Have you ever wondered what your “thing” was? That “thing” that sets you apart or, rather, plunges you into a group you didn’t even know you were a part of and didn’t even know existed? If you have and, I guess, depending on what that “thing” is you probably felt relief or disappointment. I think I felt both but relief seems to be prevailing so we’re going with that.

I have always been into the more, shall we say, dark side of life. Not to any real extremes at least in my own mind. I enjoyed my half-shaved head, eraser burn scars and black nail polish, sure. Let’s put it this way: I was, for a time, a fan of Nine Inch Nails but never was able to get on board with Marilyn Manson. Does that clear it up? It didn’t for me.

When I settled down, when I married my husband and when I had my babies, I felt pieces of whoever I thought I was slipping away. You know what I’ve come to find out? the pieces had started slipping long before that. Somewhere along the way I stopped knowing who I was or what I even ENJOYED other than going out and being social. I lost my connection to me. I can remember complaining to my husband who seems to always be pretty secure with who he is and what he wants in life. I would whine about not having a hobby or anything interesting that was just mine. Nothing I could identify and something interesting about myself. This went on for years.

When I was expecting my second baby, I needed something to keep myself distracted (I’m NOT a patient person). The news was full of stories about this murder case with this woman, Jodi Arias, on trial for brutally killing her boyfriend. It caught my interested and after several click-throughs, I was on a YouTube channel where they were broadcasting the court proceedings in real time. I. WAS. HOOKED. The case was fascinating and she was bat-shit crazy so I couldn’t get away from watching. I come from a long line of ambulance chasers and this was like a slow-motion car wreck.Man, that spring and early summer flew by watching the case unfold. Little did I know it had brought something to the forefront that had been there all along. I wouldn’t realize what that was until the child I was still creating was well past potty trained.

Early motherhood didn’t lend itself to book reading very well and until my kids were a little older I had pushed reading way down on my priority list. When I finally emerged, I knew I didn’t enjoy novels as much as stories that were based on something true and my favorite were real-life murder mysteries. I wandered into a Barnes & Noble and was embarrassed but asked my friend who worked there where in the non-fiction I could find books about people who killed other people. He didn’t flinch. He immediately took me to a section I had never heard of called “True Crime”. What the ever-loving huh? There is a SECTION for people like me?! Step one was accomplished.

When we moved to Austin and discovered Half-Price Books (*swoon) I was a woman on a mission. I started devouring books. The only problem was that when life got busy it was easy to justify pushing the books lower on (or off) my priority list. Well…two moves later and although I kept buying books, I wasn’t getting through them. Still, in my head, it wasn’t something that set me apart. Everyone loves True Crime, don’t they? I mean, it’s not like people actually enjoy fiction is it? Hmmm…

Last summer, I was watching TV with my brother while he was visiting from out of town. I think there was a Forensic Files on or we were watching the Ted Bundy Tapes or something- I’m foggy on the details. My brother or his girlfriend (again, can’t remember) said they listened to podcasts about True Crime on their drives. I had one of many “I’m getting older” moments and finally admitted I didn’t know how to find podcasts. I thought they were all on one app and you had to pay for it like Netflix and I just couldn’t justify another service fee. Then he showed me that there about about a zillion FREE podcast apps out there and even gave me a few True Crime shows to start. I got right to it and gave 4 different shows a good 2-3 episode try. I was hooked HARD. I enjoy different things from different podcasts but my favorite that I have insisted on listening starting from episode one and going in order? My Favorite Murder. I fell for them hard, ya’ll. I am a Murderino. The more I realized that there are a ton of people out there like me interested in True Crime the more I wanted to connect. I looked for groups and there were a ton! Some fan groups based right here in my area. I knew what I wanted to do.

I have never ever belonged to a book club- reading loses priority so quickly or at least it did. I found a way to remedy that problem- be the one to START a book club. The responsibility of putting one together and setting up meetings and organizing one made it my new baby. New babies don’t go down the priority list. So I asked the person in charge of my local fan group if I could ask members to join my book club and she gave an easy “hell yes!” I now have my own book club with 29 members. We’ve met twice and meet again next week. We come from all walks of life and are all ages and shapes. We have one really great thing in common- we love to talk about murder and True Crime and it sets us apart in other groups but in this one it brings us together!

