Memoirs of a Princess
At some point during my infancy I missed a meal because my brother fell down the stairs and had to be rushed to the hospital... or something. This is what I call “The Incident”. The Incident is the first in a long line of incidents of negligence toward me and it was all down hill from there. Growing up in upper middle class suburbia, I identified a lot with Schindler’s List. The white oppression and the pressure to succeed academically, athletically and financially (lemonade stand-style) was as bad as, if not worse than, a concentration camp. I mean, just look at the way I was limited in my wardrobe. I was constantly told to “cover myself” and “act like a lady” and “stop taking my clothes off in public”. Society might as well have slapped a pair of striped pajamas on me and handed me a shovel. “Unreasonable” was a gross understatement in describing my childhood. Life was positively fascist.
Another incidence of neglect might be on my third birthday I received The Aristocats as a gift. Unfortunately, I was given this so-called gift just before dinner, which was not, in fact, held in my honor. There was a cake involved, but it was vanilla. Everyone knows little girls only eat chocolate. Everyone knows that. After this dinner I was forced to take an unscheduled but otherwise innocuous bath in order to remove the mud that had built up in my crevices during the long day of play. This bath took upwards of 6 hours, if memory serves, and at the stroke of Bed Time I was only just donning my pajamas. I didn’t sit for a viewing of The Aristocats until noon the next day. It was completely and utterly unacceptable.
My life was so unbearable I often envisioned my own special on 20/20 in which an extrinsically ominous man stands inside the kitchen of my childhood home and tells the audience in a despairing voice that my father once put the chocolate syrup in the cup before the milk, thus creating an imperfect ratio in my chocolate milk and causing lasting psychological damage on his under-appreciated daughter.
Living in such conditions as this, I identified early on with the film Matilda. If there was ever a character with whom I could relate as a child it was that precocious and magical little girl. She knew what it was like and she taught me that those mean old parents must be punished. When I watched Danny DeVito suffer at the tiny hands of his tortured child my eyes lit up as bright as the 1993 tube through which this vision appeared to me. It was a sign from God.
[In moments like these, I truly believed my life was thus halved in quality as compared with my peers. Having been given everything, was it that I lacked the preparation to handle the word “no”? Had my privilege left me entirely incapable of handling the world outside of my neat little shelter?]
I once came to school with no snack money in the second grade and the amount of effort it took me to understand that that meant no snack nearly caused me to pass out. In the five minutes it took for my table mates to wait in line and purchase their snacks, I had devised a robbery plan worthy of an Ocean’s Eleven sequel: Ocean’s Spawn: The Snack Time Heist.
I experienced love for the first time that same year. Given the evidence, it’s apparent I was destined to fail at this milestone, as well. He was named Matt, as so many of them are, and he was devastatingly handsome for an 8 year old. His blonde hair moved like a Head & Shoulders commercial and the way his eyes twinkled when he called me “butthead” was hypnotic. I was particularly enamored with the way he was obsessed with me, because I was obsessed with me. It was something we had in common. When I stared into his crystalline blue eyes I could see my own reflection staring back at me and I fell deeply and hopelessly in love. We spent a few short years together as friendly adversaries. He was the most worthy water balloon opponent I could have dreamed of and the finest Luigi to my Princess Peach in MarioKart.
When fifth grade rolled around he sprouted up, as they do, and a new status of “cool” was bestowed upon his handsome and athletic existence. One day I woke to my brother, two years my senior, chuckling to my mother over cereal, as casual as any other school day, telling her just the silliest story about how Matt, my Matt, asked our neighbor Jocelyn to be his girlfriend. Jocelyn was also two years my senior and, out of respect for social boundaries, denied Matt’s request for courtship. She had already given her heart away to my own brother, who was incidentally completely averse to her attentions and often told her so after a crack about her lack of breasts.
