Tag Archives: personal narratives

Miss Behavior

In a psychology class I took when I was 20, back when I was smack dab in the middle of a severe depressive funk, we had to come up with an activity that “defies social norms.” We had to go out and do this unusual activity in public (or around family and friends) to gauge reactions to our anti-social behavior.

Because my very existence defies social norms, you’d think that this would be an easy activity for me.

It wasn’t. I was feeling down and dull, so I decided to do something simple: I stared at people, to see if or when they noticed.

At 29, I feel more creative. I wish I’d done something silly, like wearing all my clothes inside out.

I’m not talking about a Superman situation, I should say. I’m keeping Victoria’s secret. But flipping my jeans over and wearing them with the lining-side on the outside? I could do that. No branding, just … just lining.

I’m a consumer, but I don’t let it consume me.

The Perks of Waiting It Out

Every time I’ve waited before buying something — apparel, in particular — things have turned around for the better.

When I was 15 or 16, the kids at my school shopped at Old Navy, Aeropostale, American Eagle, and all the other stores at the mall. Charlotte Russe. Gap. Other stores that have since closed.

The Walmart clearance section and the clearance bins at these stores — that was a precursor to fast fashion. We would buy all sorts of clearance clothes that we didn’t need. Shirts that we didn’t wear outside of the house. Shirts that said Baby Girl Surf League.

Or Big Dawg Lil Pup Pound Town Party. Which would probably go over well in certain circles, now that I think about it. I need the guy who messed with the Sara Lee social media accounts to get on this. I have a new idea for your next basement rave, honey.

It was hard not to be at the forefront of whatever trends were going on — but now, in my late twenties, I’m glad that I haven’t bought tons and tons of clothes that I never wear. I find myself being disappointed by (and sometimes disgusted by) overconsumption and waste in the fashion industry.

Any time I’ve thought about ordering something online — fast fashion, specifically — I remind myself that, five years from now, I’m going to remember two words: Abercrombie and Fitch.

I shudder to think of all of the polos lining landfills. Some of them, I’m sure, still have the collars popped.

Critical Thinking

I posted a TikTok earlier today that was just, like, a wee little joke. It was a lighthearted joke — and not a hurtful comment or a slam.

If I had said something prejudiced or hateful, I would’ve deserved some pushback. But I know I didn’t say anything sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, ageist, or violent. I wasn’t making a personal attack, or being vicious about someone’s bad outfit, or even taking a cowardly approach to bullying by saying, “Post this on IG Reels if you’re brave.”

I didn’t do anything vile or cruel. I didn’t. But after posting this video, I received a bunch of … I don’t know how to describe these comments. Other than — and I really don’t want to go there, but I’m going to go there — a bunch of young people complaining about what I’d posted.

So what was my big mistake? I made fun of an influencer.

I understand that going after influencers might seem can be misogynistic — depending on the type of criticism you’re levying. If I’d made a comment about her body, her face/beauty, her personality, her voice, her aesthetic, or even her choice of clothing, then I understand that people take umbrage with that sort of non-constructive “criticism.”

I also think it’s crucial to note that those types of cruel comments are often directed at young influencers and BIPOC influencers. (The influencer I referenced in my video is, for the record, a white woman in her late twenties or early thirties.)

But a woman making a crack at a specific video posted by another woman is not misogynistic. It’s just … it’s just clowning on a corny post. She put it out there for a global audience and she left it up, presumably to drive up engagement.

People rushed to her defense in my comments, and because I was afraid they would snitch-tag her, I shut the whole conversation down. I made my post private, which I would say is a cowardly thing — but I don’t care.

I took the video down because of the deluge of complaints in the comments. After I thought about it some more, I realized that the influencer was complaining in her video, and I made a video about her complaint, and then my comments were full of complaints. It was all too complain-y/Karen-y for me.

In 2024, I reserve the right to protect myself from bland commentary.

That’s the difference in the influencer and myself. I put it out there — and I took it down. Maybe that makes me a coward. Maybe that makes her braver than me. Oh, well. Good for her!

I almost replied to one of the teens in my comments section — I was a teen once, and I know what it’s like to make your voice heard. I know that — sometimes — it feels good for someone to validate your comment by sending a reply.

So I almost said, “I hear what people are saying. To keep it completely real, not all ‘news’ sites are truly in the news business. They’re just content aggregators trying to push content to get clicks. I get it.”

As soon as I typed that up, I felt like … damn. This is exactly what overexplaining is. As a teenager and early twenty-something, I often overexplained concepts and theories to my parents, my grandmother, and my best friend. I cringe at all the times I lectured my best friend, and I hope she forgives me for acting like a ninth-grade history teacher when we already had a ninth-grade history teacher.

