Poet of Logan Square's Open Salon Blog

What's the Matter With Me?

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:05:23 -0400

I just blew a bunch of job or job prospects. Not meaning to blow them or maybe really meaning to blow them. I am being stalked by someone in the unemployment office who keeps screwing up my unemployment extension by rolling new boulders into my path, forcing me to go into the office week by week and sort things out. I don't know who this person is, but they think I do not deserve the extension. The latest screw job is a letter stating that they've OVERPAID me for a year and I owe the unemployment office $742 dollars! Are they crazy? I'm unemployed! If they "overpaid" me isn't that their error?I have to go back in on Monday. I thought I made a friend there--Jim. But I guess not.

I was supposed to do an interview at the Botanical Gardens which is two trains, a metra and a bus away. It would take me an hour and a half each way and cost about $15-20 a day. Was this even possible for a part time $8.00/hour job? I decided not. I don't own a car. Was I wrong? Aren't we poor Americans doing ANYTHING for a job? Apparently not.

Do I mean to blow off these jobs? What's the matter with me? I can no longer stomach anything! The lastest fiasco was being yelled at and intimidated by a 300-pound 6'4" African American self described "young lion" in the telemarketing room of a famous Symphony. (Guess which one!) He locked the door on the room one evening and said no one was leaving until somebody made a sale! He stood over you and YELLED at the top of his lungs WHILE YOU WERE ON THE PHONE WITH SOMEONE. It was a completely crazy environment. I was afraid my blood pressure would rise so far I would die of a stroke or heart attack. I left.

I had a very unsuccessful interview at J. Crew for a sales/personal shopper position. I received the most strange and cryptic typed letter from the young child-like man who interviewed me. It felt like a rejection of me personally. "We are not going forward with your application." I felt as if I had been ripped apart and told I was unworthy. For that interview I had dressed to the teeth and straightened my hair!

I don't know where to go anymore. I blew off an adjunct instructor's job fair for City College of ______. I was afraid getting fired from my previous teaching job would haunt me there. I was afraid I don't want to teach people who don't want to learn. I am afraid of racism, sexism, ageism and classism.

I am caught without a job for over a year.I am beginning to wonder if I am employable. I am also noticing that my attitude sucks. Some Americans are willing to take anything.

Even with my poverty, I cannot take "anything" any more. I am 63 and some things make me so tired I can't even think about them--like telemarketing. And some things terrify me--like teaching inner city adults who hate white people. I am sorry if this sounds racist. I don't mean it to be. This is all new to me. I know they are probably justified and I am always trying to see life from the eyes of another, but at a certain point I ask myself--what can I bleeping do about it? I can't help it that I am white! I don't want to feel ashamed or proud of it. I just want to share what I've learned and be judged by the content of my character rather than the color of my skin.

I am not sure I can stand up for 8 hours in a place where everyone is 30 years younger than me.

I don't know where my place in this society is anymore.

Dear Santa

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:02:23 -0500

Dear Santa Claus

I have been sending resumes and letters and queries out via mostly internet but I also attend job fairs and networking "parties" (party is a loose term, mind you), every day! Every day! (that bears repeating!) I figured out today that rather than use that well worn "black hole" analogy, I might go with a new approach. Sending out resumes to jobs I see on about twenty different sites, including Craigslist where I am lured into being a script reader only to find out that this is a scam to get me to buy products from some portal in Zimbabwe, (no offense to Zimbabwe, please), I have discovered something REALLY GROUNDBREAKING!!! This is NOT a peripheral social issue like contraception (just kidding), this is truly going to ROCK MY WORLD AND CHANGE EVERYBODY ELSE'S! No, it's not as bad as the Vanishing Bees with global food and environmental ramifications, but LET'S LOOK TRAGEDY IN THE FACE AND DWELL ON IT!

Sending resumes out daily week after week since I was laid off in April, 2011, I have finally understood! I've seen the light! I am writing letters to Santa Claus. So let's get things straight and stop fooling ourselves! Ive been writing to the WRONG PEOPLE. I need you Santa and Mrs. Santa too! Bring'er on board. The more the merrier!

So:

Dear Santa:

By June, when my extended unemployment runs out I need the following:

1. A Job: something that employs me and forget my Masters--I'll try anything but bear in mind I am 63 and I don't have the physical or mental stamina I used to have. So go easy on me--sales? You bet. The Gap? love it. Can't be a waitress: ADD gets in the way, but tutoring, teaching, educating? Yeah, bring it on! Storytelling? Love it! Public speaking? Commericials for Depends? You bet! I write in 6 genres. Need letters, resumes, whatever written? I'm your WO-MAN! Receptionist? Phones? Telemarketing? Hey you get the idea.

