my parents spanked me and i can totally understand why. i could be the whiniest, neediest, most obnoxious little shit you ever knew. plus i was an only child, secure in the knowledge that my parents had wanted more children and that they treasured me to an extent i sensed but never quite understood. i never really thought the spankings had any long-lasting effects beyond my fear of flyswatters and the atlanta journal-constitution, but now i'm not so sure.
when i was a four-foot-tall crazy person who couldn't sleep and ran through the hall to crash into my parents locked door- because we would have repeated this performance several times that night and the locked door was the last act in the intricate drama that was my going to bed in the winter of 1989- with a whoosh of pink polyester night gown and a poltergeist scream, i always knew i was in trouble, i knew the end was nigh, that the journal-constitution was coming, when my father said my name.
my sizable anti-spanking lobby audience will probably weep upon discovery that to this day, i associate my name with the shit hitting the fan. which is rather an unfortunate circumstance when operating in the professional world, where one's name is kind of key.
now, people say my name all fucking day. they also say carolyn's name.
carolyn was the last of the new girls in our office. she's in a different department and she has a whole other name that i've spent a good bit of my life convincing people is entirely different from mine. and it is entirely different, but not quite enough.
for over a year now it has been as though my name was called from the rafters from 9 to 5. and every time, for just a second, there's a little girl part of me that feels i should gather my gown and run because the AJC, it's coming.
6 comments:
as if newspapers needed any further negative connotations these days. First they lose all their advertisers, now they've been likened to a switch. Spare the Chicago Sun-Times, spoil the child?
fortunately, newspapers are dying so they make a rather puny threat these days.
The problem with fishwraps is that they sound all stuffy and conservative. I don't want to read grampa's newspaper. They need to modernize. Put in hip words and stuff. Seattle Blog-Dispatcher? Atlanta TTYL-er? New York Newsgawkler?
Hmm, I read the AJC. While it is no Tennesseean, it will have to suffice for right now.
And I could totally see you as that bratty kid. LOL.
I will beat my children with blogs.
huh. i'm curious about how that would manifest itself. would you print out each post and then beat your child with a sheaf of them? torture them by reading aloud in character as mickey rooney in character as mr. yunioshi?
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