on Tom Petty's "Good Girl" and female friendship

As I am just entering motherhood and my thirties, I have to say my search criteria for a good girlfriend has narrowed quite a bit. By summer, I will have a daughter, and significantly less free time. That being the case, I’m not looking to waste my time with people who don’t truly make me happy.

My husband and I just moved from Nashville back to our hometown of the DC suburbs. It may sound ideal--moving home, picking back up where we left off, with a baby on the way. But in some ways it’s the loneliest set of circumstances in the world. Here we are, back where we started. Old friends had moved on to lives without us. New friends are hard to make. It isn’t exactly easy to put yourself out there when you’re pregnant, you can’t drink, and everyone assumes a lot of boring, lame things about you.

But if I could befriend anyone, if I could somehow advertise myself on a friend-making site without getting solicitations for threesomes, I’ll tell you who I’m not looking for:

I’m not looking for a “Good Girl.”

Good Girls first appeared in my life the way a lot of other mysterious phenomena did--through a song. Good Girls, as described by Tom Petty, enjoyed the most generic swath of things: Elvis. Horses. America. Jesus.

Part of me felt there had to be something more. If you rearranged the letters, did they spell out some kind of sexual deviance he was actually after? If you played the song backwards, did it explain how good girls were actually kind of a snooze-fest, and no one wanted to date them, not even Tom Petty, apparently, as he goes on to state that he doesn’t even miss her, and seems to say without regret that he broke her heart?

I felt sorry for the good girl, but I couldn’t necessarily relate to her.

To me, the song is kind of a sequel to Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young.” The oh-so-cleverly named Virginia listened to the fatalistic plea for her to ditch her Catholic faith in favor of Billy Joel’s penis, and she went ahead and said no. In chapter two, the world is moving on from her. The bad boys are standing in the shadows. The good girls are home with broken hearts.

Chapter three is her eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s with her mama (yet another unique thing she loves), watching a bad movie, going to Youth Group the next day, finding a nice boy who will wait til marriage, then having like 42 kids together and quitting her career. Not really the makings of a hit song, in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t someone who could be on the reality TV series Bad Girls Club that I’m seeking. I don’t want someone whose life could in any way be compared to a natural disaster, someone to suck me into their drama.

I just want someone with a few enemies.

Enemies are an important part of life. Having an enemy shows that there is some aspect of you that is controversial. If you love things like Elvis and horses, no one can really disagree with you. But at the same time, there are no nuances to interests that generic. No one can truly bond over something like that. It’s like saying you like the beach in hopes of uncovering some kind of miraculous common interest with someone.

The best friends I’ve ever had are ones who have made serious mistakes in their past. They are reformed heartless bitches who are now somewhat back on the straight and narrow. They are currently kind, empathetic creatures, but there’s also some guy out there who has considered running them over with his car, or at the very least has smashed up belongings of hers--her DVD collection, her Nintendo 64.

I want a girlfriend who knows that there are people out there who talk about her behind her back. As women, we can’t make everyone happy, and furthermore, we shouldn’t. If we did, not only would we put our happiness on the line--we’d put our personhood on the line, too.

No one is talking shit about Good Girls. Not so much because of their innocence, but more because there isn’t a ton to say. Tom Petty could only get one verse in about her before even he had to move on.

I want a girlfriend who might be out to dinner with me and then say all of a sudden, “Oh shit, we need to leave,” because they see someone connected with their old life who’ll eternally hate them. We’ll throw money down on the table and stumble out, drunk on laughter and shame, and find refuge somewhere in the parking lot where we can sit down and mock the social media of whoever that person just was. She’ll explain why they will eternally see her as some ice queen, and I’ll laugh and know she’s my kind.

a drive down route 50

Jake: That furniture store JUST opened and now they’re doing 70 percent off?

Me: Oh. It’s this song again.

Jake: Look. They even have the guy out there with a sign. If you need a guy out there with a sign, I don’t trust your business model.

Me: It makes me uncomfortable when she says she can show me incredible things.

Jake: Oh my god. They’re putting in another mattress store?

Me: You can read him like a magazine because that’s the only thing you know how to read.

Jake: There must be fifty mattress stores within a ten mile radius of our house. More than pho places.

Me: Make the bad guys good for a weekend? What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?

Jake: Buying a mattress is like buying a car. They list prices that are like four times what anyone would ever possibly pay so they can cross them out and lower them four times. They try to make you feel like you’re getting a good deal--but you know you’re not.

Me: Is that supposed to be attractive? A nightmare dressed like a daydream? If a girl I liked told me she was a nightmare dressed like a daydream, I’d run the other way.

