Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 10, 2001
Latest Update: November 10, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

It all started ever so long ago. I guess I was making them crazy then, too. I had been hired to teach statistics and methodology. When I came here I had to have a job; and quickly. My best friend was marrying my husband, and I had to be mature about all this for the sake of her children.

Why do my best friends keep marrying my husbands? Well, now, that's not fair. Seven years earlier, what was her name, anyway? declined to marry Robert, no, that was Walter, wasn't it? On the grounds that she was my friend. So he married his secretary with three or was it four kids? having decided that they would together populate the world with small geniuses (because he had a genius IQ, as his mother kept assuring him), and that would be his great scientific contribution to the world.

You know, we took graduate math classes together at Tulane, so he should have known about regression towards the mean. That means that when the parent deviates from the mean by three standard deviations, even though heredity counts for something, over generations there is a tendency for the measure to move back towards the mean. That's one of the explanations given for why geniuses don't have little geniuses. I was virtuous. I didn't remind him of regression towards the mean. May he have little geniuses, although I seem to recall that they stopped having children when they got to five. So may he have two little geniuses.

I could have played the great tragic heroine then, for that first divorce. I really was devastated. No one in my family (me, mother, and daddy) ever got divorced, not even when they should have. We clung to each other faithfully through all our dysfunction. Now here I was getting "A DIVORCE," with my centuries of Irish Catholic heritage. Whatever would the Pope say? I don't guess Mother cared too much about the Pope. I don't ever remember her mentioning him. But she worried a great deal about what the "NEIGHBORS WOULD THINK." Now that's the stuff of not only personal tragedy, but also grand soap opera. Dominant discourse writ large.

The WEIRD Trio (Remember the WEIRD Trio? They're the culprits in this novel.) didn't know that I had all this experience with soap opera. Compared to Mother, they aren't even in the same league.

Whenever you've been hurt, it's a good idea to invent different characters for those who hurt you. That helps gain social distance. And in later years I learned that it's an important political gimmick. NEVER, NEVER mention your opponent's name. I take that to be a good rule of mental health also. If Mother's giving you a hard time, think of her as a crocodile. No, it helps, really.

But I digress. I was telling you how once upon a time, there was no WEIRD Trio, not even in my imaginary. Either way, I still had to get a job, and fast, then, too. Because Robert, I think it was this time, was marrying Connie, who was really my best friend, but who didn't extend friendship to not marrying my husband, like my other best friend, the one whose name I can't remember.

Now, I was seven or eight years older and more experienced in the ways of the world now. And while this scenario might make a wonderful plot for the tragic heroine whose husbands keep marrying her best friends, I cannot tell a lie. (Actually I don't know why I can't tell a lie, because this is fiction, but it's such a good line, I wanted to fit it in.)

Truth be told, it had become perfectly clear to me how much sympathy you get when your husband marries your best friend. Also it had become clear to me that you don't get a lot of sympathy for just walking off and leaving your husband because he's stuck in the social context and too depressed to climb out. MORAL: Don't leave your husband, nudge him into marrying someone else. Then you get the sympathy, and she gets the husband.

Now, I can already hear Wesley saying, "Oh, jeanne, that's cold!" No, it's not, Wesley. Remember by this time I had been through several Ph.D. programs because I was smart, but I was a WOMAN. There were no jobs, only husbands aplenty. (You know, like streetcars, every five minutes another one comes along. Now, that's cold, Wesley. But it's such a good line, I couldn't resist.) So, in order not to be colonized, and I never liked colonization, even though I didn't have a name for it then, it seemed perfectly logical that if your marriage wasn't working out, the best solution would be to marry your husband off to someone who wanted him.

And theoretically, that would have worked out best for all concerned. The trouble was that Robert and Connie and the children were supposed to be grateful for my kind and caring sacrifice. But it didn't quite work out in praxis like it did in theory. For some reason, I could never quite fathom, Robert and Connie didn't pick up their new social roles properly. Instead of treating the whole situation the way we would have during the days of flower children and open marriages, and instead of telling the children how happy we all were with this new arrangement, Robert and Connie were angry with me. They said it was all my fault. Now, Wesley, THAT'S COLD. Here I was working out a happy extended family for them, and they blamed me for breaking up our happy social context. Honestly, how irrational!

