THE ULTIMATE HUBRIS

Yes, Dahling -- like I really presume you give a fine early-morning shit who I am, what I think, where I go or how I get there.  But I have to account for those who -- like me -- sometimes will read and read and read on a web site because they agree with many things they've read and want to see if they agree with more; or want to see if they finally disagree; or just because they find the narrator's writing style pleasant and don't really care about much but filling their eyes.

Especially for the last kind, bio pages are written.  After all, there aren't very many people on the face of this rock we're slowly turning into an enormous garbage pail who care much less about my history than I do.  Including you.

If my mother is to be believed -- and for all intents and purposes, she is the only known expert on my birth -- I was born on an unseasonably warm October 27th, 1964, at the now-defunct Bethesda base hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio at around 10:30 a.m.  I was a moo-cow of an infant, starting out at somewhere just over eight and a half pounds.

If you think I'm going into great detail about my childhood, dream on -- it's boring.   I was a female raised in a small, semi-rural Midwestern town within spitting distance of a shamefully backward Midwestern city (Cincinnati), who was smarter than approximately 90% of her classmates, by statistical analysis.  I didn't measure as high as 'genius' on anybody's scoreboard, but I did fall into the 'gifted' category.  I performed acceptably well in just about everything until I was in high school -- I was good at math and science, in other words, until I concluded I really didn't enjoy working math and didn't want to pursue a career that required a great deal of science.  This got me labeled 'lazy,' even though I graduated either fourth or fifth in a class of 61.  Of course, the teacher who labeled me 'lazy' was my high school math teacher.  I believe, to this day, he resented the fact that I could work math problems as well as anyone, but simply hated to work math problems.  The science teacher was more patient, and understood that not everybody is cut out for rocket science; my grades never fell in science, though they weren't as high as they could have been, had I given a smart shit about it.

Without going into a lot of boring, bathetic detail, I was persecuted in school, largely because the people I went to school with were morons who found out they could hurt me, and they enjoyed it.  They didn't like it that I was a loner, or smarter, or that my folks weren't sunk up to their earlobes in debt -- so they told me I was fat and that I shouldn't breed.  Kids suck, it's going to take a hell of a lot of convincing to get me to ever have any, and by now I'm not sure it wouldn't be too late.  If I had been a violent person, the first Columbine-style school massacre would have occurred in 1980 rather than the early 1990s, rest assured.

I liked English, and I did well in it, and I started college as a journalism major.   What I learned very quickly was, English skills meant approximately nada to journalism -- pandering to the editor mattered, once you were out of college.  Oh, sure -- we gave each other endless shit, on the college paper, about grammatical and spelling errors that slipped by into the paper ... but we all knew nobody really cared very much outside college.  To this day, I've seldom been proved wrong -- even the best daily local paper is rife with errors and difficult to read.  Local papers, and county advertisers, are the pits.  Count me grateful I had a halfway decent excuse for dropping out of college, because I can't imagine I'd have had either the manipulative personality or the selfishness to be a success in journalism.  My ego is not nearly enormous enough to serve me well in that industry.

So I got married and became a world traveler.  Well, okay -- perhaps not.  I did get married, and shortly thereafter moved to Illinois, and from Illinois to New Mexico, and from New Mexico to South Carolina.  While I was practicing at being somebody's wife the first time, I used my spare time learning to better manipulate words on a page.   Because I really just don't like interacting with strangers all that much, but writing somehow fulfills some of those urges.   I have so far mustered neither the narcissism or self-confidence to publish anything but a story or two in local literary tabloids; this only means I'm anxiety-ridden, not that I'm a shitty writer.  Well, there are those who would probably differ, but I doubt you'll ever speak to them.

Not going into a long disquisition on my politics; the content of the rest of the site will probably give you an idea, but even if it doesn't, I really don't care.  I don't have kids, and I've never been hit on purpose by anybody but my late father and my mother (who, one would assume, at least had some claim to a right to do so).  So there aren't any really filthy secrets hiding anywhere here, I don't think except that I probably have more animals in my house than a sane person would choose to have, and I have problems accepting authority and finding gainful employment in Dayton, Ohio where I now live.  We didn't move here for me -- we moved here for my husband's job -- and I gave up a really good job in Cincinnati to move here for him.  If I'd known what the market was like for what I do here, I'd have protested the move (hell, he wouldn't have suggested it, if he'd known I was going to spend most of my life here unemployed).   It's not about the money -- we can get by fine with what he makes -- it's the sheer boredom, and the fact that most weeks I spend at least five days uttering no more than the number of words it takes to buy groceries to anybody but four cats and a dog.  And only the dog actually listens.

Oh, yeah -- and the old gal who lives next door doesn't like us because we won't cut down all the trees in our yard.  She hates trees, you see, especially ones in other people's yards that drop leaves in hers.  No, my husband actually goes out and rakes all the leaves our trees drop in her yard in the fall, she doesn't have to do anything about it.  No, she never goes in the part of the yard where the trees drop leaves.   She just doesn't like them.  Don't ask me -- maybe she was molested by a tree in her youth?  Feh.  We bought the house for the trees, so she can kiss my butt.

I once had a psychological counselor tell me she thought I'd probably been mildly, chronically depressed most of my adult life.  That's a weird thing to hear, but she's probably right.  The worst question I've ever asked myself is, what would I have been like if I hadn't been?  The second worst is, do I really want to know?  Maybe I'd have made a bunch of babies.  Maybe I'd have been a star.  Maybe I'd have been a Republican.  Eww.  Scratch that -- the second question was worse than the first.

Stay tuned -- maybe I'll vomit up some more detritus at some point.

10/03/2002 02:26 PM