We had the same ninth-grade history teacher, now that I think about it. And he was a much, much better lecturer than I could ever be.

I cringe at all the preaching I did to my best friends. And my family! Wow! They sure put up with a lot of overexplaining about politics and things they already knew about! I should’ve overexplained things like WiFi routers and PDF rotation. That would’ve been more helpful.

Not to be the old woman who shakes her fist at the clouds — especially because I’m just a young woman shaking her fist at the clouds — but it always makes me laugh when a nineteen-year-old who just took a JMC 101 course tries to explain to me “how the media is exploitative.”

I always want to respond with something like this:

“Hell yeah, girl. Do you know why the media is exploitative? Lemme guess. Your mass comm professors have talked to you about why stories sell, and which stories will sell, and all of the business behind the business. I understand that, too, because I was exactly where you were, ten years ago. But let me tell you a little secret. Every industry is exploitative — to one degree or another.”

Here, I’d have to take a pause and collect myself. I’m not done. This is a speech.

“I’m not done, girl. This is a speech. You teach the 101 class; I teach the graduate seminar. And I appreciate the fact that you are trying to teach me something — but I live that experience every day. And so do you. And I’m glad you’re more and more aware that the world is exploitative. So now, on social media, you should realize that everything here is exploitative, too. I was trying to exploit your (underdeveloped?) sense of humor to get a laugh — but I exploited your sense of incredulity and you gave me a lecture instead. Ah, well. Let’s keep it moving. I’m giving a lecture down the hall in thirty minutes. Drop in if you finish your lecture early. Toodles, babes!”

I’d be exhausted after all of that. So I didn’t post any lectures of my own. I just bailed.

2024 is the year of picking your battles — and I’m not battling nineteen-year-old media theory students.

I would rather encourage them than to argue with them. And even though they can teach an old dog new tricks — which is a good thing! — I want them to understand that the old dogs already know the old tricks.

Woof, woof!

Natural Disasters

In this part of the country, we’re no strangers to big storms. We’ve survived thunderstorms, wildfires, and tornados.

I personally also survived doing tornado drills in too-tight low-rise jeans. I had to cover my backside with both hands, just to make sure I didn’t give away too many of my secrets. None of which were endorsed by Ms. Victoria.

Anyway, we live right alongside an earthquake zone. The last time we had a big earthquake, we were given — by the miracles of plate tectonics — an inland sea, otherwise known as a sag pond.

Next time, I hope we get a geyser. I want to have a mini-Yellowstone. Not like the TV show — more like the national park.

I’d prefer a geyser to a volcano. I don’t think I’m ready to try to handle any kind of lava, besides a chocolate lava cake.

My Cousin Died — And It Warped My Mind

I had planned on writing a much, much longer essay on how I became a germaphobe — something I struggled with at the beginning of the 2010s, managed to overcome by 2017 or so, and then struggled with again after March of 2020. (For obvious reasons.)

But this has been a tough thing to write about — and I really wanted to explore my germaphobic tendencies on a deeper level. I may get around to that, eventually. For the time being, here are some early notes I made on how I was personally/directly affected by the pandemic.

The mental strain was enormous, to the point that it spilled over into physical pain. I could feel the tension in my body, the ache of anxiety. And the tingling tension wasn’t the only physical manifestation of my stress. For about six months, I had a wound on my hand that wouldn’t quite heal.

My cousin’s death — during the height of the pandemic — rattled me. I was shocked, I was sad, I was pained.

Some would probably say that I should link that to the “excessive” hand washing we did back in the early part of 2020, but — no. I’m glad I tried to stay hygienic. And the hand washing was only part of the process. I would cover the wound, I would change the bandages, but it never quite closed over. The wound itself would itch and itch and itch, and it seemed like it would never heal. It was a visible manifestation of the way grief lingers.

Eventually, the wound began healing. It took months, though — and even now, I can look down at my hand and my memory can retrace the borders of the pain.

Back in the fall of 2020, as the pandemic was about to enter its first big wave, my older cousin — my mom’s cousin — contracted COVID. Within a few weeks, as she thought she was recovering, she had a stroke. She went to the hospital, and then to a nursing home. From there, she came back home — but this was only because she was placed in at-home hospice care. A few days afterward, she passed away.

