Plastic Cup Politics

This is the continuation of my last blog post. It helps to read the first and get some background!

When my sister was a Junior in high school she moved her room out into the garage side room. We had been fostering Jenna's friend Lindsay for a few months. Jenna and Lindsay had all the freedom in the world.

One day, I recall seeing Jenna crying on the stairs in our foyer. Mom was giving a look that was hard to read. Dad asked what was wrong and mom said, "Well obviously she was on the list."

I was confused, but I didn't want to interrupt this not-so-warm family moment to ask what the hell was going on. Lindsay later admitted she was on the list too, which was assumed.

Finally, after a series of tense conversations that I failed to eavesdrop on effectively, my sister and Lindsay led me into their room to explain.

That weekend there had been a party at the Caravel, a hotel just down the street from our house. Jenna and Lindsay had attended. At the party there were a few kids that didn't normally run in those circles, and at least one of them was spying for the high school. Yes, the administration in Chelan really is THAT stereotypical and pathetic. Like a Lifetime movie.

"The List" was the one that the principal was given by the party imposter. Several students had already been called in to the office to tell their side of the story, and one had tipped off Jenna and Lindsay that they were indeed on it.

Naturally they were called in, and both of them were punished. Jenna was involved in so many things, including cheerleading, FBLA, FCCLA, student government, Honor Society, and Junior Miss. She was kicked out of each organization. She had signed an honor code, and she knew the risks, but the backlash she faced was ridiculous. One teacher, who ran the school website and yearbook, attempted to photoshop her out of any picture she was in representing a club or sport. The gossip got around and some of her friends were forbidden from hanging out with her. A matter that should have been private and discreet turned into public humiliation.

Jenna's reputation was soiled, and in a small town it took no time for everyone to find out what had happened. So Jenna got kind of depressed. Instead of doing the work necessary to regain entry to her many involvements, Jenna started partying more often and just generally saying "Fuck it and fuck you."

My parents struggled to discipline her because she was already so unhappy, and the pressure for me to stay out of trouble multiplied.

Gossip is one of the most poisonous parasites imaginable. Even if I hadn't grown up in a small town, I would have dealt with it. It is a fact of life.

I watched myself fall victim to this parasite when I would repeat secrets that I had promised not to. Secrets that weren't mine. I never went to far as to make something up, but I know others do.

Gossip has taken a turn for the worse in the technological age. There are entire CHANNELS on tv that focus on celebrity personal lives. Myspace and Facebook have added to our ability to spread rumors at lightspeed.

But then sometimes, gossip can be a helpful thing.

Take into consideration the first day of Christmas break this year. My parents called me soon after my final to ask if I could assist them in taking care of my nephews over the break. With one parent in jail and the other in the hospital from an overdose, my nephews were removed from their family and placed into ours.

I come from humble beginnings, I'm not poor, but I am frugal.
Suddenly my nearly-retired parents were caring for 3 boys under the age of 6, who came with nothing but the clothes on their back. However, because of gossip, friends and coworkers began donating diapers, formula, toys and clothes to us by the box. My family has never been the type to ask for the things we need help with, but we were so blessed to receive the help.

I feel that overall, gossip is a negative thing, but maybe we just need to be more weary of what we are truly saying.

My Faith Was So Much Stronger Then... When I Was Young

There are few things in my life that so obviously contributed to the person I am today. I can only think of four off the top of my head:
1. My parents
2. My sister
3. My half-brother
4. My hometown

1.) My parents have stayed married my entire life, and are married to this day. I was one of only 2 people in my group of friends growing up whose parents were still together. Both of our dad's, however, had previous marriages. Though I am not from a broken home, my dad's ex-wife and their son, my half brother Jason, contributed to the chaos that is my family. My parents only grounded me twice in 18 years, and both times I deserved more than they gave me. That's not to say I got away with a lot, on the other hand I just respected their rules which I found quite reasonable. My mom was raised in a very strict religious sect (Seventh-Day-Adventist) and became the "lenient" parent when she got married to a Lutheran and abandoned her childhood religion. My dad came from a very traditional Norwegian family and has thus been the "strict" parent. What they formed with their children was the perfect balance of allowing us to have social lives and make mistakes, without allowing us to end up on the streets or like Jason, who we'll get to later. My parents are both high pressure business people that are very successful at what they do. They instilled in me a love of reading at a young age, a large vocabulary, and the ability to address large crowds of people with little fear. My sister and I have both become our parents in the sense that we thrive off of being busy.

