my first creative nonfiction paper.
Oct. 2nd, 2007 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charlz_lynnwriting class... it's pretty painful to sit through.
but, i'm putting my first paper on here because it's about my mumma and since most of you know her, and knew me when i was a teenager, it might be kinda funny to you.
i'm not a very good writer, but a funny story is a funny story.
Clay
This is so not normal. I mean, it’s probably normal to spend this much time at the Sculpey wall, sure. Color is very important to an artist. But my mom is not an artist, she’s just fed up.
She keeps picking up a color, like Mother of Pearl, holding it against the tiny object in her hand, shaking her head and putting it back. Then she holds the thing up to the wall, the off-white section, and tries to find a better fit.
She’s talking so loud; I wish I could get out of here. Someone, surely, is going to realize what she’s doing, and then I’m going to die of embarrassment. Today’s already bad enough, I don’t need to choke on my own saliva when someone discovers how nuts my mom is. The fluorescent lights are making every blemish on my face stand out like a ten-year-old in a bar, and the shiny floors are kinda messing with my head. I guess I’m not totally over my trip from last night. It’s good I don’t have to work tonight.
“Oh! Brandiy,” she shouts, “I can mix two and it’ll be a perfect match!”
“That’s great, Ma,” I answer from the acrylics aisle. I’m thinking about how I’m going to get out of class tomorrow so I can work in the afternoon, and wondering if everyone that looks at me can tell I’m totally tripping out.
My mom finally settles on Ivory, with a little bit of Tan mixed in, and I’m so grateful that we can get the hell out of this place and back to the privacy of our weird house. Thank God the girl checking us out doesn’t ask my mother what she’s doing. I always expect them to be curious about people’s projects, but I probably wouldn’t be either. Really, how many times a day can you hear “I’m making a dollhouse for my bratty granddaughter,” or, “Bedazzling this hideous sweater I bought at Dollar General,” before the apathy truly sets in?
In my mom’s dirty white Geo Metro, she makes fun of my teenaged embarrassment. Sometimes she plays it up in public because she knows how mortified I am at what a freak she can be. I mean, we’re both freaks. My short, neon pink hair, facial piercings, and huge psychedelic pants circa 1969 lend for some staring. Especially when combined with her facial piercings, brands, Shrek-like wardrobe, and matlocks. Especially in stupid Toledo, Ohio. Then she has to run around acting like a kid all the time, too. As if fielding homophobia isn’t enough work on its own. It’s ridiculous.
We pull up in front of the house, and I slap the top of the toilet in the overgrown front yard on my way in. I always do, it’s for good luck. Someday I’ll actually get around to planting things in there, but for now it’s just a toilet with some graffiti on it. And how I give directions to our house.
The screened-in front porch has a tiny pathway to the door, and it smells like plaster dust that’s been sitting around getting damp for a while. To the right is a pile of debris that used to be our living room ceiling.
Mom decided a couple months ago that we should have a loft, so I stood in the attic and smashed the ceiling out with a sledge hammer. She was downstairs holding a piece of three-quarter inch ply over the forty-gallon fish tank. It was just another one of her weird ideas, and I only went along with it because she said I could hang my punching bag from the rafters in the living room. The stairs she built up to the new loft are way too steep, and none of the wiring is up to code. I don’t know why she didn’t just let me do the electrical work. It is what I do all day in school. But the loft is pretty cool; it’s great for house parties and my punching bag is hanging in the corner of the living room, as promised.
In my room, I can hear The Princess Bride playing for the millionth time, in French, and when I come out I see my mom sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. On the table in front of her are three tiny molds. She used the object she had in the store to make them out of Sculpey, and is now making a huge collection of matching things. I see her first attempt, blackened in a pile next to her. She does art just like she cooks, I guess.
“It said 475 degrees, but I put it to broil instead ‘cause I was impatient,” she tells me guiltily. All I can do is roll my eyes, laughing, and walk away. I wonder if she can tell I was smoking pot in my bedroom again. Probably not, or she’d have said something.
From the kitchen I ask her how she’s going to make them stay in. She tells me epoxy putty will probably work, and I spray Mountain Dew all over the sink.
“Mom! That shit is so toxic!”
