Author: the outside lane

“It was definitely a more innocent time.”

That’s what I said to someone when we were talking about cellphone technology today, and how my teen years were spent yelling, “I’ll call you when I get home!” Then, actually calling my best friend and sitting on the phone for hours saying absolutely nothing of value.

But, I’m not sure it was a more innocent time. It was the 80s–not exactly a decade remembered for its reticence. I’m not sure there is such thing as a less innocent time when you’re talking teenagers. Shakespeare* tells you that, at least in the 16th Century, between sixteen and twenty-three, the only things getting done were immoral, illegal, and idiotic. You want to go back further, and Socrates** was complaining about the mini Me Generation of his day, too.

Why does it feel more innocent, then?

For me, because all the mistakes I made, I made in person. There was a level of intimacy required for rejection that made a difference. If you were going to make a gesture, you had to really work for it.

Say I wanted to send nude photos to someone (which I never did, Mom!), I had to work for it. First, I had to own a camera because my teen years pre-date the easy availability of even the disposable Kodak, and I had to buy film ($8 to $35 a roll, depending on whether it was B/W or Color, and how many exposures I wanted.)

Back in my day, there weren’t view-finders to help you see and artfully off-center your subject, so I either had to enlist a friend to play Terry Richards for me (which I never did, Mom!), or I had to kind of hope I was holding the camera far enough away from my body, at just the right angle to capture more than just a blur of background and my elbow. Kids my age did generally own, or have access to remote shutter release technology (that’s an ancient selfie stick, teens, and the one I bought for a college photography class set me back close $80), so there was no pose-and-click your way to your very own junior lad’s mag spread.

Even if I had made it that far using mirrors to reflect what would have been my underdeveloped physique, I still had to get the film developed ($15–$50+ depending on B/W or Color, number of exposures.) That meant either the Photo Hut that used to sit in the middle of the Winn Dixie parking lot, or the film counter at Eckerd’s. Either way, I would have had to wait up to two weeks for my film to be mailed off for processing, and sent back for me to pick up. In person. There was zero anonymity.

Just to give a boy a quick, visual thrill (never did it, Mom!) I had to spend money, time, effort, and at least three layers of dignity (Layer One: The weirdo that worked at the Photo Hut. Layer Two: The nameless weirdos developing the film. Layer Three: The weirdo at the Photo Hut after he’d seen the photos.) As fleeting as teen romance can be, and as flighty as I was, I could have gone through a handful of boyfriends before I even got my pictures back. None of that is to mention the difficulty I would have had pulling it off!

So, even if my teenaged gerbil brain had thought nudies were a good idea at the time, the work involved to bring my idea to fruition would have been too exhausting.  I’d have lost interest somewhere between getting my mother to drive me to the store for film, and trying to explain why I needed the film.  And, if I’d managed to work up the nerve to walk up to the store and make my purchases, there is no way in the world I’d ever have worked up the rest of the nerve to go back to the Photo Hut.

Today?  If I wanted to send nudes to my husband, all I have to do is turn on my phone, swipe, enter my pin, tap the camera, take a picture, tap the Message icon, enter his name, and send.  I don’t even have to leave the room.  I can do it in under a minute, if you don’t count the time I would take to put on makeup, do my hair, find a decent pose, and delete my way through 300 images before finding one that was close enough to not looking like me that I felt okay sending it***.

The 80s were hard!

I had a recent conversation with a 20-year-old, who asked me if I’d ever seen The Breakfast Club.  Once I’d stopped crying, I explained that I saw it in the theater, with my parents (who were scandalized by it), when it came out.  She went on to tell me how it resonated with her because it captured teens so well.  “It’s my favorite movie of all time,” she said.

And I thought of this from SlowRobot.com:

You can’t remake it.  And there isn’t a way to go back to the intimacy of a world that required at least the hearing of a voice to communicate your passion.