Jake: How many times is that Indian place going to change its name?

Me: There. That’s the only line that I think rings true in the entire song. Boys only want love if it’s torture.

Jake: Have I ever told you about my unofficial ranking of local frozen yogurt places?

TTFN, middle school: a linguistic retrospective

I never really got to say goodbye to the last era of my life. Which, I’m sure, was in part due to the fact that I was actually uninvited to my own goodbye party. (That makes it sound like I did something terrible, but in reality, I just didn’t donate my five dollars at the appropriate time.)

So here is my goodbye, in the form of a short sociolinguistic dictionary. But first, let me just say: I spent five years of my life in middle school (seven, if you count when I actually went to middle school). Not by choice. Who would ever choose to do such a thing?

Just a short slice of life from my own middle school experience: I am walking down the hallway at Carl Sandburg Middle School, violin case clanking against my side, backpack with multiple textbooks weighing me down. I am wearing my favorite outfit: overall capris inspired by a Keiko from Zoom, and a yellow shirt--the only one that doesn’t show my ever-present pit stains. All of a sudden, one of the white girls from the trailer park (one who slicks her hair tight to her head with gel and wears copious amounts of dark lipliner) shakes my shoulder.

“What the fuck are you wearing?”

“Um...pardon me?”

“Yeah. You in the highwaters. What the fuck do you think you’re wearing?” She starts laughing with her friends, scary-looking dudes.

My mind begins racing. I’d heard stories about this middle school, but I never believed them. But here was my current reality: this girl was probably about to beat me up in some sort of fashion hate crime. I did what made the most sense at the time. I ran down the hallway, all the way out to the bus.

My second middle school experience was quite different. No one openly ridiculed my outfits to the point of intimidation--they weren’t allowed to! No, this time around, my students stroked my ego in hopes of a higher grade. Every year, we had the conversation where they asked, “Ms. D, what were you like in middle school?” And every year, I told them the same thing: I was a total friendless nerd. You wouldn’t have talked to me. And somehow they never believed it, when really, between my YouTube YA book trailers that I made for them and my long-winded speeches about UVA, I had obviously been a nerd the whole time.

Mistakenly presuming I was cool, the kids shared their language with me. Here are some of my favorite/least favorite words and phrases from the past five years:

Turn-up- Turn-up basically means cool, not lame, fun party, etc. I mainly remember hearing it in the context of the sentence “I hope Woodson is turn-up next year.” If the people I’ve met over the years who went to Woodson are any indication, it won’t be.

What are the odds... This is one of the strangest, dumbest games I have seen since Zap. One student asks something like, “What are the odds I hit Ms. D with a trash can after class?” And then the other kid says a number. Not a percent ratio, not one in a higher number, just a number. “Six.” Then both students count to three and say a number between one and six. “Five.” “Five.” Uh-oh! Now student one has to hit me with a trash can!

YOLO- I wish I didn’t have to discuss this word, but this sociological study would be incomplete if I neglected to mention it. This word is something you say as an excuse for doing with possible major consequences. Some say Drake coined this phrase, but I say that is giving him way too much credit. Anyway, I think the most accurate usage of this term was evident when I told my students the story about how I dove into a coat closet at age 3, accidentally hitting a sharp edge and requiring stitches. “Why’d you do it?!” one of them asked me. Another student shook his head, fed up with such a stupid question. “Because YOLO,” he said.

Lax flow/bro flow- Here is a throwback to when I taught at a private school in Maryland. I had just gotten my Real Adult Teacher haircut, one of those short wispy ones that sort of made me look like a fun mom. What I had not anticipated was that Maryland was the most enthusiastic high school lacrosse state in the country, and I had unintentionally gotten the same haircut as all of the popular boys on the lacrosse team. “Ms. D has mad lax flow!” I heard again and again.

Swag- Swag is interesting because it comes from a real word, swagger, that students have no idea is a real word ever since it was appropriated to mean basically nothing. Swag can mean cool, desirable, skilled, but it has also come to be something that people say for no reason at all, almost like “Um.” Other word parts include “swagged out,” and “swaggalicious,” but let’s just be honest, these kids don’t really know about parts of speech, so all of these words are interchangeable.

Corners- Fairfax Corner Shopping Center.