The sheer volume of the sound of my heart breaking should have been enough to warn Matt, or Matthew, as he was to be called from that day forward, that I was coming for him. Oh yes, he would pay and he would pay dearly. If I couldn’t break his legs I would settle for breaking his spirit. All of the happy memories we shared became buried under a solid foundation of hatred and angst, and maybe a little bit of Ben & Jerry’s. This violent hatred manifested for the first time on the school bus one morning. He sat in the back, where the cool kids sat. But fortunately, I was a few months older and, by default, I was awarded the tiny seat in the very back of the bus next to the precariously levered emergency escape door. (I later lost the right to this thrown for being so uncool that sitting there was a rebellion the likes of which no bus has seen since that little thing Rosa Parks did.) As I passed the seat out of which Matt’s long legs sprawled, careless, in a show of moxie and attitude, I stomped and I stomped hard. I stomped as if my life depended on it and as his frame double over and his face came within range, effectively contorted in pain, I secured him in my cross hairs and fired. My heavy backpack wheeled around fast and smacked his face so hard it left him with a split cheek. I think he caught the sharp corner of Literature: The Ten Pound Book of the Large-Font Harlem Renaissance Stories.
That afternoon on the bus home a little note found its way into my lap. I opened it, unprepared for how my world was about to change. The little piece of paper had three sloppy words scrawled onto it and there was no signature, but there didn’t need to be.
“I hat you.”
I knew that he meant, “I hate you.” He was never really very good at spelling. Still isn't
My heart stone, I swore off men forever. I switched to girl friends that sucked at MarioKart and eventually broke my heart in a slower and more pointed way once puberty happened. Who knew designer handbags were so important to social survival? Deep in my heart I knew Matt would never have cared if I carried a designer bag or not.
By the eighth grade Matt had publicly broken up with four girlfriends and declared himself The Lady Killer. He took on an identity resembling Eminem and decided he would be a rapper. He was so cool.
Our contact was limited to awkward greetings at neighborhood gatherings and the occasional driveway basketball game between him and my brother. My heart fluttered at the mere mention of his name and, if by some stroke of luck he would ring the doorbell for my brother and I was in the position to answer it first, I would become so lightheaded I thought I might float away. He once even stopped in my room while he waited for my brother to shower off after a day of swimming just to say “hi” and hangout for a minute. I can’t remember if I said anything because I was too nervous to perform normal cognitive functions such as converting short-term memory into long term.
To call this romance a failure would be a great disrespect to my propensity for fucking things up in spectacular flair, but my first job held similar results with more controlled reactiveness so it could probably be filed under “Failure” rather than “Fucked Up Like Hiroshima”. I turned fifteen in May and went to work at Russo’s Market in Wildwood, NJ in June. This endeavor wasn’t sought on my own volition but by my evil parents with fanciful ideas about independence and self-sufficiency. I spent thirteen hours a day, three days a week throwing together sandwiches for beachgoers on their way to have fun. I stood there each morning in my little apron, my hair pulled back in a rough bun, holding my cleansed hands in the air like a doctor ready for surgery and watched the clock tick closer and closer to the eleventh hour. As the minutes wound down, I could start to feel the energy radiating from the imminent moshing that would take place at a dangerous proximity to my tiny sterile workspace and myself.
It all happened at once. The glass door would swing open and a gust of deliciously salty air would precede the sweaty, harried and breathy appearance of a well-intentioned tourist. Behind this single pioneer a gaggle of brazen, half-naked and burned vacationers would pour through in a tidal wave of happiness and hunger that would bury me in a gigantic pile of lunchmeat and misery.
“One two-foot Italian hoagie with extra extra oil. Like all the oil you have! And cut it into eighths! No, sixteenths!”
“Thirty foot-longs cut in half, one with mayo, one without mayo, one with light mayo, one with extra meat, one with no meat, one with light meat, one cut into fourths, one cut into fifths, one cut into swan-shaped pieces, one cut into the side of Mt. Rushmore, and a PB&J cut into triangles for the little guy.”
When the rush was over at 10:00 PM, I tossed my apron in a bin just to strap on a clean one. The ensuing two hours were devoted to ripping the place apart down to its foundation and cleaning every nook and cranny. Since that summer I have never seen a place get so thorough a scrub-down. It took a team of fifteen just to do the sandwich counter. At midnight when I’d stumble home in a drunken exhaustion clutching a foot-long PB&J (I was an innovator) and a box of french fries the size of my torso, I would patiently watch my life flash before my eyes before keeling over face-first into my couch, at long last. The condo was usually empty, my parents spending their night at some raucous party or pub having fun and living in direct, asshole contrast to my miserable existence. Jerks.
