Don't Mind Me, I've Just Been DNA Testing

That moment when--after thinking for all 37 years of your life that you'll never know who your biological grandfathers were--you realize: "Holy fuck, I just did a DNA test and found out the identities of both of my biological grandfathers."

Yep. That's me this week.

Let me back up a little and explain how both of my grandmothers were promiscuous young women. Or at least one of them wanted us to think she was and the other one was but didn't want us to know.

It's difficult, I know, to think of a grandmother as a sexual person, with desires and needs. And a vagina.

For many years I've trained myself to divorce the chain-smoking, man-hating woman who was my maternal grandmother, from the young woman in high-heeled Mary Janes and a red feather in her hair who worked on a Louisiana riverboat casino and played blackjack until the wee hours of the morning. I've trained myself to separate the white-haired, plump woman who fried bacon every morning for my father, from the laughing-too-loud, flirty twenty-something that Granny had been when she was a waitress in Kansas City, Missouri.

First, the liar. Yep, my maternal grandma wanted us all thinking she was a big-time hoe-bag. So much so that when both of my sisters got pregnant out of wedlock, and in their teens, she lit up a Pall Mall and was like, "Oh that happens all the time."

When my youngest sister got divorced last year, after thirteen years of marriage, I told her, "Dude, go sleep around. Just blame it on our whore gene." There's a mixed bag of theories in genetic research whether or not it's in an individual's DNA to be promiscuous. Still, in a March article of Daily Mail, it was reported that 8% of woman aged 65-74 have had ten or more sexual partners. My grandmothers fit into that category, or were slightly ahead of the curve, so that gives my sister a free pass. Just catch up with Grandma.

This week I confirmed with a DNA analysis of my spit that I hail from a group of people with the surname Tippen. My fourth great-grandparents were named John Wesley Tippen and Elizabeth Castleberry Tippen. I share genes with another living person who also had their DNA tested. This person is the third great-grandchild of the Tippens. The Tippen line carried down to me through my mother, and to her from a man Grandma married because, as she told my mother years later, she was preggo and needed a hubby, STAT. My mother's real father, Grandma said, was already married, was a traveling salesman from Michigan or Minnesota, or one of those "M" states no one ever admits to being from. She never told my mother a name or anything about this guy. Just that the Tippens were not blood relatives.

Grandma was lying. But why the hell would you make up some shit about another man when there was no other man? The only thing I can think of--and this totally fits Grandma's possessive compulsions--is that at some point after Grandma had moved to California and remarried, my mother asked her about her biological father's identity. And Grandma, who couldn't handle any sort of rejection, told my mother a lie so she'd never want to go back to Texas and live with her father. So my mother has lived most of her life thinking there's a mythical father somewhere who may or may not know anything about her. When, really, her biological father died in 1971 and she never got to mourn him properly because she didn't think he was really her dad.

Yep. I know. That is fucked up.

It's the total opposite of what I'd do. If I got divorced and my kids wanted to live with their dad, I'd be all, "Sure. Here's a suitcase. Don't let the door hit you on your way out."

Then I'd bust out my slut gene.

Now let's address Granny. A born-again Christian, she's has never been forthcoming about the details of her sordid past. Instead, she's stuck a short story titled "I-Don't-Remember-Who-Your-Grandfather-Was," which reads, "Your father was adopted by Don when he was seven, so Don's his father." And that's it.

But she can't deny the DNA that has linked me with a living second cousin, a huge branch of people still living in Missouri that have pictures of my father's biological father, who died in 1961, and lament that they never knew my father ever existed. They seem like a happy enough bunch and are curious about me and my sisters and our father. So I didn't really know what tone to take when I called Granny to give her the news. I finally decided on the casual route, saying, "Hey, I think I found a link to my biological grandfather," and gave her the name of the dude.

And without missing a beat she said, "Yeah, that's him. He had red hair so I just called him 'Red.'"

What the fuck?

She's not senile. She hasn't been hit over the head with a blunt object. How the hell do you forget the name of the man who got you preggo and then, poof, remember?

