Junior High School Is Burning

I teach junior high school. It's everyone's worst age to be and to be around.

I thought I'd learned everything I needed to know about that age when I was in 8th grade and decided to cut my extremely curly red hair into the shape of a globe, but it can always get worse. I know that now.

However, this post isn't an expose on the current state of affairs in American middle schools because despite what I say on the daily, I DO NOT want to get fired.

This is about fashion, and I am here to tell you that if you're not dressing like a 14 year-old, you're cancelled.

At my school, even teachers wear uniforms. The communist in me says, "YAS." But the 14 year-old in me says, "Fuck you." I take strong offense at making girls in their peak Mesopotamian child bearing years wear khaki pants, but all I can do is stock up on the world's thickest maxi pads because they will lose their goddamn minds if you hand them a tampon.

Anyway, so when we have a dress down day, WE WERK.

I don't know if you know what a VSCO girl is, but I don't either. What I do know is that to be a VSCO girl, it's required you have crushed velvet scrunchies in every color (preferably pastels) on your wrists, backpack and even in your hair.

Mine is bottle green, and it is very important for me to wear it on dress down day because I once told a student to put her scrunchie up because it was a distraction, and I kid you not, at least six girls whipped around and screamed, "You know what a scrunchie is!?"

Never in my life have I been so offended.

I get a lot of compliments on dress down day because I am very cool, but if they could see what I wore when I was their age, they'd never look me in the eye again.

Your jeans could not possibly be low enough when I was in middle school. Turns out, denim cutting just below your uterus and just above your butt crack looks good only on a very small number of people who don't exist.

When you bent over, of course, your butt crack fully revealed itself culminating with burst of highly flammable thong fabric. Our Hollister shirts were also very tight cutting off at the thickest parts of our arms and stomachs. Good thing our shoes were oversize to balance out the proportions.

In a radical move that makes me believe that they might actually be capable of reversing the effects of global warming, Gen Z is shunning our moronic, bullshit clothes and embracing the loose, high-waisted jeans, baggy tops and thick panty lines of the early 90s.

Important note: if any of these aren't purchased second hand, you must lie and say they are.

I am so proud of them and fully embrace this gift they've given us.

Last dress down day, I wore some very broken in denim and a flannel button down in a men's large. I thought I looked amazing until Luis said, "Ms. Green, you look like you came straight from a farm."

I started to explain that I actually had been raised in a rural community in Northwest Missouri but realized it wasn't worth it and turned my head, so he could see my scrunchie.

I think he was impressed, but I have no idea what boys wear.

Snapchat me if you want to borrow it.

Covidpendency

"Stop doing that face. It bothers me."

Apparently, the face I make when eating a bad orange has bothered Jaime since the dawn of time, but he's just now getting around to telling me.

Other than that, we're handing social distancing pretty well.

I've never met anyone as suited to working from home as Jaime. He can stay in bed for hours focused on the task at hand while declaring every 90 minutes or so that he probably gets more done naked at home than clothed in the office.

If I had a snow day, and Jaime arrived home to see me smeared with chocolate and peanut butter watching Schitt's Creek for the 9th time in a fart cloud, he would have the exact same reaction as if I'd cleaned the house top to bottom, meal planned for two weeks and completely fixed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

"Fuck it. It's your time. Do what you want with it."

I really appreciate this about him, so I try not to micromanage his time either, but the pressure of the virus got to me while stuck late at parent-teacher conferences, and even we had to make sacrifices.

After I ended the call asking Jaime to go to the grocery store, the science teacher assured me that he could do this.

He couldn't, but that's none of science nerd's business, so instead I answered the question he'd asked me before: What would you use if we ran out of toilet paper?

At first I said Jaime's old underwear, but then I changed it to bidet. I'm pricing bidets now.

The groceries were on the table when I got home. I explained it's customary to put sundries away after purchase, but he assured me he'd refrigerated all the perishables. I went to bed so freaking excited to put them away in the morning.

Jaime was still sleeping, so I had to laugh-cry silently while unpacking from what appeared to be his maiden journey to any grocery store anywhere.

He bought two jars of rhubarb jam but no bread, two boxes of cereal but no milk, oats that we already have and don't eat and the most gigantic can of baked beans made with bacon. We're vegetarians.