Troo, troo- This is mainly said in response to criticism or highlighted hypocrisy. For example, a student may say that working on his essay for an hour is “too hard,” and then I might point out, “Well, you play Call of Duty for about 6 hours each night, and I’m only asking you to spend 1/6th of that time on your essay.” “Aw, troo, troo.” The problem with this statement, though, is its rampant overuse. In my most challenging team taught class this year, nearly everything we said aloud was pointing out a problem or correcting behavior. One day, after about twelve students had said “Troo, troo,” my team teacher said, “That’s it! The next person who says ‘troo’ is going to be kicked out of the room!” To which we got the most predictable of responses: “Aw, false, false...”

___ is life- This grammatically confusing statement is used to identify with something that one truly likes, or to mock something, intimating that no one should like it. The most common “is life” statement I heard was, “Ball is life,” roughly meaning, “I enjoy playing basketball.” What are nouns, anyway? Verbs? Why do I even try?? Conversely, students could make fun of something, for example: “One Direction is life.” It’s all in the tone.

a little less Black Beauty, a little more Seabiscuit

Steer clear of that Katy Perry girl. She’s into some dark stuff.

In her latest love song, “Dark Horse,” Katy Perry’s message is honest: sure, you can fall for her. But just know up-front that she’s a life ruiner. She ruins people’s lives.

The beat is dark. The key is minor. The message is threatening.

“So you wanna play with magic?” she opens her chorus with, equating her vagina to preferred Friday night activity of nerds everywhere. Too much credit? I think so.

“Baby do you dare to do this?” she continues. “Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse/ Are you ready for (ready for)/ A perfect storm (perfect storm)”

How is it that Katy’s short chorus is able to reference two different 3-star movies? She must have confused her favorite online metaphor-generator with movies tagged on IMDB as “meh.”

Ultimately, she equates a relationship with her to gang membership: “Cuz once you’re mine/ There’s no going back.”

Not only are these words holy-Jesus inducing, the delivery is frightening as well: “There’s no going back” is said in that foreboding, gangster, slowed-down manner that you’d use to hold up your local Wendy’s.

Of course, Katy Perry is not alone in this endeavor. Juicy J, three-time winner of the White People’s Choice award, comes in with some...enlightened...lyrics. He starts off strong with “She’s a beast/ I call her karma/ She’ll eat your heart out/ Like Jeffrey Dahmer.”

That was a cannibalism joke.

It only gets better: “She’s sweet as pie but if you break her heart/ She’ll turn cold as a freezer.” As a middle school teacher, I would not give credit to those similes.

But wait, there’s more: “She can be my sleeping beauty/ I’m gon put her in a coma.”

What’s a love song without a little domestic abuse? Clearly Juicy J was reading the Grimm Brothers’ version of that one.

There is no video to put all of these magical words to yet, but it’s coming soon (as in next week), and it’s apparently going to be big. Juicy J stated at the Grammy’s that it will be a “major motion picture,” which leads me to believe that he doesn't know what that means.

on conformity

Scattergories is a great game. Why? Because it rewards players only when they don’t have the exact same thoughts as each other. 

Many things in life, I’m afraid, are not like that.

And now with Facebook’s new trending feature, as if it weren’t happening enough: people are only going to think to talk about what everyone is already talking about.

I have always been a black sheep. And not the kind of person who tries really hard to be one. No, it was something I never could have escaped. I mean, I got tormented mercilessly on my bus on the way to middle school for wearing things like silver pleather pants, which I didn’t really give two thoughts about not wearing, because I liked them and in my mind, they were cool. The bullying and the pity party aside, I will pass on this really great pun that a dumbass on my bus said to me: “I can see myself in your pants. In two ways!”

Now that I teach middle school, even my honors students wouldn’t be able to come up with that one.

I think the moment that my unconventional way of thinking really sank in was in second grade. We were in Waynewood Elementary, sitting in the “pod.” Probably sitting on a lot of dried pee. Some police officers came in to talk to us, and I guess we were still just a tiny bit too young for a scared straight talk, so we were getting the “strangers are dangerous” talk instead.

The police officer posed the following question: “What does a criminal look like?”

Now, if I were in his shoes, I think I would have been careful not to ask so loaded of a question. Especially to a very homogeneous group of kids at a school that was nicknamed “Whitewood.” That question had the potential for a lot of really awkward responses. But at the time, closing my eyes, this was how I pictured the criminal:

She was a light-skinned lady with black hair. The hair was cut into a severe bob. She was wearing a trenchcoat and bright red lipstick. She had high heels on. Honestly, she looked pretty fucking stylish in my imagination, but I knew she was a criminal.

I raised my hand, really wanting to use my words to paint a picture to my classmates. I thought everyone would be impressed with the thoroughness of my description.

