I managed to meet a mom friend - not someone from the previous birthday party weekend, but a mom friend from the kid’s school - and have a walk and talk on the Beltline on President’s Day. I’m pushing myself, now that the Lake Claire property is sold, to try and do one social thing per week outside the home. It’s nice to notice every time I publish online that I’m not alone in what I’ve been experiencing financially, but it’s probably healthier just to talk to other women my own age in person. Every time I do this I find that while the specifics of our situations are different, we’re all sort of moving in the same direction as moms and spouses and professionals together. Well, together when we can manage to actually meet up in person, which takes real effort on both sides. It’s also nice to know the other person has made just as much effort as you to get out of the house and talk to another human being.
I could feel for the first time this week a kind of Spring, even though I know the cold weather will come back. It’s not just that the house is sold, and that I can see for the first time the possibility of months at a time where we won’t be going backwards. The annual taxes will be filed soon and we’ll have an actual refund for the first time in years. There’s the possibility of a raise at the husband’s job, now that he’s been with his new employer for a year. Real, concrete steps are beginning to happen regarding our oldest child maaaaybe moving out in eighteen months or so to a dorm. I can see for the first time a future changed by the last three years, but not utterly ruined.
I am, two weeks after the weight of the Lake Claire house was lifted off my back, slowly feeling my way forward again after I spent the second half of 2019 working on that anchor, and then 2020 to present trapped there by COVID and its economic aftermath. I think about who I was before we moved into that house - someone who marched in Beltline lantern parades and went on long urban hikes and was politically active - and I have to wonder if I really am the same person. I think I am, mostly. While friends of mine went to Love Burn and Mardi Gras and rallies last weekend though, I managed two long Beltline walks, one with a friend and one by myself. I can reclaim who I was, I think, and I can come out of all this better.
Thinking about marches and political action now makes me think about the recent unrest, and there’s some great reporting on everything going on in Atlanta in this podcast. The city continues to fight for its soul over Cop City, something that no one on the east side wants but keeps happening anyway. I look at the kids being charged for domestic terrorism just for marching on Peachtree Street and I am totally baffled. If I hadn’t been sick in bed the weekend of the last cop car fire, would I be in jail just because I’m slow and easy to catch? What about my kids, who will soon be college kids and sure to march in protests as well? I’m so confused over the situation. I legitimately can’t understand why the prosecutors are lying to judges in pushing the arrests from the march, and saying that facts don’t matter. The only things that matter are facts, or that’s how it’s supposed to be in courts. It would seem to me the moment someone says that truth is the enemy they’re admitting a loss, but - well - that’s been part of the madness for years now.
I can crawl my way out of my own personal deep dark well, but of course there are so many still in their own pits struggling. The nature of truth is something we’re all going to be wrestling with for another decade I suppose. I’ve dedicated most of my professional career, life, and writing to nailing down the nature of truth for myself and others, using all the tools of information science, digital asset management, research, and publication I have been able to master. I’ll keep working in that direction while I can.
It was nice, this last week, to feel the sun again on my face for the first time in such a very long while. I can walk out in public again, by myself or with friends. I can keep putting one foot in front of the other until my stamina is back and I’ll be in parades of one kind or another again before long.
I'm only walking the Beltline now, but I can feel the need to walk alone or with others on Peachtree Street again in my future. It will take some time to get my stamina back, and I'm older, but I will get myself and my city back fully again, eventually.
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Going to a Party After the House Is Sold
Nothing about the house in Lake Claire was easy, not even the final sale last week to a couple of flippers. The buyers had money down for thirty days, which is of course standard, committing to pushing through all the legal parts of the sale. What wasn’t legal was when I found out they had broken in about ten days before closing to start renovation work, which was creepy. The buyers/break in artists also messed with our mail. I discovered the break-in was when I went for the weekly mail check before the sale was finalized. This meant I had to chase down tax documents through email, which was a pain in the ass. The workmen illegally re-wiring and painting the place promised us 5k after they flip the property, but I have my doubts about shady promises from shady people.
Even the final closing signing was hard. The funds didn’t wire in on signing day, but the next morning. I spent hours in anxious hope, and a great sigh of relief when the funds went through. We took the family out to a dinner we couldn’t afford that night. There was no profit in the sale, as we narrowly avoided foreclosure. I borrowed $40 from my oldest kid to settle the tab at a mid-priced restaurant near our rental townhouse.