I later learned that I prefer physical work over deskwork with the passion of a thousand suns and would happily construct a million masterpieces out of capicola and ham if it meant never stepping foot into an office space ever again. Live and learn, I guess.
I was able to combine this knowledge about myself with the knowledge that I handle heartbreak badly by setting myself up for the jackpot when I was 17. I took a job in a doctor’s office, emphasis on office, just as my two-year relationship was falling apart. One day I found myself sitting at my desk, glaring at a huge stack of files that needed to be put away, unable to muster the strength to do so when suddenly my phone vibrated in my purse. Stealthily, in between glances from my boss, I reached down and read a text. It was a break up text. Actually, no, that’s a misnomer in this case. It wasn’t just a breakup text, it was a declaration of war. At least, that’s how I understood it, because boys who hurt me are asking to be punished, as I demonstrated in my first-love reverie. Don’t worry, after my second divorce I will surely seek psychological help for this.
As fate would have it, experiencing heartbreak in the environment I hate most turned out to be the catalyst that sent my life spinning wildly out of control, or if you’re a free spirit, wildly out of THE MAN’S control (she said ironically). In fact, “control” turned into a demonic word that made me lash out at the mere thought. It was a horcrux and I was Dumbledore drinking the water (she said as she pushed her glasses up her nose).
Desperately seeking fulfillment from people and jobs, with as little control as possible relinquished to either, became a full-time job in itself. “On call” is a deal-breaker word, as are “secretarial” and “sedentary”. My favorite thing to wear to work has mostly been a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and my favorite thing to wear on a date has been a pair of fresh pressed bitch pants, or a bitch skirt if I feel fancy. Existing at the whim of an external entity is a compromise that capitalism, government and mean bosses depend on people to make (she choked out through a cloud of marijuana smoke) and is therefor covered in bright red flags and screaming alarm bells.
Evidently, my biggest problem in life is how to be the happiest I can be with the least effort. The darkest my life has ever been was during the bender I went on after my wisdom teeth were taken out, and it was quite literally sanctioned by a doctor. Living in a way that makes a delayed viewing of The Aristocats seem like a deplorable injustice is the American Dream, and I have had the undeserved privilege of living it.
Another incidence of neglect might be on my third birthday I received The Aristocats as a gift. Unfortunately, I was given this so-called gift just before dinner, which was not, in fact, held in my honor. There was a cake involved, but it was vanilla. Everyone knows little girls only eat chocolate. Everyone knows that. After this dinner I was forced to take an unscheduled but otherwise innocuous bath in order to remove the mud that had built up in my crevices during the long day of play. This bath took upwards of 6 hours, if memory serves, and at the stroke of Bed Time I was only just donning my pajamas. I didn’t sit for a viewing of The Aristocats until noon the next day. It was completely and utterly unacceptable.
My life was so unbearable I often envisioned my own special on 20/20 in which an extrinsically ominous man stands inside the kitchen of my childhood home and tells the audience in a despairing voice that my father once put the chocolate syrup in the cup before the milk, thus creating an imperfect ratio in my chocolate milk and causing lasting psychological damage on his under-appreciated daughter.
Living in such conditions as this, I identified early on with the film Matilda. If there was ever a character with whom I could relate as a child it was that precocious and magical little girl. She knew what it was like and she taught me that those mean old parents must be punished. When I watched Danny DeVito suffer at the tiny hands of his tortured child my eyes lit up as bright as the 1993 tube through which this vision appeared to me. It was a sign from God.
[In moments like these, I truly believed my life was thus halved in quality as compared with my peers. Having been given everything, was it that I lacked the preparation to handle the word “no”? Had my privilege left me entirely incapable of handling the world outside of my neat little shelter?]
I once came to school with no snack money in the second grade and the amount of effort it took me to understand that that meant no snack nearly caused me to pass out. In the five minutes it took for my table mates to wait in line and purchase their snacks, I had devised a robbery plan worthy of an Ocean’s Eleven sequel: Ocean’s Spawn: The Snack Time Heist.
