Kitty Konsumerism (Or, Brittany Likes Stuffed Cats So Much, Someone Should Buy Her a Real Cat)

When I want something very badly, images of what I'll do with it and how incredibly awesome my life will be once I get it are all that fill my mind. Eventually, one of two things happen. One, I get it and do what I planned, it's great, and eventually I accept it is a normal part of life. Or two, I never get it and the desire fades--luckily, I've always been resilient enough not to get bitter about not getting whatever I want.  There are ways to deal with the disappointment of not getting what you want.

I don't know where I first heard of or saw Hello Kitty (maybe one of those weird Hello Kitty cartoons where she somehow speaks without having a mouth), but from ages six to nine, I was obsessed with having a Hello Kitty doll. I loved drawing her and I loved the occasional Hello Kitty paraphernalia I would find at Korean stores near the ballet studio I went to. But in the 90s, Sanrio stores were not common at all and I'd actually never seen a Hello Kitty doll, though I assumed they must exist somewhere. 

HERE. THEY'RE ALL HERE.

So I mostly resigned myself to not having one and I took Albert, my stuffed white cat, whose inscrutable frown had always marked him as male to me, and put a pink hairbow around his head. Albert remained Albert (where on earth did he even get that name in the first place?), but occasionally, when I was in a Hello Kitty mood, he donned his bow and I imagined he was the Hello Kitty I wanted.

By the time I was nine, the Hello Kitty phase was beginning to pass in favor of a Pokemon phase. Not that I could play Pokemon well, mind you, but I loved the show so much and begged my mom for the Pokemon puzzle I found in a store mostly so I could draw the characters from the box. In that same store there were shelves of Beanie Babies, those floppy awkwardly shaped stuffed animals that so many stores used to tempt children in frothing fits of need by filling cases of them at child-level near the cash register, not far from the candy. In one of those cases, I found a striped grey-and-black cat and was suddenly consumed by a NEED to have it be MINE that is probably only comparable to Frodo and the One Ring, or Bella and Edward, or my current self and any food containing avocado.

It may not look like much, but hey, I never expect understanding for my unhealthy obsessions.

My mother said no, and at home it was all I could think about, as my mind replayed fantasies of me sitting on the stairs landing by my bedroom and dangling her over through the bars of the railing. The possibilities of our future together! I pleaded for that cat. I knew her name already from her ear-tag (Prance) and there was a little poem about her that seemed to tantalizingly promise that YES, this cat was basically fuzzy bean-filled happiness and I would not be complete without it:

She darts around and swats the air

Then looks confused when nothing's there

Pick her up and pet her soft fur

Listen closely, and you'll hear her purr!

This was so much more necessary than a Hello Kitty. A Hello Kitty doll was a character already invented and crafted by someone else, and although new stories could be imagined around her, she wouldn't be entirely MINE. Prance was a blank slate for any story I wanted. I don't know how many times I visited that store, clutched that Beanie Baby and insisted that I have it, but it was more than once. I also don't even remember the day I got it, though I do remember that swinging her by the tail through the railing was about 150% as satisfying as I expected (no idea why).

Prance could be anyone. Obviously, Albert being a male cat and with his transvestite Hello Kitty days in the past, was automatically her boyfriend, but somehow never a husband because Prance didn't settle down. Most of the time when I played with her, she was in high school (teenagers were literally the coolest people I could imagine....

In this drawing, she is actually in front of a high school with her classmate Albert. Yes, her shirt says Girl Power. It was the 90s; shut up.

...and moonlighted as a superhero (because of that magic rock she's always holding).

I was not particularly gifted at designing costumes, obviously. Also, cut off next to her is Albert. Check out those Pokemon-inspired toothless mouths!

