Saturday, January 22, 2011
Close Encounter with a Purpose-Driven Life
"I do management hire-fire for a multi-concept owner", I am sure she said into her phone as she swished by me and up the concourse rolling her carry-on. She seemed so full of purpose. I imagined the many sacrifices she's making to live her purpose-driven life. Rising early to do her hair, eating fat-free yogurt in a hurry, keeping her belly sucked in and her face tilted just so, maintaining at all times a seriousness and responsibility and flinty joylessness that nearly obliterated her fine and possibly beautiful features.
Later, when I was last onto the plane, I saw her sitting in the back, not in business class, and she was so diminished back there next to the big guy with the Constitution tattooed on his forearm that I suddenly needed to get home to my girls and explain everything to them. Like how coloring your hair and failing to enjoy the flavor of fat and never questioning your eagerness to please will make a doll out of you. Girls! Let your hair grow! Eat! Do not tolerate assholes! Do not be driven by any purpose except your own enjoyment! And let experience teach you what you really, ultimately enjoy! I love you!
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ReplyDeletehere's 9/10 of all the sermon I need, brother. And let the other tenth be shifting, occasional, funny and brief.
ReplyDeleteAnd, oh gawd: we actually have a super-specialized class that 'does hire-fire' for the specialized class that is trained at Wharton? Trained at School of the Americas? And they're kept hungry? This can only mean that they're kept tenuously on-leash by a super-super-specialized class that will be powerless, when the shit hits the fan, to explain the tantra of our culture's esoteric tradition. And who does they work for?
Mr. V: how about a different perspective?
ReplyDelete“I don’t know why this guy keeps glancing at me. When he first walked past me while I was on the phone with the jerk from Simco, he had a smirk on his face. Now I am sitting down, his fleeting looks are getting very annoying. I take a look at him: a middle-aged man with a beer gut which he doesn’t even try to suck it in. He probably hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since Clinton was in the office. Although his face seems kind, he has this yuppie-turn-hippie way about him – as if he is enlightened or something. He is probably a good dad – then again I wouldn’t know what a good daddy is like. Even Cindy doesn’t know who my dad is. Cindy’s boyfriends, most of them anyway, wanted me to call them "daddy" and they all wanted to put me on their laps and put their hands between my legs. That’s how I ended up going to a foster home with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson since I was 8. Once in a while, Cindy would call to tell me that she is still my mother and ask me if the Andersons have adopted me or not. I haven’t thought of Cindy and my life before the Anderson’s home for a long time. Mrs. Anderson always tell me that I have a purpose in life – I am smart enough to get away from the life my mother leads. Mr. Anderson tutored me all through 12th grade and when I finally got into the university with a full ride scholarship, they were the ones crying with joy. I didn’t really have much of life in college – working two jobs and taking heavy loads of credits – so I can “make it” in this world one day; so I can put away the memories of Cindy and her little hut in Cave Junction, Oregon.
Now under this guy’s appraising glances, I am not sure if I’ve made it. Maybe the marks are so permanent on my face – no amount of make-up, no hairdo sophisticated enough and no designer's power suit, will cover up the fact that I shouldn’t have these chances to be where I am? Oh, thank G-d, he is sitting down now. I can’t be dwelling on the past and the suspecting looks of a stranger. Focus, focus, I still have this presentation to do tomorrow.”
There isn't much room to maneuver in a world in which a man looking at a woman is always "appraising" and "suspecting", and in which the choices a woman makes are rooted in trauma and abuse. In an airport we pass strangers and inevitably project our concerns onto them. Strangers can be types, or Rorschach tests. Anyway, this stranger carried just enough information in the open for me to start fretting about how some particular women and girls in my life manifest their anxiety and weakness in people-pleasing, and I spun a short description of parental anxiety out of that. I'm sorry that I, as a stranger to you and as a sort of ink-blot, am illuminated in your character's mind as a reminder of abuse and abandonment. So sad that mistreatement by one can taint the perception of others. "To the eyes of the victim, all are perpetrators."
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