Girl Out of Michigan

By Juli

So, I grew up really poor. I don’t know why I always start there, except that it had such a profound effect on why I make the decisions I do now. The seed of my childhood poverty has grown into this baobab that I can see from every window of my life. It has a presence, a vote, my ear. It is my private council. It tips the scales.

My mother was a single mom that had two kids by the time she was twenty. Not a Brady Bunch existence by any means. It was hard. My brother and I had it really rough. I was a deep little kid, so much deeper than I am now. I watched, and felt, and ached for something different. I loved my family, but I didn’t want to relive their lives in a different skin. I did not love my home state. I loved it so little, in fact, that it never occurred to me that you could love a hometown, a place, a mitten shaped clump of land. To me, Michigan was everything I didn’t want to be. It was reclusive, sedentary, passive. Michigan was a big bird with its head stuck in the sand. It was waiting to be saved, discovered, loved. Michigan was the last kid picked for the team. It was crying in a pillow, listening to late night talk shows, taking slow drags on a cigarette and watching The Price is Right and so wishing I could win. Spin the wheel. Land on the dollar. Michigan was the fat kid with the patchwork winter coat held together by diaper pins. Michigan was very me.

So I ran from it.

I left for a school I could not afford amongst people to whom I could not relate. I brought my problems with me. I brought Michigan with me. I graduated, somehow, with a degree in Anthropology. And I left there too, that silly school, and it hardly knew I was there. I fell in love with the East though. Its standoffish people who didn’t ask you how you were, where you could have real privacy in a sea of people. People who were always doing something, always passionate about something. People who didn’t punctuate every joy and sorrow with food or smoke or alcohol. People who seemed so much more alive. Different. Like I wanted to be. Anything but that girl I knew from Michigan.

So here I am. Fast forward almost twenty years. Still in the East, my love affair dimming. Two kids, a husband, two dogs, a cat. Some fish. I have a happy life. A lucky life.

But I miss Michigan.

I long for real hugs. Kind strangers. Chatting in the grocery line. Warm smiles and loud, infectious laughter. You won’t find that so much here. So many caterpillars in the pillar. Ready to bump you down if you get in the way. I hated what I perceived as lack of motivation in the people around me growing up. I see now it was selflessness. It was love thy neighbor. It was turn the other cheek. It was living in the moment. It was no, you go first.

Michigan is laughed at. Dumped on. Used up and tossed away. Forgotten. And it continues, slow and steady. It doesn't hold a grudge. It has a strong will and a pure heart. I believe it will find the happy ending. The fresh beginning. How can you not love streets in grids, funny accents, soft people with big hearts, tall trees, and people who still remember watching and listening is so much more important than talking. That what you are is more important than what you do or have. That how you live trumps where you do it.

I am so sorry I misjudged. I didn’t know better.

If I knew in my heart that I could go back and be who I’ve become, enjoy what I have, and not slip into what I once was, I would consider it. If I knew I could shield my children from the heartaches I grew up with, maybe. But I’m scared. The place is a slow burn, a big oaf, a gentle giant that has good intentions but might accidentally sit on you. It’s the frumpy mitten on the little kid. I’m the little kid, and look at my palm, there, I live right there. I am Michigan. I miss it. I root for it. I want it to win the prize, cross the finish line, get the car behind curtain number three. Because I’ve been gone a long time, but there’s never going to be a way to take the Michigan out of me.

And so I sit out here, and I watch. And I wait until the time is right. And it may never be right. There’s no rushing what will be. It will be. You learn that early on when you’re from Michigan.

Since we last saw Em on PTS

By Juli

Two months of my sister's life. Courtesy of Facebook updates.

• Em is totally amazed by how many people openly pick their nose and examine it on subway... And these people are in suits. What's up with that?
• Em can not get that song "Move Bitch" out of her head when she wading through the sea of r-tards at train station.
• Em thinks the book "Wicked" is way too wordy and does not connect well with the reader. Maybe they'll make a movie and condense this horsesh*t.
• Em is happy that she has no goals in life, that way she has nothing to regret on her death bed. HAHAHA, the glass in always 1/2 full.
• Em is sick as a dog and looking forward to going to work tomorrow to spread it around.
• Em is wondering why Oreos can't have the reverse effect on her ass.
• Em is having a hard time not telling homeless people to "f@?! -off", when they're wearing nicer clothes than her.
• Em is ready to skip town and join the circus.
• Em thinks trashy, tabloid magazines are Grrreat!!! What's up with the octo-mom?? hahahahah.
• Em's cat is still alive. It can only get better from here. Can I get an "Amen"?
• Em is always in need of prayers. Today, for her cat.
• Em is so very sad today.
• Em is.
• Em is trying not to have a stroke after receiving the vet bill.
• Em's life defines irony. Hates helping people. Yet, works for a helpline.
• Em feels so bad for making her wonderful bro-in-law wait for an hour to give her sorry ass a ride home.
• Em wonders if it would be justifiable homicide to kill a neighbor that's singing crappy 80's Whitney Houston songs at top volume in Portuguese.
• Em is guessing by the stink lines coming off the guy next to her, he has never been introduced to a shower.