Throughout everything, I never called her any name but Prance (she was so much luckier than Albert!!), but she fit into dozens of "stories" my brother Steven and I would play. With three colorful rocks, a toy garbage can, Prance, Albert, and Steve's stuffed sunglasses-wearing dragon, Drago (seriously, ask him about Drago next time you see him!), we had a whole story about crime-fighting teenaged animal-people. Being 1 1/2 years older, I always led the play, and the plotlines were mine, especially when I followed out my fascination with tragedy by saying, "Let's play the END of the story." I'm sure Steven dreaded those (Melissa always refused to play those when she had played), but he went along with it, being a very easy-going and happy-go-lucky kid (believe it or not). So everyone died, or it was all a dream, or they had to give up their memories to save the world, or some other contrived sad ending.

Despite my morbid story-telling, Steven followed me along on other stories starring Prance, Albert, and Drago. There was a medieval one that was short-lived enough for me to not remember any of it, but long enough for me to draw a lot of it.

Someone was probably being killed, thus the tears.

Eventually, we created Tech-Lin, a story about a town populated by our combined hordes of stuffed animals including my Puppy Surprise and his Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as Prance, Albert, and Drago. Because I was the boss of everything, Prance was undeniably the main character and the hero of every storyline. She had to be the one to fight the villain.

She had wings for some reason and there is something seriously wrong with her wrists. Also, she became a redhead? (She still carried a broadsword, which sadly isn't pictured here.)

Albert was usually high-minded and a know-it-all, but not half as tough as Prance (don't let her cute outfits fool you). As for Drago, like most characters Steve played with or as, he was the comic relief. This is the boy who used to tell people he'd be Timon from The Lion King when he grew up, after all.

There's still time for him to make that dream come true.

All that to say, Steven wasn't the most discerning. He and I don't have all that much in common now, even though we're the closest in age, but we did spend years communally imagining whole worlds and characters based on the toys we had. And before then, when Melissa and I had played together, she led the stories we imagined and all my ideas were subject to hers (the price of being younger sibling). When she stopped playing with me (I was about eight and she was twelve), I turned to Steven, who till then had been an occasional playmate, but mostly was relegated to playing in the corner while Melissa and I played our games. Steven was my first audience as I tested my storytelling abilities beyond imitating Melissa's ideas. I could try out a tragedy or alternate universes or characters who straddled the line between good and bad (Melissa always hated those guys because they were massive jerks) and he accepted it as the "reality" of the story.

I don't think we played like most children; I understand that now. We had particular stories that we called "shows", and Steven and I took mine and Melissa's use of the word "shows" even farther--we played commercials at random segments. Playing was performing, while my writing was still a private activity only shared with Melissa, who has consistently read all my writings since, barely literate, I wrote my first story at 6 or 7 (I so regret throwing that out!). But through playing I learned how to craft stories and how to build characters, something that my writing skills still weren't quite strong enough to explore. I didn't have the patience to finish even a lengthy scene, much less an actual story, till I was about 11, but I could happily play all day.

Imagination is a powerful thing. So I guess that little Beanie Baby did change my life. Thanks, Mom, for buying this little brat the stuffed cat she insisted she needed.

Art by Steven, showing how what looked like a dead-eyed fat-headed animal (top) could be transformed into a moody animal-person wearing a communicator on her ears and with a microphone extending around her face so she could keep in touch with the team (bottom).

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We Were All Young (and Hopeless) Once, Weren't We?

Written for Ink Spots writing club prompt #1: What media (books, movies, TV, comics, music, etc.) do you feel had the greatest positive influence on you growing up? With examples.

I don't consider myself a musical person. Not just because I experience similar troubles learning to read music as I do trying to understand mathematical equations (do-re-mi is as deceptively intelligible as addition, but take all that further and solfege and binomials are all a foreign language to me) or that I have a difficult time staying in harmony in choir if I don't have a stronger voice to follow, but also because music is not a big part of my day-to-day life. I have friends who can't go more than a day or two without music, but I can go weeks without realizing it.

This is not to say that I don't love music. I do. I am often committing to choirs (why, when the struggle makes it hard to enjoy it at times, I couldn't say) and I always sing to myself (private concerts while I make breakfast!). I love live shows and can't resist moving in some way to live music (yes, even during hymns as you might know if you've ever been in a nearby pew when I'm at church). Music affects me emotionally and can make me cry, but definitely is less likely to than a book, movie, or show. Yet when I thought about a form of media that had a genuinely positive effect on me, my first thought was of a particular album I received for a Christmas present in 2004.