Several things can be true at once. She was a bit older – but she wasn’t ancient, and she was still very active. She was disabled, true, but this was because of a recent car accident. A car accident that someone else caused, I should say, lest she be accused of being “old and senile.” Old people and senile people deserve respect and protection, of course — but my cousin was not doddery. She wasn’t the type to hurt herself or anyone else. She was agile and active and alert.

She could still walk just about anywhere — and she did. She went places. She was active — and not just in an I-like-to-go-out-and-sit-in-a-corner-of-my-garden way. That’s something that I do — and I’m not quite 30.

For her, activity meant being active. Moving. Being out and about with people. Going to a major social gathering, with hundreds or even thousands of people. That’s likely how she became sick in the first place.

But because she had a stroke, and then never recovered from that, it did something to me. It snapped some synapses or something.

I became afraid of ending up in her situation, fighting off a deadly disease, fighting for my (boring, but precious) life.

And I still think about her. I think about her all the time. Whenever anyone mentions the pandemic in the past-tense, as if they’re glad that it’s all behind us now, I think about how it causes lasting trauma in my own family.

I am sorry that my family is traumatized. Not because it inconveniences or annoys those who want to minimize the impact of the pandemic — but because I’m sorry that such large-scale trauma happened in the first place.

It’s something that lingers. Just like the happier memories, grief and trauma have a way of holding on, of not letting go. Of making an invisible wound — or a spot that closes over, but leaves an unfading scar.

CBO (Chief Blogging Officer)

I was a teenager in the days before Vine — right before Vine, I should say. Vine was a big thing when I was a young college student. (I remember trying to film Vines at Bonnaroo, which was another experience that defined that stage in my life. Both of those things shaped the bulk of my personality back in 2013.)

We had Vine, sure, but we didn’t have lots of ways to watch what other people were up to. We could read blogs or Facebook posts, but the world of vlogging? That was definitely more of a niche thing. I’m sure there were vloggers, but the world hadn’t yet pivoted-to-video. At that point, we couldn’t even post videos on Instagram.

We watched MTV, if we wanted to see real-life eccentricity. (“Eccentricity” covers a lot of territory: the delightfully-eccentric good, the cringeworthy bad, and the maddeningly wild.)

MTV even came to my super-country high school to audition someone for True Life or Made, or one of those reality shows. They decided not to film at our school. I don’t know if they couldn’t find anything worth filming, or if something else happened. But we didn’t miss our turn in the spotlight. A couple years later, a television crew from another country came to our school to film a specific club, because said club won a national championship. That was a cool experience.)

There were other shows that appealed to our desire to watch people do bizarre things. We didn’t have ice cream so good, but we had trashy television. We watched things like To Catch A Predator and Jerry Springer. Two of my high school classmates even acted on appeared on an episode of Jerry.

I didn’t go with them, so I never got my beads.

We also watched a lot of YouTube skits. In the era before people filmed their beauty hauls, their skincare routines, and their video game play-throughs, people filmed annoying skits and posted them online. Two of my friends and I even got together to plan a bunch of silly YouTube skits, which we wrote scripts for, but never filmed or posted. And that’s a shame, because both of these friends are artists. One of them is a professional photographer, so the videos would’ve been high-quality. But I know I’m not a natural-born performer, so … I’m glad there isn’t video evidence of my bad acting.

The kids who visited Jerry? They were stars! They got beads!

This was back around 2010, 2011, 2012. We didn’t have Vine. We didn’t have TikTok. We didn’t have Twitch.

All of that stuff is new. And I see this evolution as a good thing, because … I’ve decided I’m going to try get ahead of the curve. I’m going to turn my focus to the Generation Alpha and Generation Beta demographics. But first, I need to convince them that ✨blogging✨ is cool. Blogging is it, baby!

When we bring back the pre-Ice Road Truckers Weather Channel, just to have something vaporwave-y vintage to vibe to, we also need to bring back Blogspot-style blogging. The general vibe of that era, from 1999 to 2009, was fascinating. Those were the original years of realizing things. And I want to revisit that era. I want to convince everyone that blogging is the next big sphere of influenceability.

I want to stumble upon a Bulgarian math teacher’s music blog. I want to scroll through an uptight Mormon woman’s recipes. And I want to read about what’s happening to a random design student in Toronto, or Berlin, or Lagos.

I don’t want memes or filters or trends. I want to read confessionals, I want to read workplace/classroom gossip, and I want to read poorly-written poetry. I just … I just want to read someone’s diary.

I want to stare into your blog, baby. Is that too much to ask?!

“Jamais Mayville”: Explaining The Name

Have you ever heard of Peter Mayle? He wrote a bunch of books about living in Provence, which is a beautiful place that smells of lavender and sunshine and dreams.