It's 3:49 on a Thursday afternoon

Juli:
I’m “working from home.” I am at the kitchen counter pretending not to hear my kids pretending to be taking a nap upstairs. I’m drinking Crystal Lite, fruit punch, and am trying to do some work for a friend’s website and be finished by 5. I will not finish. I’m wishing I’d showered this morning and am bothering my friends with my pet projects. And realizing I’m going to be up late doing work for another client. And I still need to get in a 7 mile run. What I really want to be doing is putting a quick shine coat on the wood floors in the kitchen. Welcome to my sickness.

Me, hunched over my laptop, really not accomplishing much, is the appropriate visual.

Em:
I escaped from work early and am now doing my part to stick it to the cable company by re-watching "Zach and Miri Make a Porno" for the 3rd time after buying it on pay-per-view last night.

Catherine:
I'm supposed to be making dinner, but I succumbed to the lure of the computer to find a recipe on the internet, and was caught like a fly in a trap, restlessly searching the internet for I know not what? Solutions to all the problems in my life? Entertainment? Information? Companionship? Outrage?

I'm listening to a retrospective about the TV program ER on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Dr. Mehmet Oz is the guest. The dogs are having an afternoon nap, and the house is silent. There's clean laundry folded on the coffee table, waiting to be put away. The dregs of last week's "sick dishes" pileup are in the kitchen, waiting for me to stick my cold hands in the dirty water. The sun is shining outside, but it's still solidly winter here in Michigan on this March day. I can't smell anything because I still have lingering sinus congestion from my cold. The post nasal drip occasionally triggers my gag reflex--hard--causing weirdly amusing "surprise vomit" moments. My husband tells me that my constant throat clearing is offputting, but he's not here, and I am not aware of it.

Any minute, Glen will burst in through the front door, home from school. We are having cornish pasties for dinner--a Michigan UP delicacy that I developed a fondness for one summer in high school when I went to Michigan Tech for a two-week smart kids camp. I'll be using leftover pot roast from last night and home made pie crust made with whole wheat pastry flour. That's the recipe I was tracking down. I have 618 words of my minimum 750 word article written, and another 200 worder that I haven't started yet due as well.

Leigh:
i am waiting for my son to finish pooping, wash his hands and put his boots on so we can go home. swim instructor stood us up and i have a bone crushing headache from skipping lunch so i could leave early to get them to swim. someone hates me. darn full moon!

The Many Madonnas of Me

By Juli

I just poured myself a glass of wine. Okay, my second glass.

Fuck, my third.

Somebody, probably someone famous I’ll feel stupid for forgetting to credit (blame the wine), once called a women’s menses “a time that cannot lie” or tell lies. Or something. Basically, you can’t lie when you’re on your rag. You’re all Id. Like my cat. (Who is, right now, by the way, sitting on the chair next to me alternating between yell/meowing at me and purring. . . trying to get dinner early. To bad Id, go deal. I’m writing. Elbow to the chin.)

Well, without divulging where I am in my cycle. Cough, cough. I think the third glass of wine is also one of those “times that cannot lie.” I get confessional. So here I go.

I live in daily fear of something.

It’s not falling. It’s not spiders. It’s not coming home from Target and finding my husband doing the nasty with the nanny on the matrimonial bed (we don’t have a nanny, btw).

It’s someone posting an old picture of me on Facebook.

Seriously, no shit. It freaks me out. This is why.

I was skinny until exactly second grade. And then I got fat. And I stayed fat through college. Okay, a few years after college. While all of my other friends have cute pictures of them half-smashed on various beaches for spring break, I have nothing. Because I threw them all away. What I DID have was five thousand doughy pictures of me with bad hair. So, that’s a session for a would-be therapist someday (or for my fourth glass of wine), but somewhere in my mid to late twenties I shed the fat suit and started running. Thank sweet Jehovah I have nice oily skin that bounced back. Anyway, I still battle 10 pounds or so when I get caught up in deadlines and random life drama, but whatevs. Right? That kinda fat builds character. My old kinda fat built neurosis.

The kind I’m trying to tell you about right now. Shut up and listen.

So, a friend I went to college with just posted a picture of a bunch of her friends in college sunning themselves on Tar Beach. She didn’t mention “Tar Beach” but I know where it was. Why? Because that FAT GIRL in the corner of the pic, the one with her head turned, with the one-piece and the shorts on? Yeah, that was me.

I’m on the offense. Anyone posts a fat pic of me, and they’re smoked. Yes, the little itty bitty dash of Italian in me is going to rush to call Cousin Guido, and then you’ll be sorry. I swear to God, it will be UGLY.

Anyway, and not to get too deep here, but I have to make a point or Catherine will be annoyed I’m just writing a typical confessional blog entry. . .and this IS a good point. It used to be you could just reinvent yourself and say “bye, bye” to those old friends and move on. Your husband didn't have to know you were chubalicious, your new friends never got enlightened you used to date girls (omigod, did I just say that??), the people who knew you as flakey in high school and college never mingled with the people who know you as flakey now, whatever. But here’s the deal. Now with things like Facebook (eeeevvvil Facebook), it’s all mishmash. You have a whole meetinghouse of people who really know different versions of YOU. Big you, small you, nice you, bitchy you.

Maybe they’ll all take it with me like we do with Madonna. When my Material Girl world collides with the chick who ran off to Africa and adopted an orphan, maybe it will all be okay. They’ll see my ability to work with the clay that is me, and they’ll nod and smile and say “Good for her. She evolves."

Or, if they’re not a fan, they’ll go off in separate corners and giggle and make fun.

Well, screw them.