I think I finally just "got" this cover...the joke is "nuclear family", isn't it?  Huh.

I was 14, and I was going through an awkward pseudo goth-punk phase that involved haunting Hot Topic and actually wearing a mesh-sleeved shirt. This was a tricky phase to go through when your main socialization comes from Christian communities like church or a homeschool group, because it definitely labels you as the oddball (among others who are oddballs in their own way, ironically). I had a burned copy of Good Charlotte's Chronicles of Life & Death album from a friend and had watched the music video of "Predictable" so many times that I still have most of it memorized. I had put The Young & the Hopeless on my Christmas list that year, and I don't remember anything else I got that year--just my older cousin handing me the gift at my uncle's house.

When I opened it, my cousin nodded approvingly. "That's a good album."

I looked up at him--tattooed and pierced--then at the inside cover of the album where the band members were tattooed and pierced and kind of laughed. "Is this what happens when you listen to this music?" I joked to my sister.

But that night, driving home from the Bronx back to New Jersey, I put the CD into my discman (2004, remember?) and gave it a listen. I expected something like the Chronicles album, which was the kind of dark music I was into, but this was something I'd never heard before. I'm not saying Young & the Hopeless was particularly well-crafted or that it was genius in any way. But in that moment, I listened to each song with the disbelief that something like this existed...someone had actually written down and sung about what I was feeling and thinking and what it had seemed like no one else could ever understand.

The gist of the album is in its title--the songs vary in story, but the message is one of fear, anger, and hopelessness, particularly that hopelessness that exists only for the young. It's that hopelessness that well-meaning campaigns like It Gets Better or To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) can't really get at. It's being fully aware that you have so much time for things to get better and that maybe your living situation will indeed get better, but feeling like you can't last even that one year to get to that better place, much less the several years to adulthood and freedom. It's knowing that sure, someone may love you, and maybe many people do, and yeah, people would miss you if you were gone, but you just hate yourself so much that living as you for any length of time is just a sickening thought no matter what.

The chorus of the title track of the album goes like this:

'Cause I'm young and I'm hopeless
I'm lost and I know this
I'm going nowhere fast, that's what they say
I'm troublesome, I'm fallen
I'm angry at my father
It's me against this world and I don't care
I don't care

Listening to those words, while leaning my head against the dark window on the drive home Christmas night, I was suddenly not alone. It was such a relief, I was almost crying, but couldn't because even in the dark, someone else might see. I hadn't known how to voice this, but two punk kids from Maryland had and recorded it. They knew what it meant to be a broken wreck and still be condemned to live and carry on. They knew what it felt like to be spiraling downward and to feel like the whole world was in some plot against you. Most importantly, they knew what it meant to be angry at your father.

Good Charlotte's front men, Joel and Billy Madden, were the products of a broken family, with a dad who had just up and left, leaving them to struggle with poverty and a sense of worthlessness. In their early twenties, they broke into the music business, which was having a punk revival of sorts. I was the product of a shattered family that had been shoddily put back together in 2003 and was limping along, pretending to be okay, when in reality, we were slowly rotting and dying. Nestled in suburbia and deeply religious, we kept up an excellent front. But my father was a disturbed man, steeped in secret sins and living under a narcissistic delusion that he was the wronged hero of some tragic story. As I got older, I understood that abuse doesn't have to be physical, that emotional and verbal abuse is real, that constant threats to your person are not unimportant, and that living in fear is not normal. I look back now and see that all of the worst days were when my mother wasn't home, like the day he grabbed me by the neck and shoved me against a door. It was my fault he did that, I believed; after all, I'd yelled "Don't touch me!" just moments before when he'd tried to grab my arm. Of course, he was only grabbing my arm to keep me from running out of the room after he'd thrown handfuls of CDs at me.