My time of home ownership is done. It will be a very long time before I own again, if ever.
Then I went to a party last weekend, drunk only on the relief of having three stories of concrete off my back. It was a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, and it was really great. While there, I socialized with three different groups of people over the course of the evening, and I’ll call these groups The Moms, The Post Punks, and The Ex-Academics. There were overlaps in these groups, and I belong to all three, but they mostly broke down as follows:
The Moms were the most likely to stay seated, because The Moms are tired. We had all spent time earlier that Saturday getting kids to lessons or games or performances. We don’t know what to do with them just yet for the summer. Most of us were divorced. The Moms mostly had cigarettes or had quit but really wanted one. Some of them had started drinking before the party. I invited The Moms to come out with me to brunch on the Beltline sometime in the future. We’ll figure it out at some point, a way to overlap schedules so we can drink and walk and smoke and commiserate about The Kids.
The Post Punks had dyed hair of various Overtone shades and/or haircuts with shaved sections. Those of us in The Post Punks are part of parade Krewes and/or have intense costuming efforts for DragonCon. We talked about independent publishing, and locally sourced weed gummies, and why it sucks that Diamond Comics still has a monopoly on several kinds of comics. I’ll see The Post Punks again at DragonCon, if I don’t see them at a lantern parade, or a neighborhood festival parade, or somewhere else where we’re being visible and slightly obnoxious trying to get people to lighten up already, jesus christ, don’t people know they have to make their own fun?
The Ex-Academics clustered tightly and spoke quietly but intensely to each other. We’re either microdosing mushrooms for depression, or exploring legal ketamine for depression, or just sad that we’re still at a party, because we’re depressed and the bed is so much more comfortable. We’re all really looking forward to the second season of Yellowjackets. We’re trying not to drink because alcohol is a depressant. We all said things we wish we hadn’t, and had a hard time getting out of our heads and into the party. All Ex-Academics want social intimacy but probably went home thinking we said too much. We’re trying not to think about the fact that those of us who have watched what has happened to academia over the last two decades will have kids of college age in the next few years.
I should point out that I’m describing here mostly Gen-X women who went to college in the 90’s and who now are all financially insecure, because we’ve all taken hits over the last six years that were equivalent to body blows to the savings account. Yay us. The men were there too, and having a better time, I think, but that could just be projection because the birthday host was a guy and so, so happy to see all of us. It had been years since a real party because of the (don’t talk about it) quarantine. All he wanted for his birthday was a great party with all his friends, and he made it happen. So that was really nice; it had been far too long. The party made everyone feel loved, I hope.
I had to leave the event before nine as my voice gave out and I started coughing. I’m still recovering from COVID, physically, but it was obvious that everyone at the party was still recovering from COVID, socially. I’m glad I went to the party. It took me an entire day in bed to recover, because I’m still rebuilding my stamina.
The house is gone, and I’m on my feet now enough to go to a big party again. It’s nice to be part of groups where you fit in as much as anyone else does. I will try to do brunch with The Moms. I will try to beta read publications from The Post Punks and make a lantern for the next Krewe parade. I will look into the new drug therapies for depression, and talk to my fellow Ex-Academics about what we think these chemicals might really do to our brains. The house is gone, but I’m still here. So are most of my friends, and their friends, and our overlapping social circles are slowly turning again. In less than thirty days it will be the third anniversary of the thing we try not to talk about but isn't quite done with all of us yet. Let's try to have more parties.
Even the final closing signing was hard. The funds didn’t wire in on signing day, but the next morning. I spent hours in anxious hope, and a great sigh of relief when the funds went through. We took the family out to a dinner we couldn’t afford that night. There was no profit in the sale, as we narrowly avoided foreclosure. I borrowed $40 from my oldest kid to settle the tab at a mid-priced restaurant near our rental townhouse.
My time of home ownership is done. It will be a very long time before I own again, if ever.