Just the other day my husband pointed out to me that I had finally found my “thing” and he was so proud of me for going for it and putting myself out there. I hadn’t realized it was truly my “thing” but it so is.  True Crime is my “thing” and you better bet I’m proud of it. Does it make me dark? Maybe. I needed a little edge as a middle-aged mother and wife. I mean, I do love a good conversation about Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. But I like to think that makes me Nine Inch Nails… not quite Marilyn Manson.

Is anyone still out there? It’s funny (not ha ha funny) when you consider yourself a writer and then realize you haven’t really done any creative writing for at least three years. Better late than never? I don’t know. I feel so self-conscious about my inability to drag myself out of a block that I couldn’t put anything down…for years! The $$ that comes out of my account annually for a blog I don’t write in has been my penance for not staying true to myself. It was a reminder of things I didn’t like:

#1 Leaving Austin was hard. Why have a site named “Austin Annie” if you aren’t actually IN Austin anymore? I don’t regret any of the chapters in my life but my year and a half in that city was wonderful albeit too short. Next time I find myself in my early twenties with no children and a large disposable income I’m headed back for sure!

#2 I STILL wasn’t in a career that I loved. I jumped head-first into a new job and it was so much fun learning something completely new. I can find something to enjoy about any job I’m in and I’ll do just about anything to move our family forward. LOVE isn’t a word I would use to describe a place I never truly fit. Not really.

#3 Returning to life of part-time work and full-time identity crisis was a wake-up call that nothing had really changed. In the four years since my life-changing move from home and life-changing move back my personal battles were sadly quite unchanged. I know I did some growing up and dealt with my grief while I was gone, but who the hell am I? I still had no idea.

 

My solution? Counseling. I’ll say it again for the cheap seats in the back: COUNSELING!!! I am finding out so much about myself. Did I know I was a people pleaser? Yep. Did I know that I had developed an aversion to changes in plans and any type of disorder? Kind of. Did I know I have a hard time liking myself…I mean truly LOVING myself? Nope! I hadn’t realized how much I’d lost touch with who I was and the little girl inside me who has been along for this whole ride.  She still has a fire in her belly and a playful, adventurous heart. Going forward, I’m going to take care of her. I need to get her out in the open air more and not listen to the hesitations and influences that hold the two of us back. This should be fun! Someone should write about it…

In my last post I said my next book would be A Prayer for Owen Meany. Well, as soon as I cracked it open and read the inside cover I realized it was the book that the movie Simon Birch was based on. I just finished reading The Help and didn’t want to read another book that I had already seen the movie for…at least not now. So, I reached for a book my husband had just finished on the death of Matthew Shepard. What really drew me to this book is the fact that it is written by his mother. That automatically means more to me.

This book couldn’t have come at a better time. I had just finished a three-part series on my other blog “Good Grief” about my sister’s death and had been called out for being too harsh or mean to my sister for being honest about her choices and ultimately their terrible consequence. Someone close to me thought I needed to be more reverent about the way she passed and wanted to remind me that I may not know the whole story. While that’s true, I know enough and I’m entitled to my feelings and my choice to share those feelings. Being the person I am, it bothered me that I had upset someone I love. I started reading back through and second guessing myself about how I chose to post the whole thing. After a while I came to realize that bloggers face this scrutiny every time and if I wanted to feel like a legitimate blogger, it was bound to happen. No love was lost with the person I had upset; I’m good at fixing.

I tell you about my other blog to bring up one thing I absolutely loved about this book. Matthew’s mother shares about the son she loved completely but guess what? She didn’t leave out the less-than-great details about his life. She told the little ugly truths that we as a whole like to brush over. He had problems. He made bad decisions. When he passed away he didn’t know it yet but he had HIV. When I read these things she said about her son, I didn’t take them as her attack on his character, but more as her bringing him down to Earth for us all to relate.