Though, I could completely understand a drunken one-night-stand, which is what I was thinking when Granny suddenly got even more of her memory back and elaborated: "He was an iron worker, much older than me. He worked on a crew building bridges. I didn't know he was married until one of the guys on his crew told his wife we were running around. By then I was pregnant with your father."

Okay then.

This is the big family mystery she's kept for over sixty years? She's never told my father the identity of his father because she fell for a married man? Sure it was 1953. Sure she was young and looking for a good time. But really? Never telling anyone? Or at least, never telling anyone who might need to know family medical history information? Apparently, having her son and three granddaughters write "unknown" on doctor's office information forms, then having the doctor say things like, "This cancer could be hereditary, if only we knew..." was a lot less humiliating than telling her son the name of his father.

What is with that generation and lying? Is this what sex-shaming has done? Created an entire female generation, or two, or three, or thousand, who are so completely terrified of living the truth that they deny it even happened? And we wonder why we have a mental health epidemic in this country; we're afraid to live our own truths because of what our neighbors will say about our bedroom behavior. When will we, as a culture, embrace women's sexuality and promiscuity without labeling them "sluts"? Without running them out of town, pushing them to the fringes because they remind us of our own unfulfilled sexual desires? Instead, let's practice birth control--educating young women about how to effectively use condoms and hormonal injections and little pills that can keep away unplanned pregnancy, and allow them the sexual freedom they deserve.

Let's not be afraid to talk about Grandma's vagina.

The Great Depression

...this is a long-ish piece i've been working on for a LONG time...i think i finally figured out in the last few months what i really wanted to say here about hunger and poverty and depression...it's changed very much since the initial draft and i'm pleased to say that the parts i cut have found their way into a new piece of writing...i'll be shopping this around soon, so i welcome comments and feedback...

The Great Depression

“Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.”

                The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood

The Big House—as we called it—came to Grandma through auction in the summer of 1992.  A small grouping of tract homes, on the outskirts of the California desert where we lived, had gone bankrupt because no one was buying 3500-square-foot houses during a recession.  People in our town were more concerned with eating regular meals than luxury living. But in our family—that small unit consisting of just Grandma and me—beautiful architecture and unnecessary square footage trumped food. All of the abandoned homes in the small neighborhood were for sale. They were gorgeous pastel stucco two-stories, with Spanish tile roofs and large airy rooms. But they’d been dumped into the middle of bare yards, cinder block walls dividing the lots from the trailer park next door. Grandma wanted the model home, completely landscaped and furnished. Its bedrooms were supposed to simulate easy living, the living rooms (two of them) were designed to make even a family of ten comfortable, and the dining table set for a wax ham-and-potatoes dinner enticed buyers to pull up a chair.

The facade had failed. That should’ve been a warning to anyone who wanted to live there.

The auction was held in a motel that had once been a razzle-dazzle place along Sierra Highway, but was now home to transients, off-the-books day workers, and immigrants. Before the auction, Grandma parked her aging maroon Cadillac in the faded parking lot and groaned when she slid out from behind the wheel. Her back popped. Her pumps crunched the broken asphalt. She flicked a lighter and stood in the pitted lot while smoking a cigarette. She said, “I’m not going above 130.”  How she arrived at this number I didn’t know. She might as well have said she wasn’t going to go above two million. To me, all numbers were the same: money we didn’t have, money others did.

Inside, the conference room smelled like a Las Vegas casino—dead promises and stale cigarettes. It had low ceilings, dim lighting, wood paneled walls, brown shag carpet. On the day she bought The Big House, we sat in the first row of folding chairs set out before a long banquet table covered with a white cloth.  A man standing at a podium clicked a slide projector when each home was put on the block. When the model house came up for bid, Grandma raised her marker.  The price reached 135, and still she bid.  Up, up, up it went.  A Middle-Eastern couple across the aisle kept raising their marker.  When the price reached 195 I squeezed Grandma’s elbow, a gesture that was meant to say Please stop. Just stop.