He explained that bread, oat milk and fresh vegetables are all perishable, so he didn't buy them. I asked him if the 23 bananas (actual number) he bought were perishable, but he just shrugged.

So now, we're just chilling at home for the unforeseeable future, snacking on some banana bread with jam reminding each other why we promised to hang out in sickness and in health until one of us dies.

Does anyone want these? Pinto beans not included. 

Mutter Christmas, Emma Green

I thanked Jaime's mom for coming with us to the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities. Everyone else in the house had said, "No."

She guessed that since she'd been to every other museum in Philadelphia and likes to walk for at least an hour each day, it wouldn't kill her. However, she did, for the first time since I met her, agree to let us pay for her ticket.

Three adult admissions cost us $60. I would have paid $600, but still I stared at my mother-in-law willing her to lie about her age by just one year, so we could get the senior discount. She pretended to not see me.

The Soap Lady was just inside the first gallery. Postmortem bacteria had turned the fatty tissues of her body into a wax like substance that covered and preserved her corpse. I wondered if it bothered her that she was on display for something she did not choose or probably even understand, but then I remembered that there is no consciousness after death, and that must be very comforting to the person who locks up at night.

Next was a floor to ceiling display of skulls with tags that said things like:
"Woman. 18 years old. Executed for murdering her child."
"Male child. 12 years old. Tuberculosis. Gypsy."
"Soldier. 23 years old. Killed in fight at brothel. Catholic."
"Man. 44 years old. Idiot."

It was really something.

Downstairs, we saw part of a colon that has expanded to the size of a car tire. The poor man in the photo looked miserable, but the placard told us he wasn't constipated.

The American Giant's skeleton towered over Jaime, so for a quick second, I was attracted to it. Beside him, Mary Ashberry, a dwarf, stood with the crushed skull of her infant at her feet. Doctors had tried to save them by removing the baby with forceps but both died from the traumatic birth.

There was also an average-sized skeleton in the case that no one cared about.

Jars upon jars of diseased parts and deformed fetuses lined the walls interrupted every so often by wax representations of boils, tumors and rashes.

It was all incredible, but for me, the holiest of grails was the cast made of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined twins from Siam. Their liver and band of tissue that connected them at their sternums was preserved in formaldehyde underneath.

I was admiring these childhood idols of mine next to a kid and his mother.

She looked over at him and said, "This is what will happen to you if you smoke," then she made direct eye contact with me daring me to contradict her.

I thought, "You could have said that about LiTerAlLy anything else in this entire museum, and it would have been more believable."

But the kid just said, "Another person will get stuck to me? Cool." Kid's already acquainted with the ganja.

Having fully maintained our appetites somehow, we left to pick up lunch for the family.

When we got home, my sister-in-law asked me how it was. I told her it was life-affirming, but probably not everyone would agree. She still thought she should go sometime, but I told her to for sure wait until they're done having children...


...because I want to take them there.

She'll thank me later.

Jaimesport

When family and friends come to visit, Jaime's top priority is to take them to Jamesport, an Amish town, located about 20 minutes north of where I was raised but also to definitely not stop where I was raised.

I'm not sure if it's because he knows there will be puppies for sale or because he likes their hats (hats for humans [tragically not for puppies]).

Both are straight up legit reasons, but I'm over it and assume our guests aren't interested.

I'm wrong, though.

We finally took Jaime's parents there last week, and they fucking loved it.

But I'd learned on a previous trip that despite getting a kick out of it, Spaniards and Jamesport are a queer mix. A stranger made the mistake of asking Jaime where he was from, and I've never seen him square up so fast. He thought better of it, though, and instead tersely reminded the man that HE TOO HAD AN ACCENT BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS AN ACCENT then he bought two homemade jams (rhubarb and peach-honey).

He only ever gets that nasty when he's making paella, and I'm the only victim of that hate crime.

This time, it was my father-in-law,  Alfredo, trying to order a beer at a Mennonite restaurant that set the awkward tone for the trip. I thought our poor 13 year-old server was going to shit her frock. We got him a root beer instead. He liked it.