Too often when people die and WAY too often when their death receives a lot of media attention, people tend to begin to speak about them as saints. I know I’m guilty of it. I’ve done it when talking about my dad or my sister, neither of whom were perfect. I know it used to drive my mom crazy and I couldn’t see her point. Yet another moment of clarity when I realize my mother was right. Dang! So now that I have a shared perspective with Matthew’s mother and my own, I think it’s better for all to explain how real a person was rather than sugar-coating their life for a frilly little story. Relationships are messy, real, gritty and raw. Life is all of those things too. Why bother writing about the tragic death of your son if you plan to make it soft? Luckily, she didn’t do that. Any good mom will tell you honesty is the best policy.

As I finished this book this morning, I felt angered. I was mad not because of the way it ended, with an optimistic look at really making changes in the future of the LGBT community, erasing hate and acts of hate through education and awareness and putting children first. I was angry because when this book was published, we were finally seeing the progress these efforts were making. Finally there was a more accepting world being formed for our children to grow up in and finding their voice wouldn’t mean making sure it was an “acceptable” voice first. What an exciting time it was to think that we may be able to agree that all should be allowed basic human rights. But flash forward eight years and look what we’ve done.

Now, I didn’t and don’t intend for my blog to be political. I am beyond pissed that talking about allowing all to have basic human rights and protections is “choosing a side” in our newly fucked political climate. This is why I am pissed. Why was it so easy to erase all of the progress that people like Judy Shepard have been working tirelessly to make? Why did people gravitate to someone who wouldn’t hesitate to call someone a slur and send the message that it was acceptable to do so? Was there that much underlying hate still running through the veins of this country? Is it hopeless to keep fighting and to stand up for what is right? What can I do- me as one person?

I get that for some people it really was a choice about one issue, such as abortion or gun control. What I want to ask those people, though, is how can you be okay with all of the other shit and the shithead that came along with that? What kind of message to you want to send to the young kids still trying to figure out who they are and struggling with perhaps being homosexual, or minority, or female or anything else our country’s “leader” seems to be fine putting down? How can you be fighting for suicide prevention and simultaneously stripping an entire category of people of their rights, dignity and security?

While my final feelings were despair and frustration, so many things about this book spoke to me. I cannot imagine what it was like to cope with the loss of a child in such a brutal way while also being bombarded by media, well-wishers and the devil himself in the form of the Westboro “Baptist” Church. How this woman made it through is a heroic tale of the choice we’re all faced with (often more than once) after we lose someone to something tragic. We’re faced with the choice to fall down or get up. The choice to get up is made almost every day at first. This woman was brave enough to share her sorrow with us all. It is definitely worth reading.

 

With this review, please keep this in mind: I am fighting a cold and feeling scattered. I just wanted to get this one out there because it was very provocative for my mind and my emotions.

I have read eight books this year so far. Of the eight, I have deemed five worthy of my mention and reflection. The only problem is, as my loving husband had brought to my attention, I start forgetting little details within just a few days of reading these books. I have total mom brain. With that in mind (for at least a moment), I either plan to re-read or at least re-browse the other books I’ve wanted to review but didn’t get to in time. Like I said, I don’t want to just review books on here. Should I used the word review? It’s more like telling you how it made me feel and the one I finished yesterday brought out all the feels. It wasn’t pretty, right husband?

The Devil’s Highway is a very blunt, straight forward recounting of what happened in the Arizona desert in May of 2001. It. Was. Horrible. As usual, if you want the specifics, you’ll have to read it yourself, but I will tell you that an inexperienced “guia” or “guide” was placed in charge of crossing 26 men and boys from Mexico into the United States, took them into a desert, got lost, wouldn’t admit to the men that he was lost, marched them during triple digit heat while running them out of water, took money from them and left to find help leaving them to die while he neared death himself and survived to go to prison for the deaths of 14 that had trusted him. There were so many mistakes, near saves and tragedies at play in this situation that it would have been easy for the author to become so passionate in defense or accusation of one side or the other but he maintained a pretty straight forward explanation.

