Junior High and Dolly

Junior high was an interesting time.  Interesting in the way one says interesting when they have no other adjective to use.  I attended Imperial Junior High in Ontario which was about three blocks from our house on Glenn Street.  Our house was on a cul de sac across from the Section 8 apartments where most of my friends lived. 

My parents bought the house new.  Within a couple of years they would lose it to a bank when my dad quit his truck driving job and mortgaged it to buy a bar.  As my mom always said, "a drinker owning a bar is a disaster waiting to happen."  And eventually, that disaster did happen and my parents lost the house.

But in Junior High, my mom and dad still owned the house.  It was the early 1980's and we had just transferred from St. George's, a parochial school in Ontario that we had attended for two years.  My mom couldn't afford the tuition or the uniforms any more so we started seventh grade back at public school.

I was happy because my best friend Melinda and I would be reunited again.  Duran Duran and Wham were all the rage and I remember my outfit on the first day of school: black leggings and a florescent pink oversized sweatshirt like the one in Wham's video.  My mom bought my twin sister Jackie the same sweater only in yellow and I begged Jackie not to wear it the first day. 

The first day of school I realized that Melinda and I didn't have any classes together.  All of my classes were GATE classes.  I remember Melinda commenting on it and I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "We will still eat lunch together."

My first class was English and I sat in the front of the class as usual.  A girl sat down next to me and said, "Hi, my name is Dolly, what's yours?" in a thick Southern twang.  Dolly and I became fast friends.  She had moved from Arkansas and lived with her parents in the condos next door to Imperial Junior High.  She used the word "fixing" as in "I am fixing to turn on the lights."

Dolly had curly blond hair and she wore her bangs over her face on a slant.  "It's new ro", she told me.  I pretended I knew what she meant, but later she explained that new ro was short for the New Romantic music phase.  I remember that she wore the coolest white overalls that had splashes of florescent faux paint splattered all over them.

We used to go to Dolly's house at lunch and watch movies on the cable channel.  Her room was covered in pictures of Duran Duran and we would always argue over who would get to marry John Taylor.  Simon Le Bon was always our second choice.

Dolly and I were close.  I would spend the night at her house and her mom would get us take out.  Her mom's bathroom cabinet was filled with medication for her "issues".  "She takes Valium to calm her nerves," Dolly told me one day her voice twanging on the word nerves.

My friendship with Dolly eventually faded.  I wonder what happened to her.  Did she move back to the South?  She didn't go on to Chaffey with us.  Where is she now?

It is interesting to go back in time and dredge up memories.  It can also be frustrating.

Dolly's story is one that that I don't have an ending to.  In junior high she was a huge part of my existence and now she is just a somewhat vague recollection.

If I had to imagine an ending, it would go something like this.  Dolly moved back to the South and graduated from high school early and went on to study film at NYU.  She changed her name when she became a famous filmmaker.

Fiction can be liberating.  I wish memoir was that easy.

The Importance of Being Good

A couple of years ago, I read a book by Nick Hornby titled "How to be Good".  The story centers around the conversion of a man from angry to good.  There is a spirtual healer and a lot of other issues involved (that don't matter for this story), but it was the concept that was most interesting.

This morning I was thinking of how hard it is to be good.  I equate good with nice and maybe that is the problem.  Maybe they are not the same thing.

Truth be told, I am not a very nice person.   I am bossy, irritable and I love to get up on a soapbox and voice my opinion even when unwanted.  My sister Annie calls me on it sometimes.

"Don't use your lawyer voice on me", Annie will say in her usual diplomatic but forceful way (yes, reader, she is an Aquarian).  She knows I can't help it.

My husband, after twenty years, also realizes my nature.  And, when I am (insert air quote here) nice, he is perplexed.  "Why are you being so nice?", he will ask in his usual droll Piscean manner.  "Are you ill?"

My clients seem to understand me as well.  I work hard for them and they seem to get it.  Lawyers can be nice and not be good.  They can promise you the moon and then screw you over (legally speaking).  I pride myself on never giving up.  "I am not Harry Potter," I sometimes tell people.  Yet, I always try to work some magic.

