printersanonymous – Page 2

Why It Doesn’t Surprise Me At All That Mitt Romney Was a High School Bully

I was mercilessly and relentlessly bullied from the day I moved to El Paso and started second grade until I began junior high school for every reason imaginable.

I was an easy fucking target. I was tall and skinny, with paper white skin, auburn hair and hazel eyes hidden behind enormous coke-bottle old-biddy glasses, a know-it-all attitude, a penchant for books that were way over my head, and a Central/East Texas accent that, thank Jesus, is no longer present. I wasn’t athletic (no, ballet didn’t count as a sport) and thanks to my huge-ass glasses (really, hipster girls, you had to bring that shit back didn’t you?) the only sport I was good at – basketball – came with a sense of inherent peril. As an only child, I had no idea how to negotiate playful banter. I took everything personally. And I fought back in possibly one of the least socially acceptable ways possible — by cursing my tormenters in Arabic and Armenian. Yeah. You can imagine how that went over. Continue reading →

Turquoise and Gold: Everyone Loves Fairuz

I can’t tell you the first time I heard her voice- all silk and honey and orange blossom water- gently emanate from my parent’s record player. It was always there in the background, caressing the air around us as my mother rolled grapeleaves, or had sweet mint tea with company, or chatted on the phone with my aunts as I played on the carpet. It was just part of the atmosphere of my home. It’s quiet Sunday afternoons after church. It’s holidays and the smell of roast lamb or turkey- my mom and my aunt Sona dancing dabke in the kitchen together as they cooked. It’s their fond memories of a childhood in Jerusalem and vacations visiting cousins in Boorj Hammoud (the Armenian quarter of Beirut). And this is something they share with so many people of the Middle East, Christian, Sunni, Shi’ite, Druze… Everyone loves Fairuz. Continue reading →

An Open Letter to Kim Kardashian from the Ghost of My Mother

My mom was a tough lady. Born to genocide survivors from Turkey in pre-war Palestine and raised in the post-war West Bank she grew up with loss always on the brink, and a sense garnered out of necessity that one can make lemonade out of even the tartest, dirtiest lemons. She was also very, very ill from a young age, one of the first in her generation to be formally diagnosed with SLE (as opposed to “rheumatism”), but regardless of her life’s seemingly endless challenges, she went to school in the states, graduated Magna cum Laude, and was a highly respected linguist and speech pathologist. Along the way she married my dad- a schlubby, sweet Mormon guy (I know), and had me. So it goes.

She was also a bitch of the first order. A woman who inspired fear and respect. She ruled the household with an iron fist clad in a velvet Chanel glove, and made it a point of pride to stand any man down who got in the way of her or her husband’s success. Continue reading →