That’s what you’ll get for me as far as summing up the topic. Now on to the meat of this. I’d rather talk about how this book made me feel. Fair warning: I am a “bleeding heart Liberal” so I tend to believe that all should be treated with dignity. These people who cross our borders aren’t all criminals as certain “presidents” not elected by me would have you believe. It’s just easier to shove them around like cattle if you don’t know they belong to families who have just as much a claim to humanity as we do. I know, I know. Pinche snowflake. That is me.

I’ve decided that I don’t ever want to be nice to a company executive for a large company. I’ve done the corporate ass kissing stuff before, but I think I’m done. They are as responsible for ruining people’s lives as cancer. Maybe worse. Let me explain. I once worked for a company that had a lot of money. The top person in Marketing owned an island in Belize. An island. The scary part? She probably thought she deserved it and earned it! When I met her, I was on a business trip and making somewhere around $12 per hour. Each year of hard work and dedication I was given a 3-5% raise. That was all my immediate boss was allowed to offer me. I walked out of my yearly review able to afford…wait for it….a brand new tank of gas! (that’s spread over 4 weeks each month) I know I shouldn’t have, but I looked up bonuses for the people at the corporate level and stumbled upon her bonus that year. It was a million dollars. That’s on top of whatever her ridiculous salary was already. Did she earn that? Really? The worst part was us at the ground level of the company scrambling to make ends meet and being told constantly to cut expenses. I can only imagine that’s what made companies move factories that were people’s livelihoods in Mexico to China because it was cheaper. These families that already survived on very little now had less. I am guessing the companies that left Mexico due to “overhead cost cutting” still paid their top people these absolutely disgusting bonuses. I want to know who really needs to own eight cars, two planes, five houses and an island. A flippin’ island…it kills me to this day. But I digress…

Did you know that most of the people in Mexico that cross the border aren’t from the border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, etc..? They are from further in where there are limited resources and the north is a romantic idea to them like an old western movie. There are entire crime businesses set up to feed on these poor souls. They want a better life for their families and being paid $4 per hour under the table in the US will afford them those improvements. The crime bosses send someone to sell them on the American “dream” and even dole out loans to make it easier for them to say yes. Think of a used car salesmen who knows that many who buy his cars will die a horrible death because the product he’s selling is total crap. The salesman could care less if you live or die once you drive off the lot- you gave him your last dime already.

This book makes me panic. When I was in high school, I drove a truck that often had a giant water tank in the back to haul water to my horse. I want my truck and my tank right f-ing now. I want to drive to the desert and search for dying people who were treated like shit, lied to and are now dying without seeing the family they are trying to help ever again.

I want to get involved. I don’t know where yet, but I want to help. I feel like the people who see this horror of people dying trying to cross the border every day become hard to it. They don’t mean to but wouldn’t you? I can see it happening because, as my hubby pointed out, it’s a job. We all get tired of our jobs sometimes. We all get so deep in that we become complacent with the little details. If you work in a museum, do you really appreciate the exhibits every day? Do you get tired of the same things getting people’s ooooohhhs and aaaahhhhs every single day? I bet border patrol gets tired of people like me who read a book and demand that something be done. I guess I don’t care if they are tired of it though because I’m talking about human life not museum exhibits. I need to be involved in a solution. Figuring out where is the issue.

My favorite person in this book is the lady who works at the Mexican consul. She is the one who turns these “bodies” back into people. She returns them to citizens, gives them names and faces and families. She makes sure they are treated with some dignity whether they are alive or dead. She’s my favorite and I want to shake her hand. Ok, who am I kidding? I’m a hugger and she’s probably earned millions of hugs by now.

I am moving to the border in 10 weeks. My immediate plans are to make myself start using the Spanish I already know and brush up on my conversational skills. I have a feeling I’ll need them down the road. I also want to talk to as many people as possible about how to get involved. I want to research jobs and groups that are making a difference. I don’t doubt that it will get political for me. It already is! I will find my role. Until then, I’ll keep learning.

