 12) with her friends in their Starter jackets and tapered acid wash jeans, I was glad to be a product of the bourgeious suburb from whence I came... after going to a movie we were walking home in the dark with some of her guy-friends and in a parking lot, a kid who couldn't have been more than 16 started picking a fight with "our" boys... Then he pulled out a gun... we all ran like hell, but man, that was enough to squelch any inner-city curiousity I had for a long time... in fact, save for this episode, the next time I went back to Northeast philly was in college when I was doing a volunteer tutoring gig and I would drive in my big old Ford Taurus with NH plates along with three other "women" to work on Spanish literacy and literature with a group of puerto Rican and Dominican high school girls.
But I was supposed to be telling a story...The rowhouses reminded me of my first boyfriend, whose name, believe it or not, I was having a hard time remembering, but I decided that it was Bill, Bill Bradley, I think... I know it was a politician's name too.
He was my first "official" boyfriend, though if you were to ask my mother, she would say I never made an official announcement. I was rather secretive at 13, (aren't we all?) but he would come over on occasion, I think maybe mostly when my parents were out. Most of our courtship involved the telephone and it evolved from the basic "getting to know you" stuff to talking dirty... or at least my limited 13-year-old idea of what talking dirty was, having very few actual referents with which to compare, because he lived in the next town over and I, of course, was too young to drive. What can we expect from a first boyfriend? Well, of course he had to be older, for any number of reasons, but mostly beacause at 13, girls look like women and boys... well, I do like skinny boys, but let's not exaggerate, they should not break in your hands... Bill was 18 and he was a senior, very exciting, only problem was that when he wanted to be together, all I wanted to do was sleep over at Noelle's house and go hiking up to our study rock and do biology homework. I mean, having a boyfriend "in theory" was a status symbol and a senior, well that was even better, but actually having to _deal_ with him? Too much trouble... Now poor Bill had a few things going against him... and here is where the row houses come in... This is where you are going to think me a horrible classist witch, which at the time I probably was and may well still be, I just hide it better? But his family was so terribly crass, so astoundingly Americanly uneducated. The one, and only, time that I went on a family "date" to his grandmother's house in North Philly I ended up in a heated argument with his horribly sexist uncle, cringing next to his hopelessly obese and opinionless mother... Those things separately would be fine and acceptable, but the whole experience was so very _foreign_ and uncomfortable to me, that I wanted to run screaming, instead I was paraded around for the family to see that Bill finally, after how long? had a girlfriiend and she was even smart and pretty (if opinionated)... Needless to say that relationship was doomed to a short life, but not without its traumatizing climax (or anti-climax?)... So Bill and I went on a few more weekend dates (this is where I learned the trick that "long-distance" relationships are the _best_ kind because you don't have to see the person daily... much more bearable) and the last time we actually were together was a month before we "broke up". We had been talking up a storm on the phone and I think that he must have gotten too many ideas, but the night ended badly... and in fact poisoned me against oral sex for a good four years... with a very inexpert tongue on a fishing expedition that was leading nowhere, with my pants only halfway down around my knees and him on top, and me praying "please just get off, please just get off..." but of course, saying nothing... (what did I know, I was 13 for chrissake?) I just assumed that you had to grin and bear it... Now it is rather amusing... and public opinion has shifted back and forth on the whole oral sex issue... but the really sad part or funny, depending on whose POV you take was how it all ended. So, after that night, I made every excuse to not be alone in a darkened room together, but I was supposed to be his date to Senior Prom, so I kept talking to him... Well, the week before he went on a band trip and there was a girl that I can only imagine he had lusted after for several years, that had just been dumped by her prom king boyfriend, and so Bill became her consolation target-date, and like a teenage boy, he caved almost instantaneously, only to be heartlessly ignored by her at the dance. Was I the poor jilted freshman? Never... when he called to tell me I was so relieved I almost cried, and instead I went out with my girlfriends to the freshman dance... These things must be so amusing to an outsider, they are such false constructions, bizarre social conventions imposed on generations of students in the public school system. It would happen that I never would go to a Prom, nor would I ever be sad about that, my life is perfectly complete without a photo of me and some uncomfortable tuxedo-wearing boy who thinks he's going to get lucky in a ridiculous dress... ah well. Of course the epilogue is the best part. Two days later Bill called me to say that he had made a horrible mistake and my reply was "sorry, you had your chance," and with that, I hung up the phone, never to see or hear from him again. How is it that 13 (almost 14 then) year-old girls can be so cruel and callous? Are we still heartless in different ways as we grow? God, I hope I am a better person now than I was then, but sometimes I have my doubts.
posted by ilana at 1:09 a.m.
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