2.) My sister, Jenna, is 4 years, 4 days, and 4 hours older than me. We are both Sagittarius', which has become apparent in the past 10 years or so. We are closer than most siblings. It breaks my heart to see that some people so clearly dislike their brothers and sisters, where Jenna and I had a ridiculously close relationship. She let me read her journals, we voluntarily shared a bedroom, traveled Japan and Europe together, and rarely fought. Jenna lived a much edgier life than me. In high school she started dating an older guy and began partying and enjoying her youth. I was a bit more of a late bloomer, but she helped me to learn from her mistakes. We also survived "the man outside the window" (MOW) together. MOW was a ghost or spirit that haunted the house we lived in for 16 years. Part of the reason we shared a room much longer than we needed to. Now, Jenna is in Seattle and we still try to get together at least every couple of weeks, (hence my extra-long weekend in Canada.) When we are reunited we tend to stay up until the wee hours of the morning talking about whatever crosses our mind. She is headed to Korea in March to teach English for a year and I am convulsing at the thought of not seeing her for so long.

3.) I touched on the subject of Jason a bit in my last post. Jason is my fathers son from a previous marriage and my half brother. He is considerably older than me (about 20 years) and has had a lot of problems in his life. Jason began using drugs at age 12, and has struggled with addiction for 28 years. Jason has done every drug you could ever think of, with lifelong struggles with alcohol, meth, and heroin. When I was about 8 or 9 I witnessed him overdosing on meth and I barely knew what was wrong with him yet. To my father's credit, I know that he will never stop loving me no matter what I do because he has put up with and fought for Jason through so many screw ups. To my mother's credit, she has supported my dad through these struggles though she has no blood ties to Jason. My sister and I have always had to walk on eggshells around our parents, because they don't want us to turn out like him. If anything, my experiences with Jason have pushed me away from drugs. I love my brother, but I have a lot of anger towards him because now he has 3 children he needs to worry about. My nephews are the shining light in this whole situation, and currently in my family's care because Jason and his wife have screwed up majorly. The realization that I have 3 children in my life that need to break the cycle of addiction has been terrifying.

4.) Chelan, WA. Home of Lake Chelan, second cleanest lake in the U.S. and popular tourist destination. It's easy for the outside world to believe that Chelan is this fantasy party place because most of those people only visit between Memorial Day and Labor Day. For the other 8 and a half months, however, it's any other small town. I have no real memories of my life before I moved to Chelan, and lived there up until I moved to Bellingham for school. Chelan is one of those stereotypical small towns where the entire population worships the basketball teams/players and nothing else really matters. (Think Friday Night Lights, but basketball). If you went to a party and the starting lineup was there, you were sure not to get in trouble with the school or the police, assuming it's before State. I was a cheerleader and though my goal was to support the team, I was not put on the same pedestal. Gossip is another daily realization in Chelan. Everyone is always in your business, you know all the cops by first name, and your last name could make or break you. People always ask so I'll just throw it out there: There were 300 kids in my high school and 80 in my graduating class. My school had little diversity, it was 60% white and 40% Hispanic.

The reason I have opened up this blog to a little bit of my history is because I feel that all of these things are important to understand the following story, and how the context of parasites led me to this memory.

(Continued in next blog)

Maybe You're Better Off This Way

So I knew this girl, let's call her Melanie*. She was in my sister's sorority and always seemed like a perfectly nice, down to earth girl. One day my sister called me, short of breath and clearly shaken by something. This is how the conversation went down:

Me: Jenna, what's wrong?
Jenna: You remember Melanie? You met her at the Heaven and Hell party?
M: Yeah, is she okay?
J: I guess she went to this rave in Vantage this weekend, and she tried acid.
M: Oh no, Jen, she didn't... die? (Jenna had lost a good friend earlier that year to an Overdose)
J: No, but she lives with Rose* and I guess after she got back she was acting really weird. She took all their pictures off the wall and drew designs on them, and threw away all her clothes and said she's done with material possessions. Rose said she gave her a day to be a little weird, but it's been like 4 days and she's still in lala land.
K: Oh my God... Jenna what's going to happen?
J: Rose called Melanie's mom, she's taking her to a psych ward to get evaluated...

A week later I found out that Melanie had been admitted to the mental institution for an indefinite period of time. I had always heard stories about people doing acid and "never coming back," but I thought it was an urban legend. Melanie had a hereditary mental illness in her family that changed the chemistry in her brain and caused her to have a permanent reaction to the drug. After about 3 weeks in the mental institution, she was released and given medication to help her "normalize" her life.