We public defenders get a bad rap.  We make next to nothing relatively speaking, have large caseloads and are called "public pretenders".  It is an uphill battle to get our clients to trust us.

My friend Tracy also understands me.  Tracy has known me since high school and she is so nice that she would probably say I was nice if I asked her.  But, I would know she was just being nice as opposed to truthful because bitch can be an understatement when I am in one of my moods.

The question is whether it is worth it for me to try to be nicer.  I will never be nice, but perhaps I could be less gruff, more patient and less bossy.  Is it possible?  The answer: possible but not probable.

The problem is that I like myself, bossy, annoying and opinionated person that I am.  I don't want to be a doormat, I think (actually I know) my opinion matters and I hate waiting.

It is JEM's world people and you are all just living in it.

The Perks of a being a Ghost World Girl

I saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower (a film based on the screenwriter/director's acclaimed young adult novel of the same name) a couple of days ago and it brought back many memories of my high school years.  The only other movies that have touched me similarly are movies from the actual 80's era itself, namely, the John Hughes cannon of 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club.

And I can't forget about Ghost World, a movie about the post high school existence of a goth girl and her best friend.

The angst of high school was so prevalent in The Perks of Being a Wallflower that you could almost taste it.  I sometimes forget how beautifully bittersweet those years were for me.  Much like Charlie, the male protagonist of the movie, I felt like an outsider during high school.  My home life was so chaotic and upsetting that it impacted my ability to see a future and a different kind of life.  As a result, I tried to sabotage it.  The two things that saved me, just like they saved Charlie, were music (specifically the Smiths for both of us) and my two best friends.

Music for me was a salve to everything at home.  The Smiths changed my outlook on life.

The Smiths were not just a band, they were a lifestyle.  Morrissey was not just a writer, he was a poet and he touched the loner outsider in all of us.  He spoke of unrequited love, of longing and of loneliness.

"That music is so depressing" is what some say of it.  But, for someone struggling with depression, the Smiths was a kind of cure.

My two other favorite bands in high school, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, were not just music to me.  The bands were style and substance and a view of the world that didn't accept that everyone had to look or be the same.

My two best friends, Tracy and Melinda, were my other salvation.  We had adventures that I will always treasure and cherish in my mind's eye.  The memories of those adventures are their own book, one I hope to publish some day.  We were our own little world together.

Ultimately, that was the perk of being an outsider.  I found other outsiders and created a life and a world for myself out of dust.

And it was beautiful.

On being Belinda and other fantasies of childhood

When I was in the last stages of elementary school (circa 1981), the Go-Go's were my favorite group.

My dad had a huge laser disc player, a precursor to a DVD player, and each disc must have weighed five pounds.  The laser disc came in a huge sleeve about one and a half times the size of a vinyl record.  My dad went to a place in Pomona to rent the discs.  On one such trip, my dad surprised us when he bought the laser disc of the Go-Go's live in concert singing their first album "Beauty and the Beat".  Although I am not a music critic, I think it is undisputed that "Beauty and the Beat" is an album that still holds up today.

The album is pop punk.  The album has a host of great songs including "We Got the Beat" (every school kid's anthem), "This Town" (life in the big city), "Fading Fast" (the consummate bad relationship song) and "Our Lips Are Sealed" which was the theme song of me and my sisters who were constantly mortified in front of the neighbors by my parent's fighting.

"Can you hear them talk about us, telling lies, well that's no surprise. Can you see them, see right through them.  They have no shields, no secrets to reveal.  Doesn't matter what they say, in the jealous games people play."

As if it was a minute ago rather than thirty years, I can picture myself in the living room of our house on Glenn street in Ontario, California.   I am singing into a hairbrush and dancing wearing a long skirt with a loose shirt.  A silver bangled belt is slung over my hips.  My hair is curly just like Belinda Carlisle's (the lead singer).

My twin sister Jackie is playing guitar on a tennis racket mimicking the moves of Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey and Annie is playing the drums off beat (unlike Gina Schock who was always on beat) on the end table with silverware. No one ever wanted to be Kathy Valentine.