Grandma lifted her marker at 199, and before I knew what was happening she’d won.  I was silent, stricken with fear.  I just knew the house would “go back” as she said whenever she was borrowing from Peter MasterCard to pay Paul Visa. She incessantly called one of her ex-husbands for more alimony. I’m not exactly sure how she managed to buy a house without having a nickel in the bank or a steady income, but I’ve since learned that recession homes can be purchased with spit and a promise.

Once all of the paperwork was complete—a process that took less than an hour and included several tongue clicks as Grandma signed on a series of dotted lines—we walked out into the desert afternoon and climbed inside the Cadillac. The cracked leather seats scorched my thighs. I couldn’t look at her, and spent the ride back to our house attempting to ignore the churning of my empty stomach, the anxiety that had plagued me for all of the years I’d lived with her.      

The Big House, 2014

My head began to ache and pulse above my temples and eyes. Grandma spoke only once. Stopped at a red light, she lit a cigarette and said, “You wanted that house so badly you pinched me on the arm. I think you left a bruise.”    

 *

We couldn’t afford a new house and I knew moving wouldn’t solve anything—I’d fallen into a state of depression when I turned thirteen.  At times, Grandma called it “hormones.” But mostly she blamed it on the genetically far-fetched ideas of my incarcerated father’s bad blood and her daughter’s stupidity in marrying him in the first place. She often told me that if I strayed from her teachings, I’d become white trash just like the both of them. When I heard these words, I thought of a reverse Cinderella—a kingdom falling in on itself, a pumpkin instantly transformed from carriage to rot. But her threats seemed to lose their impact when I entered my teens.

So, because she was the type of person to run from problems, the only solution she could think of was to move me into a grand house where I could build a new persona. Or the persona of what she called A Good Girl.  A Good Girl was a ghost. A Good Girl didn’t date, go to the movies with friends, sleep over at girlfriends’ houses, or talk on the telephone. A Good Girl went to school, occasionally participated in a school-sanctioned activity like a club meeting or a dance, and never socialized with classmates outside of the confines of the school grounds. A Good Girl lived unknown to her peers. No one knew what went on within the confines of her home.

What went on behind this Good Girl’s closed door was the utter absence of food. Grandma had a purse full of credit cards, all maxed out, and no income. The only work we had was going to garage sales on Thursday and Friday afternoons, and reselling the items we found at the local Swap Meet on Saturdays and Sundays. I spent Friday nights cleaning and repairing trashed items, readying them for a markup. Grandma gave them each a “family history” to entice potential buyers. We’d arrive at the Swap Meet before the sunrise and leave after dark. I’d subsist on water and four boiled eggs until Sunday when Grandma stopped at VONS and bought bread, canned vegetables, a chicken, cheese, Coke Classic, canned tuna, and cartons of cigarettes. Then we’d return to the confines of the beautiful house.

Perhaps because of the housing boom and bust of the early 21^st century, American society is now more aware of the “near poor” or people who are just getting by.[1] But when I was a teenager, normal-looking actually meant that you were just like everyone else. No one knew I was hungry and poor. And I believed Grandma when she said all I needed was a change of address to improve my mood. Everyone in my small hometown—home of the T-shirt that read “Would the last person to leave Littlerock, CA please turn off the lights?”—knew my father was in prison and my mother had left me with Grandma years before. My days were spent under close watch, and I was Grandma’s sole companion. Even in the middle of the night, when other kids’ parents were sleeping, she was vigilant, sitting up in bed with the television blaring its End of Broadcast signal, afraid that if she slept I’d somehow sneak away and leave her all alone.

By the summer she bought The Big House, I’d lived under Grandma’s roof for six years and though the move was meant to pull me out of my depression, it only worked to make me more aware of my shortcomings, the differences between me and all of the other kids my age. My new school was more affluent, filled with kids whose parents were doctors, teachers, lawyers, ranchers. They ate a never-ending supply of Pop Tarts—something I knew the name of but had never tasted—and never bothered to pick up change they dropped in the school parking lot. While they were from two-parent families and complained about having to eat asparagus while sitting next to annoying siblings at the dinner table, I longed for food that might fill a plate and for siblings with whom I could talk.