Then I went to a party last weekend, drunk only on the relief of having three stories of concrete off my back. It was a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, and it was really great. While there, I socialized with three different groups of people over the course of the evening, and I’ll call these groups The Moms, The Post Punks, and The Ex-Academics. There were overlaps in these groups, and I belong to all three, but they mostly broke down as follows:
The Moms were the most likely to stay seated, because The Moms are tired. We had all spent time earlier that Saturday getting kids to lessons or games or performances. We don’t know what to do with them just yet for the summer. Most of us were divorced. The Moms mostly had cigarettes or had quit but really wanted one. Some of them had started drinking before the party. I invited The Moms to come out with me to brunch on the Beltline sometime in the future. We’ll figure it out at some point, a way to overlap schedules so we can drink and walk and smoke and commiserate about The Kids.
The Post Punks had dyed hair of various Overtone shades and/or haircuts with shaved sections. Those of us in The Post Punks are part of parade Krewes and/or have intense costuming efforts for DragonCon. We talked about independent publishing, and locally sourced weed gummies, and why it sucks that Diamond Comics still has a monopoly on several kinds of comics. I’ll see The Post Punks again at DragonCon, if I don’t see them at a lantern parade, or a neighborhood festival parade, or somewhere else where we’re being visible and slightly obnoxious trying to get people to lighten up already, jesus christ, don’t people know they have to make their own fun?
The Ex-Academics clustered tightly and spoke quietly but intensely to each other. We’re either microdosing mushrooms for depression, or exploring legal ketamine for depression, or just sad that we’re still at a party, because we’re depressed and the bed is so much more comfortable. We’re all really looking forward to the second season of Yellowjackets. We’re trying not to drink because alcohol is a depressant. We all said things we wish we hadn’t, and had a hard time getting out of our heads and into the party. All Ex-Academics want social intimacy but probably went home thinking we said too much. We’re trying not to think about the fact that those of us who have watched what has happened to academia over the last two decades will have kids of college age in the next few years.
I should point out that I’m describing here mostly Gen-X women who went to college in the 90’s and who now are all financially insecure, because we’ve all taken hits over the last six years that were equivalent to body blows to the savings account. Yay us. The men were there too, and having a better time, I think, but that could just be projection because the birthday host was a guy and so, so happy to see all of us. It had been years since a real party because of the (don’t talk about it) quarantine. All he wanted for his birthday was a great party with all his friends, and he made it happen. So that was really nice; it had been far too long. The party made everyone feel loved, I hope.
I had to leave the event before nine as my voice gave out and I started coughing. I’m still recovering from COVID, physically, but it was obvious that everyone at the party was still recovering from COVID, socially. I’m glad I went to the party. It took me an entire day in bed to recover, because I’m still rebuilding my stamina.
The house is gone, and I’m on my feet now enough to go to a big party again. It’s nice to be part of groups where you fit in as much as anyone else does. I will try to do brunch with The Moms. I will try to beta read publications from The Post Punks and make a lantern for the next Krewe parade. I will look into the new drug therapies for depression, and talk to my fellow Ex-Academics about what we think these chemicals might really do to our brains. The house is gone, but I’m still here. So are most of my friends, and their friends, and our overlapping social circles are slowly turning again. In less than thirty days it will be the third anniversary of the thing we try not to talk about but isn't quite done with all of us yet. Let's try to have more parties.
Thursday, February 09, 2023
A Late Tribute
I miss my friends Amy and Kate. One of the last times we had a hang, just the three of us, we ended up walking though Oakland Cemetery. I found on the ground an American Chestnut pod, something neither of them had seen before. They were surprised at the spiky thing I broke open to show them the three withered nuts inside. We talked about what had happened to American Chestnut trees, and how shortsighted mismanagement of a disease by a government agency had led to almost all of the trees being cut down. Amy and I were both working for the CDC by that time, and Amy made a dark joke about mismanagement by a government agency never being the case with human diseases. None of us laughed, but it was funny, back in the fall of 2018. Amy was funny, and I hope Kate still has a sense of humor when I get to see her again, if I get to see her again.
I should have known my old friend Amy was dead. The last email I have from her is from the end of May 2021. The internet now tells me she passed away just a few months later.
The thing that we both treasured about our friendship was that we only hung out about once every year or so, and every time it was like no time had passed. Amy was another of my friends that are fiercely independent women, and again the end came from a combination of COVID and lung cancer. When I met Amy she smoked the French unfiltered cigarettes that had been popular in the punk and goth scenes of the early 90’s. I smoked cloves, but never regularly, and of course gave them up entirely when I was ready to make babies. Amy did switch to filters at some point, but I don’t know that she ever was able to kick nicotine entirely until near the end.