I have a lot of hope for the future.  My kid is learning to do things I never dreamed of existing when I was his age.  Right now, he’s watching from season 1 of Top Gear, using technology that was SciFi when I was nine.  You know, back when I had to catch the episode when it came on, or wait til the season ended, and hope I caught the rerun.

I don’t need him to have 70s Summers, or 80s Dates, or 90s Music.  I just need him to have his childhood and his teen years.  He’ll have exactly as innocent a time as I did because he has me for a mother, and (like my mother) I watch, and listen, and act.  I want him to enjoy his world, so that one day he can look back and complain about how it took, like, a whole second to send a text message.

*”I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” (A Winter’s Tale, Act 3, Scene 3)

**”The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

***As a mother, I do not have time to do this.  Only teenagers and celebrities have time to do this stuff.

I was getting ready to start a new yoga class and decided to upgrade my wardrobe with a new top.  Off I went to the store and started shopping.  Do I even have to build up to where this goes?

It’s not really a problem for me to find workout clothes.  Since I’m a 14-16, I can usually wear an XL in most brands.  I can usually find something.  But, as I shopped today, I started wondering about the 18-20 set, and above.  What are their options?  When there are racks full of XXS, XS, S, and M, with a half rack of L, a quarter rack of XL, and four or five items of XXL, what are companies saying to women*?

You’ve got all these fitness people cheering JUST DO IT!  And you’ve got all these other people jeering, “Hey, Fatso, just get off the sofa and go workout.”  But what are people supposed to wear?

I bought my stuff, then came home and looked online at sizes available.  I won’t bore you with all the details.  I’ll just show you this.  From the JUST DO IT company themselves:

You’ll see their size chart tops out at XXL, and then next to the size chart, you can see that they don’t even have yoga pants (the search I chose) available in that size.  What does that even mean?

What’s a lady supposed to think?  Exactly what a lot of ladies do think:  That the gym is only for people who have earned it through personal discipline.  The gym is only for people who have already mastered their physical form.  The gym is for XXS, XS, S, and M, and a handful of L, XL, and maybe one or two XXLs.  That is so completely wrong.

I never know what else to do, other than to point out how wrong something like that is.  Who do you call?  How do you get people to listen?  Clothing should be available for people.  All people.

*I’m talking about women because I didn’t shop the men’s racks.  I have no idea what was available there.

Let’s have a Reality Personality Round Up.  I don’t watch any reality shows because none of them can live up to the thrill of Orphan Black, or the entertainment value of Marvel’s Agents of Shield, or my newly acquired interest in Silicon Valley, or the inappropriate, cerebral humor of what Thor calls, “That British version of Jon Stewart.”  I don’t have TV watching time left over for anything else after you add in Game of Thrones, Veep, Anthony Bourdain, and Doctor Who.  Now I’m trying to squeeze in Jonathan Strange and…ugh.  No time!

But, with as much time as I spend on my computer, I have accidental and peripheral knowledge of most top tier reality celebrities.  Just the other day, I realized that without ever having watched an episode of their work, without ever having read a full article about any of them other than the Kim one (who fascinates me), I have somehow acquired the ability to tell apart even the Jenner ones of the Kardashian family, and I know all the girl names.

And let’s start there:

1.  Kim Kardashian is expecting her second baby.  Mazel Tov!  Babies are lovely, and she seems to have been trying hard to accomplish a pregnancy, so I wish her all the best.

2.  Caitlyn Jenner has subsumed Bruce Jenner in a way that leaves me longing for longer legs and better bosoms.  My biggest shock?  She didn’t choose to spell her name with a K.  Do you think that was a concern?

Maybe she wanted to be Kate, but it was too in line with Kim, K–shoot, I thought I knew the middle one, and Khloe?  What is the middle one?  Kris is the mother one.  Whatever.  This is why I should look things up before I start typing.

