Category: commentary

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“Messy” is the new “Blue”

Shades_Of_Blue_Wallpaper_1ad0gI’ve always wondered where the idea of blue being used to describe a sad emotion came from. Blue can be an incredibly vibrant color when at its best. I remember when I was a kid my “uncle” had this bright blue shirt that he would always wear on Sundays. It was something we could count on whenever we saw him on a Sunday, that bright blue shirt and a smile on his unshaven face. I never asked him about that blue shirt but I always thought about it, and what it might have meant to him. As I got older I realized there actually must have been a number of different shirts all in the same color because just one would have worn out or faded with time. He was always happy in that shirt, so I equated that color with happiness. Back then when anyone would tell me they were feeling blue, I would smile and say, “Great!” never minding their confused expressions.

There are so many different shades of blue, too, something else that didn’t truly resonate as a child. The sky was blue, and I knew it wasn’t the same blue as my uncle’s shirt, but my brain didn’t really process. My uniform for private school was a yellow shirt with navy blue pants. They were so dark they were hard to distinguish from black. I couldn’t reconcile the bright blue of the shirt with the light blue of the sky with the dark blue of the navy pants. That every single one of those things could be blue and yet be so distinguishable from each other was mind boggling. Blue seemed to me to be in just about everything around me, and I looked for it everywhere. Continue reading ““Messy” is the new “Blue””

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Write What You Know?

I’ve heard it more times than I care to admit, those people reading my writing, clucking their tongues and saying, “You write what you know.” And I get exasperated, because they’ve probably just read my treatise on the glory of the socialist state, or my poem about a trip to hell, or the story I wrote from the perspective of a girl who lost her virginity at 13. How would I know anything about any of that, having never lived in a socialist state (that I know of), never having been to hell (although maybe Brooklyn qualifies these days), and never having been a girl (my virginity was intact until I was 21, by the way)? Yet they somehow try to force me into the narrative, into the dialogue somehow, as if there is no other way of writing, as if my imagination isn’t good enough (or perhaps too good) to come up with something like that out of thin air.

Give writers more credit. Or at least give some writers more credit. You know the writer who only writes about their daily lives, their troubles, their issues, and their foibles. And that’s okay. Some of my favorite bloggers are those who write that and only that. It’s what they know, and they’re experts at it. If I can’t live inside their skin, it’s a close second to read through their emotional baggage laid out on the screen. I know, too, for so many of those writers, it’s a therapeutic exercise, to get it all out, like focused breathing. In and out. Repeat. Some writers have that gift, to connect the readers with the experience, just as it happened and nothing else. Continue reading “Write What You Know?”

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The Apologist, Part 2

Those two little words.

“I’ve skirted all my differences, but now I’m facing up. I wanted to apologize for everything I was, so… I’m sorry.” – R.E.M.

When I was a kid I remember my mother giving me “the look,” the one that said I did something wrong and I needed to somehow make it right. But I never knew what it was I did wrong in the first place, and I had absolutely no idea how to make it right. She would sit me down and explain what I did wrong. Maybe I pulled my sister’s hair, or I stole the Kool-Aid, or I forgot to feed the guinea pig, or one of a million other things I tended to mess up during the course of my short life up until that point. But that was the easy part, coming up with the problem; it was the solution that always proved to be difficult.

I’m sorry. Why was that always so hard to say? Maybe because I wasn’t. Not really. Not ever. Continue reading “The Apologist, Part 2”

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Where There’s Smoke…

A camel smoking. Hmmm.

When I was a kid there was a huge billboard in downtown Philadelphia with the Marlboro Man on it. You remember him, the rugged everyman who apparently smoked a pack of reds every day before lunch, and he somehow maintained his brilliant physique and eyes that could pierce steel. And out on I-95 there was another billboard dedicated to a caricature of a camel, also smoking a cigarette. In very small print on both signs was a warning from the U.S. Surgeon General saying something about smoking being harmful to your health. I, of course, saw neither one of these signs, but I knew what they looked like because they were everywhere.

We rode the subway to church most Saturdays, and in the underground world of the subway there were huge billboards lined up on both sides of the tracks. It was funny sometimes when a train was on the opposite track and I could see just a partial billboard through the gap in the train cars. When I first saw a Marlboro Man sign I was waiting for the El at 30th Street Station and there were two posters of him flanking a billboard for the film CB4, which also seemed to celebrate smoking as a lifestyle choice. And I wasn’t interested. It had nothing to do with the Surgeon General’s warning, and everything to do with how I was raised, to think my body was the temple of God, and to avoid anything that would ruin that temple.

That rugged dude.

So, why did I start smoking three years later? Easy. I wanted to fit in. Continue reading “Where There’s Smoke…”

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Living Next to Disney

Disney-World“People who live next to Disney hardly ever go there.”

I lived the first twenty-one years of my life in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the birthplace of the U.S. Constitution, and the home of the famed Liberty Bell. And after I ventured out into the world and met more people from other places, I finally realized just how interesting the place of my birth was. The history packed into the place could fill several books, and yet it was something I took for granted being able to walk into Independence Hall anytime I wanted, or passing by Betsy Ross’s house on my way to South Street on Thursday evenings in July. Moving away, though, gave me a perspective I never would have had otherwise.

When I won a trip for a week at Disney World, to stay on the park property, I was ecstatic. I was going to the most magical place on earth, to spend a week with several other groups of kids from all over the U.S., and it was going to be amazing. Among the group of kids who all congregated there for the week were teenagers from California, from Texas, and from Atlanta. There was also a group from Orlando, and I was so excited to meet them. I mean, they lived right down the block from a place I would kill to live near, and I wanted to know how amazing that was for them. But when I asked the question, one of the girls laughed at me and said, “People who live next to Disney hardly ever go there.” She explained that it didn’t mean the park wasn’t amazing. What it meant was that you can get used to anything. You can take anything for granted. Continue reading “Living Next to Disney”