As a country, we’re experiencing this new wave of acceptance for racists. We have people so jacked up on anti-immigration B.S. that they probably don’t even understand it- immigration is just bad now so why bother educating myself? How did we become so tolerant of intolerance? We should be ashamed. Some of us are. What are the anti-immigration war mongers really afraid of? The author of this book makes some excellent observations from way back around 2003. Illegal immigrants don’t exactly hurt the economy. The definitely aren’t “taking all our jobs”. Would you work for $4 per hour picking oranges? Probably not. But they are using their pay to buy our products, rent our apartments and houses and even pay our taxes. Do they get a tax return? They even pay a fee to send money back home to their families. How are we losing? True, they may cost us in unpaid healthcare and such, but I would be curious to see how the numbers actually stacked up. Not curious enough to stack them myself, but I would definitely pay attention to that report if it came from anyone but Fox News.

I know this one was choppy and strayed off course a lot, but that’s what happened to me as I read this book too. I went between trying to solve the problems of the world and thinking about politics and pinche Donald Trump to thinking about my own family and the sadness that this tragedy must have put in the hearts of the families who had to go to the airport and watch their loved ones caskets arrive on a plane from el norte. I got sick reading about a father holding his young son and watching him literally cook to death before dying himself. And that whole trip was just to come up and pick some oranges to afford cement and aluminum to expand his house a bit as a gift to his wife. That is tragic. Being lead on what you were told would be a two-day hike at night and then being forced to walk for days in the middle of the day and heat and sun basically in a giant zig zag with no hope at the end of it is tragic. And yet, more come. Why? Many reasons. I know it’s hard for us in our larger than necessary houses with all our unnecessary creature comforts to comprehend this: sometimes it’s just worth the risk for these people- they don’t know our definition of comfort. I would venture to guess most of those reasons don’t include wanting to inconvenience Americans, either. Having crops harvested for half of minimum wage doesn’t benefit Americans…right?

Was it worth it? I’ll leave you with this. This is written on a sign facing south for those crossing north into the desert with their guias:

For the Coyotes Your Needs

Are Only A Business And

They Don’t Care About Your Safety

Or the Safety of Your Family

Don’t Pay Them Off With Your Lives!!!

 

But these men did…and their Coyote lived. Tragic. This stuff happens all the time.

I found this book at a Half Price Books store here in Austin- incidentally it is my absolute favorite place to go on a date when someone has the kids.

Ted Conover did an amazing job of putting me in the middle of his stories just as he had. He is the kind of journalist I admire; someone who actually lives the life he is trying to learn about. In this book, that life is the life of a Mexican migrant worker. These men risk everything just making it across the border and then work their fingers to the bone for barely enough money to send home while they constantly worry about when Immigration is going to show up and deport them. We already know this happens, right? We’ve heard countless stories in the news and television shows telling us about all these people trying to cross the border. We have the convenience as Americans of tuning it out when we want to. Ted changes that. He goes beyond common knowledge and humanizes it. I feel now that I know these men personally and I wish I could meet each one of them. I feel like they are my friends too- we’ve been through so much!

What Ted Conover did was immerse himself in the culture. He did his best to blend to the point where he was sneaking across the border to his own country illegally. He paid coyotes and got cheated out of money. He ate or didn’t eat with everyone. Not only did he live among the men he was trying to understand, but he had the keen sense to figure out the effect his presence had on every situation. He knew that a group of Mexicans would not immediately trust a blond white guy to cross the border with them. He must be working for “La Migra” (immigration). How he was able to convince them he could be trusted is beyond me.

If any of you get a chance to read this book, I highly recommend it.

I just decided the above review of the book was terrible. It sounded sterile and boring and I’m not exactly sure how to fix that. (I’m taking Coursera classes to help fix that issue). I will, instead, tell you what this book made me think about and how it made me feel.

I am a Montana girl, born and raised. I fell in love with my Texan husband and I married into a Mexican family. I will admit, at first my understanding of what that meant was shallow. I wasn’t around any traditions and aside from overhearing one side of my husband’s telephone conversations, I really didn’t see that understanding deepening any time soon. Then we had a baby. I grew up proud of my roots (German, Irish, English, Spanish-Basque…ok so I’m a mutt). Now I had to understand my child’s roots. Don’t get me wrong, however shallow my understanding of the Mexican culture was, I was in love with it. I found myself asking more and more questions.