Amy and I met in 2003 through livejournal, where she went by thermidor. We were both part of the community of women, most of us librarians or information science workers, who really did build the internet. Amy went to library school in the UK, I went to Boston, and we both loved fan fiction, information science, and talking shit on the internet while simultaneously building it through work on things like the first social media platforms (all the way back to the BBS days) and collaborative efforts like editing Wikipedia, or tagging up communities like Metafilter and Livejournal. At the time we met Amy was disentangling herself from a messy divorce from an alcoholic, and I was disentangling myself from my dad, who was also a messy alcoholic. A lot has been written by and for those whose personal hell is addiction and alcohol, but not as much, I don't think, by those of us who get the by-blow hell of leaving those addicts behind. Getting an alcoholic permanently out of your life in exhausting, and we could talk about that exhaustion.
We also shared life-long struggles with depression in a way that’s hard to explain to those who don’t share the same sort of problem. The internet, and our love of information, made it easy to close off the world and create our own bubbles of comfort inside our homes that were simultaneously easy to enjoy and intellectually wonderful, while at the same time being psychologically and physically damning in the long run.
Our paths started to diverge when I had kids, something Amy never wanted and had a hard time understanding sometimes. The only real argument we ever had was about breastfeeding at work, and she apologized to me in person later, though I wasn’t angry with her. We didn’t grow up in an era when women older than us had the option to better integrate child care and work. Both of us struggled professionally as we had gotten library science degrees at the exact time our profession was needed more than ever but was being dismissed. We were both employed in academia at one point when one of Amy’s employers said to her “I just don’t understand why we need to have librarians now that we have GALILEO.” That employer was an actual dean. That the school the dean worked at no longer exists is cold comfort, but it gives you an idea where our profession was twenty years ago.
Amy marched with me in the lantern parade the first year the Beltline was paved - I had been marching from the start, and convinced Amy to come once there was a proper sidewalk to come to. Her hands swole up after, because the stick I handed her for her hand-painted lantern came from that sidewalk construction, and turned out to be fiberglass or something. Amy never marched with me again, but we would go foraging for pecans along the Beltline with Amy’s room mate Kate just a few years later when Kate also moved down to Atlanta from Boston.
When I found out about Amy’s death, I reached out to Kate to find that she has been diagnosed with an early form of dementia following a severe bout of COVID just a few months ago. Kate is also an information science worker, one of the women who built the internet, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Kate’s caretaker says she’s hopeful that Kate may be able to exit hospital rehab in a few weeks, and I’m going to try to visit.
I’m going to try and reconnect with a lot of people I haven’t seen since 2019, now that it’s 2023. If you haven’t seen me in a few years, and you want to get dinner or coffee, please let me know. I’m going to try and start seeing people again. I’m sorry we were out of touch. We’ve all been through so much since the quarantine. Everything is different, and some of you aren’t there anymore. I don’t know anyone who got out with at least a couple of scars.
The pandemic is over, and it will never be over. The tragedy is still finding me, still finding my friends. Kate was one of the most brilliant catalogers, working on some of the most prominent commercial collections at the turn of the century. Although most will never know it, if you clicked on any kind of tag today, it probably would link back to, or touch in some way, something Kate cataloged in the move from analog to digital. Amy was so good at information management that she made it into the highest clearance at the CDC, the one that gets you into the underground panic room. How can I explain to people younger than me, including my kids, what it was like to know some of the smartest women of my generation, members of the information science workforce, who were some of the first to connect online in the late 80’s and early 90’s?
I won’t be able to tell my kids any of Amy or Kate’s jokes for years. They were all too dirty, though Kate would be quick to correct me and say “dirty implies shame, use the word adult”.
You two were two of the best adults I knew in Atlanta. I miss you.
I should have known my old friend Amy was dead. The last email I have from her is from the end of May 2021. The internet now tells me she passed away just a few months later.
The thing that we both treasured about our friendship was that we only hung out about once every year or so, and every time it was like no time had passed. Amy was another of my friends that are fiercely independent women, and again the end came from a combination of COVID and lung cancer. When I met Amy she smoked the French unfiltered cigarettes that had been popular in the punk and goth scenes of the early 90’s. I smoked cloves, but never regularly, and of course gave them up entirely when I was ready to make babies. Amy did switch to filters at some point, but I don’t know that she ever was able to kick nicotine entirely until near the end.