I'd also told Alfredo not to take pictures of the locals because they do not like it, and one time they flipped off my Uncle Louie for doing it. He responded by holding the phone up to the window to record as we passed a horse and buggie driven by a mother with her three nesting doll boys.

I glanced over at their tiny faces under those sweet ass hats and felt a pang of regret that they would never even get the chance to binge drink and expose their penises to their Yale classmates before becoming Supreme Court Justices.

It just seems so unfair.

After asking where a public restroom was and receiving the answer that the climate crisis isn't real and god said the Muslims would always be fighting, we were entertained by a yodeler who was a horse wrangler for a Spanish matador who was best friends with Ernest Hemingway, but if liars can yodel like that, I don't want to know the truth. 

Our last stop was to visit the puppies at a general store with gas lighting. We bought a bag of about 20 dozen potatoes and the craziest shit we could find including the bacon bits that Jaime nearly choked to death on before discovering they were imitation. 

"What are these yummy red, crunchy things on my salad?" 

Again, bless that poor server girl. I hope she's recovered from the mess of waiting on a table of alcoholic vegetarians. 

Special Fucking People- Prince Randian

If I had access to a time machine, I would first go back to the year 1993 and convince Quentin Tarantino to recast Prince Randian as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction with all due respect to Scientology's John Travolta.

We would then go further back to 1920, collect Prince Randian, fit him for a decent black suit and introduce him to his new best friend, Samuel L. Jackson.

That's all I would change about history. Everything else seems fine.

Jackson would carry Randian around set like a clutch until it was time to pop some caps in some motherfuckers' asses.

They would be best friends, and the only reason I know this is that I've seen Prince Randian (The Caterpillar Man, The Living Torso, The Snake Man) roll and light a cigarette with only his lips. It was truly inspiring, and the only other person who could probably do it is Mr. S. L. Jackson.

Randian was maybe brought to the U.S. from Guyana by P.T. Barnum in 1889. I don't know why he was there because he was purportedly an Indian man who spoke Hindi, French, English and German fluently like the royale with cheese he was (he was absolutely for real not a prince).

I have ten working fingers, not to mention hands and arms, and I become absolutely outraged when Duolingo reminds me to use the free app to practice a language I want to learn more than anything else in the world.

He was married to a woman BEFORE he was a famous performer, and they had five children. I don't know much about Princess Sarah, but to hitch your wagon to a horse without legs, especially at that time, seems like a very short trip.

My boyfriend in high school cut the tip of his pinky finger off, and I was like, "EW."

But by all of the one account I read, she genuinely loved him, and they had a happy marriage.

He supported his large family by slinking around stage in a tube sock, writing letters, smoking and shaving. They only thing I've done on that list all summer is wear a single sock.

He, like many of his special contemporaries, acted in the greatest film of all time 💯Freaks💯, and he was amazing.

A showman to the end, Prince Randian, by then a grandfather, died of a heart attack at home just a few hours after a performance.

       Prince Randian (real name unknown) was born without limbs due to tetra-amelia syndrome, 

but that didn't stop him from being a badass motherfucker. 

See him roll a cigarette here...

Sources:
Drimmler, Frederick. Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. New York: Amjon Publishers, Inc., 1973, print.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/prince-randian

Special Fucking People- Julia Pastrana

Jaime and I met because we'd tricked each other into thinking we were hot.

Before I knew him, I knew his Facebook profile, and damn, was it a playground. Most photos focused on his ripped bod doing something dangerous without a helmet or duck-facing in front of an ancient ruin. The others were of bright, chipped murals on the backstreets of small Asian countries or fruit.

I did not know that he was also stalking my equally curated page because he'd been obsessed with redheads ever since his parents sent him to Ireland at the peak of puberty to maintain his English.

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times...thank you-thank you-thank you, Alfredo and Carmen.

But this story isn't about how desperate we are to appear attractive to the world. It's about how Julia Pastrana traveled the world only because she wasn't. What would she have given to look like one of the photos I untagged or deleted because I thought I looked like an inbred pharaoh?

Maybe nothing?

She was photographed in professional studios appearing in newspapers and playbills at a time when most people lived and died without any photographic evidence they ever existed. She traveled to other continents wearing silk shoes and organ-asphyxiating-but-worth-it corsets. She spoke at least three languages fluently and was a talented singer and dancer. She was friends with a countess and married to a man who said he loved her.

