Confessions of an American Teenager

Drunk Driving

2010-05-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was involved in an accident with a drunk driver.

I had my final band concert last night. Afterwards, I went out for ice cream with a few friends. We hung out until a few minutes after midnight, and all took off in separate cars. I was driving down the road home. I passed through an intersection at a green light. The next thing I knew, I was pressed up against the window of my driver's side door, and my car was facing the wrong direction. In my post-crash haze, I tried to start my car. The key wouldn't even turn in the ignition. I then looked down to see something white spilled all over my black concert dress. At first, I thought something in my car had exploded on me. (Turns out it was an overturned milkshake from earlier that day). I then turned to open the door, but it was stuck. A witness ran up and pulled on the door, but he couldn't move it all. He then yelled to see if I could crawl to the other side. He ran over and helped me out on the passenger side, and sat me down on the curb. Another witness let me borrow his cell phone to call my dad. About a minute later, paramedics and police started to show up. I was strapped to stretcher and taken to the hospital.

After an X-Ray and two CAT scans, the doctors determined nothing was broken. I've been at home resting. I have extreme soreness in my neck or head, and the left side of my body has some bruising. I was incredibly lucky to be able to walk out of the hospital five hours after the accident. I had a phone call from the witness who pulled me out of my car about an hour ago, and he told me my car was airborne (he estimated five feet in the air) upon collision. He also said he assumed I was dead, or at least dangerously injured, when he saw the crash.

The thing that pisses me off is that this guy was driving away from a Jimmy Buffet concert. As I'm sure most people in the world know, Jimmy Buffett concerts are infamous for the drinking that goes on. My best friend was about a mile ahead of me driving home, and she didn't see a single cop. When my dad drove to meet up with me, he intentionally went 10 miles over trying to get cops at the scene. It's a good 10 minute drive from my house to that intersection, and he didn't encounter a single cop either.

Obviously the police knew stuff like that was going on that night. (The radiologist at the hospital said they have a hard time staffing Jimmy Buffett weekend, because the ER doctors know it'll be full all weekend). Yet there were no cops looking out for drunk drivers. There were no cops hanging out in the parking lot of the stadium trying to catch drunk drivers. There was no security, period. My accident could have been stopped, easily. But it wasn't. Something NEEDS to be done.

and now for a liberal interlude...

2010-05-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

I've always had fairly liberal views. Odd, seeing as much of my family is incredibly conservative. I probably seem like the epitome of liberalism to most people. I'm atheist, a vegetarian, support gay marriage, and I'm pro-choice. But I would really like to explain why.

Let's start with my vegetarianism. I'm not one of those "Blargh! Animal rights! Blargh! Fur coats are bad!" PETA types. Yes, I support animal rights. No, I won't be buying any fur coats anytime soon. However, I became a vegetarian at the age of seven. SEVEN. Obviously I didn't understand what animal rights entailed. I've simply never liked the taste of meat. Even as a baby, I refused to eat hot dogs, burgers, chicken...Over the years it evolved into something more concrete. I still don't like the taste (even the SMELL) of meat, but I also maintain my vegetarian lifestyle for health reasons. The way meat is manufactured nowadays disgusts me. It's not clean, it's not safe, and it's not animal-friendly. I prefer to eat organic food, and I don't go anywhere near fast-food joints. I'm not going to bash you over the head with vegetarian propaganda. I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU EAT. Really. Just don't force your carnivorous habits on me!

How about some gay-marriage time? I really don't see how anybody can be AGAINST it. So what if you're uncomfortable with homosexuality? It's not your life, it's someone else's. So what if your religion doesn't tolerate same-sex relationships? You can't enforce your religious beliefs on others. Seriously, if you disagree with same-sex marriage, don't marry someone of the same sex! It's really that simple.

I'm sure there's people out there who want to shoot me for openly stating that I'm pro-choice. But really, I don't feel the government has any power to dictate what a woman does with her body. I personally don't think I would ever get an abortion, but that doesn't give me the right to tell other people to follow my views. But there are some cases where I would whole-heartedly support a woman who chose to get an abortion. A rape victim, for instance. She had no choice in her pregnancy, and she may not be at a point in her life where she can carry a baby for nine months. My 5th grade teacher was a 4 foot 10 woman who weighed under 100 pounds. When she found out she was pregnant, her doctors told her that the delivery would endanger her life due to her size. She disappeared for a few months, and we heard through the grapevine that she had had an abortion. Many kids ranted about her "terrible sin", but I didn't have a problem with it. Why should she be forced to endanger her life for a child she wasn't ready to have? It just didn't make sense to me.

I was baptized as a Catholic. My entire family is strictly Catholic. My grandmother prays her rosary daily. I was five when I started questioning Catholicism. I went through the motions--I dutifully went to Sunday school, participated in Communion and Confirmation, and followed my parents to church every Sunday. But I just didn't understand why everyone believed in religion so strongly. The pieces didn't fit for me. I didn't see how people could believe in God over evolution. I didn't agree with most of the teaching in the Bible. If you've ever read it, you know that it condones rape, the oppression of females, and even mindless genocide. It's disturbing to read, and I can't see how anyone agrees with it. I can't even believe in a deity. It just doesn't make sense to me. It bothers me that religious people condemn their non-religious peers while preaching fairness and justness. That they feel they have the right to tell others their going to Hell for their beliefs (or, in my case, lack of beliefs). Perhaps the only religion I respect is Buddhism. I'd like to learn more about it, if anyone cares to educate me.

