I have 200 followers??? How??? I just…y’all are so sweet???
New followers can collect their party hats on the left (top hats and beanies also available), their sticker sheet on the right, and their all-access pass to my inbox at the door.
Now, listen, sweeties, I’ve been considering doing a thing, and this is a good excuse to do it, so I’m going to post some of my writing as…the online equivalent of champagne, I guess?
I am sick and I have completely lost my voice. Awesome. I so very much don’t have time for this.
Um, PSA? If you’re going to message me–and trust me, I want you to message me–please introduce yourself or at least…like…tell me something about who you are/why you’re in my messages. I’ve received two messages today from completely random blogs who weren’t even following me and apparently had nothing on their blogs, and I…look, guys, I’m sorry that I just kind of blocked you out of hand, but in my experience people who just send ‘hi’ are a bit sketchy.
So. Introduce yourself, because I’m a bit paranoid and jittery. It’s a win-win. Yes?
I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
FUCKING UPDATE.
So I got out of responding to the rape story, but I still had to go to class so that I could respond to the OTHER story we read (see above re: fucking abstractist writing that I still hardcore do not like). And I was like “All right, I can live with this, I got my iPod, I got my Fall Out Boy, I got my writing, I can do this.” But I forgot that the classroom is really small and my seat is very close to the teacher, so I couldn’t, like, crank my music to the point where I couldn’t hear anyone talking and so I ended up listening to the talking. And fuck me I’m angry.
Pro tip: as a teacher at a college that specializes in taking people out of like sophomore year of high school (I dropped out and started college at 16), it is your goddamn job to express clear ethical and legal boundaries. Admitting that rape is wrong is awesome, but it is ALSO WRONG to abandon a rape victim when you have every opportunity to help them. You should not ever be talking about how well a student puts the reader into the mind of a witness and makes their decision to not help understandable.
Also, there was a lot of talking about “Well, I feel like there was some confusion about consent between the boyfriend and the girlfriend.” Let’s be clear here, folks, if I wave a knife at you and you say “Oh no, don’t stab me,” and then I stab you thirty-five times in the chest, the cops are not going to be like “Well, I feel like there was some confusion between the stabber and the stabee.” That’s not how it works. If the girlfriend says no, pushes the boyfriend away physically, and reaches out to a bystander for help, that is not ‘confusion,’ that is pretty fucking clearly not consent. Like, you know what, if you’re going to make me fucking sit through this story, you’d better at least have the stones to admit that your student turned in a story about rape and you forced the rest of the class to read it.
I’ve reached this point of universally being furious with everyone in my writing class. Even the people I like. Literally just existing in the class is enough to make me angry with you, by, like, transitive properties of loathing. And my teacher can fuck the entire way off and not make snide remarks about my writing anymore just because I don’t fucking turn in weird abstract rape stories.
FUCKING EDIT: Did I forget to mention that it’s actually literally illegal to do nothing to aid the victim of a rape? LOOK AT THIS. You can be charged as an accessory to literally whatever the perpetrator is charged with.
I’m taking that creative writing class and I just. Okay. Guys. Explain me a thing. WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape? I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ. Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this. I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing. This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“ I just. Do not understand why rape is the thing. Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape. They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.
Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’ Like, no. It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing. The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.
Every once in a while I remember that, during the last round of workshopping people’s writing in my fiction class, I got into a fight with my teacher and the rest of the class about whether or not motive mattered in writing. This one story was about this guy who was a serial killer and his girlfriend who…evidently knew he was a serial killer for months if not years and did nothing and the last scene was her murdering him with poison in his food. (There were a lot of really heavy rape-y abusive overtones and I was kind of like…sweetheart, have you considered therapy rather than exorcising your issues onto all of us.) And I made what I thought was the totally valid remark of “Well, it’s not clear what makes her snap and murder him; like, she’s known for a while, generally people don’t just suddenly DECIDE to kill their significant other who they’ve shown no violent inclinations toward in the past without some sort of prompting, and like you don’t need to get into the motive much in the story but maybe hint at it? Because murder?”