Amy and I met in 2003 through livejournal, where she went by thermidor. We were both part of the community of women, most of us librarians or information science workers, who really did build the internet. Amy went to library school in the UK, I went to Boston, and we both loved fan fiction, information science, and talking shit on the internet while simultaneously building it through work on things like the first social media platforms (all the way back to the BBS days) and collaborative efforts like editing Wikipedia, or tagging up communities like Metafilter and Livejournal. At the time we met Amy was disentangling herself from a messy divorce from an alcoholic, and I was disentangling myself from my dad, who was also a messy alcoholic. A lot has been written by and for those whose personal hell is addiction and alcohol, but not as much, I don't think, by those of us who get the by-blow hell of leaving those addicts behind. Getting an alcoholic permanently out of your life in exhausting, and we could talk about that exhaustion.
We also shared life-long struggles with depression in a way that’s hard to explain to those who don’t share the same sort of problem. The internet, and our love of information, made it easy to close off the world and create our own bubbles of comfort inside our homes that were simultaneously easy to enjoy and intellectually wonderful, while at the same time being psychologically and physically damning in the long run.
Our paths started to diverge when I had kids, something Amy never wanted and had a hard time understanding sometimes. The only real argument we ever had was about breastfeeding at work, and she apologized to me in person later, though I wasn’t angry with her. We didn’t grow up in an era when women older than us had the option to better integrate child care and work. Both of us struggled professionally as we had gotten library science degrees at the exact time our profession was needed more than ever but was being dismissed. We were both employed in academia at one point when one of Amy’s employers said to her “I just don’t understand why we need to have librarians now that we have GALILEO.” That employer was an actual dean. That the school the dean worked at no longer exists is cold comfort, but it gives you an idea where our profession was twenty years ago.
Amy marched with me in the lantern parade the first year the Beltline was paved - I had been marching from the start, and convinced Amy to come once there was a proper sidewalk to come to. Her hands swole up after, because the stick I handed her for her hand-painted lantern came from that sidewalk construction, and turned out to be fiberglass or something. Amy never marched with me again, but we would go foraging for pecans along the Beltline with Amy’s room mate Kate just a few years later when Kate also moved down to Atlanta from Boston.
When I found out about Amy’s death, I reached out to Kate to find that she has been diagnosed with an early form of dementia following a severe bout of COVID just a few months ago. Kate is also an information science worker, one of the women who built the internet, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Kate’s caretaker says she’s hopeful that Kate may be able to exit hospital rehab in a few weeks, and I’m going to try to visit.
I’m going to try and reconnect with a lot of people I haven’t seen since 2019, now that it’s 2023. If you haven’t seen me in a few years, and you want to get dinner or coffee, please let me know. I’m going to try and start seeing people again. I’m sorry we were out of touch. We’ve all been through so much since the quarantine. Everything is different, and some of you aren’t there anymore. I don’t know anyone who got out with at least a couple of scars.
The pandemic is over, and it will never be over. The tragedy is still finding me, still finding my friends. Kate was one of the most brilliant catalogers, working on some of the most prominent commercial collections at the turn of the century. Although most will never know it, if you clicked on any kind of tag today, it probably would link back to, or touch in some way, something Kate cataloged in the move from analog to digital. Amy was so good at information management that she made it into the highest clearance at the CDC, the one that gets you into the underground panic room. How can I explain to people younger than me, including my kids, what it was like to know some of the smartest women of my generation, members of the information science workforce, who were some of the first to connect online in the late 80’s and early 90’s?
I won’t be able to tell my kids any of Amy or Kate’s jokes for years. They were all too dirty, though Kate would be quick to correct me and say “dirty implies shame, use the word adult”.
You two were two of the best adults I knew in Atlanta. I miss you.
Thursday, February 02, 2023
Your Sixteenth Summer Prepares You For Life
In the before times - the world before the quarantine - I was one of those moms who spent a large chunk of my time every January desperately filling out the kids summer plans with camps and family visits and activities. Part of this, of course, was the necessity of child care in the ten weeks of the year where school doesn’t fill the time I need to work during the day. I would be lying though, if I didn’t admit that my pride was involved in summer planning as well. It was a big deal to me to be able to send the kids to two weeks of sleep away camp (at a modestly priced place within driving distance), plus arrange for them a week or two on a local college campus for Lego robotics or a week making pottery or whatever other arts and crafts I could manage to find and afford. The husband and I would cobble together intricate pick-up and drop-off plans that often required help from others as the kids bounced from one side of the city to another in June and July, with the idea that exposing them to everything would cause something to stick. They had fun, and I got to feel like a super parent for eight weeks a year.
