not falling down

Hail Killroy!

“Perhaps if alcohol itself were given a holiday, it would fall into disuse the rest of the year as well.”

How do you undo a thoughtless injury to someone vulnerable?

I’ve been thinking lately about the summer of 2002–my second term as a GSP RA, and the story I promised to tell and didn’t. It’s about a girl with a drinking problem. I don’t know her name anymore, if I ever did.

The girl was from a small town–part of the half of Governor’s Scholars who don’t come from Louisville. She had a drinking problem. She’d disclosed this to her school counselor, who had disclosed it to GSP admissions; she’d made an agreement with both of them to quit before the program started. GSP was her best chance at a scholarship, and they all knew it.

GSP has a list of non-negotiable rules. If you break a rule, you go home: no second chance, no protest, no appeals. Everybody knows the rules. They include stuff like “don’t sneak into opposite-sex dorms” and “don’t have fireworks, weapons, alcohol or other drugs.” They’re more a matter of liability than morality, but nobody at GSP has the power to overrule them, up to and including the director of any campus.

This girl’s friends visited on Family Day and brought her a present: a couple bottles of vodka. She hid it, drank most of it, and eventually got caught with it. Joe, our campus director, told her unhappily that she was expelled; they called her parents and she packed her things. The entire campus knew by that night, when Sherleen Sisney arrived.

Sherleen Sisney is the stunningly arrogant, singleminded, self-righteous Executive Director of GSP. She’s highly decorated and powerful in Frankfort, and probably has more power over the program than the governor himself. Until that year I’d considered her a self-aggrandizing annoyance.

Sisney was supposed to be there to sign off on the expulsion form. After Joe and Aris Cedaño (the director of GSP) briefed her on what had happened, she called the girl in to talk to her. She administered a Meyers-Briggs personality test. She told Joe and Aris that the girl could stay in the program, as long as she apologized publicly to the campus, and that they could deal with any problems this caused. She was gone by 11:00.

There was no other topic of discussion on the halls that night. Some Scholars were glad that nobody got kicked out of their campus, and many were angry at the girl for screwing with everybody’s GSP experience. All of them wanted to know whether they got a second chance for breaking the non-negotiable rules. We had to tell them no. We also had to follow staff policy and present a united front, saying that we supported the decisions made by the administration.

When Joe showed up at his office the next morning at 7:00, every RA was waiting for him, bleary and grim. He looked at us and said “okay, let’s go upstairs and talk.”

Joe, Aris, Otto and we all knew what the Scholars didn’t: Arizona once had a GSP, structurally similar to the Kentucky version. A group of documentary filmmakers snuck onto their campus and got tape of the Scholars there drinking, dancing (the way high schoolers dance), running around long after curfew and getting tsked at by their staff. They aired it on a PBS affiliate, and there wasn’t a GSP in Arizona ever again.

I’m not saying they were wrong to show what went on there, and I’m not saying that one girl drinking is the same thing as a whole campus run amok. But there are a lot of people who don’t like that the smart kids keep getting funded for free summer camp when our state can’t even put together a budget. We knew that if it got out that we allowed kids to stay in the program after breaking our own rules and the law, that information could be used to shut down a campus, or two, or three.

That’s why the Residence Life staff told Joe that unless we could enforce the rules equally for all Scholars, we’d walk out. We’d already written and signed a letter of protest to Sisney; we didn’t think she’d read it. We were willing to shut down EKU GSP that summer in order to keep the program itself running the next year, and the year after that.

We came pretty close, and if Joe hadn’t taken us seriously we might have done it. Instead we talked and held meetings with outsiders and set plans into motion that, I think, are still moving. Then it was two days after the attempted expulsion, and everybody was sitting in the assembly hall while the girl stood at a podium.

She read an apology she’d prepared with the program counselor. Her voice was small, but she had a microphone. And at the end she said something that wasn’t prepared: “Finally, I think that my presence here is disrupting GSP, so I’m leaving. I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

She walked up the aisle between the auditorium seats, in silence, alone. She went out into the lobby and called her mom. She disappeared.

It worked: the community healed. I had to tell the kids in my seminar group that I’d been willing to abandon them if it meant keeping the program alive, and that wasn’t easy. I’m sure it was more difficult for the girl’s roommate and her RA to deal with the aftermath.

I don’t know if I could have done what she did.

This story is kind of about how I accidentally injured a friend with my thoughtlessness, yesterday. It’s about that girl, too, and how she had a magic bullet–one that cost her a great deal–that I didn’t have then and don’t have now. She undid Sisney’s injury to our vulnerable community. We had no way to undo the injury that all of us had done to her.

