Pantsuit Nation

Hillary PTSD

~ MaryG ~ 13 Comments

My get-out-the-vote calls went pretty well today. It was actually kind of fun. I talked to left-leaning voters from Pennsylvania. Many had already voted for Kamala and were willing to reach out to friends and family to do the same. One young man from Erie County, PA told me he wasn’t just excited, he was ECSTATIC to make Kamala Harris the next President of the United States.

So why don’t I feel better? Where’s my joy? Why am I SO anxious?

Because I remember 8 years ago…

Here I am in my cute little pantsuit (which no longer fits) on November 8, 2016, heading out to help elect Hillary Clinton as our first woman president. I was so excited and happy. Joyful!

And then….

Utter despair, bitter disappointment, disbelief, and a huge amount of anger at every single person who saw fit to pull the lever for Mr. Grab-em-by-the-Pussy Donald Trump.

Tomorrow (US Election Day) is going to be rough. I’m going to wear my new KA-MA-LA t-shirt and buy some celebratory champagne, but I also have to prepare myself for the worst. I have Hillary PTSD. Of course I’m hoping against hope that it’ll be a Kamala landslide and red states will start dropping early on. (My fantasy is that Florida miraculously goes blue by 9pm.) But that’s probably not going to happen. It’s probably going to be some sort of a protracted nail biter like Biden/Trump in 2020. (It took four days from Election Day for CNN to declare Biden the winner.)

The one and only good thing about the November 8, 2016 election was that Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis the very same night. And that is the only reason I’ve made it through the past eight years.

May the Trump Era in the United States of America end tomorrow.

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I Hate Funeral Homes

~ MaryG ~ 6 Comments

What was your favorite subject in school?

My favorite subject in school was English.

I always liked reading, and writing was OK too. As a senior in high school, I took a class called Humanities, which looked at different periods through literature, art, and music. It was co-taught by a team of three teachers.

The class was only for seniors and everyone had to do a final project. We did them in groups. My two best friends and I wrote and performed a play entitled “I Hate Funeral Homes.” As best I can remember, it was about three high school friends meeting up at their 15th reunion. So we were 18-year olds pretending to be 33-year olds, which seemed very old at the time. We had each taken different paths in our lives since high school—one of us was married, one divorced, and one was something else I can’t remember.

One of the themes of the play was how people don’t really listen to each other. Instead, they’re always thinking about what they’ll say next. So the lines were a series of non-sequiturs starting with “I Hate Funeral Homes.”

I don’t remember much else about the play except my costume, which was a black taffeta pantsuit. I was supposed to be the rich one. It was my first pantsuit, but not my last.

So, yeah, English was my favorite subject in school, but writing and performing a play with my best friends is my favorite memory.

The cast of “I Hate Funeral Homes” celebrating our 50th birthdays together in New Orleans

Two More Weeks

~ MaryG ~ 4 Comments

Two more weeks until Election Day. I can’t believe it’s been FOUR years since Pantsuit Nation got the crushing news that America is way WAY more racist and misogynistic than we thought. (It turns out Black people were already well aware of this and were not terribly surprised that the pussy-grabbing reality TV star won, but it sure was a massive shock to the rest of us.)

So, here we are, after 7 months of COVID-19 lockdown with 220,000+ dead and no end in sight. We all want Trump to lose by a HUGE margin, so that he won’t be able to dispute the results and start a Civil War. We need the Senate too, especially now that the Supreme Court will be so conservative. (Amy Coney Barrett terrifies me even more than Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh, because I think she’s smart and her worldview was formed in some sort of extreme Catholic sect.)

I’ve already voted, sent postcards to swing state voters, annoyed my social media friends with numerous political posts, and made sure my kids and their friends got registered to vote. I’ve taken action on local legislation that will hopefully protect my state if Roe v Wade gets overturned. I even went to Town Meeting to vote for a Climate Action Resolution. It really feels like there’s nothing left to do but wait and worry.

Sometimes I think it helps to imagine the worst, so you can let it go—like writing a letter that you’ll never send. (Picture the worst.) OK, that just can’t happen.

Postcards to Florida Democrats

Twitter: A Place for Your Rage

~ MaryG ~ Leave a comment

It’s been four years since I posted anything in this blog, which was a sort of mid-life experiment in connected creativity.  Everyone was doing it.  It seemed fun!  Looking back on those posts from 2015-2016, I feel as though they are from a completely different time in history.  They are from pre-Trump America.  Cold winters! youth sports! reading glasses! Were those topics really top-of-mind just four years ago? Here’s a photo of me, in my pantsuit, going to vote for America’s first female President on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 – the very last day of that era.  That was such a good day!  I skipped choir rehearsal that night to stay home and watch history being made.

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Well, we all know how that turned out.  Tears, disbelief, consoling my college-aged daughter, and booking a trip to Washington DC to be part of the first massive Women’s March, were among my first moves in this new era.

I am well aware that the daily challenges I face living in Trump’s America, as a white college-educated woman born in this country, are mostly emotional.  Immigrants, journalists, scientists, poor young women in need of healthcare and many others face actual threats to their lives and livelihoods.  Still, my emotional challenges are real to me.  And with ANGER being the biggest one, I’m glad I discovered Twitter.  It seems like venting is its raison d’être.  Things that are just “too political” for Facebook can be said, and very succinctly, on Twitter.  And guess what?  It turns out that many other people are thinking the exact same thing.  Maybe it’s true that it’s just an “echo chamber” further cementing our differences, but it’s also a relief.  You are most definitely not alone in thinking whatever your thinking.  Rage away people.  That’s what we do now.