Two by two our socks are folded
Waiting till our feet get colded
Sleeping clean in sloppy piles
Dozing through the dusty whiles
Hating summers fetid heat
Dreaming of our humid feet.
Posted by Elizabeth @ 3/26/07 5:00pm
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
People Need to Stop Marrying
Right after the ceremony when Dad married Wife Number Three, and we were standing outside of the church in the setting summer sun, the minister gave us a look that I’ve never forgotten. I doubt that any of us blamed him; he’d married Mom to Husband Number Two a few years ago, and Dad to Wife Number Two even more recently. I doubt that he failed to notice Wife Number Three’s need of an interpreter to understand her vows. Also, we were wearing what even the most liberal of prostitutes would consider to be inappropriate wedding attire. Jennifer had on some kind of funereal-French-maid number, Heather had on a backless gold Salvation Army item, and I was happily braless in a red floor-length dress with spaghetti straps and lace trim. In the spirit of full disclosure, there were also some six inch platforms involved. He didn’t wish us any happy tidings, he just gave us the hairy eyeball and walked towards the rectory, probably to photocopy Dad’s check. Until recently, my reaction to his extreme disappointment was always, ‘Well, if the minister didn’t like us, we must be cool.’ Until recently, I didn’t know anyone who was getting married.
The first people to go were ones I’d always suspected of being idiots, and they married each other so I wasn’t too bothered. That was high school; they were gossip. Then in college, people I knew and liked started getting married. People I’d gone to high school with, who had written interesting papers about the French Revolution, who’d gone to Ivy League colleges and driven better cars than me, but who I now must think of as Morons. Maybe they are in love, maybe they will be together for ever, but if your parents pay your rent and you still keep pot in your underwear drawer, you are not an adult and should not be at liberty to enter into binding legal contracts.
Most recently and most upsetting, people who I dated are getting married (not to each other, that might be hot). My first boyfriend, twenty-four, now out of community college and in the air force, is engaged to the girl he dated just before me. She’s a whale of an English major, with the same haircut she had when they were seventeen and sixty-nined behind the Assembly Hall. My second boyfriend, twenty-one, now out of jail and working as a sandwich boy at Cosi, is engaged to his heroine-addicted under-aged girlfriend of ten months.
I understand when politicians cause the deaths of thousands, really I do, because they’re under a lot of pressure, and it could always have been worse. I understand why people commit murder; there’ve been times when I’ve gotten homicidally sick of looking for cigarette money in pay phones and public fountains. I can even understand why people make bad art; schnapps and meth will turn one’s brain into a delusion-riddled sponge that will easily confuse cheerios glued to a toilet seat with meaningful expression. What I can neither understand nor forgive is unnecessary marriage. Why buy the cow when you don’t have your own barn, or hay supply, when you’ve only been intimate with two or three other cows, and when there are fields and fields of cows all over the world who are going to frolic and explore and make stupid but reparable mistakes for another ten years until they know better?
Divorce does not repair anything: When the Hollywood star gets photographed and arrested while getting a hand-job from a transvestite in a ’73 Camero, and then performs fifty hours of community service, the matter will legally over, but nothing will ever be the same. I should know, too; I’m the product of a first marriage. Mom and Dad got married when they were about the age I am now, twenty three. The end result is, no matter how much I’ve come to agree with the disgusted minister, I can’t walk away from my family, my friends, the people I grew up with. Even though I’ve never said ‘I do,’ I’m going to be stuck with these people and their bad decisions for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
(Elizabeth posted this @ 11:30 ET)
The first people to go were ones I’d always suspected of being idiots, and they married each other so I wasn’t too bothered. That was high school; they were gossip. Then in college, people I knew and liked started getting married. People I’d gone to high school with, who had written interesting papers about the French Revolution, who’d gone to Ivy League colleges and driven better cars than me, but who I now must think of as Morons. Maybe they are in love, maybe they will be together for ever, but if your parents pay your rent and you still keep pot in your underwear drawer, you are not an adult and should not be at liberty to enter into binding legal contracts.
Most recently and most upsetting, people who I dated are getting married (not to each other, that might be hot). My first boyfriend, twenty-four, now out of community college and in the air force, is engaged to the girl he dated just before me. She’s a whale of an English major, with the same haircut she had when they were seventeen and sixty-nined behind the Assembly Hall. My second boyfriend, twenty-one, now out of jail and working as a sandwich boy at Cosi, is engaged to his heroine-addicted under-aged girlfriend of ten months.
I understand when politicians cause the deaths of thousands, really I do, because they’re under a lot of pressure, and it could always have been worse. I understand why people commit murder; there’ve been times when I’ve gotten homicidally sick of looking for cigarette money in pay phones and public fountains. I can even understand why people make bad art; schnapps and meth will turn one’s brain into a delusion-riddled sponge that will easily confuse cheerios glued to a toilet seat with meaningful expression. What I can neither understand nor forgive is unnecessary marriage. Why buy the cow when you don’t have your own barn, or hay supply, when you’ve only been intimate with two or three other cows, and when there are fields and fields of cows all over the world who are going to frolic and explore and make stupid but reparable mistakes for another ten years until they know better?
Divorce does not repair anything: When the Hollywood star gets photographed and arrested while getting a hand-job from a transvestite in a ’73 Camero, and then performs fifty hours of community service, the matter will legally over, but nothing will ever be the same. I should know, too; I’m the product of a first marriage. Mom and Dad got married when they were about the age I am now, twenty three. The end result is, no matter how much I’ve come to agree with the disgusted minister, I can’t walk away from my family, my friends, the people I grew up with. Even though I’ve never said ‘I do,’ I’m going to be stuck with these people and their bad decisions for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
(Elizabeth posted this @ 11:30 ET)
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