Is anybody else just fucking creeped out by the American Apparel “Meet Melissa” ads? I’ve seen them a lot on the Onion and a few times on IndieClick affiliates, I’m not sure where else. The ad is a picture of a pretty girl with dark hair in a white t-shirt, smiling under a badly lit shower and looking kind of nervous. The ad has a rollover sidebar. Expanded, it reads:

“Meet Melissa. She won an unofficial wet T-shirt contest held at the American Apparel apartment in Montreal. Her prize for winning was a travel mug from McGill University, and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Melissa is wearing our new ultralight Sheer Jersey T-Shirt, AKA “The Summer Shirt,” available at our stores and online.”

Let’s translate that.

“Meet Melissa No Last Name. We had a party at a company apartment, then piled on the peer pressure and alcohol until we got some girls to pose under a shower. We thought this one was hot, so we’re going to put her face and upper chest on a few billion pageviews. We didn’t pay her shit!

We’re reasonably sure Melissa’s over 18, but hey, no last name and no pay means no paper trail, right? P.S. Go to our site and you don’t even have to look at her face, just her hands over her breasts splashed real big on the front page.”

For a company that’s trying to build a rep as progressive (“Sweatshop Free, Brand Free Clothes”), they sure come off like fratboy assholes there.

Update 1453 hrs: Ashleigh linked me to an enlightening Business Week article.

“By the energy of the alcohol

the virgin Mary was made man.”

The Nicene Creed, babeljacked. Man, I don’t know whether it’s funny or a million stories waiting to happen. Or maybe just a stupid Dan Brown book.

Also, “babel-” totally needs to be a prefix in the Futurologian Congress. PS Dear Leonard: can the Eater of Meaning maybe do this someday?

A friend of mine has been questioning me with regard to the inner struggle in which I am pretty consistently engaged. I said I think it’s the way I’m trying to train myself into maturity. She asked why. This is my answer.

Katie’s passed out on our futon in the front room; I put out a trash can and a bottle of water even though I don’t think she’ll need them. Her friends say she’s been like this since around 6 pm. It’s pretty clear none of them made an effort to stop her.

I don’t mind that Kim and Danielle and Will left her here. I’d rather she be passed out in our apartment, which is at least a safe environment, than at fucking McNally’s house. I don’t mind taking on the responsibility of taking care of her tonight. It’s something for which I’ve made myself available, and something I’m willing to accept.

I will defend the letter of the law in that it allows adults to ingest drugs like alcohol if they want to abuse themselves. It’s a right. We have rights for a reason. I’ll defend that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hate it.

People think alcohol makes them more interesting because it is essentially a self-centering device. All drugs are. And all drugs make you less interesting to everyone but yourself.

I will not deny that fucking yourself up is a valid choice to make with your life. I will not agree that it’s ever a good choice. There’s a difference. I want to scream this at people, but I’m incapable of that even if I thought it would do any good.

The things I actually hate in life are deliberate blindness and stupidity. They never accomplish anything worthwhile. They never make anyone happy in the long run. And living in Kentucky (or college, or America, or the world), I’ve seen so much of it that sometimes it makes me want to throw up.

I never want any part of that to be a part of me. My definition of maturity is not complete open- and empty-mindedness, but the unflinching refusal to be blind or stupid. It’s considering the needs of others before your own, and choosing to act in a way that takes into account the consequences of your actions.

I’m not there yet: thus the struggle. It’s me finding the parts of myself that won’t listen and trying to dig them out with whatever tools I have, and it’s my choice to never turn to chemicals to let me out of the job.

I feel like I lived two lives tonight: one where I went with excited people to see a really entertaining movie and stayed happy about it for an hour afterwards, and another where I sat in here being bitter and hating alcohol while a helpless, silly person sleeps on my roommate’s couch.

I keep believing that if I can find the anger and precision to hammer out every word of what I feel correctly, it’ll have to reach someone who’ll listen. That’s why I choose to articulate instead of screaming. Then again, of course, we all know that nothing ever changes.

Angie show was great, of course, if sadlya little shorter than the first one.There were actually fewer people there, but because the bar was approximately the size of my closet, it certainly felt a lot morecrowded.

The people from Ohio were there again, in full stalkers-fueled-by-alcohol mode, and once againAngie made jokes about being scared of them that everybody else there knew were serious. Thelocal opening band was a little frightening too, in a “you think you’re getting the crowd excitedbut really we just don’t want you this close to us” way. Ah, Lexington.