And the whole class basically sat around talking about how motive doesn’t matter and it’s fine that she just kills him for no apparent reason and how in writing it’s fine if there’s no motive because the characters do what they need to for the writer’s plot to work and I was just like “Wow, that’s right, this is why I fight with most of you about writing so much, it’s because in order for a plot to function, motives need to…like…exist.”
Like, if your character goes to get a smoothie, it matters if they’re getting it because they’ve had a bad day and smoothies are a fave, or because they’re on a health kick and they’d rather have a milkshake, or because they’re meeting someone there, or whatever. It changes the character’s backstory and behavior. Am I crazy?
Are you ever just sitting around and suddenly you’re blindsided by Lord of the Rings emotions? Because I am. And just was. It’s not just me, right?
So, after much hassling from my parents and my dear roommate, I went in to talk to my physics teacher and I went “So, it’s come to my attention that I’m way too ADHD to be getting as much out of this class as you seem to think I should be, do you have any tips.” Because, you know, sitting in a classroom watching a teacher derive equations on the board for an hour doesn’t play great with attention issues and a total inability to sit still. It also causes problems on exams with a strict time limit for obvious reasons. And like it’s not that uncommon an issue so, foolishly, I assumed that he would have literally any help at all to offer me.
He suggested that I make sure I’ve done the reading before every class, in detail, so that I won’t have to pay as much attention in class since I’ll ‘already know the material.’ Because clearly reading between twenty and fifty pages of extremely dense physics textbook is going to go so much better. CLEARLY the best solution to attention deficit problems. OBVIOUSLY. The more fool ME for not thinking of it, right? Who wouldn’t think of that as the obvious solution to ADHD? God, Moran, what are you even doing with your life if you’re not meticulously doing the reading for everything? Because God forbid I realize that doing the reading is literally useless to me, even in classes I give even a single iota of a fractional fuck about as anything except a mandatory requirement.
Since I’m probably abusing sarcasm at this point: I just want to punch him in his smug asshole face. Really hard. A lot. Also the next time he laughs at me for not getting something I might actually flip a table.
Once upon a time my mom and I were talking and she said, completely serious, “I think if you went to Heaven you’d be there for all of thirty seconds before you started telling Saint Peter that he needed a better system, and you’d actually have a better system to suggest. And if you went to Hell you’d have overturned Lucifer and set yourself up on the throne as Unquestioned Overlord within a year. So I guess you’re going to Purgatory.”
And I think that is an excellent assessment of my personality.
Today was my birthday (I am 19 and…you know, I keep waiting to feel like an adult and like this is my second year doin’ the thing, and I feel like I’m still kind of five and needing to hold hands to cross the street, you feel me?) and I just want to say one thing.
Sometimes things are good. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes they’re awful, sometimes they’re acutely horrible and sometimes they’re just low-level unpleasant, but other times they’re good. And like, listen, eight years ago I was alone and depressed and drowning, and four years ago I was shouting in classes and getting in fights in hallways and running the ragged edge of expulsion and hurting myself by accident because I was so bored that I would scratch my arms or scalp raw without thinking, and I still have really terrible days when I shake with anxiety or have flashbacks or feel like I’m in everybody’s way or can’t eat food I haven’t prepared myself.
But today I’m home from college on spring break and I slept in, and I went out to a coffee shop with my parents and argued about how well anarchy would work as a theoretical political system and laughed and joked, and my best friend @twistedangelsays sent me an all-caps message to wish me happy birthday and listened to me talk about the novel I’m planning to write about a bisexual technopath and her girlfriend taking down corrupt governments together, and I watched Mad Mac: Fury Road with my parents and it was just as good the nth time around. And it was good.
So I guess my point is that…if it’s bad for you right now, I get that. I’ve been there. And as cliche as it sounds, it does get better. To quote what is (in my opinion) one of the best action movies humanity’s ever churned out, “It’s a hard day.” And sometimes it’s just a hard day. But other times it’s good. And today was good.
And I’ve decided that it might be okay to hold hands when you cross the street even if you’re a grown-up.
Vodka Tia Moran