I was ashamed of my hunger and kept quiet about it. No one knew that our fridge seemed to have only three purposes: to keep Cokes, milk, and leftovers cold, to house two glass jugs of water, and to preserve her Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes. No one knew a typical day in our home met me with a bowl of cold cereal and nothing more. No one knew dinner was optional. On good days, Grandma baked a chicken, smothered in onions, and a huge pot of fluffy white rice. Or steak and gravy and green beans. Or goulash. Or spaghetti. I remember these meals only because they were so infrequent they are burned into my memory. Most of the time, dinner was an iceberg lettuce wedge smeared with mayonnaise and a sprinkle of garlic powder. Or sugared toast. Or another bowl of cereal.

Grandma never cooked anything until all of the left-overs from a meal had been consumed. So never was I allowed to say, “I don’t want to eat that again.” I’d tried it less than a handful of times and learned the result was an empty belly until the next morning. I thought dinner rolls, biscuits, croissants, and French bread were only for braggarts. I once went to a neighbor’s house and her mother made chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. They were as big as my hand and she let us eat as many as we wanted with huge glasses of milk. When I got home and reported my awe, Grandma’s response was to say, “If you think that sort of thing happens every day, you’ve got another thing coming, gal. I’ve got more important things to do than bake cookies for kids to just eat up in one sitting.” She did make cookies once, the dough out of a tube. I was given two. The next day at school I dreamed of those cookies and couldn’t wait to get home. But when I arrived, they were all gone. She’d eaten them.

I realize that the food I managed to survive on during my childhood is more than some children today find awaiting them when they get in from school, especially those born to the “working poor.”[2] Like those kids, my main meal of the day came during school lunch. Grandma bought me a lunch card at the start of every month, and I watched each day as the thin construction paper square was consumed by the lunch lady’s hole punch. Thirty years later, I still have nightmares that I arrive in line for lunch and have lost my punch card. I look everywhere for it—even in my socks—but it’s gone and I have to go without my only sure-fire meal of the day.

 *

At some point in Grandma’s life—probably between her fourth and fifth marriages—she was diagnosed with agoraphobia and prescribed Valium.  I have vague memories of a small brown bottle in her purse right next to her Pall Malls.  Every so often, she’d split a little yellow pill through its holed center and down it with a swig of Coke. By the time she bought The Big House, though, the valium had gone. Instead of heading to a doctor and getting a new prescription, Grandma simply stemmed her increased nervousness with more cigarettes. Smoking helps those with money worries “cope with high levels of stress and depression.” A 2013 study reveals that depravity “creates enormous mental anguish. One of the fastest, most convenient ways to help is a cigarette.” Put simply, “smoking treats hunger pangs.”[3]

She’d tried to quit smoking only once in her life. “That’s when I got as big around as a house,” she often recalled of herself without nicotine. She’d bring out her photo albums, a monthly ritual, and point to her “fat” pictures. The only difference I could see was that her face was fuller, her bosom more pronounced. When the albums appeared, she smoked more and picked at her meals, only eating a small portion before dumping them back into the pot or pan. I’d like to think she did this because we didn’t have the money to grocery shop and she was allowing for more food for the upcoming days. But it was vanity. 

Along with the photos went the stories—relatives long-dead, holidays spent on vacation, tables laden with food prepared for a reunion or homecoming. The glory of her past, my lineage, sat on the table before us and listening to her talk about each picture filled my meal-time hours. She’d seen people die from hunger and malnutrition from the earliest times she could remember.  She was born in 1930, and for the first ten years of her life her family hardly had enough food to survive.  Though she never admitted going hungry, she would proudly tell me how poor they’d been, as if challenging me to contradict the sepia-toned evidence. They lived on a farm in East Texas.  My great-grandmother, Eula Mae, was an Humble—as in Humble Oil and Humble, Texas—my great-grandfather, William, was supposedly Cherokee Indian.  The two met and fell in love and Eula was doomed, as Grandma said it, “to live a life beneath her” until their divorce when Grandma and most of her siblings were already adults.