Failure.

2010-04-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

In the past month, I have received rejection letters from three colleges (I only applied to five). I've also been rejected from three different scholarship committees. Lately I feel like I just can't do anything right.

I feel like a failure.

I see all my friends getting ready to go to Brown or MIT, and can't help but wonder why *I* can't be like them. I'm not dumb, I know that. But I obviously lack something that they have. And I can't figure out what.

Am I unmotivated? Do I lack charisma? Or I am just utterly talentless in every way. There's nothing I'm great at. Sure, I'm decent at music, but I'm definitely not the best oboe player in the world (I'm not even the best in my REGION). I'm smart, but a lot of my friends are smarter. I'm not that attractive, I'm not that funny, and I'm so unathletic it's sad. I've never had a boyfriend, and I didn't even get asked to my senior prom. (It's tomorrow...I won't be attending.) I often wonder if I'll ever find anything I shine at, or if I'm doomed to a life of mediocrity.

I've always longed to be great at something. For people to see me and go, "She's really going places!" But it won't happen, because I'm just average. I mix up my words when I talk, I trip when I walk, and I can't carry on an interesting conversation for more than a minute or two.

I just feel like there is something more to me, something I have yet to discover. I hope so, because if this is all my life is, I'll just be another meaningless human, soon to be forgotten.

Mother Dearest

2010-03-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

The first time I thought of my mother as a bitch, I was seven years old. I asked her if she would take me to the neighborhood pool after I finished my homework. She told me she would. I hurriedly finished my math worksheet and got changed into my bathing suit. When I came downstairs, she barely glanced at me before she started yelling. She told me I never listened, that I didn't deserve to go swimming with the other kids, and that I didn't love her. As I ran back up to my room, I thought, "bitch".

Of course, I was seven at the time. I only knew "bitch" was a word my dad used when he was angry with my mother. I didn't know exactly what the word meant, or what, exactly, made my mother a bitch. It wasn't until my early teens that I began to truly hate my mother.

I suspect now that she has undiagnosed bipolar disorder. If not, she certainly has anger management problems. If anything went wrong at work, my mother would come home in a fit of rage, yelling at everyone and throwing things. Once, she tore through my closet searching for a bedsheet. After ripping all of my carefully-stored possessions from the shelves, she stalked out, ordering me to clean up my "mess of a bedroom". There were several instances like this: I would witness her make a mess of our house, then yell at my sisters and I to clean it up. Mostly, though, she blamed my dad. If something in our house broke, it was my fathers' fault. When my mother was attempting to take out a too-full trash bag, it was my fathers' fault that she couldn't lift it. When she had a hard day at work, it was my fathers' fault for not making enough money to support her. She whined about having to work, claiming her life dream was to be a full-time mom. (Which I found ironic. For someone who wanted nothing more than to be a mother, she sure did an awful job at it). When we moved from California to Texas, she demanded a house that was way out of her price range-and continues to scream at my dad about not being able to make payments on time.

Not every day was bad, though. Every once in a while, my mother would seem to be the happiest person on earth. She would give us presents for minor holidays-St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Fourth of July-and dance around the house in a fit of laughter and smiles. Every time I witnessed one of these days, I hoped it would last. Each time, I thought maybe, just maybe, she'll stay like this. But each time, I was wrong. Her happy days didn't last long. The next day she would wake up in a bad mood, as if she rolled out of bed hating the world. Nothing we did was right. When we fought back, she screamed that we didn't love or appreciate her. She would tell us she did everything she could, that my father was worthless and she was depressed, or that she had high stress levels and couldn't deal with her kids judging her. If we sat back and waited for her to finish yelling, she would claim that we never listened, that we were just as worthless as dad, or that we didn't care about anyone but ourselves.

On one particularly bad day just a few months ago, she came after me, screaming that I was worthless and would fail at everything I tried. This came shortly after a rejection letter from a college I desperately wanted to attend, so naturally I felt even worse about myself. She screamed at me that I would never learn to be independent, that I could never survive living in the "real world", and that I would never amount to anything. This was when I realized I had grown to hate my mother. I could no longer love a person who tore me down like that. I closed myself off from her completely.

Now, I'm getting ready to go to college. I leave in only four and a half months. The past 17 years of living with my mother have been hell. I feel absolutely nothing for her other than contempt. I watch my friends joke with their mothers, and wish I could have had that kind of relationship. I don't know how to explain to my friends that they can't come over, because my mother might have had a bad day. Last week, a friend of mine that's interested in photography took nearly a hundred beautiful shots of me. She put them online and sent me the link, instructed me to pass it along to my mom. Apparently, she ran into my mother a few days later, and confronted me about why I never passed the pictures along to her. I didn't know how to explain-how do you tell someone who is best friends with their own mother that you do everything in your power to avoid your own? That you fear coming home from school because your mother may scream at you about accidentally leaving a glass on the counter? That you lock yourself in your room as much as possible in an attempt to drown out the cursing from downstairs?

My relationship with my mother cannot be saved. I don't believe I'll ever be able to care for her again. She's ruined any respect I ever had for her. I can only hope that any mother out there reading this will learn from my mother's mistakes. Don't ruin your children's lives. They love you, and you only have a limited amount of time of unconditional love.