Twitter Fiction: 140 Characters or Less

Twitter fiction is a new phenomenon where writers tell a story within the 140-character limits of Twitter.

"She clicked through old emails that she never deleted. 'Hello Beautiful Girl,' read one subject. And the dog sat and watched the tears fall."

"Can I tell you something?" he asked. And as she waited for him to declare his undying love, he said: "I'm worried about you."

Non-Fiction/Memoir: Becoming A Woman

                I remember it quite vividly. I sat in my bedroom, next door to my parents' room, listening to my parents watching their favorite sitcoms through the wall, while I watched a movie on my own little TV. It was one of those periods where we got free HBO on every TV, not just the big one downstairs or the one in my parents' bedroom, and I was watching Big Daddy, the movie where Adam Sandler adopts a cute little blonde boy with a lisp; a film I still associate with this day. Even now, in my twenties, when I'm flipping channels and see that it's on, I remember exactly how my short life changed while the movie played, as I sat around between dinner and bed.

                My friends and I had been buzzing about it non-stop for the past year. Who would it would happen to  first, and when, and what we would do if it happened in the classroom, or on the bus, or somewhere where our mothers weren't. We'd read all the books about it and listened on the edge of our seats during the classes that taught us exactly what was happening. Nija had gotten it first, as we'd suspected she would. She was almost a full year older than the rest of us, several inches taller and already more curvaceous. All the boys liked her, wanted to feel her up behind the basketball courts while the rest of us waited for something to arrive on our chests bigger than bee stings. Shayla came next. She got it during Language Arts class while we studied Maniac McGee and counted down the days to our yearly planeterium visit. Emily had been next. my closest friend calling me squealing to let me know that she had just crossed that mighty threshold as well. Weeks passed, and became months, and I began to wonder if I would ever catch up to my friends.

                This is probably why I remember that evening to vividly. Because I had wanted it so badly, had wanted to feel grown-up, had wanted to belong, had wanted to become as sophisticated and wordly as you could be in the sixth grade. I hated the idea that my friends were experiencing something I wasn't, and all I could do was sit on pins and needles and wait for the day that I could join their secret society, that I could be a woman too and throw in my expert opinion when they discussed all the gory little details that came with it. I wanted it so bad that I wished for it every night before bed, squeezing my eyes tightly together and praying that maybe, when I woke up, I would be a woman.

                It was two days before sixth grade graduation. Our elementary school went up to sixth grade, so in a few days we would finish our stint at Browns Mill Elementary and move on to middle school. It was a major milestone, I think, because moving on to my next school was when I would encounter those all new very bad things. I'd hear kids talking and learn what a blowjob was, and I'd meet girls who would have babies very very soon. I'd see fist fights broken up and couples kissing in the hallways, sometimes using their tongues. So it seemed appropriate that just days before that transition, my dream would come true and I would become a grown-up too.  It was then, sitting in a folding chair I'd gotten out of the garage so I could have an extra chair in my bedroom, watching Big Daddy on TV before bedtime, that I felt a strange little sensation I had never felt before. I can't fully describe what it felt like, but it was new, accompanied by a dull ache in my abdomen that I'd assumed was a result of eating too much dairy that day, for I was still a little lactose intolerant. Still, I knew immediately what it was. I'd read enough books and articles in Girls' Life magazine to realize. I went to the bathroom and checked my underwear, a pair of teal Hanes Her Way for Kids, the big cotton ones that come in a pack that your mom buys you. The unusual rust-colored stain in the center told me all I needed to: I was a woman now. I started to my parents' bedroom, then stopped. My mom lie next to my father, and I was too embarrassed to tell her in front of him that I'd finallly joined the ranks of my mother, and older cousins, and aunts, and that I now had that monthly excuse to be mean and nasty or cry over long-distance phone commercials. I had no sisters to whom I could confide, so I went to bed that night having told no one, excited that soon all my friends would know that I was a woman too, but disappointed that the event had come with no fanfare, no confetti, no streamers or balloons and no parade, just a quiet little stain and a headache that wouldn't go away. Days later, I would come to realize that being a woman was really no fun at all, and would have given anything to go back to not having to worry about feminine hygiene and bathroom breaks and Aleve. I thought to myself that maybe I should not have wished quite so hard, or I wouldn't have to be so concerned with ruining the white dress they made every girl don for our sixth grade graduation ceremony, and suddenly being in that group of complaining young ladies was hardly worth it. We could always talk about something else, of course. Which member of NSYNC was the cutest or what we were doing that summer or what clubs we were going to join once we got to middle school. But before, it had seemed like the be all end all. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, I realized then, at eleven years old, cramping, uncomfortable, and yearning to be a little girl again. 