“Yeah, but it won’t be enough to do anything.”
I’m too exasperated to say anything to this. This is our usual fight. My mom does dangerous things all the time, and she doesn’t have health insurance. She drives to other cities to hang out with her friends, and won’t call me for days and days, and I’m sure she’s dead in some ditch somewhere with no one who knows her anywhere around. Of course there’s no way for the cops to find me, or even figure out that I exist. The woman is a danger to herself.
When I’m done with my ramen noodles, I retreat back into my room to pull a few more hits off my bong and do some bad oil pastel drawings. After an hour or so, I hear “WOO HOO!” and I know that she’s finally made a successful batch. As much as I’d like to stay annoyed with her, it is a pretty good idea and it’ll save us a lot of money, so I go to check it out.
In the kitchen, my mom is standing holding up a perfect match to her tooth. On her palm she has a replica next to the original, and I can only tell the difference because of the sheen. The color is exactly the same. On the stove, there’s a cookie sheet with probably twenty more identical teeth
“Alright, that’s pretty cool,” I tell her, and she kisses me on the cheek.
“Now I just have to paint them with nail polish and glue one in,” she says in her excited voice, heading back into the living room with the tray.
All my life, Mom’s been telling me I have to floss, or I’ll end up with teeth like hers. Which are brown and rotting, and are now falling out of her head. The first one that fell out is the one she’s replacing right now. The dentist told her at the end of an appointment a couple weeks ago that a crown would be three thousand dollars, and she told him to piss off and figured out how to take care of it herself.
In the past week she’s gotten herself a set of tools, the little mirror and a pick, and has become obsessed with cleaning her teeth and fixing the broken one. It’s a lot like how she fixes our cars with duct tape, wire hangers, and a blow dryer.
Except this time she’s fixing her face. Pretty successfully.
Over the next four years she will slowly poison herself with super glue and end up having something like an asthma attack. This will happen only after swallowing or losing probably forty of her homemade teeth. And of course she’ll survive this little complication and perfect her design so the tooth holds itself in place, without the glue.
but, i'm putting my first paper on here because it's about my mumma and since most of you know her, and knew me when i was a teenager, it might be kinda funny to you.
i'm not a very good writer, but a funny story is a funny story.
Clay
This is so not normal. I mean, it’s probably normal to spend this much time at the Sculpey wall, sure. Color is very important to an artist. But my mom is not an artist, she’s just fed up.
She keeps picking up a color, like Mother of Pearl, holding it against the tiny object in her hand, shaking her head and putting it back. Then she holds the thing up to the wall, the off-white section, and tries to find a better fit.
She’s talking so loud; I wish I could get out of here. Someone, surely, is going to realize what she’s doing, and then I’m going to die of embarrassment. Today’s already bad enough, I don’t need to choke on my own saliva when someone discovers how nuts my mom is. The fluorescent lights are making every blemish on my face stand out like a ten-year-old in a bar, and the shiny floors are kinda messing with my head. I guess I’m not totally over my trip from last night. It’s good I don’t have to work tonight.
“Oh! Brandiy,” she shouts, “I can mix two and it’ll be a perfect match!”
“That’s great, Ma,” I answer from the acrylics aisle. I’m thinking about how I’m going to get out of class tomorrow so I can work in the afternoon, and wondering if everyone that looks at me can tell I’m totally tripping out.
My mom finally settles on Ivory, with a little bit of Tan mixed in, and I’m so grateful that we can get the hell out of this place and back to the privacy of our weird house. Thank God the girl checking us out doesn’t ask my mother what she’s doing. I always expect them to be curious about people’s projects, but I probably wouldn’t be either. Really, how many times a day can you hear “I’m making a dollhouse for my bratty granddaughter,” or, “Bedazzling this hideous sweater I bought at Dollar General,” before the apathy truly sets in?
In my mom’s dirty white Geo Metro, she makes fun of my teenaged embarrassment. Sometimes she plays it up in public because she knows how mortified I am at what a freak she can be. I mean, we’re both freaks. My short, neon pink hair, facial piercings, and huge psychedelic pants circa 1969 lend for some staring. Especially when combined with her facial piercings, brands, Shrek-like wardrobe, and matlocks. Especially in stupid Toledo, Ohio. Then she has to run around acting like a kid all the time, too. As if fielding homophobia isn’t enough work on its own. It’s ridiculous.