Even while I blamed myself for when situations got really bad, I couldn't shake that anger that built up inside me. But I couldn't voice that anger--after all, my dad was funny and nice and just generally likable. Sure, he wasn't perfect, but the year before when he moved out temporarily, I had learned that yes, no one is perfect, even your parents. It wasn't fair to just always be angry, I felt, but I couldn't get rid of it, nor could I act on it. Hearing a song that just straight up admitted as an aside, "I'm angry at my father," was the closest I could get to a helping hand. It helped steer the anger that I had already turned against myself and begun to translate into self-harm into an avenue that was safer: anger at someone who was cruel to me and to others.

Back then and even now, there were adults who would criticize music like Good Charlotte's for the very reason that album and that song struck me--they were horrified by music that openly expressed anger or hopelessness because they thought it would influence or encourage kids to be angry depressed messes. As an adult now, I can understand that fear, even though it just annoyed me as a kid. Adults know how impressionable kids can be and worry about that. Many well-meaning folks think that maybe positive music would be better for a depressed kid--maybe it will lift them out of that dark place. And that does happen. But there are levels of pain where optimism can't do a lick of good. What's most important in those situations is to accept the situation and its feelings as reality, to recognize that this happens to many people and YES, your situation is better than some, but ALSO worse than others. Anger is a normal human emotion and has its place. Better to recognize that anger than stifle it and pretend it doesn't exist.

"The Young & the Hopeless" tackled the questions that no one I knew was asking:

And if I make it through today
Will tomorrow be the same?
Am I just running in place?
And if I stumble and I fall
Should I get up and carry on?
Will it all just be the same?

The answers to those questions in my life were yes, yes, and more yes. "Tomorrow" was actually worse. It wouldn't get better for another seven years, when my family moved away from my father and I was able to fully cut off all ties to him. He had ceased speaking to me when I was 19, the year I started college, because I didn't open the TV cabinet fully when he yelled at me to do it for him one evening. I ran in place, because I couldn't change my situation for a long time. I got up when I stumbled; I carried on. Even now I'm not free of the past and talking about things that happened leave my hands shaking. This is an improvement; there was a time when I would just start shaking all over and forget how to breathe. I don't hate myself and I don't want to die anymore, but while I'm being honest, I'll admit that when things get hard, my mind still slides quickly to self-disgust and the longing to just end it all.

Ironically, the song's opening verse is the most hopeful:

Hard days made me, hard nights shaped me
I don't know, they somehow saved me
And I know I'm making something
Out of this life they called nothing

This glimpse of hope meant a lot to me back then--maybe all this had meaning. Maybe hard times would make me stronger--being thought of as strong was infinitely important to me--and all of this was FOR something. My life, which felt worthless, could be something good. That little hope of purpose carried me through even as I was hopeless most of the time.

It turned out to be true. If I could go back and change my life (be more open about what was going on, stand up to my father more, hate myself less, etc.), I wouldn't. It did happen the way it happened for a reason. Those experiences broke me, making me at once weaker and stronger than I'd've been without them. Most importantly, it made me capable of being sympathetic to others. When I was a counselor at a high school camp post-high school, I realized that I could relate to the troubled kids. That realization brought me to tears of relief. I could do good with the bad I'd been given. I wasn't worthless; I had purpose. It's why I work in education, and why I have such a hard time answering the question of why I want to work with kids. I usually say something like "Um, I love kids a lot. Of all ages. They're great. Yeah." because explaining it for real takes too long and I doubt it's what most people want to hear about.

Now, to conclude, I will confess that Good Charlotte was new to me, but their message was run-of-the-mill. They weren't the first to voice them, they weren't alone in doing so even at the time, and now I'm sure others are sharing those feelings through music, though the Madden twins themselves eventually sold out and became fame-hungry, money-grubbing, hiphop wannabes.  It was a right time, right place sort of experience. I listen to that song now, and all I feel is a stirring of the residual feelings and some nostalgia. But oh back then. That clutch at my heart, my jaw dropping, the tears coming to my eyes, and the elation of being understood by someone and told that I wasn't alone at all.

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