Fiction: Fixing You

            “Your eyes are red,” I declared with trepidation.

            “My eyes were watering…”

            “What for?”

            “’Cause of my contacts. I put ‘em in funny. I mean, I put ‘em in wrong.”

            “Um hmm,” I responded. Her false air of confidence had never done much to fool me. Facing away from me, she couldn’t see the suspicious glance I slid her from across the room. She’d turned to watch the wall; it never noticed her eyes.

            “You never wear your contacts,”

            “I guess I just felt like a change today.”

            “Um hmm,” I repeated, busying my hands with the empty pill bottles on her desk. I stacked them up high, little plastic palace, then knocked them down again. How proudly they stand, how quickly they fall.

            “You’ve got those little rings around your eyes again.”

            She pretended not to have noticed.

            “Do I really?  Oh, shit. Hand me my make-up bag? It’s ’cause I haven’t been sleeping.”

            “Um hmm,” I murmured as I passed the little pink cosmetics case. She dotted beige cream under her eyes, and as she rubbed it in, the dark circles that surrounded deep blue faded.

            A long pause. I stared out of the nearest window, unsure of my next move. She was so fragile, delicate as the newborn in the sterile white incubator whose parents pray through the window. I was too young and unwise to handle her; so clumsy, every move came that much closer to hurting her.

            “Are you doing it again?”, I asked.

            “Doing what?”

            “You know,” I answered. “What you used to do last year. And I asked you to stop.”

            I’m the only one who’s ever asked. She answered slowly, searching for a diplomatic answer, racking her brain for a way to make it all seem so trivial.

            “I haven’t done it in like, two weeks. I’m totally fine about it.”

            “But you still do it?”

            “It‘s not a big deal. I mean, it‘s like, it‘s just what I do, you know?”

            But I didn’t know. I started to nod, then stopped.

            “But you’re already so sick. Your body’s so weak. Why put it through this?”

            “You do it,” she said shortly.

            “I don’t do it anymore, Jess. It scares me. The way my head spins and my chest hurts when I do it. It all scares me.”

            “If it hurts, you do it wrong.”

            “No, Jess,” I said. “It’s supposed to hurt. ”

            She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, without the tiniest hint of apology.

            Her father did not swim at the bottom of that sea all those years ago, and when she was only ten, he was gone. I knew I didn’t understand. “I can’t live without him,” she had said me that night when she told me every detail with dry eyes. And so for the past ten years she had not really been living, a ruined little piece of what she could have been.  Had she really drowned along with him?

            “I told you guys I was screwed up. Nobody can fix it.”

            My eyes searched for hers, but she’d crept out of my sight. The bathroom door was shut, both sink faucets on full blast. The shower was running, steam seeping under the door and fogging the windows; no one stands under it‘s stream. Water hitting porcelain is not nearly as noisy as she anticipates. I can’t fix her.

            

Fiction: October

If only I'd known. It was October. The air was thick with clichés as the cool night breeze nipped at our faces. Hormones pumped through our skinny pubescent veins as we filled the night with our footsteps. The click-click of sassy high heels—the sound of sophistication! Gleaming off-white teeth bounced light against the sky, our grins rivaling the moon. And the moon! I glanced upwards, nudged, gestured—it was full; staring down on us, reveling in our nostalgia as we broke into giggles at obscure inside jokes. The glowing yellowish orb above us was an old friend—the only one, it seemed, that would stay with us when we were thrust into adulthood in May and left only with our memories. As commencement drew nearer, we began to live for moments like this. It was October. Two days prior to Halloween, which had, as kismet would have it, fallen on a Monday. As seniors, weekdays were reserved for burying our noses in thick college-level textbooks or frantically filling out applications for our futures, so we, undeterred, moved our festivities to Saturday. We’d spent all evening getting ready, huddled in the hall bathroom, painting our faces in colors that did not appear in nature; and picking out garments that would dishearten our mothers, with a bit of lace here and a touch of skin there. And as we stepped precariously into shoes that pinched our painted toes, we knew no one but us could understand the glitz and glamour of that autumn evening. It was October. Young ladies our age from across the county were stumbling drunkenly out of family-owned sedans or hanging across boys they’d never care for in sobriety. We recognized a few of them, in face rather than form as their hips ground against the pelvises of faceless males. Requisite puffs of marijuana smoke floated in illicit clouds around the room. This, we thought, as we looked around, was the essence of high school. “A Costume Bash”, the invitation had read as it was shoved into our hands after school one day. The girls, it seemed, had come up with inventive costumes—supermodels, demons, fairies—while most of the boys sported ski masks and eye patches paired with clothes they’d be seen in on any given day. We had chosen a different approach. We’d found discount animal ear headbands and Velcro tails, and slunk into our revealing ensembles and heels. A kitty cat, a bunny, and a teddy bear. Ladies of the wild, we called ourselves. And for at least one night, we were free to be exactly that. It was October. We had linked arms and vowed to stay together all night, though this obligation crumbled with each interested young man. We forgot the rules our mothers taught us about parties, the rules we rolled our eyes at and blamed on overprotection. We forgot about leaving drinks unattended, or being alone with strangers, or losing the people you came with. We forgot that not every smile was to be trusted. We forgot to keep our cellular phones ready in event of an emergency. We forgot. And in this memory lapse, we became victims, two of ourselves, and one of depravity. We became tiny disasters. It was October, just like the one in picture books, with crisp air and bright orange leaves that danced to the ground. That night, we were leaves, dry and limp, falling down, down, down, as the moon embraced us with empathy. If only we'd known.

