{"id":1401,"date":"2004-07-26T12:45:17","date_gmt":"2004-07-26T16:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1401"},"modified":"2022-10-09T14:02:45","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T18:02:45","slug":"the-specificity-of-imagined-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1401","title":{"rendered":"The Specificity of Imagined Despair"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday night was my monthly Girl Group. That’s what we all call it. “Girl Group”. We’re going on almost 4 years now of once-a-month meetings – and if you think about how difficult it is to coodinate meeting up with ANYONE, EVER (or maybe that’s just a New York thing…) it’s quite an accomplishment. Here’s a brief (and vague) description of what it’s is all about<\/a>. David, my co-blogger, is one of the “husbands” I describe, who desperately wants to know what goes on in the group. Heh heh. I’ll never tell.<\/p>\n

Friday was basically a MONSOON. We were meeting at one of the member’s houses – out in the ‘burbs of New Jersey. I stood in my lobby, waiting for my ride. Watching the buckets of rain pouring down, the street now a rushing river … storm drains bubbling up backwards … It was NUTS.<\/p>\n

As Sheila (we refer to each other as “I’m the OTHER Sheila”) and I drove through some of these office-park-ish suburban towns, we began to speak about how we could never live in places like this. We just couldn’t. We didn’t know why we had such an adverse reaction, but we did. It’s visceral – our feelings that we couldn’t live in places like that.<\/p>\n

Also, our reactions to living in suburbia are very SPECIFIC, even though neither of us have ever experienced it. I said maybe it was a past-life thing.<\/p>\n

I am convinced that if I lived in a suburban town surrounded by office parks, I would become a martini-swilling pill-popping housewife. I would lose my soul. I would bake cakes. BADLY. As tears ran down my face. Like Julianne Moore does in her last 7 roles. I feel a shiver through my soul at the thought of this imagined despair.<\/p>\n

And the other Sheila said, point blank, “I would weigh 500 pounds and spend all my time at Houlihans.”<\/p>\n

We were HOWLING. We were staring out the windows, at this lush green wet world, street lamps, cute little houses with shutters, large green lawns … a very pretty sight, actually – yet we could only picture utter MISERY. And obesity, apparently.<\/p>\n

“I would weigh 500 pounds and spend all my time at Houlihans.”<\/p>\n

Heh heh.<\/p>\n

That being said – it sure was gorgeous out there in suburbia. It felt so wonderful, so soothing, to see such unending green.<\/p>\n

(I mean no offense to those of you who live in suburbs. I know people who literally cannot imagine living in an urban area, like I do. Without constant access to nature, they would wither up and die. I totally get that. I miss nature myself! But for me – neat trim little suburban towns, filled with SUVs, malls, and office parks – is the equivalent nightmare. I would wither up and die there.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday night was my monthly Girl Group. That’s what we all call it. “Girl Group”. We’re going on almost 4 years now of once-a-month meetings – and if you think about how difficult it is to coodinate meeting up with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[600],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1401"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178025,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions\/178025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}