Here's the truly twisted part though. Melanie likes her life better now. She'll frequently stop taking her pills because she prefers her drug-addled psyche to her previous life. So my question is, who's to say what is better for her?

In class we discussed the idea that people infected with parasites might be happier that way. Melanie was infected with what I find to be one of the most interesting parasites of all: drugs. She liked who she was on a permanent acid trip, much like the sex-crazed hosts of the Shivers.

Perhaps this constant struggle to be "normal" or "sane" is a parasite in itself. Maybe Melanie feels more like herself than she ever has before. Even if the happiness she feels is a side-effect of the drug, she doesn't know any differently.

On the other side of the spectrum, I have dealt with an older brother who struggles with an addiction to Crystal Meth. I have known this since before I truly understood what drugs were. I knew he was "sick" and "different." He was considerably older than me and by the time I was aware of his condition, he had moved out of my parents house and into some drug den on the West side of the mountains. I became interested in my brother's struggle, because at this point I still believed that he could change.

This is when I read one of the most powerful books that had the biggest effect on me. It is called "Crank" and it is written by the mother of a meth addict in the daughters point of view. This opened me up to the realization that many meth users create alternate personalities to somehow justify or explain their use. This helped me understand why my brother sometimes called himself "Samuel," which was not his name. When he was Samuel, he was high. You could see it in his eyes, or rather see nothing in his eyes. He looked like any trace of his soul was gone.

I have never been an anti-drug crusader or anything, but I have seen how drugs can change people and turn them into someone completely different. Samuel was not my brother. Melanie will never be the same. The drug parasite is one that I would like to further understand, but I don't know if I will ever truly be able to grasp the way it can permanently alter your personality, because I will never make the mistakes that have been waved in front of my face.

I Tremble... They're Gonna Eat Me Alive

When I was younger, I had night terrors. I would awake in the middle of the night from some half-conscious nightmare that was so real, I would be literally paralyzed with fear. I would hide under my blanket and quiver uncontrollably for hours at a time, until I would finally pass out from exhaustion.

To me, a shiver wasn't something that occurred when it was chilly out, a shiver was part of the routine.

Though the nightmares only come rarely anymore, I still remember the earth-stopping fear that debilitated me as a child. I have since decided that I'm not going to be afraid anymore, and have pulled in the opposite direction. I had a period of time where I lived in a legitimately haunted house, I have become quite the scary movie fiend, and have formed a near obsession with paranormal theories and research. Perhaps it's a coping mechanism, but it seems to be working.

I was beyond excited to watch "Shivers" in class, because even the cheesiest of horror films is delightful to me. I got the impression from the description that the movie would be something similar to "The Faculty," which is one of few "parasite" movies that I have seen. I thought Shivers was a bit more of a frightening idea though, because the people were trapped within this little apartment community. When the Doctor is trying to escape and finally finds a way outside, he realizes that the outside world is no longer safe. In the final scene, it becomes obvious that the parasite will only continue to spread. This was different from The Faculty, because the main character never gets infected, and the people all end up normal in the end.

In Shivers, the images seemed humorous and ridiculous, but the concepts were scary. Not only would it be heartbreaking to have moving lumps in your stomach, but the sexual and forceful nature of spreading the parasite borders on my biggest fear: rape. Some people in class mentioned that once infected, the people seemed happy and that perhaps it's not the worst thing that could have happened. However, having my actions altered by an outside source, whether happy or not, still seems like a loss of soul, something I find to be worthy of my fear.

I think my fears are all based on hypothetical or completely improbable situations. FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." It seems that since I was a little kid, the fear is the biggest parasite of all. it takes over my mind, threatens my happiness, invites itself in.

I'm Stuck In The Middle And It's: Parasites

This should be a swift transition considering I have been neglecting my blog for a few months now, but for those who actually read it (thanks by the way!) it is going to take a new form for a while.

I am currently enrolled in English 203, Writing in Context: Parasites. Basically everything we read or write or discuss is in the context for parasites. This can relate to vampires, diseases, technology and the lot. We have weekly blog posts, and since I already have a blog I'm going to utilize it for the class. I may intermix normal blog posts or I may wait until the class is over, but I will be back!

Tony and the class:
The "funny" "not funny" scale doesn't necessarily pertain to the class blogs, so just use them as a "like" or "dislike!"