The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": political teens

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The Teen Political

I might be the only person in America already sick of the Obamas. I just don't care what they are eating or wearing or thinking: I just want him to fix stuff that's wrong. My kids watched the inauguration almost all day at school. The teachers kept saying, "It's historic," and of course we all know what the nine and ten year olds in my daughter's class were thinking: "Great, no work." My teenagers said some of middle and high school kids were taking bets as to whether or not someone would attempt to assassinate him. (When I nervously asked if they had contributed their lunch money toward such an awful wager, they looked at me and laughed. "Mom, are you nuts? They had hot pretzels today.")

I guess I think 150 million could better be spent on literacy programs or childhood vaccinations or even animal shelters. Do the people in D.C. really need more parties like that? I feel like I could see clips of the last ten presidential balls and not be able to tell which era it's from. Washington D. C. seems to breed a particular brand of beefy political male who stuffs himself into a party suit then twirls around the floor with his Barbie-gone-middle-aged wife. They all just have this look about them. Maybe that's just what really rich, disconnected people look like. Or maybe it's the Botox, I can't be sure.

I know how crabby I sound. And that's precisely why I don't discuss politics with my kids or their friends too much. Actually, almost never. But I did listen to the political teenspeak around my house this weekend. Here are my favorites:

Girl, 16 -- "Imagine having Obama's ears and not having them done? I definitely would have gotten them done instead of getting a car. Maybe instead of college."

Boy , 14 - "Wow. His wife is like bigger than he is."

My Son, 14 - "You think he voted for McCain? Could they find out?"

My Son, 16 - "So they can eat whatever they want, whenever they want? There's a chef there all the time? That would be awesome."

My Daughter, 10 - "On their birthday, his daughters' friends get to sleep over at the White House. So how far do we live from there?"

Boy, 15 - "Did they give him a new car? Does he get to keep it after he leaves?"

Girl, 14 - "What's a brace of birds? I saw that on the news. It sounds scary like the birds are crippled or something and they're going to, you know, eat them."

Maybe because I see the future lolling about my living room and trying to sneak onto the ten year old's Wii, I have an entirely different outlook on America's future. It's still filled with all those corny words like bright and promising; it's just a whole lot less expensive and a whole lot more amusing.

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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