When the opportunity presented itself for us to relocate, I was pumped. Here was my chance to immerse myself in the culture even more. I would spend more time with my family and I’d be speaking Spanish better than in my four years of high school in no time right? Wrong. Life got busy again down in Texas and we were too far away in city life to be around the family and culture long enough for it to stick.

When I read Ted’s book (in my head we’re on a first-name basis- that’s how his writing makes me feel) I felt ashamed that he was able to accomplish in a month or two what I’ve been trying to do for 7 years. I felt a renewed sense of urgency to jump into everything that I love about the family I married (because I married all of them when I chose my man) and really try to be one of them- just a pastier more sun burnt version with a little less desire for menudo (*groan). I’ll try and actually speak instead of just listening and understanding 50-70% of what I hear. I’ll do it even though I have found that school book Spanish and daily use Tex-Mex Spanish aren’t the same thing. Telling my husband I had to go “duchar” brought many a laugh- I was just trying to say “shower”! Ted inspired me-I can make more of an effort to jump into this family even further Irish wit and wisdom AKA sarcasm seems akin to Mexican attitude and outlook in many ways.

A plan is currently in the works for a more full immersion into the culture- but that will be a blog unto itself. Look for that one coming Summer 2017.

I’ll leave you with this bit of Irish wisdom translated poorly (by myself):

Una mujer, un cerdo y una mula son las cosas más difícil a enseñar.

A woman, a pig and a mule are the hardest things to teach.

…let’s hope it’s just some Irish asshole’s saying and it isn’t true of this woman.

Cheers! Salud! Slainte!

 

Have you seen the movie Good Will Hunting? My guess is most of you have seen it by now. The reason I ask is because I started taking courses on the website Coursera. How are these related? Read further to find out.

Now listen, I am fully aware that Coursera has great information but may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you aren’t familiar with it, go check it out. For me, being at home all day with a toddler, having limited funds and working at night are not conducive to attending actual college. Coursera is kind of like going to a university and sitting in on random classes around campus. It’s education dabbling, if you will. Sure, you can pay the money to receive “Specialization” certificates, but where are those useful? It’s not a degree and I haven’t seen a single job posting that required a bachelor’s degree or equivalent certificates. I browse the classes and find the free ones loosely related to what interests me. I’m cheap like that- see the above “limited funds” statement. $49 buys groceries for a week, people…*grumble

For months now, I have been coming around to my renewed desire to finish a degree. Thousands (millions?) of “non-traditional” past/future students such as myself face the idea of going back to school with a long list of doubts:

-Will my decade-old credits transfer?
-Do I remember how to do basic math?
-Should I be parenting young children if I can’t do basic math? (oops-different list of doubts!)
-Can I afford to take time away from “normal life” for this?
-Will my husband secretly regret telling me he would work while I go to school?
-Is it worth it for a piece of paper? (I know it’s more than that-relax!)
-What the hell am I getting myself into?

Ok, so everyone’s lists may not be exactly like mine but still- close enough, eh? So, back to Coursera. A few people suggested it as a way to kind of try out a bunch of different that I have thought at some point would interest me. I looked at it and decided to give it a go. I started in what I thought would be a good jumping off point- a class called Learning How to Learn. I loved it! I passed it with a 99% and enjoyed every minute of it. I could totally learn this way- by being interested in a topic and taking a class to learn more about it.

Here is my dilema: Would you hire someone with the knowledge needed to do the job but no degree? Why or why not? College is so very expensive. Would a person who (paid the damn $49 and) received a Coursera “specialization” in a field after taking classes from professors at Duke, UC San Diego and other amazing schools be someone you would hire? Or would you rather have someone who did things the traditional way? What about someone WITH a bachelor’s degree but from an online school? I’m really asking this. I would love a few comments on this post- pros and cons of each. Doesn’t (shouldn’t) it all boil down to retained knowledge and ability?

This post is incredibly scattered which is an accurate representation of my brain at the moment. Austin Annie is reading books and taking free online classes to wake up her dormant brain. What should my next step be? Help!

In the meantime, I am going to be taking these classes because the brain is a muscle…and my other muscles will have a post of their own coming soon.

Thanks for reading!