2a. MONEY: I need MONEY SANTA. Enough for me to move from the little studio where I live, where I am grateful to be living because my daughter is helping me pay the rent, where I've made these two rooms into an art cave for writing and music with great pictures on the walls, a cozy little "artist's den"--oh I do not want to sound ungrateful but!--I am the only tenant who has stayed longer than two months, people steal my NYTimes newspapers and I am afraid to get any kind of check in the mail. In fact, I cannot get delivery of anything! I get my packages delivered to my daughrer's salon 2 blocks away.

2b.I want to move to Nashville, Santa. My research shows me that this would be a good community for me on multiple levels. Santa--can you help me with enough money to move? I figure around $6000. Not a fortune, but you know-- I'm an adult and even if I only live in 2 rooms, I have stuff! I'm a writer so I have 7 bookcases double shelved with books! My iMac, my clothes (I love fashion), my shoes--you get the picture.

3. More MONEY: I need a car! PLEASE Santa! I haven't driven since 2008, when I gave my car to the repair shop for $200.

4. MORE MONEY: I need a vacation. I haven't left Chicago for even a day since January, 2008. I need enough to go stay in a cheap hotel and visit my two adult kids in NYC before you move me to Nashville.

5. MORE MONEY: so I can pay my oldest daughter back for supporting her needy mother for five years.

6. MORE MONEY: So I can pay back the $130,000 in student loans I borrowed to get the education I completed in my 50's that I can no longer use.

Will you be getting this together soon, Santa?

Thanks,

Your good girl,

Alzy

Not to Mention

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:11:36 -0500

Not to mention

A pragmatic, civilized attitude

"don't make me a god"

does religion mean

I live respectfully

responsibly

or does it mean

that something happens

when I cease being?

I'm A Slut

Sun, 29 May 2011 13:05:43 -0400

I was considered a slut all through my late teens and my entire 20's. I went to bed with men I thought I wanted to fuck, I allowed men to fuck me that I didn't love or even like, I had low self esteem and I was always trying to please men and I was desperate for approval--consequently I had multiple sexual partners and in one month I had four and that was the month I conceived my youngest daughter who is now 32 and has just graduated with an MD/PhD (and a Masters in Math for good measure) and is now about to launch her brilliant medical scientist research career with a 4-year residency at Columbia University in New York.

I am proud of her.

Our last luncheon together, before she leaves this city where we both share avoidance, hostility and animosity (on her part) was long, arduous and incredibly painful. It was then that she shared her residue of anger at me kicking her out of the house at 15 ("I had no parent. They should have called child protective services. I was alone") Not completely true but that's another blog another day. I cried. I bawled my eyes out in the restaurant--a local one where I am now embarassed to show my face. I recalled all those awful movies where I see mothers crying and daughters dredging up the past, accusatory, angry and hurt. I felt HER pain, not my own. I understood my stupidity, my cavalier selfishness, my bad parenting and not only did I apologize but I felt such a sense of those lost years it was overwhelming. I blew Parenting 101. All those years we could have connected and I ruined it with one thoughtless act when she was fifteen. I regret it.

She's my baby. I made huge sacrifices to have her. There I was--a single parent of 2 kids by two different fathers having a third and I didn't even know who the father was! My parents, family and friends turned their backs on me. The entire community labeled me a spoiled brat and a slut and no one talked to me. I sold my car and went on welfare and food stamps and moved out of our family-subsidized townhouse to a lumbering, rotting 3 bedroom house on the Eastside of town. I bought a 1977 Pontiac Catalina that had endless problems-I got 3 jobs, one was playing 3 nights in a local club where my ever-expanding stomach made me have to pull the bench out farther and farther from the piano. One male customer asked me about my husband and I said I didn't have one, and he handed me a $20 bill and said, "Oh, you're poor." Until that moment, I never realized that yes, I am poor. I just thought we were going through a hard time.

Ananda's birth (her name means bliss) was easy and pain free. I was so anemic that I had to have iron shots the last 3 months of my pregnancy. The doctor was afraid I wouldn't have enough oomph to push the baby out. Her god parents were there and during the birth her godfather made some stupid comment about how I shit when I gave birth. I didn't really want them there--they were friends sort of, not THAT close, but I needed someone to drive me to the hospital and they wanted to see the birth. So be it. My dad finally arrived after not speaking to me for 9 months. He saw Ananda when she was only 10 minutes old. To his credit he was a very loving, supportive father from that point on until he died 13 years later--but again, that's another story.