I experienced love for the first time that same year. Given the evidence, it’s apparent I was destined to fail at this milestone, as well. He was named Matt, as so many of them are, and he was devastatingly handsome for an 8 year old. His blonde hair moved like a Head & Shoulders commercial and the way his eyes twinkled when he called me “butthead” was hypnotic. I was particularly enamored with the way he was obsessed with me, because I was obsessed with me. It was something we had in common. When I stared into his crystalline blue eyes I could see my own reflection staring back at me and I fell deeply and hopelessly in love. We spent a few short years together as friendly adversaries. He was the most worthy water balloon opponent I could have dreamed of and the finest Luigi to my Princess Peach in MarioKart.
When fifth grade rolled around he sprouted up, as they do, and a new status of “cool” was bestowed upon his handsome and athletic existence. One day I woke to my brother, two years my senior, chuckling to my mother over cereal, as casual as any other school day, telling her just the silliest story about how Matt, my Matt, asked our neighbor Jocelyn to be his girlfriend. Jocelyn was also two years my senior and, out of respect for social boundaries, denied Matt’s request for courtship. She had already given her heart away to my own brother, who was incidentally completely averse to her attentions and often told her so after a crack about her lack of breasts.
The sheer volume of the sound of my heart breaking should have been enough to warn Matt, or Matthew, as he was to be called from that day forward, that I was coming for him. Oh yes, he would pay and he would pay dearly. If I couldn’t break his legs I would settle for breaking his spirit. All of the happy memories we shared became buried under a solid foundation of hatred and angst, and maybe a little bit of Ben & Jerry’s. This violent hatred manifested for the first time on the school bus one morning. He sat in the back, where the cool kids sat. But fortunately, I was a few months older and, by default, I was awarded the tiny seat in the very back of the bus next to the precariously levered emergency escape door. (I later lost the right to this thrown for being so uncool that sitting there was a rebellion the likes of which no bus has seen since that little thing Rosa Parks did.) As I passed the seat out of which Matt’s long legs sprawled, careless, in a show of moxie and attitude, I stomped and I stomped hard. I stomped as if my life depended on it and as his frame double over and his face came within range, effectively contorted in pain, I secured him in my cross hairs and fired. My heavy backpack wheeled around fast and smacked his face so hard it left him with a split cheek. I think he caught the sharp corner of Literature: The Ten Pound Book of the Large-Font Harlem Renaissance Stories.
That afternoon on the bus home a little note found its way into my lap. I opened it, unprepared for how my world was about to change. The little piece of paper had three sloppy words scrawled onto it and there was no signature, but there didn’t need to be.
“I hat you.”
I knew that he meant, “I hate you.” He was never really very good at spelling. Still isn't
My heart stone, I swore off men forever. I switched to girl friends that sucked at MarioKart and eventually broke my heart in a slower and more pointed way once puberty happened. Who knew designer handbags were so important to social survival? Deep in my heart I knew Matt would never have cared if I carried a designer bag or not.
By the eighth grade Matt had publicly broken up with four girlfriends and declared himself The Lady Killer. He took on an identity resembling Eminem and decided he would be a rapper. He was so cool.
Our contact was limited to awkward greetings at neighborhood gatherings and the occasional driveway basketball game between him and my brother. My heart fluttered at the mere mention of his name and, if by some stroke of luck he would ring the doorbell for my brother and I was in the position to answer it first, I would become so lightheaded I thought I might float away. He once even stopped in my room while he waited for my brother to shower off after a day of swimming just to say “hi” and hangout for a minute. I can’t remember if I said anything because I was too nervous to perform normal cognitive functions such as converting short-term memory into long term.