Of course, 2020 and 2021 were the years of no camps, because they weren’t open. By the time camps did reopen last year, the kids had largely aged out of the affordable options, and now everything left is massively expensive. It’s also time for real college summer programs. I spent about an hour walking my older child through an application to a summer program last week in the hope that she might qualify for a scholarship, only to find that the “scholarships” offered for the program amount to coupons. I was crushed, and the kid was confused. In a way I’m glad this first experience happened with just a summer program and not the real college application process. It was good experience in understanding that we can’t afford the elite higher ed institutions that are now targeting the older child due to her high SAT scores.
If you were wondering which summer college program I’m referring to, it’s the National Student Leadership Conference. This program offers a taste of dorm life on campuses like Duke and Yale to high school juniors, and says scholarships are available. To find out if you qualify for a scholarship, you must first give them three hundred and fifty non-refundable dollars, after which eighty percent of applicants will get a discount on the main sticker price of their two-week summer programs. NSLC like real college that way - there’s the sticker price, and then the real price, but you won’t know the real price until you commit, and even then, the price of the place is so much that you need to be wealthy to attend.
The summer between junior and senior years of High School were quite different for the husband and I in the early 90’s. He was from a WASP background and did time in Harvard dorms studying classical mythology and other things he loved. I read an article in Sassy magazine and applied to the baby peace corps (Student Conservation Association), and spent time living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for no pay. The summer between junior and senior year of high school really did prepare both the Gen Xers that the husband and I were for the rest of our lives. I went to work and got covered in bug bites and lived like a homeless person while trying to make America’s resources more accessible to the public. The husband learned that nothing he really loved to read or do would ever make any money, so he better choose to do something else. This is how we prepared to be the adults we are today.
This whole year has been a re-adjustment, a grieving period, really, for the kind of higher education preparation and experience we all thought the girls would have. I suppose I thought that when I married a WASP that the kids would automatically be able to attend undergrad somewhere in Boston, or at least New England, just as a default. It’s now impossible for me to even take them on tours of campuses in Boston as I had always dreamed. This change in the vision I had for the kids might not be a bad thing; no one really knows what anyone is supposed to do after High School anyway. Among our friends, those who finished a higher education seem to make just as much as those who didn’t. The difference seems only to be debt and bitterness about the degrees we were told were the way ahead.
I’ve told the oldest child that if she wants to just work her job at the pizza place all summer that’s fine, but she needs to work at least thirty hours per week if that’s the case. She doesn’t seem motivated to work beyond her normal three high school shifts of five hours each. There are affordable state university summer programs, many of which offer real scholarships, and maybe she’ll go to one of those and practice living in a dorm away from us and maybe she won’t. I don’t know if working or gaining college credits is a better path either way. I just know we have no money to help her out with either plan.
Weather damage and clean-up continues to happen all over Atlanta. The only good thing about this is that I know it will continue to stall Cop City construction. The roads are being resurfaced between the capitol building and Peachtree Center, the site of so much smashing two weeks ago. We all seem to be in a pattern of cleaning up one mess after another, waiting on decisions from insurers and lawyers, personally and politically. I don’t know what will happen. No one does. Nobody seems to know when the broken cell phone towers will be restored, so we all just have spotty reception. Nobody seems to know when the broken higher ed system will be fixed, so we’re all just making guesses with our kids’ future.
I was talking about all of this with one of my best old college friends today - talking to them through the shitty connection the towers broken a month ago provide between our two locations. My friend said, “It’s not so much that I mind living through the apocalypse, it’s just that I wish we could get to the part where I don’t need a job anymore.” I laughed, and mentioned not for the first time that I didn’t think the apocalypse would be so slow, this rolling thing where everything seems to just get more and more broken gradually. “There will always be work.” I replied, “It’ll just be different.” My friend wished the different part, where we live in a more communal way would happen. It seems most of my friends think about that a lot lately, but the overculture being what it is, no one has a clear path forward.