Sitting in our local pub, in a small booth on a rainy day in Chicago (what day ISN'T rainy this spring?) she told me that her anger is subsiding now because she realizes I was mentally ill when I raised my kids, my life was a mess and anyway, I was promiscuous when I had her! I was being called a slut by my daughter. Then she told me how angry she was when I went back to school in my 50's and majored in Creative Writing. She was hoping I'd major in something practical that would get me a decent job! I didn't bother to tell her that writing is my passion and my vocation, just as medicine is hers', that I have serious learning disabilities that weren't even diagnosed until I was 55 that block my ability to study subjects that demand highly quantified understanding, that I really thought my MFA would lead to at least a teaching gig. Well, it did--but more on that later, since I am now unemployed! She then lectured me about how that's fine, I am an artist, she understands artists need "day jobs," so why don't I write a light hearted, easily read- on- the- train memoir? I didn't answer back. I simply thought, this blog is as close as I will ever get to a memoir and I don't plan to write a "serious" memoir. I am a fiction writer and every piece of fiction I write comes from me! My imagination is my memoir!

At any event, instead of showing me how proud they were that their mother finally went back to school at age 52, graduated with a BA at age 55 magna cum laude and got into a top MFA program, they acted sullen, withholding and awful. I could never figure out why. Finally, these many years later, (I graduated with my BA in 2004) she finally told me that she had spearheaded the family rejection of my choice of major--they were all simply angry because mom didn't earn a living and now would never earn a living. And I hate to admit it, but perhaps they were right. Here I am on food stamps, unemployment and social security--it seems that "earning a living" has never been something I've been able to do. And now I have been told by my children that I have flunked MOM 101--the only thing I did do!

I didn't say this to her. My goal in that lunch was to tell her how much I loved her, how proud I was of all her hard work and accomplishments and how much I will miss her. My secret goal was to make sure she knows the door to my heart is always open so that if some tragedy does befall her or even if she simply needs someone to talk to or cry to, I am always here for her. I don't think she will take advantage of this offer, she doesn't respect me or my insights or my opinions, but you never know. I put it out there anyway.

Her goal in that lunch was to tell me that in spite of the first 15 years of her life, in which I thought I poured all my love and energy into her, she had succeeded in life IN SPITE of me, not because of me, and that her memories of childhood were anything but positive. In fact, she informed me, I was mentally ill and depressed. Yes, there were times when I was depressed. I was a single parent of 3 kids by 3 different fathers, I was being sexually abused by a therapist slash "teacher" for nearly 14 years--(I never told anyone--I didn't even really understand what was happening to me) I was working at a series of dead end low paying jobs--I did my best. I still am.

This is who I am. I probably won't write that memoir.

However I ask myself: what about all the music we did at home? The games we played, the trips to the lake, the lessons I drove them to for 15 years 4 days a week after school--the violin, the piano, the Montessori, the bed time stories I read each one of them--making sure each child had his or her own story, (Ben had Sir Gawain the Green Knight, Sheba had The Little Princess and Ananda had a series of children's tales) You know, am I kidding myself? Whitewashing things? Were there ANY good times or am I simply trying to rationalize a childhood filled with trauma and bad parenting? I will never know. I have to believe her when she says she sees her childhood as a blight and move on from there.

I asked her if there was anything good she had to say about me before I stopped bawling in the middle of that restaurant and we left and went our separate ways. She said "You"re very creative." Check. Anything else? Something about my character? "Yes," she said, "you have a flexible and curious mind--you are not rigid the way most people are. You are open minded, you can learn new things, you can change and grow."

Well, that's good to know.

She is 32 years old and about to launch into a brilliant career that may change the world. I am glad I brought her here and I hope one day she will forgive me.

Forgiveness is the only way we can really love one another.

Even now when I tell people I have 3 kids by 3 different fathers they act as if I were the only woman on the planet to have multiple sexual partners at some point in life. I haven't had sex at ALL since 1996 so I've sure made up for it! I went from being a slut to being a NUN. Still, in their eyes I am and always will be a slut.

So be it.

We've always had a double standard when it comes to sex--we judge men differently than we judge women. We always have.

When will this ever change?

The Turning Point

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:04:27 -0400

The turning point came when I no long wanted to

please anyone any longer when I became a self absorbed

adolescent at the age of 62 and felt proud of it!

when I realized that racism has nothing to with what race you are

or where you've come from

that the politically correct behavior is morally bankrupt and

filled with mendacious attacks on personal integrity

when bad behavior was the only way

I could finally

lose my job.