The only countess I've ever met named herself that and has a penis (she did tell me she loved me, but I think she tells everyone that).

But, and I suspect this was more likely, maybe she would have given up all of this to have not been so special?

Julia was born in Sinaloa, Mexico in 1832 or 1834. Her mother's death when she was still a child resulted in her being sold by one of her uncles (most likely the one who voted for Trump). In the 1850s, audiences didn't come to see her sing and dance. They came to see the thick hair that covered her face, chest, arms and legs. They came to see the deeply burrowed eyes she kept focused just above everyone's forehead, and they came to see her nose and lips: two features often cited as proof she wasn't fully human.

Her manager, a real twat named Theodore Lent, was also her captor, exploiter, rapist, embezzler and beloved husband. He'd married her to prevent other twats from stealing her away with ludicrous promises of being treated like a person.

Anyway, the twat's micro penis (I can only assume) was functional because she got pregnant.

At the advanced age of 26 or 28, Julia gave birth to her furry son. The infant died two days later. This is where the book loses me, though, because it said she died of a broken heart shortly after him.

It's more likely her death was the result of traumatic childbirth at a time when all your girlfriends chipped in for a casket at your baby shower.

And this was when the twat really began to shine.

Devastated not by the loss of his wife and child but by the loss of income, Lent had the two of them mummified, stuffed and sealed into glass display cases.

This is also my plan for when Jaime dies, but he will rest in peace under my bed.

Julia Pastrana continued her public career as a freak postmortem for another ONE HUNDRED years until her corpse was lost. The author of Very Special People ends her chapter with a plea for anyone who has knowledge of Pastrana and her son's whereabouts to contact him, so he can conclude her story.

But bitches had other plans because he died before solving the mystery.

Turns out the Norwegians had her (the baby had been eaten by gross mice after being vandalized by grosser teenagers). Fellow Mexican artist and admirer of Julia's, Laura Anderson Barbata, was as pissed as you are and led the decade long fight to bring Julia home to Sinaloa.

Finally stripped out of the silk and whale bones she'd worn since her death in 1860, Julia Pastrana was dressed in a traditional cotton huipil handmade for her and buried alone on February 12, 2013.

Julia Pastrana had hypertrichosis terminalis (excessive body hair), andgingival hyperplasia (enlarged gums and lips) and a dick of a husband. Only one of these things killed her. 

Sources:
Drimmler, Frederick. Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. New York: Amjon Publishers, Inc., 1973, print.
http://juliapastranaonline.com/
https://hyperallergic.com/421575/artist-repatriation-of-julia-pastrana/

Special Fucking People

I was on the phone with my cousin, who has had her incredibly unfair share of bad luck, talking about her latest bout with some undeserved bullshit.

Somehow always pragmatic, she implied that I could relate because bad things happen to everyone from time to time.

It was a great opportunity to lie, "MmmHmm. Yes, I understand."

But instead I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about. Bad things don't happen to me."

She did me a solid by laughing, but we both know it's true. I used to try to fabricate the struggle like Republicans do, but I've learned to embrace the rainbow filled bubble in which I float through life.

...Glenda the Good Witch style except without helping people.

It's why I gravitate towards salacious gossip, true crime podcasts and stories about freaks--a term I use with the utmost love and respect.

Many years ago, when I used to read, I found the first thing my father ever bought himself. I couldn't have known then as I opened the strange cover of Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities that I would go on to read it in its entirety at least a dozen times and reference it many more, but I did know I had found something magical.

I became so obsessed that my dad eventually just gave me the book, and it's one of the few that have survived every move.

It is because I can walk down nearly every street nearly anywhere and be ignored that I am sympathetically curious about people who cannot...even though they've never asked me to...even if I'm around that friend of Jaime's who told him, "Red heads aren't attractive because they don't look like fully formed humans." Fuck you, Louis.

In an effort to write more this summer instead of doing what I really want to do -*-unnecessary DIY projects that piss off Jaime and watch the Netflix-*- and to honor those who've given me hours of inspiration, I'm going to post an undetermined amount (possibly one) of small essays about people who are fucking special.

I'll start with Julia Pastrana.