My views on transgender people has changed a lot in the past twenty years.  Back when I was an acolyte of James Dobson, I thought there was something wrong with them, that they deserved my pity, love, and prayers.  Then, I had the good fortune of making friends with a man, who was transitioning into a woman, and that person was extremely kind and patient with all my (probably–likely) rude questions.

I came away from that relationship with an understanding of transgender people as HUMAN BEINGS, not sad, broken THINGS.  While I still didn’t understand it, I was very clear that transgender people weren’t confused men/women who deserved pity.  They were men and women.  Period.  My understanding was irrelevant.  How I felt about them was irrelevant.

Years after that, I have a better formed, if still hazy understanding of the science behind transgender.  You know what?  My understanding still doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that I am treating the people around me with respect and giving them their dignity.  There is nothing wrong with transgender people, and even if there were–and there is not!–it wouldn’t change how I am set to treat them.  They are just like me–human souls inside a human suit.  They get to decorate their costumes the same way I do.

Transgender people, like gay people, straight people, androgynous people aren’t criminals because of their body choices.  Their choices about what to do with their own bodies are not scary, criminal choices.  Criminal choices happen when you start making decisions to do things to other people’s bodies–people who have not, or who cannot consent to your actions.  Which brings me to…

3.  Those Fucking Duggars.  I feel okay calling them that because my understanding is that their whole empire is built on the fact that they rut like bunnies and have as many babies.  Yes?  But bunnies are cute.  These parents are not cute.  These parents, while asking their daughters to present as paragons of Victorian virtue, allowed their eldest son to play hide-the-finger with his younger sisters, who were either unable to give consent because they were a) not conscious at the time their brother was touching their genitals, b) were not old enough to understand what was being done to them at five years of age, and/or c) were so cowed by their family’s commandments that they did not feel safe in protesting.

C becomes a big deal when you find out that police reports state these girls were reporting having been molested for more than a year before the parents became involved.

I’m not going to talk about the boy who was doing the molesting.  I’m going to straight up condemn the parents who KNEW their daughters were being bad-touched in a way that would make them less desirable as media-friendly faces for Quiverfull, and who deliberately, with intent allowed those children to be molested in order to protect their marketing package and religious movement.  And, more importantly, whose actions meant that children who desperately needed help were denied it.

I condemn them.  I judge them.  And I hope they lose their ability to profit from their fucking, unless they do it in the same straightforward, honest way Jenna Jameson does hers.  Bad hair and all.

It’s been a banner week for me.

ScaryMommy.com ran a post of my Rebels piece, and at this moment, that’s been shared 12.9k times on Facebook.  I don’t know that many people, so that means strangers actually thought it was worth sharing!  Who knew having Jan and Marcia fighting in your bikini bottoms was going to be such a hit?

You guys got to read that first, but you may have missed the piece I wrote for the GoodMotherProject.com. I sent that to them as an original, unpublished work, and they ran it on Friday.  Such a delight!

I submitted two other pieces to two other websites, who have accepted the work, and I am waiting to find out when they will run.  One you’ve read here before, the other was my essay for the Listen To Your Mother Austin show.  And, I’ve submitted an essay to a lit mag, and am waiting to hear back on whether it fits their needs.

The submission process has never gotten easier for me.  Every time I click Send, I feel like I am casting a little bit of myself out for judgment and rejection.  It’s a beauty pageant for my words–my soul–rather than my body.  I honestly feel a lot more comfortable with people judging my body.

That recurring nightmare I have of being shoved out onto a football field, as I am now, wearing a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader uniform is nothing compared to the one I have of being told I’m a hack writer.  Or the one where I realize the toilet I am using is in the middle of a room full of people.  That’s actually the worst one.

When I write, I think a lot about the things written that have meant most to me.  Today, I leave you with a link to a blog post about how our ability to use language forms our worlds.  I read this one months ago, and I think about it almost daily.

When Every Word Matters, by my friend Tamara.