Actually, this first part isn’t shizzle. Not by any means. I am truly excited to be guest posting here for…gulp…the wonderful writer Chris Kuhn! Her support for The Judy Blume Project has been tremendous. Women like Chris are proof that there’s power in Sisterhood of the Heart. I hope you’ll visit me over there and introduce yourselves to Chris, because you need to meet her. You really do.
xoxo,
~Kitch
***
And now, on to our regular programming of shizzle and general bitchiness. Yeah, Swear Jar can suck it today.
***
T.S. Eliot, I owe you an apology. When you began a (very long) poem with the words, “April is the cruelest month,” I called bullshit. I read The Waste Land sophomore year in college, and I called bullshit then and I’ve called bullshit ever since, because any human being on the planet knows that February wears the tiara in the cruel department.
It just does.
Or maybe not. Damn, I hate to be wrong.
I’m not going to write about the thing. Other people have done it far better than I could, and I still don’t have any ability to write a coherent sentence about the thing, so I won’t bother you.
For the last 14 years of my life, Columbine has owned April’s ass. I wake up, stumble for the coffee maker, wonder why I feel so etherized, so weirdo inside, and then I remember.
In past years, I’ve slashed through that day with a sharp, red stripe on the calendar hanging on my wall–the calendar that reminds me that there’s choir practice or late start or gymnastics or doctor visits.
How stupid of me. How self-absorbed and arrogant of me, to erase a day when I wake up on the right side of the dirt. But I did it.
Stupid girl. You cannot erase days.
Even sloppy, wrecked days where you’re stuck in the house, predatory blizzard swooping down, children who want more breakfast and some dopewad put a Kleenex in their pocket which is now ripped to shreds in the washing machine and it’s hairball circus with the cat.
Even days far worse than that. Days that draw blood, but even those days deserve recognition.
So I apologize T.S. Eliot (grudgingly, because The Waste Land has way too many footnotes and even to this day I still don’t understand it but you wrote Prufrock so I forgive you). I also apologize to the following: Chernobyl (04/86), Waco (04/93), Oklahoma City (o4/95), Virginia Tech (04/2007), Boston marathon (04/2013) and fallen Boston police officer (04/13). All of you deserve and earn a cross-off on the calendar, but I don’t think I can give you that. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.
