Doreen Michele

At age twenty, it finally came out that I had gotten secretly married the year before and my husband had finally joined the military like he said he would and he would be starting basic training shortly.  I very suddenly had a job and an apartment almost immediately with minimal effort on my part after years of failing to arrange to move out on my own. My parents fixed me up with a job, helped me get an apartment and may have moved my furniture for me while I was at work.  Prior to that, I had been job hunting, without good results, having dropped out of college to avoid committing fraud on the financial aid forms my father filled out or inform him I was technically married. But I didn't know how to job hunt and no one was really helping me figure it out. In contrast, I got endless help with homework and establishing good study habits and my dad filled out the financial aid paperwork for college -- not all parents do that. I and a friend tried to come up with her tuition out o...

Uh, oh. I made a clean spot here. It's a cute scene in the movie Aliens with Ripley -- a mom whose child grew up and died while she was in deep sleep for space travel -- and Newt, a little girl and the only survivor of something terrible. Social stuff doesn't really work that way. If you participate in a sick system, no one accidentally ends up clean. I don't really need to tell you the Internet has deteriorated in my lifetime and efforts to monetize this cool futuristic thing is a huge part of why. We have words for that, including enshittification , and everyone knows common sayings like "If you aren't the customer, you're the product." I'm a big fan of Google. This site is hosted by one of their products and when the Internet was younger, AdSense probably worked well for some people. It never worked well for me. I never had adequate traffic to turn that into something resembling an adequate income for my work. I write about topics that are inherentl...

I was probably eighteen years old. I say that because this conversation happened in my friend's car and that most likely means she had picked me up to take me to college. My dad was twelve years older than my mom and when they first got together, he would go to the field for his job and  put his car on blocks before leaving. She didn't have a driver's license. So she took classes and got her license while he was gone and then years later their son  had a driver's license the nanosecond he turned sixteen and their daughters both physically moved out and owned a vehicle before getting a license because in some ways my family is the most sexist pig that ever did pig. So when I was eighteen, my mother gave gas money to a friend who lived nearby to take me to school with her rather than, you know, get me a driver's license. And that explanation is an example of how my mind organizes information: We had this conversation in her car, so I was probably eighteen because REA...

All y'all is a Southern expression inclusive of myriad groups of peoples. Y'all is just plural to distinguish it from singular you. I'm struggling here to explain it because historically English had thee and thou but that wasn't singular versus plural you. It was intimate versus formal you. Tu in French is a close friend or similar. Vous is someone you don't know well. The word they can be used in singular form as a gender neutral version of he or she if being gender neutral matters more than grammatical agreement on singular versus plural. It's generally less awkward than trying to use the word one  which sounds stiff and formal and folks don't much use that construction. In the South, generally speaking: You = just one person that I'm speaking to. Y'all = a group of folks I'm addressing who likely identify as a group, such as members of the same family or members of the football team. All y'all  = a group of groups, inclusive of many dem...

My maiden name is Irish in origin and I realized in recent months at the age of sixty that my Irish heritage was in some sense treated more secretly than my Cherokee heritage. My mother was a German immigrant who grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. My father spent 18.5 years of his 26.5 years of military service overseas, possibly in part because it was easier for him to be White passing as a foreigner. I was molested as a child. I grew up in a family haunted by "dirty secrets" many of which were dirt from other people, from a larger context, from a racist society and from a world unable to heal up in the face of wars and other large scale problems individuals typically don't know how to adequately navigate. We fight over an offense we did not give against those who were not alive to be offended. While poor, I sometimes experienced abusive behavior from Black Americans thrilled to take their anger out on a White woman they thought was beref...

Grandfathered in is a phrase from the ugly post-Civil War Jim Crow era in the Deep South that refers to efforts to legally protect the rights of White people while denying newly freed Blacks voting rights.  They passed a law saying illiterate people couldn't vote knowing most newly freed slaves were illiterate because it had been illegal for slaves to learn to read. They then added a clause saying "You can still vote even if you are illiterate if your grandfather could vote." This meant dirt poor illiterate White people were likely to qualify for the right to vote but no newly freed slaves would pass this test granting an exception for illiterate Whites. Their grandfathers were likely slaves (or rapey White slave owners not admitting to being the father, but that detail is something newly freed slaves were unlikely to argue in a court of law at that time). That's from a piece called Rotten to the Core on Eclogiselle and you may wish to read it because it says more...