Posted on 09/24/2007 7:07:01 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...Eight years earlier, he and I had met at a restaurant in Boston where we both worked late nights. We were each in the midst of deteriorating relationships and through our commiseration became close friends, confidants and eventually a couple. Our relationship was brief, intense and tumultuous, more addiction than love a scalding hot bath that feels like comfort but in reality is scorching you.
I think we both knew we were wrong for each other but didnt care. We were young, lost and unmoored, each secretly terrified of the phrase, your whole life ahead of you. Depressed and discouraged about the seemingly aimless path we were on, we partied too much, all the while treating each other as an extra added vice. More than anything we were grateful not to have to sleep alone.
After just a few months, I discovered I was pregnant.
I made an appointment at an abortion clinic before I even told him, never considering any other option. I was 20, a college dropout with nothing but a journal of badly written poetry and a résumé of restaurant jobs. He was 26, a short-order cook who liked to smoke, drink and acquire tattoos. We werent but children ourselves.
When he said without hesitation that he wanted to keep the baby, I was shocked. Having come from an abusive family, he had long claimed that he never wanted children, that he would never bring a child into this messed-up world. But when actually presented with the opportunity, he changed his mind.
Maybe this is exactly what we need, he said. Exactly what weve been looking for. Maybe a child would give our lives meaning, a purpose. Maybe if we had a kid, we wouldnt feel so lost anymore.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://profiles.friendster.com/2634264
More About JenniferSchools(Other):
emerson college
Occupation:
drinkslinger, struggling novelist, mini-journalist
Hobbies and Interests:
etymology, researching the pentacostal religion for creative purposes, and teaching myself music theory.
Favorite Books:
history of love, nicole krauss. boys of my youth, jo ann beard. actual air, david berman.
Favorite Movies:
annie hall, adaptation, jesus’ son, breathless, wings of desire, royal tenenbaums, amelie, almost famous, harold and maude.
Favorite Music:
jenny lewis, bobby bare, jr., brendan benson, the shins, south san gabriel, m. ward, the decemberists, rilo kylie, red house painters, elliott smith, camera obscura, ryan adams, magnolia electric, silver jews, clem snide forever...
Favorite TV Shows:
freaks and geeks, curb your enthusiasm, csi (only las vegas)
Zodiac Sign:
Scorpio
About Me:
big city, bright lights, being alone.
Who I Want to Meet:
david berman.
ROTFL!
Ain’t that the truth.
What I was struck by reading this story, is that the woman never seems to think of anyone but herself, totally.
The baby is a thing, the man is a thing. Even when she talks about if the child had alive to reach four, she talks about it makes her feel - weird. It’s all “I, I, I”.
And I gather she is still angry. She called him up to tell him she was going to kill their baby even though he told her he wanted it, and he had the nerve to make her feel guilty. So she writes this snotty piece about how strange he is.
That last “he’s found his place in hanging” smacks of real meanness.
“What possesses people - women mainly - to write these confessionals where they reveal themselves as simply old children, self-centered and narcissistic to a fault?”
You answered your own question, bud. Pure unadulterated narcissism. LOOK AT ME! To a large part of society, negative attention is better than no attention.
Oh, absolutely. She will be hanging from the ceiling by the New Year. Then she can write the sequel to this piece, about how Suspenders (the Artists, not the haberdashery) are so terribly, terribly misunderstood, and how we Ground-Pounders (the regular folks, not the Infantry) just can't understand the freedom that comes from putting barbed fishhooks through our own flesh.
My take is that she is young enough that she (at some level, perhaps unconscious) still thinks she will have a child.
If that doesn’t ever happen (and its looking less likely) she will, someday and one day, begin to grieve about that baby. She just doesn’t know it yet.
I think she already has, but she is incapable of squaring that grief with her assumptions about abortion and centrality of her own self in the universe. So her unfocused and indecipherable grief comes out as, Oh, yeah ... weird.
A child instantly makes your life (assuming you are remotely sane and moral) instantly no longer about you....
If she was so worried about not having a child with a man she didn’t love, she shouldn’t have been spreading her legs for him in the first place.
We’ll never know how this would have played out had she made a different decision in its entirety, but we do know a precious gift from God was sent Return To Sender by a selfish narcissist.
I know that any woman who would abort a child I was the father of, other than a situation where her life was threatened, would indeed be dead to me.
Hook Boy winds up looking like the mature and sane one... “Oh yeah... weird”, indeed!
“Favorite Movies:
annie hall,...”
Nuff said. Woody Allen is a loathsome character, a one dimensional “actor” who is incapable of playing anybody but himself. His direction and writing are only marginally better than that.
“Hobbies and Interests:
etymology, researching the pentacostal religion for creative purposes, and teaching myself music theory.”
Basically she is saying she has no real hobbies or interests. I’m curious how one goes about teaching one’s self “theory” on any topic, much less someone who does not profess to play an instrument. She states that she is a journalist/novelist but nothing related to that is a hobby?
All I see from that profile is a mixed up little kid, desperately looking for someone to refer to her as “that cool chick”.
She said that they couldn’t have a child together, because they didn’t love one another.
People tend to put love in a box. It knows no bounds and can bloom in the most unlikeliest of places.
It is entirely possible that a child would have given them both a needed sense of purpose and drawn them together.
Welcome to America today. Adulthood begins at 50. ;)
The 'no health care excuse' and the unspoken name of the Hildebeast are most troubling. And the author think that hanging from fishhooks might 'make him happy'.
I'll bet neither she nor her ex went to Sunday School very often.
If they would have, they'd both know that drunk, tattooed and hanging from fishhooks is no way to go through life.
But then this is the NYT.
The whole thing could be fiction.
Underline “drink-slinger.” Basically she was a goth waitress eight years ago and she’s now a bartender with deep, intellectual artistic pretensions. We all have known people like that.
Unfortunately, ten years on she will be the same thing, only with crow’s feet and an apartment full of cats.
I have to think that they believe themselves to be normal. All their friends feel this way, live this way.
If they knew themselves to be freaks, wouldn't they be hiding this in shame?
Went to Sunday School? She doesn’t even know God exists. She has never called His name. It’s a shame she was not taught by her parents. She is probably a third or forth generation agnostic.
This has already happened to the whiners of the Boomer Generation.
I think her parents may have tried, but failed, to emphasize how important religion can be. This is her way of being a rebel. Unfortunately, the one thing she craves--a sense of purpose in life--is missing because she doesn't know that a much greater power exists, but only after accepting in God's plan.
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