We had a tamborine and I would always use it on the song "Automatic".   I would shake my head like Belinda and shrug my shoulders in time with the music moving the tamborine up and down at my side while I mouthed the words,  "Inside fire burning bright...  Time stop.  Automatic."

Being Belinda was my way of imagining that another life existed.

At age six, I used to read my mom's Harlequin romance novels and dream of being a heiress or a ward.  This scarred me for life romantically and caused my first grade teacher to wonder aloud why I knew the word "ravished".  Later, I daydreamed myself into being Scarlet O' Hara.  Then Belinda.

Everyone wanted to be Belinda.  She was the epitome of coolness.  Of course, as a child I didn't know her dark side: the drugs, the insecurities and the rabble rousing.  Or maybe subconsciously I did.  Aren't all cool kids at least a little bit dark?

When I hear a Go-Go's song it transports me quicker than any time machine could.    I morph from a forty something lawyer to a tween lip syching with a hairbrush in her hand.

It brings back the good memories of my sisters and I rocking out and it brings back the melancholy memories of sitting in the park with a book wondering when my dad was going to get home and if my mom was still screaming.

I think that is why I love the Go-Go's so much.  Their music while up tempo is very bittersweet most of the time.

Just like life.

The Greater Fool

I just finished watching season one of HBO's show "The Newsroom".  The show is about believing in the pursuit of truth.  Will, the anchor, is called a greater fool for doing so.  A greater fool is defined on the show as someone who thinks they will succeed where others have failed.  Think Don Quixote (the ultimate literary fool).  It is about going for your passion and doing what you believe in, no matter the cost.

It made me think, am I a greater fool?

Some would say by being a public defender I am.  Being the voice for the voiceless is one of my passions.  I love and believe in what I do.

Yet, I have to ask myself, is it my greatest passion?

I think not said the cat.

When I was five, I used to dream about being a writer, not a lawyer.

When I was the editor-in-chief of Mt. SAC's newspaper "the Mountaineer", I considered applying for a degree in journalism.  After looking at the average pay I changed my mind.  I could make more money bartending and waitressing.  I applied to UCR and chose English Literature as a major because it seemed more practical.

My newspaper professor Gina, who was a former journalist for the Washington Post, never spoke to me after graduation.  Gina had higher hopes for me than I had for myself.  Gina had entered my story in a national journalism contest and when it won second place, she told me she thought I should be a journalist.  She urged me to apply to the journalism school at Columbia University.

I couldn't visualize it.  New York?  It seemed impossible.

Sometimes we make choices in our lives and it takes us down a different path.  Would I have found my greatest passion earlier if I had went down the scary road rather than the safe one?  Where would I be?

You cannot second guess your life.  I cannot change the past.  But, what I can do is visualize who I want to be and what I want to be.

And, I have realized that I want to be a greater fool, no matter how desperate and foolhardy it may be.

My pen is my only sword.  Wish me luck.

If humilation is good for the soul....

If humiliation is good for the soul I am set for life.  A couple of Fridays ago, I had a hemorrhage at a conference in Irvine.  From my butt.

That's right.  From my bunghole.

The blood poured my asshole as if I had hit a vein.  The truth is, I had.  Hemorrhoids are a type of vein and as I learned later from a kind rectal surgeon, my hemorrhoids were at the stage four thrombosis stage.  Stage four didn't sound too bad until I learned there are only four stages.  Stage four equals surgery.

Earlier, right after lunch, I had to use the bathroom and as I sat down I saw the toilet was filled with blood.  I stood up and blood splattered on the floor in a puddle.  After ten minutes of me trying to staunch the flow of blood, the hotel bathroom looked like a murder scene from a slasher flick.  I am going to pass out and someone is going to see all of this blood and think someone tried to kill me.  Eventually, they will realize it was just my butt bleeding out.  

I was at the Hyatt in Irvine for a Veterans' Court Conference and had tried to ignore my worsening bathroom issues all week.  Every morning, I would wake up and use the bathroom and see blood filling the toilet.  I would grit my teeth through the pain and put pressure and the bleeding would stop.

But this time the bleeding didn't stop and I grabbed paper towel after paper towel and stuffed them in my jeans. 