Anyway, Angie started off the set with “Wonderland”–said Amanda: “wow, no foreplay!”–and thoughwe didn’t get to hear “Fight For Your Right” or “Gravity,” the version of “Memphis City Rain” was(if possible) better than ever. It just grooooved.

And once again, the magnificent Mandar has pics! Already! I don’t think I’ll ever understand howthese “one-hour photography” places work. There was no cool lighting this time, but we were muchcloser–like arm’s-length closer–and some of them turned out really nice. The crowd includedMonica and her friend Jenny (shown in the sixth pic holding their stolen setlist), plus me, Amanda and Ken–notablebecause the eighth pic below isthe best one ever of Ken. There was another one that was comparable, from an old Short Story concert, but I appear to have lost it; ifsomeone else has a copy, let me know.

There is also one pic in therein which Angie appears to be both asleep and bleeding from the mouth. Don’t blame the photographer!After all, she provided the last pic–in which we prove that even though Jon couldn’t make it tothis show, he was definitely there in spirit (or at least in PSP).

Pics open in a separate window.

So I turn 21 tomorrow. I’m not exactly planning a big bash, because a) I don’t much like big bashes and b) it is (as has been the case for eleven years) on a performance date. Anyway, these are the last free hours I’ll have for a while, so I thought I’d get this entry out of the way.

I’m not going to drink. I’m not going to start drinking. I don’t think that’s really a big deal. I don’t mind answering when people ask me why I don’t drink; I have plenty of answers to go around (”it’s not what I do” is the most popular lately). What gets to me is the sheer shock in some of my friends’ eyes when they find out.

“Like at all?” they ask. “Ever?”

I have friends who drink, and I don’t treat them any differently than my friends who don’t. Their choices don’t define who they are; I don’t think I’ll ever understand why mine apparently does.

I’m going to enjoy being able to get into clubs for 21-and-over concerts. That’s really the only difference this birthday makes to me. Having gained the right to do something doesn’t mean you have to go out and immediately overindulge in it (how many people go binge voting when they turn 18?). In fact, it doesn’t mean you have to do it at all. A privilege is a privilege, a choice, not an obligation.

Alcohol’s a good disinfectant. The day I see it accomplish anything other than that, or aid anyone or in any way contribute to the general good, I’ll try drinking it. I’m not holding my breath.

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Also! Has anybody else heard Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” lately? I’m not even going into the mess Everclear made of it (they had to slow it down because their bass player wasn’t good enough to play it at the original speed), I’m talking about the original recording, the one you might hear at a supermarket or a party with a DJ. IT’S THE WRONG VERSION.

I LIKE this song, and I own one of the CDs it’s on (a re-release actually titled “Brown-Eyed Girl,” with about eight other songs), and I know the lyrics. Toward the end, the original lyrics go

…sometime I’m overcome thinking about
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium…

And the version that’s getting played now, all the time, is as follows:

…sometime I’m overcome thinking about
Laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey
Behind the stadium…

It’s pretty badly done; the line is obviously copied from where it appears earlier in the song, and you can hear that the bass and drums are different in the background. It’s jarring and annoying and stupid. I’ve been kind of hovering between “annoyed” and “outraged” about this for years, and today I looked it up and found out why.

That’s right: the version you hear now was originally a censored single in 1967. Let’s say that out loud, to make sure we read it right: 1967. My mother was younger then than I am now, and somehow the censored version is still getting played.

I could make some point about how this proves censorship is pervasive and insidious and, well, annoying, but that’s kind of redundant. What’s more important is getting the REAL SONG out there, on Morpheus and Kazaa, and replacing the stupid stupid 1967 single. Download now and strike a blow for not-stupidity!

van_morrison_-_brown-eyed_girl_(REAL_version).mp3

(That’s kind of a weak ending. Hmm. Opening night and the school show went well; tonight’s the real test, to see if we can keep it up. Wish me broken legs.)

Getting off DS time means we struck the set in a record-breaking two hours (would have been threeexcept… you get it). Somebody mentioned that the hour we gained this morning was actually takenfrom May. Weird but theoretically true. Sounds like a story.

On the way out of Grant after working post-Rent loadout, David and I ran into Emily Minor looking small and hollow-eyedlysad. She asked where we were going, obviously wanting the answer to be “alcohol,” and though weboth offered to walk her anywhere she wanted she declined. I found it a bit odd, since she’s beenattached to Allison’s leg for a week and I know for fairly sure what she’s doing now. Iworry about her. Emily, I mean.

Returned to Bingham, moments later, to find Jordan nearly unconscious in a toilet stall–slumpedover the porcelain with undies around his ankles. Ah, rush season.