Excerpt: Racial Construction of the Subject

This is an excerpt from a scholarly paper I did for senior level Critical Theory. It's some of my best work, twenty pages long, and was written in one day. Some call it procrastination, I call it challenging a deadline and winning. 

     If, as a society, we are heavily influenced by the ideology of the dominant social class, and we can say, as a society, the dominant social class is wealthy, Caucasian males, how can we explain the existence of different cultures within one society? More specifically, what makes expectations for acceptable behavior within the Black community different from that of the White community? Why do the majority of individuals of different races live by different customs, expectations, and beliefs? The fact is that different races are interpellated differently. The drives and desires checked within the superego or symbolic of a White American are not the same as those within a Black American. From birth, many Black Americans are taught that certain behaviors are for “white people,” and to behave in such a way often leads to alienation or ostracism, especially among young adults still forming their identities.  The examples abound, and though I am in no way trying to generalize that all of these behaviors are either exclusive to the race with which they are usually associated or that they are performed by all members of said race, it is true that much the stereotypical behavior associated with one ethnic group are widely considered unacceptable for another. Take, for example, the instance of an American individual speaking Standard English. In one culture, this may be encouraged, as it implies a mastery of the English language and displays intellect and professionalism. However, within another culture, speaking this way may be frowned upon, as it implies that the speaker is trying to be someone they are not and is talking like a “white person” in order to appear uppity or to impress the members of the dominant ruling class. Another example is the difference in the standards of beauty between the two races. Looking at common opinions, one will more often see an emphasis on the beauty of voluptuous curves within the Black community, while within the White community, thinness is more often equated with beauty, leading to the greater prevalence of eating disorders within the White community—disorders commonly regarded as “white girl problems,” though by no means exclusive to white women. If it is true that we live our lives based upon the ideology of the ruling class, and it is also true that individuals of different races tend to live by different sets of ideology, we can then assume that our ruling classes are different. It is almost as though we can split our society into a number of different hegemonies, specific to different races—if there is only one, then how can we live under such different sets of ideology? What a member of one race is ostracized for, a member of another is praised. One must assume, with that knowledge, that there is not one dominant ideology over all of Western society; there are instead several smaller ones dictating which behavior is acceptable for different races.
           In Stuart Hall’s essay “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance”, Hall    addresses the dominance of one race over the other and the effect which it has on society.

“Some are exclusively concerned with forms of political domination or disadvantage, based on the exploitation of racial distinctions. In the vast majority of these studies, race is treated as a social category. Biological conceptions of race have greatly receded in importance, though they have by no means wholly disappeared. The principal stress in this second tendency is on race or ethnicity as specifically social or cultural features of the social formations under discussion.” (Hall, 2)

Hall recognizes that race is no longer just seen as a biological or genetic different and goes far beyond the different pigmentations of members of one society. There are now inherent social differences, and race makes a huge difference in relations within a society. If we can recognize that race is far more than skin deep, we must then examine where those social differences lie. If interpellation is the coercion of subjects by representations in the media and popular culture, and different races receive greater exposure to media relating more closely to their race, it is a fair assumption that different races are coerced in different ways. Similarly, in his essay The Social Construction of Race, Ian F. Haney Lopez addresses race as a social construction rather than a biological one. Lopez writes:

“Race must be viewed as a social construction. That is, human interaction rather than natural differentiation must be seen as the source and continued basis for racial categorization. The process by which racial meanings arise has been labeled racial formation. In this formulation, race is not a determinant or a residue of some other social phenomenon, but rather stands on its own as an amalgamation of competing societal forces.” (Rivkin, 969)