I was prepared for this, after all, by living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for free between my junior and senior year of high school. People will always need things built, and repaired, and made accessible. I also learned that living in a tent for an extended period of time sucks. I hope whatever my daughters learn this summer serve them just as well.
Of course, 2020 and 2021 were the years of no camps, because they weren’t open. By the time camps did reopen last year, the kids had largely aged out of the affordable options, and now everything left is massively expensive. It’s also time for real college summer programs. I spent about an hour walking my older child through an application to a summer program last week in the hope that she might qualify for a scholarship, only to find that the “scholarships” offered for the program amount to coupons. I was crushed, and the kid was confused. In a way I’m glad this first experience happened with just a summer program and not the real college application process. It was good experience in understanding that we can’t afford the elite higher ed institutions that are now targeting the older child due to her high SAT scores.
If you were wondering which summer college program I’m referring to, it’s the National Student Leadership Conference. This program offers a taste of dorm life on campuses like Duke and Yale to high school juniors, and says scholarships are available. To find out if you qualify for a scholarship, you must first give them three hundred and fifty non-refundable dollars, after which eighty percent of applicants will get a discount on the main sticker price of their two-week summer programs. NSLC like real college that way - there’s the sticker price, and then the real price, but you won’t know the real price until you commit, and even then, the price of the place is so much that you need to be wealthy to attend.
The summer between junior and senior years of High School were quite different for the husband and I in the early 90’s. He was from a WASP background and did time in Harvard dorms studying classical mythology and other things he loved. I read an article in Sassy magazine and applied to the baby peace corps (Student Conservation Association), and spent time living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for no pay. The summer between junior and senior year of high school really did prepare both the Gen Xers that the husband and I were for the rest of our lives. I went to work and got covered in bug bites and lived like a homeless person while trying to make America’s resources more accessible to the public. The husband learned that nothing he really loved to read or do would ever make any money, so he better choose to do something else. This is how we prepared to be the adults we are today.
This whole year has been a re-adjustment, a grieving period, really, for the kind of higher education preparation and experience we all thought the girls would have. I suppose I thought that when I married a WASP that the kids would automatically be able to attend undergrad somewhere in Boston, or at least New England, just as a default. It’s now impossible for me to even take them on tours of campuses in Boston as I had always dreamed. This change in the vision I had for the kids might not be a bad thing; no one really knows what anyone is supposed to do after High School anyway. Among our friends, those who finished a higher education seem to make just as much as those who didn’t. The difference seems only to be debt and bitterness about the degrees we were told were the way ahead.
I’ve told the oldest child that if she wants to just work her job at the pizza place all summer that’s fine, but she needs to work at least thirty hours per week if that’s the case. She doesn’t seem motivated to work beyond her normal three high school shifts of five hours each. There are affordable state university summer programs, many of which offer real scholarships, and maybe she’ll go to one of those and practice living in a dorm away from us and maybe she won’t. I don’t know if working or gaining college credits is a better path either way. I just know we have no money to help her out with either plan.
Weather damage and clean-up continues to happen all over Atlanta. The only good thing about this is that I know it will continue to stall Cop City construction. The roads are being resurfaced between the capitol building and Peachtree Center, the site of so much smashing two weeks ago. We all seem to be in a pattern of cleaning up one mess after another, waiting on decisions from insurers and lawyers, personally and politically. I don’t know what will happen. No one does. Nobody seems to know when the broken cell phone towers will be restored, so we all just have spotty reception. Nobody seems to know when the broken higher ed system will be fixed, so we’re all just making guesses with our kids’ future.
I was talking about all of this with one of my best old college friends today - talking to them through the shitty connection the towers broken a month ago provide between our two locations. My friend said, “It’s not so much that I mind living through the apocalypse, it’s just that I wish we could get to the part where I don’t need a job anymore.” I laughed, and mentioned not for the first time that I didn’t think the apocalypse would be so slow, this rolling thing where everything seems to just get more and more broken gradually. “There will always be work.” I replied, “It’ll just be different.” My friend wished the different part, where we live in a more communal way would happen. It seems most of my friends think about that a lot lately, but the overculture being what it is, no one has a clear path forward.
I was prepared for this, after all, by living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for free between my junior and senior year of high school. People will always need things built, and repaired, and made accessible. I also learned that living in a tent for an extended period of time sucks. I hope whatever my daughters learn this summer serve them just as well.
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