I called my husband crying and told him I was going to leave the conference and drive home.  "Are you fucking crazy?' he yelled at me.  "You're hemorrhaging, call 911.  It could be internal."

I walked back out to the conference room and sat down with a grimace.

One of my colleagues, a female probation officer, asked, "Are you OK?"

"I am not OK at all", I whispered back.  "Can you go with me to the restroom?"

We had went to the fair the night before and danced our asses off to "No Duh", a "No Doubt" tribute band.  She could never have foreseen what getting friendly would mean the next day.

I walked out of the conference room and ran to the bathroom.  The paper towels were soaked through.  I felt dizzy as I watched more blood splatter from my anus to the bathroom tile.  

My probation officer friend handed me some more paper towels over the bathroom door which I stuffed in my underwear.  Hobbling out of the restroom, I said, "I am going to pass out.  We need to call the paramedics."

The District Attorney on my team was waiting outside the restroom for us.  He said, "Let's go sit down."

I replied, "I can't sit down."  The face he made showed his confusion and I said, "That is where my problem area is," I said.  He nodded.  The hotel staff walked over and told us that the paramedics were on their way.

Within three minutes, a paramedic who looked like a cross between Owen Wilson and Bradley Cooper was taking my vitals.  His partner, a Matt Damon lookalike (I know paramedics are cute, but these Orange County guys were ridiculous looking!) asked me what the issue was.  

I was so exhausted and dizzy that I was blunt.  

"My ass is bleeding out."

The humiliation did not end there.  I was rushed to the hospital where I had to tell multiple nurses, an ER doctor and a rectal surgeon my hemorrhoid issues.

The rectal surgeon stopped the bleeding with table sugar.  My husband said it is the osmosis whatever that means.  

Today, I am on my way to the hospital for a colonoscopy.  The first step to treatment is to make sure that there is nothing else wrong.  I drank two liters of a vile liquid yesterday.  And fasted.  That may account for why I am stupid enough to blog about this.  It is not bravery or a need to share, it is food deprivation.

In the end, what I have learned from this experience, because as all my readers should know, my goal is always to make this blog like an after school special on ABC (cough, not!), humiliation is relative.

It just depends on your threshold and after a month of (finally) dealing with my hemorrhoidal issues, I no longer care what people think.  It is my issue.  We all have them.  And the scary part is, I suffered for ten years because I was too embarrassed to talk about it.    

But, fuck it.  I am a bare ass, sugar on her butt hole (aka sweet ass) girl who has thrown all caution to the wind.  

Go ahead and stick your scope up my butt and look inside.  Just be gentle.   

The absence makes the heart grow fonder conundrum

I am in Irvine all week on a conference for work. And, I am homesick. Very homesick. I am homesick for the sweet smell of my dogs and my husbands thick head of hair lying in our king bed beside me. It may seem odd to focus on his hair, but you haven't seen my husband's thick black head of hair which only grows more shaggy and floppy with age while mine gets thinner and more brittle. Does absence really make the heart grow fonder? I don't know if it is the absence so much as the longing for that person or animal (which are one and the same in my world as my animals are people to me). It is the remembrances of the day to day ordinary rote routine which seems compelling in its absence in a way that is not compelling in reality. I even miss the way my husband hogs the shower in the morning. He is six foot four and taking a shower with him is like taking a shower with a huge tree in the way. His frame blocks all my water stream and I have to wait until he is done. I miss that. I lived by myself for many years and when I was in law school in Los Angeles, Adrian and I only saw each other on weekends. When I moved to Texas after law school, we saw each other once a month for three years (not including a few extended vacations). While in Houston, I was used to sleeping alone, going to the movies alone and being alone. I am not happy alone anymore and that is scary. That is not to say that I don't like some alone time now and then, because I do. As a feminist I think it is important to be happy on your own before you choose to spend your life with someone. It is nice not to need someone, but to want someone. I went to the beach and boogie boarded Monday night. I swam in the ocean and sat on the beach and read my book. No one bothered me, but on the other hand, I had no one to tell how much the face of the water moved me or how much my arms hurt. Well, that's not entirely true, I told Facebook, but that is a sad friend to have. I guess even if I don't want to admit it, I need someone and want someone and have someone. And for that I am happy.