She’d had rich cousins, aunts, and uncles on her mother’s side who visited the farm and brought hand-me-down clothes and tins of saltine crackers. They took pictures of the family, flashed them around Humble and said things like, “Just look at our country cousins.” Grandma never smiled in the pictures. She hated being a country cousin. Poverty, or her rise from it, was her badge of honor. Even as an adult, she hungered for the life she’d seen from her Humble cousins. And The Big House, her Cadillac, her Good Girl granddaughter, all flew in the face of that life-long hurt. These things might’ve been compromised if she’d quit smoking and suddenly allowed herself to eat. Her self-worth was somehow at stake.

Ruminations over old photographs were the extent of her conversations about pain, physical or mental. She spoke matter-of-factly about the scorn from her city cousins. She never elaborated on why, when she was still an infant, her mother left her father for a short time. Left the kids in his care. Or why, when her mother returned, after Grandma had already begun to walk, she clung to her oldest sister. “I didn’t know my own mother,” she told me. “I screamed when she tried to hold me.  I thought Sister was my mother, I guess.”  Never did she outwardly admit that as the fourth living child in a family of ten that she had to scramble for table scraps, to suck the meat from a chicken neck, eat a sliver of cornbread in a mug of buttermilk as her only meal. Nor did she ever know that prolonged malnutrition within the first year of life causes higher anxiety, egocentrism, and lowered sociability in adults.[4]

Instead, she told stories about the people she said were “really poor”—the displaced families of The Great Depression, who traveled in droves through Texas. If the stragglers neared the family farm, my great-grandmother would feed them.  Sometimes twenty people would eat off the same chicken. A pan of cornbread could feed a mob.  As a small child, Grandma sat in the barn loft and watched the men huddled around a campfire in the yard while sucking chicken bones. Off in the distance, the women either crowded around their own fire or clustered together trying desperately to get a new mother to release the long-dead baby she clutched to her chest. The men ate because when the work came they’d have to be strong enough to do it. The babies and women starved. She told me how repulsed she was, how she would never be that bad off. 

 *

On the evenings when we sat down to a proper dinner, Grandma’s attention was often elsewhere, sometimes on the television but more often she simply held a far-away gaze almost as if she was in a trance. She lit a cigarette and let it burn nearly to her fingers before realizing she’d done it. Then she’d light another and puff away. At the time I was grateful for the silence—could concentrate of the luxury of the food on my plate. But as I think about those evening meals, I recall that she hardly touched her food. Instead, she let the silence consume her, thoughts of her past, her family, their East Texas farm. Or maybe she was worried about us, the fact that we might not have money for the next bill or the next. And maybe, that led to regret, fear, and anger,[5] because on those glazed-over evenings she would, eventually, become furious and stay up late into the night cursing something, someone. And, eventually, she’d come around to “dirty, filthy men” and the husbands she’d left. And, eventually, The Leather Jacket Man.

The Leather Jacket Man wasn’t his name, it was the name I gave to his story. She never told me his name, never fleshed out his appearance or lineage or any love he may have felt for her in return. He was a boyfriend from her early teens who rode a motorcycle. The Depression had ended and the country was booming from war-industry jobs. Oilfield and mill towns burst with people from all over the country. One of them was this much-loved man, the one she wished she’d never let go, the one who could’ve given her the life she wanted. He was the one she spent years regretting.  She told me, “It was the smell of his leather jacket.  The way the noon sun fell on a jagged fence in the middle of that field beyond the barn.  How it felt like he squeezed my heart.  Into a tiny fist.  That’s it, mostly.  But you can’t convince yourself, no matter how hard you try, that a man will deliver. When you’re young you want everything fixed right away. You want someone to do that.  So. Sometimes where the heart goes, the mind just won’t follow.”