But I digress. That will be the theme of another November Novel. This one is about the WEIRD Trio and my adventures with them. If truth be told, and you know I'm really fond of telling the whole truth, the divorce freed me from the constraints imposed by the buraucracy of marriage. People aren't static in marriage. They grow and stretch and change. That means that sometimes, as they grow differently, the marriage just isn't going to work without constraining one or both of them hopelessly. Now I had figured all this out by my mid-thirties. After all, I had several post-graduate degrees, accumulated meticulously between jobs, oops, I meant husbands. (And no, Wesley, that's not cold; that's analytical and rational and engaging in discourse on important social issues. Hmmm. . . . I wonder why Wesley keeps popping up in here? Reckon I'd better figure that out before Michael comes back to join him next week.)

Now, I came to Ambassador College in the midst of all this soap opera. I had to get a job, since Connie and Robert certainly couldn't support me, and I had to do it fast. There was an opening at Ambassador, so I rushed down for an interview. I think I was wearing a long red plaid skirt and boots. Definitley, "hippy style." I didn't get the job. But I won friends among some of the more "radical" students. One of them went on to try to persuade me to sue Ambassador for gender discrimination. They hired a man, more than one, I think.

Sure, this is how I wanted to spend the rest of my career, suing local schools over their "old boys' network." Besides, I had no intention of staying in Los Angeles. That was a mere artifact of the structural context. My last husband's job was in L.A. In my lifeworld, you went where the jobs were. You didn't get to pull out a map and say, "Ooh, that looks like a good spot. Let's go live there!"

I had to finish my Post-Doc at USC and then head for the East Coast and the Ivy League. But first I had to get a job. I had a standing offer to work with the Census Bureau, with computers. That was a fun group, and I liked them. But I rather liked people and teaching more. I'd been teaching imaginary friends since I was three. So Ambassador's job opening had looked good. They were looking for someone in statistics and research, and I fit the bill. I just didn't belong to the "Old Boy's Network." The angry student who thought it was gender discrimination was wrong. It was friend discrimination. People would rather hire people they know and like than strangers, especially when they're not skilled at hiring.

Now, of course, their friends were male, because that's who was in graduate school in those days, because that's who held the titular authority in the system hierarchy. But if you didn't want to get stuck on petty soap opera dramas, you found your way around such penny-ante battles. I was headed for the East Coast. The last thing I cared about was who got what job where and how. I just wanted to eat and sell our house, and hit the road to the East, where LIFE was as I wanted to live it.

Just when it looked like I was going to spend the next year or so with computers in the census bureau, Ambassador called with an offer for a non-tenure track part-time job. Perfect. I took it. My mother bought me some wonderful new "hippie" clothes, and helped me through the next year. That let me jump at full speed into the McGovern campaign in 1972! But that's another November Novel.

I came to Ambassador in this frame of mind: '60s radical, with a heavy investment in the academy. Ph.D.'s cumulating. Little real experience of the radical world because I'd been too busy studying for those jobs that didn't exist. Naive, sheltered from the middle class world, an Other (from the culture of poverty and the streets) in the academic world, an exile with nowhere to call home. I was "passing" big time, with nary a clue as to how people in this lifeworld of real non-volunteer jobs related or worked out their social context.

I've got to stop right here and explain that I'm not an omniscient narrator. I'm me. One of the characters in this soap opera, and I am NOT objective. I don't even like objectivity. I'm a postmodernist, and I believe that claims of objectivity are fraudulent. Just look at my claims on how to solve marital problems by finding your husband a new wife. Does anybody want to call that objective? But it makes for a nice local narrative.

The characters in this story are made up in my head. Of course, I started out with real people and real incidents and real memories. I didn't need to search a database for plot lines, or follow the newspapers for sensational stories. Enough of that happens in my world non-stop. But in the story I let those people loom and stretch and fidget until they came out much more to my liking. They're as far from real people and real incidents now as they probably are from who I thought they really were. I guess one of the advantages of being a postmodernist is that you're comfortable in a made-up world when you know there is no other kind.

---

---

1875 words. Former word count: 2316. I think. 2316 + 1875 = 4191. Total word count: 4191