But I wasn’t one of those fucking kids who waved their hand around, screaming “OOH! OOOH!” like they were about to pee or explode or something. I hated those kids. And those policemen weren’t used to standing in front of a crowd of 7 year olds, so they mistook their obnoxiousness for enthusiasm.

Every kid who got called on said basically the same thing: covered in rags, really dirty man, bearded, mustachioed, scary. They kept saying this, one kid parroting the other, just changing the words around and maybe adding a synonym, the same way they’d paraphrase from Wikipedia eight years later. I still had my hand up, but I held it with less and less confidence as they went on. After six or seven kids went, I decided that I would change my answer to: ”looks like a mummy.”

But I never got the chance, because the policeman quickly cut us short to basically say: “You’re all wrong. A criminal can look like anyone!!”

At which point I felt vindicated. And really fucking annoyed that these idiotic snot-faces had ever tricked me into changing my answer that I felt in my heart of hearts to be true. (If I’m being honest here, I guess this would be the time to share that the lady in my head was actually Lisa from Sister Sister. Something about the icy way she said “Go home, Roger” convinced me she could be a cold-blooded murderer if she wanted to.)

So it was at this point in my pretentious young life that I decided, Marissa, sometimes you’re going to think differently than other people. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that they’re all fucking dumber than you. 

But sometimes it got hard. I remember in 6th or 7th grade playing this game at the pool called “Categories,” where we would have to think of our favorite something-rather and a messenger would call out to whoever was “it” all of our anonymous favorites. The person who was “it” would pick someone’s favorite thing and call it out, and then the two of them would have to race to the opposite sides of the pool. This was how it usually went:

“Limp Bizkit One, Limp Bizkit Two, Limp Bizkit Three, Limp Bizkit Four...The Beatles?”

Thank god I wasn’t a boy. Someone would have beaten the shit out of me.

Anyway...now as the adult who supervises and grades these little humans struggling to fit in, I see it every day. And it bores me to tears. It scares me. It makes me sure that no one is going to find a cure for cancer, because everyone is just going to try to do the same thing as whatever all of their Facebook friends are doing. Even the kids who want to be different all do it the same way. Here’s how: they watch Doctor Who.

So, I do realize that it has taken me a while to get to my point but...here it is:

Everyone’s talking about how Phillip Seymour Hoffman died? Maybe you don't have to give us your personal opinion on the matter. The Seahawks are killing the Broncos? WE KNOW. How is it that I could have had a play by play of the Super Bowl, several times over, without looking at anything other than Facebook?

Facebook, by telling us what is "trending," is basically telling us what to think about. But it doesn't even really need this feature, because we weren't having any unique thoughts anyway.

third eye blind fan fiction

It’s 2002. Stephan Jenkins and Brad Hargreaves are enjoying a beer after an exhausting awards show in the hotel bar. They can get away with this, because it isn’t 1997 anymore.

“Damn, man,” Brad says. “Can’t really do it like I used to.”

“I know.” Stephan looks pensively into his microbrew. “Hey Brad? Did you see that girl I was talking to?”

“The weird artsy one?”

“Yeah, man. She said she’s bisexual.”

“Haha, nice.” They fistbump. 

“And she’s a ballet dancer. So you know what that means.”

“Those little red panties, they pass the test.” Another fistbump. “But anyway, dude. Not to totally kill your boner but...you know who that is, right?”

Stephan kills his microbrew and orders another. “No. Who?”

“That’s that Vanessa Carlton chick.”

“Yeah, I don’t know who that is.”

Brad covers his face in his hands. “Aw dude, it’s bad. Should I tell you?”

“Tell me! What is it?”

“I don’t want to crush you, but I feel like crushing you.”

“Tell me! Tell me! Crush me.”

“She’s that Thousand Miles girl.”

“That what?”

“You know. ‘If I could fall...into the sky.’”

“The fuck are you saying?”

Brad exhales deeply, toying with his phone. “Man, sometimes I wish cell phones had the internet.”

“Yeah, but how would that work? Would you have to like plug them into a phone line?”

“Dude, you’d plug them into a DSL line. It’s way faster.”

“I don’t know. I don’t really like to be tethered down like that.”

“I know, I know. You live your life like a burning man.” Brad waves his hand at the bartender. “Hey man,” he says. “Could I borrow that?” He jerks his thumb at the fake Steinbeck in the hotel lobby, just outside the bar entrance. The bartender, who appears as if he has given up on life, and who appears to have no knowledge of the great alternative stars of the 90’s, shrugs his shoulders. 

“Alright,” Brad says, sitting down at the piano. “I never claimed to be a pianist.”

“Haha,” laughs Stephan. “You said ‘pianist.’”