          I’d then listen to her talk about running away from her tiny family farm, not to marry The Leather Jacket Man who brought her cotton candy and half-melted ice cream cones from the tiny town mercantile, but into the arms of a man twice her age who lived in a nearby city.  He bought her pretty clothes but she claimed, “He never touched me.”  She ran away from that husband to work on the riverboats of Lake Pontchartrain. She met a woman with the last name Moneymaker who took her on trips to Chicago and New York.  Eventually, she became pregnant with a married man’s child and cuckolded another husband. Her second illegitimate child got her run out of The South, all the way to California, where she married husband four or five.  But always, she came full circle to that first love, the motorcycle she rode while wrapping her arms around his waist, resting her cool cheek against the warm leather jacket.

          Now that I’m an adult, I understand why creating me as A Good Girl in the way she did was so important to Grandma. It was an attempt to save me not just from myself, but from her past. Perhaps to keep me from the pain she must’ve felt for the majority of her life. Her external behavior masked a serious internal, mental deficit that began with childhood hunger[6] and went unnamed for the entirety of her life. Her depression shaped me more than anything that went on behind the walls of The Big House.

 *

          I never thought Grandma would consciously not eat.  Even if it was simply potato chips and cigarettes and Coke, I was sure she’d have enough. But after I left home, she quit cooking and actively starved herself to pay the mortgage and utilities on The Big House.  When her alimony payments dried up, she sold most of her antiques and slept on a narrow couch in the den near the front door because she was afraid of intruders in the night. Her mind began to slip, her memories escaping like ravenous field mice. Eventually, she sold The Big House and moved into a retirement complex.  She’d call me from her small apartment and leave message after message about how sick she felt, how her back and head hurt, how she wanted to move back to The Big House.  I equated this last comment with a threat of suicide and didn’t know what to say when I returned her calls. I tried to get her to talk about her family farm, The Great Depression, The Leather Jacket Man, until one day when she scoffed with indignity and said, “What the hell are you talking about, a man in a leather jacket? I’ve never ridden a motorcycle in my life.”

          Perhaps if she’d been born after The Great Depression, or not been left by her mother, or if she’d acknowledged her own suffering beyond nostalgia, Grandma might’ve escaped her own mind, perhaps she wouldn’t have become so physically frail that the wind seemed to whistle through her bones. Or if I’d been stronger, been able to handle life without a father and mother and food on the table, she never would’ve bought The Big House and instead she could’ve bought groceries and fed her memories with more than ghost stories and nicotine. Perhaps then she could’ve continued to remember The Leather Jacket Man instead of losing him, too.  

 I have a sepia-toned photo of Grandma in her late teens, the years of The Leather Jacket Man.  In it, she seems happy.  She’s plump-faced and sitting on what looks to be a veranda, on a stone bench near an iron rail. A mural of palm trees is painted behind her. I can see why so many men loved her—big eyes and full lips.  I have no idea where the photo was taken because it was given to me after her death by her brother, who came across it from an old friend.  The friend had the photo for over fifty years and claimed Grandma had given it to him.  I think of this nameless, faceless old man as the young leather jacket lover who held the photo for years, even during his own marriage, recalling a time in his life when he was happiest.

That photo squeezes my heart thinking about the loneliness that then-happy girl would grow up to face. 

In the photo, she looks just like me, or I look like her. The resemblance used to throw me into a panic where I feared I was doomed by blood and circumstance.  For the majority of my adult life, I’ve struggled with the depression that began in my youth. At times it consumes me so much that I cry for no reason. On my way home from work, I’ll turn down a road off of my usual route, pull over to the curb, and simply stare out into the sky.  It causes me to run to the store for more groceries. I finally realized, after a particularly long bout of depression where I hoarded not only potato chips but also laundry detergent, that I needed help. When I approached my doctor, I thought of Grandma and her far-away gaze at the dinner table. I told my physician, “I’ve been thinking of killing myself.”

Nonplussed he said, “How long have you had these thoughts?”

“Since I was thirteen.”

He frantically scratched on a prescription pad and encouraged me to seek out a psychiatrist. That was eight years ago. And every night, when I take my little blue pill, I remind myself that the past, this depression, is a dangerous thing. I can’t forget to take the pills, to fill the prescription, or my afternoon sky gazing will become too much. I’ll seek out the nearest closet and use my own belt as a noose.