            A strong example of this difference in interpellation is that of the rap or hip-hop culture. Among the Black community, it is by far the most popular form of music and entertainment as a whole, and, thusly, provides the greatest influence on the members of the community. Young Black Americans are bombarded with images of misogyny, overly extravagant wealth, little stress on the importance of education, and the encouragement of a life of crime. Thus, this becomes the ideal lifestyle. Though there are, of course, more positive role models for young people in the Black community, for every one notable Black figure encouraging a college education, there are 10 more, even more popular, in and out of prison and referring to women as “bitches and hoes.” Along with the negative images pervasive in the rap culture are an increasing number of Black men in school and a decreasing number in college. It is simply impossible to ignore the correlation between the two. In his essay Hegemony, Hedonism, and Hip-Hop: An Examination of the Portrayal of Race and Sexuality in Music Videos, J.S. Turner addresses this negative influence and relates it to some notable statistics that explain this correlation.

“Looking specifically at studies that dealt with effects of sexualized music videos performed by Black artists, Wingood and colleagues (2003) gathered 12 months of longitudinal survey data from 522 adolescent, single, African-American females and examined whether exposure to rap music videos correlated with risky health behaviors. They found that greater exposure to rap videos was independently associated with an array of negative health outcomes; adolescents who had greater exposure to rap videos were 2.5 times more likely to have been arrested; 2 times more likely to have multiple sexual partners; and over 1.5 times more likely to have acquired a new venereal disease or use drugs and alcohol. This study supports Emerson’s (2002) claim that popular mediated hip-hop culture impacts the ways young African Americans understand their social surroundings.” (Turner, 4)

 These statistics make clear the fact the images which “coerce” Black Americans into behaving a certain way are extremely different to those outside of the Black community and, in many ways, tend to contribute to negative aspects of the community. Moreover, they explain in part why, historically, the success rate of White Americans in terms of education, affluence, and et cetera are typically higher than that of Black Americans. 

Monday Morning

First time blogging from my phone. I downloaded the Blogger mobile app for this specific reason. Early for work so why not blog on the go?

Lately I've been feeling like a bit of a nomad. I moved back to Decatur after graduation, but it feels like I just moved my stuff back there. I haven't spent a night there in almost two weeks. Between staying with family and friends, I've been constantly on the go. I like it though. I am the type that loves being busy. However, I do miss my mom.

I've got to remind myself to photograph the things I see around the city. Atlanta really is a hotbed of interesting characters. I was telling a friend how my parents used to take me to L5P when I was a tiny kid. I really am ATL bred. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Soon I will turn 24. This birthday isn't a big deal, but next year is. 25! I already know what I want to do. My sorority little sister is always in another country. She's lived in America, the Bahamas, Ireland, and now England. I've decided for my 25th I'm going to visit her, no matter where she is on the map. Guess I should get to work on that passport!

Until next time,
Kayla

Twenty-Something in Atlanta

I guess you could say I'm at a turning point. I recently graduated, am recently single, and am spending tons of time with my best friend, who recently moved back to Atlanta from a stint in Florida. What I'm saying in all that is...I'm so open to opportunities. This is a great time to be young in the city, and I'm taking full of advantage of it. Since this is my first entry, I'll give a little summary about myself.

I went to a high school at a majority black school. I loved it. Football games, prom, Battle of the Bands...I had a blast. Not to mention that the schoolwork was never too hard. Guess I was a smart cookie. Decided I needed a change in college and went to a tiny majority white private school. It wasn't for me, but I met some of my best friends there, so I definitely think I was there for a reason. Once I transferred to a bigger school, I was a little older and VERY into cheerleading. I've been told it's not a sport, but I tend to disagree--it sent me to the ER once! Now I've graduated and am trying to find my place in life.

I know what I want to be. I started working as a high school tutor, and knew immediately that I wanted to teach. The rewarding feeling you get when you teach a kid something and they nail it--incomparable. My mother is the Superteacher. Degrees, awards, etc. As far as my career goes, she's the role model for what I want. It can be good and bad. Yes, she set a great example for me, but I also feel a bit pressured to follow her path. I can't be a crappy teacher when my mom was the best. I really want to know I can strike out on my own with no expectations.

Now, I'm young and single in my favorite city. I always say I could live in Atlanta my whole life. That's because every neighborhood is so different. Say I spend a year in Buckhead, a year in L5P, a year in Midtown, then settle down with kids in a nice suburb like Alpharetta or Kennesaw...I'd love it. But, I definitely don't mind the idea of seeing the world. At my first college, I was in a sorority. My big sis is sitting next to me right now, but my little sis is in the Bahamas and I would love to go spend time with her. And why not now? No children, no husband. This is the time to do whatever I want to do. Guess I better get my passport.

Anyway, this is only my first entry. Expect a lot more from me, because I always have something to say, and I know writing is the best way to express myself. Stay tuned!

Kayla