Have you ever heard of Sally? She writes a blog about living in a Kentucky town that’s been anonymized with a fake name — a town called Mayville, which is a comme ci, comme ça place that doesn’t smell like lavender. It smells like vape clouds.

One of the wonderful Peter Mayle books is called Toujours Provence. For this blog, Sally turned that on its head and Googled toujours antonyme, to double-check her high school French. She decided that Jamais Mayville would be an appropriate name to convey … whatever it is that she wanted to convey.

And that’s how this blog was born.

Peach-Tree Switches

There ought to be a Rice Purity Score for the oddly-specific methods of abuse — physical and mental and emotional — some Southern and/or rural folks have inflicted on their children.

#64: Have you ever been beaten with a switch from a peach tree?

#65: Have you ever had a whoopin’ or a ***-kickin’ from an old man wearing Ostrich boots?

I don’t endorse corporal punishment — and this is because I’ve been on the receiving end of it. I’ve been belted and switched, and I didn’t deserve it. No child deserves any of that.

I’m aware of how wildly awful that stuff is — and I would never dream of giving a child a switch from a peach tree when I could offer them fruit instead.

Authenticity

I’m making a list — and I’ve already checked it twice. Earlier this month, I mentioned that there are some people obsessed with proving that they’re “authentically country” or “authentically Appalachian” or “authentically Southern.”

If you’re authentically doing your thing, then you probably don’t need to take great pains prove yourself. I don’t feel like I have to flash my credentials, but if you’d like to see them:

  1. My mom’s mom’s mom’s family — the folks on my maternal side — were sharecroppers. They picked tobacco and corn under the blanket of humidity that smothers western Kentucky every spring and every summer.
  2. My mom’s dad was a cattle farmer. He wasn’t a rancher — he was a farmer, with a small-ish farm and a wood lot and a pond for the cows and the snakes.
  3. My mom’s dad’s dad and his family were sorghum farmers.
  4. My dad’s mom’s brother and his family were cattle dairy farmers. They had cattle, but they mostly did dairy operations. They milked cows all the time and all of that. My dad would go over to the farm and bale hay. My dad’s cousin — one of his favorite cousins, a man whom we all remember fondly — would muck the stalls and sing “It’s Such A Pretty World Today” while he was … tidying up.
  5. My dad’s dad had a tobacco patch, but he never planted again after coming up a nickel short on his crop. (He didn’t make a profit. He lost money on that enterprise, is what I’m trying to say — and he never planted another tobacco patch.)
  6. My dad’s dad was a miner. He ran a dragline and did above-ground strip mining in the Western Coal Fields.
  7. My dad’s dad’s dad could sharpen an ax finer than anyone else in the county. (I’d noticed that this was the kind of job you could do while sitting down, which suited him. He was a pretty … casual man. He would always weigh down his bushels of turnips with rocks before going to the market. That’s just … that’s just how he was.)
  8. My dad’s dad mended and tarred his own fishing nets. He loved to go fishing out on the Tennessee River.
  9. My dad’s dad’s dad was a bona fide alcoholic. He would get … a little bit happy and float down the river — mostly for fun, but also because he didn’t have a license or a vehicle.
  10. My dad’s dad was good friends with the local bootlegger.
  11. My dad’s dad’s dad’s uncle was the oldest living Union Army veteran in Kentucky.
  12. My dad’s mom’s brothers played the violin and the mandolin. The mandolin-player put out an album when he moved down to Arkansas. (He was also a long-haul truck driver. He was a cool guy.)
  13. My mom’s dad’s mom played the guitar. She was a tiny little woman — unlike me, a big-built gal — but she was apparently quite the entertainer.
  14. My mom’s mom — my beloved grandmother — was a hairdresser and a laundress and a housecleaner.
  15. My mom’s mom’s mom ran a hamburger stand and worked in a munitions factory and a clothing factory. She was the real deal. She was hard-working and objectively beautiful. I only inherited the first part, but … I’m glad to be like her, in some small way.
  16. My dad’s mom’s brother was a long-distance trucker. I only found this out years and years after he’d retired. (I guess I mentioned this earlier — but it deserves a separate mention!)
  17. My dad used to drive a dump truck, while we’re talking about big trucks.
  18. My dad’s mom’s brother was blinded in a spar mining accident.
  19. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother’s wife was blinded when she got chemicals in her eyes while sharecropping.
  20. My mom’s mom’s mom’s brother was shot and killed on his own brother-in-law’s front porch.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy has nothing on me.