Guilty Pleasures and Self-Destructive Thoughts
My guilty pleasure is reading O Magazine.
It just seems kind of lame. And old. Like reading Oprah magazine is a very matronly thing, you know? Even the advertisements scream OLD. Coldwater Creek. DRESS BARN. Abilify. Seroquel. Come to think of it, there were a TON of ads for depression meds. Hmmmm…
Anyway. I couldn’t sleep tonight because I am having flu-like symptoms so I thumbed through it. There were some good articles. I always really like the book section. Oprah knows good books, I don’t care what anyone says. Or at least her staff does. I always get annoyed with people that are put off by books with the Oprah approved stamp on them. Those are the same people that will hate a band once it goes mainstream. (Arcade Fire? Whaaaa?)
What caught my eye was the book section and the debut novel Tiger’s Wife. I mean, the synopsis was fine and dandy but what REALLY caught my eye was the author’s age.
25. 25. 25. 25!!!
I get all squirmy and uncomfortable when I see people younger than me reaching huge milestones that I am not even close to reaching. And it’s not just writing a book. It’s Ph.D’s. Grammys. Oscars. Babies. Second marriages. Not that I am capable of attaining some of these things. And I know I know I know, I just status’d the other day that “Every journey is different!!! For everybody!!!” I think that was me facebooking on Vicodin (totally prescribed and legal Vicodin) and I was probably in a happy state but most of the time its pretty impossible to think like that. I wish I could. Oprah Magazine tells me to. I should LIVE MY BEST LIFE.
But I am still stuck comparing mine to others. And I hate that because I know it’s ultimately pointless and leads to nothing. But me blogging at 5 am. I don’t know. I think it’s my first challenge in my 30’s, frankly. I need to get the hell over myself.
And also… I am legitimately and completely happy for my successful friends. Because 90 percent of the friends on my FB I have known for a decade or more and I know our struggles and I like to see that success and fairy tales are possible with hard work.
Again, eyes on my own test paper.
Here’s another excerpt from another part of my novel that I hope to finish before I am 40.
3.
When I was four years old my sister Shayna put me in the trunk of our dad’s Toyota Corolla and tried to drive it into the James River with both of us still in it. She was high on methamphetamines at the time after her boyfriend Milton Carr had just broken up with her 3 hours earlier. He had told her it was because her family was too crazy, too trashy. I never really understood what I had to do with the whole damn thing. I think it had something to do with her wanting to hurt Daddy because he loved me so damn much. I don’t know, she never really told me her motives. I see her all the time nowadays and we never really talk about my attempted murder. Mostly we talk about her three kids and how hard it is to find a man when you’ve got so much baggage.
After she tried to kill me Daddy put her in a mental hospital for almost two years. She was sixteen when she went in, eighteen when she got out. She didn’t go to college or anything, she ended up running off to Nevada and becoming a cocktail waitress at The Mirage. She met some cab driver and got pregnant. She moved back to Virginia and then got pregnant again with twins. They all live with my Daddy in the same house we grew up with down on JEB Stuart Drive.
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Daddy loved her too though. He loved her enough to visit her every Saturday afternoon while she was in the hospital. Sometimes he would take me along for the trip and those are my first memories. We would take the truck and I would sit in the passenger seat and hum along to his Eagles cassette. He would try to dress me up but Daddy was still a country man and sometimes I would show up at the hospital with an Osh-Kosh dress that was on backwards and drooping pigtails.
We would sit outside on concrete patio furniture and listen to Shayna talk about her newest roommate who was in for cutting her dogs ears off and then running down the busiest street in town with all her clothes off. Shayna didn’t like her and wanted her own room. Daddy would tell her he would see what he could do and she would start crying, telling him she was sorry for what she had done. They sometimes would share a cigarette and I would play lookout to make sure one of the bull dog faced nurses wouldn’t sneak up on us and scold.
The drive back was always kind of sad. We wouldn’t listen to any music and Daddy wouldn’t talk. He’d just drive and smoke about ten cigarettes. Sometimes I would read a Golden Book to pass the time or count the mailboxes whirling past us. I would wish I had a Mom and that she could be there to make Daddy happy despite having a daughter in the looney bin.
Pretty Girls Don't Eat 