And I think of Grandma, and her regrets. Of her past spread all around her like a field of wheat at harvest time. As far as the eye can see are decades. One loaf of bread grown from those crops initiates a series of memories, some ending with abandonment, starvation, and pining.  And when she wasn’t careful, an entire field left her crying into her bone-light hands. 

Just before her death, Grandma wrestled with days of mania, forgetting where she stored her towels, soap, coffee. She accused her neighbors of stealing. My mother took her to the grocery store and made sure her cabinets were overstocked.  But she forgot to eat. And the lack of food allowed her mind to fade even further into depression. When I remember her now, she’s sitting at the glass-topped table of the tiny kitchen in her last apartment, not the huge looming kitchen of The Big House.  She drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes, and though there is a full plate before her, she doesn’t eat. Instead, she stares in silence through the large window at the clear blue sky. As if she’s waiting for The Leather Jacket Man and the return of the time when he made her forget her poverty. As if the fields of her memory are full of nothing else but him and something intangible she’s always hungered for.

---

[1] Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff, and Sabrina Tavernise. “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle Census.”  The New York Times. November 18, 2011.

[2] DeParle, Gebeloff, and Tavernise. “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census.” The New York Times. November 18, 2011.

[3] “For the poor, cigarettes a salve for hunger pangs and mental woes.” Philadelphia Inquirer. November 11, 2013.

[4] Galler, Bryce, Zichlin, Waber, Exner, Fitzmaurice, & Costa. “Malnutrition in the first year of life and personality at age 40” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health. 2013.

[5] Trafton, Anne. “‘Hunger Hormone’ Linked to PTSD: Chronic Stress elevates ghrelin, increasing susceptibility to fear.” Technology Review. January 1, 2014.

[6] Galler, Briyce, Waber, Sichlin, Fitzmourice, & Eaglesfield. “Socioeconomic outcomes in adults malnourished in the first year of life: a 40 year study.” Pediatrics. June 25, 2012.

Staten Island: You Get What You Don't Vote For

...in 2009, Staten Island had a population of 491,730 residents of which 76.9% were over eighteen years of age (according to the US census bureau)...that means there were 378,140 potential voters living in Staten Island in 2009...

...roughly 70,000 registered voters in Staten Island cast ballots in the last NYC mayoral election...if we use 70,000 as a benchmark for the number of Staten Island residents who vote in a typical local election, 5.4% of people are determining who runs the city...

...so 5.4% of people are deciding how the city is run...

...i recently came across a news clip of protesters in Berkeley shutting down part of a freeway and the BART to show solidarity with their Staten Island brethren protesting the grand jury decision to pass on an indictment of the police officer who used a choke hold on eric garner...i love a good protest...especially if it'll shut down a branch of "the system" that is "broken":

...i don't love traffic...nor do i love the common practice of the police murdering citizens...but i fail to see the connection between stopping traffic and stopping the abuse of power...

...a protest march on Washington is in the works...fantastic...but i wonder if al sharpton and the rest of the organizers wouldn't mind reminding their protesters that a grand jury decided not to indict the officer...grand jury members are selected from the general populace of registered voters...

...additionally, most cities in america hold local elections for positions like district attorney...dan donovan has won four Staten Island races...it was his "office" that failed to persuade the grand jury that the officer should stand trial...

...so to use my perfect math and wonky hypothesis on voting trends: 5.4% of Staten Island residents have voted for dan donovan four times...the other 94.6% of potential voters have been content to let that happen...in the case of eric garner--and any other people murdered by police--you get what you vote for...or, for Staten Island residents, you get what you don't vote for...

...i realize protesting gets press...i realize there are no sound bytes when we vote...it's illegal--within 100 yards of a polling place--to carry signs or wear controversial t-shirts that make grand statements about candidates or issues...but if you're willing to stand in the middle of a freeway and stop traffic because you think "the system" is letting you down, you should be willing to stand in line to vote to change that system...there's probably less of a chance of being hit by a car doing the latter...