We pull up in front of the house, and I slap the top of the toilet in the overgrown front yard on my way in. I always do, it’s for good luck. Someday I’ll actually get around to planting things in there, but for now it’s just a toilet with some graffiti on it. And how I give directions to our house.
The screened-in front porch has a tiny pathway to the door, and it smells like plaster dust that’s been sitting around getting damp for a while. To the right is a pile of debris that used to be our living room ceiling.
Mom decided a couple months ago that we should have a loft, so I stood in the attic and smashed the ceiling out with a sledge hammer. She was downstairs holding a piece of three-quarter inch ply over the forty-gallon fish tank. It was just another one of her weird ideas, and I only went along with it because she said I could hang my punching bag from the rafters in the living room. The stairs she built up to the new loft are way too steep, and none of the wiring is up to code. I don’t know why she didn’t just let me do the electrical work. It is what I do all day in school. But the loft is pretty cool; it’s great for house parties and my punching bag is hanging in the corner of the living room, as promised.
In my room, I can hear The Princess Bride playing for the millionth time, in French, and when I come out I see my mom sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. On the table in front of her are three tiny molds. She used the object she had in the store to make them out of Sculpey, and is now making a huge collection of matching things. I see her first attempt, blackened in a pile next to her. She does art just like she cooks, I guess.
“It said 475 degrees, but I put it to broil instead ‘cause I was impatient,” she tells me guiltily. All I can do is roll my eyes, laughing, and walk away. I wonder if she can tell I was smoking pot in my bedroom again. Probably not, or she’d have said something.
From the kitchen I ask her how she’s going to make them stay in. She tells me epoxy putty will probably work, and I spray Mountain Dew all over the sink.
“Mom! That shit is so toxic!”
“Yeah, but it won’t be enough to do anything.”
I’m too exasperated to say anything to this. This is our usual fight. My mom does dangerous things all the time, and she doesn’t have health insurance. She drives to other cities to hang out with her friends, and won’t call me for days and days, and I’m sure she’s dead in some ditch somewhere with no one who knows her anywhere around. Of course there’s no way for the cops to find me, or even figure out that I exist. The woman is a danger to herself.
When I’m done with my ramen noodles, I retreat back into my room to pull a few more hits off my bong and do some bad oil pastel drawings. After an hour or so, I hear “WOO HOO!” and I know that she’s finally made a successful batch. As much as I’d like to stay annoyed with her, it is a pretty good idea and it’ll save us a lot of money, so I go to check it out.
In the kitchen, my mom is standing holding up a perfect match to her tooth. On her palm she has a replica next to the original, and I can only tell the difference because of the sheen. The color is exactly the same. On the stove, there’s a cookie sheet with probably twenty more identical teeth
“Alright, that’s pretty cool,” I tell her, and she kisses me on the cheek.
“Now I just have to paint them with nail polish and glue one in,” she says in her excited voice, heading back into the living room with the tray.
All my life, Mom’s been telling me I have to floss, or I’ll end up with teeth like hers. Which are brown and rotting, and are now falling out of her head. The first one that fell out is the one she’s replacing right now. The dentist told her at the end of an appointment a couple weeks ago that a crown would be three thousand dollars, and she told him to piss off and figured out how to take care of it herself.
In the past week she’s gotten herself a set of tools, the little mirror and a pick, and has become obsessed with cleaning her teeth and fixing the broken one. It’s a lot like how she fixes our cars with duct tape, wire hangers, and a blow dryer.
Except this time she’s fixing her face. Pretty successfully.
Over the next four years she will slowly poison herself with super glue and end up having something like an asthma attack. This will happen only after swallowing or losing probably forty of her homemade teeth. And of course she’ll survive this little complication and perfect her design so the tooth holds itself in place, without the glue.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 12:39 pm (UTC)im bad at reading stuff but thought id try it out. read the whole thing and actually paid attention (didnt read the first and last word of each paragraph!)hellarious story. thanks for sharing this lil window of yr world! xo.
Laughing my ass off....
Date: 2007-10-03 07:25 pm (UTC)