Ten Things I Learned at the Hallmark Re-Education Center
(AKA my parents’ house, where the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movie marathon provided ambience for our weekend) **Disclaimer follows playful rant**
1. Home is where the heart is. Home is never, ever a metropolitan area.
2. America faces a serious mental health crisis; cases of amnesia are on the rise.
3. Travel snafus are infinitely more effective than OKCupid or match.com.
4. Balsam Hill produces the only real Christmas trees; Charlie Brown’s was bullshit.
5. Omaha Steaks are aged at least 21 days, and everyone on my Christmas shopping list needs them.
6. If you have optimized your life for the possibility of real happiness, your collection of Christmas ornaments should be color-coordinated.
7. White people, white people, white people, white people – token! – white people white people… (so American society is like structurally racist duck duck goose, but charming)
8. Hallmark Corollary of the Friends Paradox: no matter what financial difficulties they discuss, other people can live in a Manhattan apartment or country home much nicer than you can afford.
9. Hardworking career women just haven’t learned the value of family yet.
10. “Maudlin” is both an aesthetic and an ethos.
**DISCLAIMER** My parents are actually lovely people; moreover, my values and theirs largely align, which is more than many of my elder-Millennial compatriots can say of their own Boomer parents. If you, like my parents, happen to like Hallmark Christmas movies, it is likely that you, like them, are not actually responsible for social, cultural, or moral decline, except insofar as you inflate the ratings of subpar television programming :)
Angry? Not I!
Angry that all that I ever loved is gone?
Not I!
Angry that my family whom I loved and gave my life and died for angry that they really don’t care about me anymore?
Not I!
Angry that I can’t be independent anymore?
Not I!
Angry that I have Epilepsy and severe depression and having to take handful of pills everyday just to live.
Not I!
Angry that the happiest times of my life have already come and gone and all I have to look forward to now is a rocking chair day in and day out?
Not I!
Angry that the only times I’m allowed to go anywhere is if I ask for permission as if I am a 10 year old child and not a 52 year old woman?
Not I!
Angry because I thought that this would be the best time of my life, I’d travel, I’d see grandchildren, I’d see the beach walk on the shore?
Not I!
Angry? Why should I be Angry. I don’t get to experience life as everyone else knows it to be
I just have to appreciate that I have a roof and a bed. The rest is just folly.
Angry? Not I!
Excuse me while I look out the window,
I’ll just sit here waiting to die.
Rage
I am angry. Most often it is about something inconsequential, but I do not know how to stop this incoherent rage welling up inside me, all the way from my head to the tips of my toes. No one tries to understand. They don't listen. They think I am mature enough to get over it on my own. But in that moment I am not enough. And I will not be enough until it passes.
They don’t know
Am I angry? Yes.
Anyone could tell you that
Very little is known about me
to people at my school.
But they could tell you one thing,
I was angry, I still am.
But they don’t know,
why.
No one asks,
they make up their own reasons.
They don’t know,
how much I distrust others.
They don’t know,
I love so much,
and rarely is it returned.
They don’t know
how I feel like everyone hates me.
They don’t know,
how alone I feel.
They don’t know,
the reasons why I’m angry.
All they know is that I am.