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BettyDoesLife
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Name: Betty
Country: United States
State: New York
Metro: Rochester
Birthday: 5/7/1976
Gender: Female
Interests: geology, anarchism, history, literature, astrology, punk rawk, laughter
Expertise: making something from nothing.
Occupation: Student/Single Mama/Furniture
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
8/30/2002
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| hey youse guysmy derby blog for one of the local weeklies is located here.
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| some people forget where they come fromWhen you are raised trailer trash it is impossible to forget your place. Maybe you make a million dollars, you will always be trailer trash. Your home when you were five or seven or thirteen will always have had useless, unused wheels. Just one step above homelessness, you slept in a very large parked car. Your home was a tin can.
It is true that you are affluent by global standards. That you are not wandering the dirt roads of cities in Senegal. Your tin home has heat and plumbing and furniture. But you will never be in Senegal. You will never know your own affluence, you will always be trailer trash.
No matter what I do, this lives inside me. When I was in school it was beautiful. It was part of some magical narrative about overcoming what you are and where you are from. It was so American, so inspiring. Now that I am working at a department store, making nine dollars an hour, trying to figure out how to pay all my bills and eat in the same month, it seems less grand. It seems sad, like I am living out some futile destiny.
Also I had forgotten to take my medicine for a couple of days.
So when this older, well-dressed woman who was fading but was still conventionally attractive said "Do you girls work here?" as if she were lowering herself to even speak to me, i had to fight tears. The tone. The word "girls", when it was only me, stacking boxes and I am a 32 year old woman working hard and still not making it. It felt like being pushed up against a wall and suspended there by my neck long enough for me to lose vision, but not long enough for me to die.
I started to help her and she kept jabbing at me in these small tiny ways. As if her obvious money, her obvious beauty weren't enough to hold against me. And then she revealed she was an employee. I couldn't take it. I frowned. I literally had to bite my tongue. She started questioning everything I said to her. When I told her I didn't have boxes for her cheap costume jewelry bought on clearance, she was rather convinced I was bullshitting her. As if I care about boxes or her that much.
She stormed around the department looking for whatever she thought she was going to find. I stone walled it for as long as I could and then as she was walking off on one of her asinine adventures I said under my breath, like I didn't know better, "well i guess i'm just an incompetent girl."
She was around the corner but had obviously been trying to hear something. "What was that?" Demanding my words like cheap plastic trinkets.
And I was so tired, so sick of only being trailer trash, "Well, i think it was rude, disrespectful and offensive to call me a girl. And that you are an associate and would do that only makes it worse."
The how-dare-you-forget-your-place expression was all over her face. She pulled out pithy claws and I was the better woman. I had said my peace even as she continued on about how offensive my treatment of her was. I think that if i had taken my medicine I would have laughed at her claims of oppression. She was trying to cut me down but how much lower can you get than a trailer trash single mom with a top tier degree selling shoes for a living? You can't, unless you remove them from the human species all together. This is of course when she said, "We can train our customers, but I doubt we can train you."
So there you have it: I am nothing if not an unruly dog.
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| meeting the parents"You're going to think my parents have money," he said like an apology. "They don't really. They just put everything into their home."
Money is such a funny thing. If you have it, you apologize about having it. If you don't, you apologize about not having it. As if somewhere in the middle there is the perfect dollar amount that reflects moral, intellectual and personal perfection.
But, as soon as I see their house I know what he means. It is exquisite. The garden is gorgeous. The pavings are unique and classic-modern. Inside, everything is perfectly placed, artful and so exactly what I dream of when I dream of those sorts of things. Don't let him fool you (or me) his parents have money in comparison to most Americans though probably not particularly much in comparison to their neighbors. What they have much, much more of is taste.
If there is anything in the world that I can appreciate, it is taste. A lot of people can walk into a room and say, "Oh my, your home is beautiful." I can walk into a room and tell you why the room is beautiful. The complementary fabrics on the sectional, the panel of paintings, the sculptures, the handcrafted tables, the relationship between one color and another. I notice them. I appreciate them in a meaningful way.
I think that The White Guy found my gushing somewhat amusing and somewhat annoying. His parents are awesome people but I can see how they would be intense as parents. Their home was like a museum, in so many ways. It's not the kind of home I would actually have. I need mess. I need breaking things. I need old mismatched with contemporary. I need string art. But still, I have taste.
We eat tasty, simple tex-mex. I drink a Woodchuck cider. We talk about important meaningful things, like white privilege and the environment. We talk about their Malcolm X birthday party, I tell them about July 5th. His mother tells a story about volunteer work in a prison that ends with "and you know they are just staring at her, waiting to get back to their little cells so they can jerk off." She apologizes and we laugh. "Don't worry," I say, raising my bottle of cider, "I'm the kind of girl who doesn't need a glass."
After dinner we watch a documentary together and discuss it afterwards. I have never known a family like this, having a conversation at one o'clock in the morning on the implications of factory farming. A conversation that sounds intelligent and lacks shrill reductions.
It's late. The White Guy says it's time to take me home. I thank his mother again. I say goodbye to his father then his mother. I put my hand out to shake--a two hand shake, I think--but she opens her arms for a hug. I was surprised and flattered.
On the way home I tell The White Guy, "Your parents' house is beautiful. But your mother is never allowed to come to my house. Well, she can come but I need to hire a maid first, so give me a lot of advance warning."
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| Happy Fifth of July!Today, I go lay flowers on Frederick Douglass' grave and thank him for being the kind of man who worked his whole life for equality and justice. I thank him for never resting and being a man of courage. I thank him for rejecting compromise.
Why today? Because he gave this speech, probably the most important speech in American history, today in 1852.
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July I answer,
a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year,
the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy
license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds
of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality,
hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings,
with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy's thin veil
to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking
and bloody than are the people of these United States at this
very hour.
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| ventingif you show up to a roller derby practice dressed like you are already a derby girl, you either need to have some chops or you need to put your ass on the line and work hard. this is not a joke. We are not fucking around. We are not dressed like this because it's sexy and we are sexy. We are dressed like this because it is the most comfortable thing to skate in. And by skate I mean really skate, not pose on the side of the wall. That is why your dumpy friend, who I had to prod to get on skates, will make the team. Because she's a better skater than dresser. Because when I said, "we are doing bridges" she showed up, listened to the instructions and worked up a sweat. And you two? Well, you would have to make it through one drill without giving up before I'd let you on The Naughty Librarians.
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