To call this romance a failure would be a great disrespect to my propensity for fucking things up in spectacular flair, but my first job held similar results with more controlled reactiveness so it could probably be filed under “Failure” rather than “Fucked Up Like Hiroshima”. I turned fifteen in May and went to work at Russo’s Market in Wildwood, NJ in June. This endeavor wasn’t sought on my own volition but by my evil parents with fanciful ideas about independence and self-sufficiency. I spent thirteen hours a day, three days a week throwing together sandwiches for beachgoers on their way to have fun. I stood there each morning in my little apron, my hair pulled back in a rough bun, holding my cleansed hands in the air like a doctor ready for surgery and watched the clock tick closer and closer to the eleventh hour. As the minutes wound down, I could start to feel the energy radiating from the imminent moshing that would take place at a dangerous proximity to my tiny sterile workspace and myself.
It all happened at once. The glass door would swing open and a gust of deliciously salty air would precede the sweaty, harried and breathy appearance of a well-intentioned tourist. Behind this single pioneer a gaggle of brazen, half-naked and burned vacationers would pour through in a tidal wave of happiness and hunger that would bury me in a gigantic pile of lunchmeat and misery.
“One two-foot Italian hoagie with extra extra oil. Like all the oil you have! And cut it into eighths! No, sixteenths!”
“Thirty foot-longs cut in half, one with mayo, one without mayo, one with light mayo, one with extra meat, one with no meat, one with light meat, one cut into fourths, one cut into fifths, one cut into swan-shaped pieces, one cut into the side of Mt. Rushmore, and a PB&J cut into triangles for the little guy.”
When the rush was over at 10:00 PM, I tossed my apron in a bin just to strap on a clean one. The ensuing two hours were devoted to ripping the place apart down to its foundation and cleaning every nook and cranny. Since that summer I have never seen a place get so thorough a scrub-down. It took a team of fifteen just to do the sandwich counter. At midnight when I’d stumble home in a drunken exhaustion clutching a foot-long PB&J (I was an innovator) and a box of french fries the size of my torso, I would patiently watch my life flash before my eyes before keeling over face-first into my couch, at long last. The condo was usually empty, my parents spending their night at some raucous party or pub having fun and living in direct, asshole contrast to my miserable existence. Jerks.
I later learned that I prefer physical work over deskwork with the passion of a thousand suns and would happily construct a million masterpieces out of capicola and ham if it meant never stepping foot into an office space ever again. Live and learn, I guess.
I was able to combine this knowledge about myself with the knowledge that I handle heartbreak badly by setting myself up for the jackpot when I was 17. I took a job in a doctor’s office, emphasis on office, just as my two-year relationship was falling apart. One day I found myself sitting at my desk, glaring at a huge stack of files that needed to be put away, unable to muster the strength to do so when suddenly my phone vibrated in my purse. Stealthily, in between glances from my boss, I reached down and read a text. It was a break up text. Actually, no, that’s a misnomer in this case. It wasn’t just a breakup text, it was a declaration of war. At least, that’s how I understood it, because boys who hurt me are asking to be punished, as I demonstrated in my first-love reverie. Don’t worry, after my second divorce I will surely seek psychological help for this.
As fate would have it, experiencing heartbreak in the environment I hate most turned out to be the catalyst that sent my life spinning wildly out of control, or if you’re a free spirit, wildly out of THE MAN’S control (she said ironically). In fact, “control” turned into a demonic word that made me lash out at the mere thought. It was a horcrux and I was Dumbledore drinking the water (she said as she pushed her glasses up her nose).
Desperately seeking fulfillment from people and jobs, with as little control as possible relinquished to either, became a full-time job in itself. “On call” is a deal-breaker word, as are “secretarial” and “sedentary”. My favorite thing to wear to work has mostly been a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and my favorite thing to wear on a date has been a pair of fresh pressed bitch pants, or a bitch skirt if I feel fancy. Existing at the whim of an external entity is a compromise that capitalism, government and mean bosses depend on people to make (she choked out through a cloud of marijuana smoke) and is therefor covered in bright red flags and screaming alarm bells.
Evidently, my biggest problem in life is how to be the happiest I can be with the least effort. The darkest my life has ever been was during the bender I went on after my wisdom teeth were taken out, and it was quite literally sanctioned by a doctor. Living in a way that makes a delayed viewing of The Aristocats seem like a deplorable injustice is the American Dream, and I have had the undeserved privilege of living it.