Brad sighs. “Alright, man. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.” Brad cracks his knuckles and then launched right into the opening notes of “A Thousand Miles.” You know. Doo doodle-oo doodle-oo doo, doo doo doo...

“Oh that one...” Stephan laughs. But in his nervous laughter, he sees it all. Like a crystal baller. Like a star-crossed pimp. He sees a commercial for engagement rings, he sees White Chicks, he sees Workaholics, he sees Lil Wayne.

And that’s how Stephan Jenkins began producing music for Vanessa Carlton.

did someone beat the suck out of gavin degraw?

You know Gavin DeGraw.

He doesn't need to be anything other than a prison guard’s son. No matter what he says, he's not over you.

He’s never spotted without a fedora on. If Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, he's the King of Modern Snoozy Soft Rock.

And now, after getting the shit beaten out of him in an anti-bore-core hate crime, he's back and ready to rock.

Coming back from a shopping trip with my friend yesterday, we scanned the radio for something decent to listen to. I heard Gavin DeGraw’s latest single, and I told her that this was the only Gavin DeGraw song I liked so far, which was interesting, because his other singles made me desire to gouge my eardrums out.

“Didn’t he like, get the shit beaten out of him?” she asked.

I knew nothing of this, so I ran a quick Google search of “Gavin Degraw beating.” Sure enough, there were plenty of articles chronicling a hate-crime-like incident that occurred about 2 years ago.

The 36-year-old crooner said of the incident, “Somebody said something to me I didn’t like. I let them know I didn’t like it.”

“What do you think they called him?” I asked my friend, assuming it was some sort of homophobic slur or maligning of fedoras.

“Jason Mraz,” said my friend without pausing.

Whatever it was that went down, it has Gavin DeGraw coming back as a new man, ready to cut the soft-rock shit and cut to the core. At this point, he’s basically the male Rihanna.

The lyrics of his new song are caustic and insightful. He hates us almost as much as we hate ourselves: “Night sky full of drones/ This neighborhood of clones/ I’m looking at the crowd and they’re staring at their phones.”

They are not the lyrics of your mom’s Gavin DeGraw: “I read that soda kills you/ And Jesus saves/ On the bathroom wall/ Where I saw you naked.”

They are mildly political in a very vague way: “We’re at war again/ Save the world again/ You can all join in/ But you can’t smoke inside.”

They are trying to prove to the world that he’s wasting away in the same way that you tried to prove to your ex that you were wasting away when you were 13: “I’ve been medicated with cigarettes and alcohol.”

They are the urgently confused lyrics of a man beaten within an inch of his life for being Gavin Degraw: “But I passed the longest sign on the interstate/ Saying, ‘Find someone before it gets too late’/ You’re the best I ever had.”

I don’t want to jinx my newfound appreciation for Mr. DeGraw by trying to listen to any other new tunes (let’s not get ahead of ourselves) but I will say this: there is a phrase that says you shouldn’t beat a dead horse. That phrase doesn’t necessarily apply to pop music.

new app creates tweets for those too dumb to articulate emotions

PALO ALTO, CA: For 7 years now, Twitter has been reducing our profound notions, political statements, and feelings surrounding Chris Brown to just 140 characters. But for some area men and women, that is just too much.

“How do I say stuff?” said Chad Johnson, 22. When asked to elaborate, he grunted.

This is exactly what software startup, EmotMe, was anticipating.

“This is the 21st century,” Kip Andrews, 25-year-old CEO of the startup, stated in an interview yesterday. “There is just too much out there for people to really know how they feel.” As he retreated farther into his hoodie, he added, “And stuff.”

The app works by scanning relevant emails, Facebook posts, text messages, bank statements, Snapchats, etc. After compiling data from other apps, the app makes an estimation of how the user might be feeling, and since the user is too clueless to be aware of their own emotions, the app is always right.

“In the past month, I’ve lost the house, quit AA, gone through a divorce, and gotten a root canal,” said EmotMe user Shelbi Fry, 32. “I was at a loss for words. EmotMe tweeted, ‘Y does evrything happen so much,’ for me. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Tom Guilianio, 28, said that he got EmotMe when he was feeling rejected. “Nobody was responding to my Snapchats.” When we inquired about the content of his Snapchats, he winked and said, “Hehh.” 

EmotMe picked up on these feelings of rejection and crafted, “Bitchez just be jealos dey don look as sexy wit dey close off.”

“Man, I never thought of it that way,” said Guilianio. “But now I might even get a tattoo of it!” At the very least, he informed us, he is going to make it his Myspace tagline.

EmotMe will come free with the iPhone 6.