My friend made art with my feet
Posted on December 13, 2013 Leave a Comment
Check out this killer digital collage print my girlfriend made out of my old MRIs and X-Rays.
Who knew something worthwhile would come from jumping feet-first into a three-foot pool, underage drinking a handle of Svedka and spending senior year of high school in a wheelchair. Click here to see more insides of people/crazy good art/her pretty face.
A letter from my mother to my mother at age thirteen
Posted on December 13, 2013 Leave a Comment
Found in her grammar school autograph book. Written circa 1967.
“Luv ya, myself” gets me every time (and I have no idea who Rita is).
“One pubic hair is stronger than the Brooklyn Bridge” and other things I heard this weekend
Posted on December 12, 2013 2 Comments
Sunday night, my childhood friend-turned-college friend-turned-forever friend and I rode the subway home from a weekend spent keeping up with college. Revisiting our old stomping grounds and senior friends coming up on their last semesters, we were met by rain, snow and shame as everyone around us celebrated some semi-formal/the last full weekend before finals. We, on the other (old) hand, were just basking in a much-needed break from the “real world” and Fireball’s year-long reign as Iona’s drink of choice.
Somewhere in between the Danza Kuduro dining room dance session, a shot of rum/paint-thinner from somewhere un-American and two visits from the cops (one of which placed more cops in the house than there were actual people), we felt at home. Sure, it hurts a little more waking up on a couch at 22 with just your jacket as a blanket but at least we weren’t this guy:
Reminiscent of October’s Homecoming blackout, we spent the weekend double-fisting Bud Light Platinums and mixed drinks that dance along the line of legal limits, Saturday morning reserved for bougie brunch. We pieced together our Fridays sipping sangria as Shannon told us all about the throat she said she’d slit and the girl who called her basic by calling out her center-part. That night we took an oath to be the oldest in the bar (not counting the townies), put our backs against the wall and danced like the world was ending. Unlike Homecoming’s 4 a.m. phone-in order to the diner from bed and the barefoot trip out the door, in the car and up the stairs into the diner that followed, I ended up housing a cold slice of Specs pizza while a townie two tables down called us poor.
“Yo, we’re fighting about hopscotch here,” said one random to our complete confusion and Ryan’s complete lack of self-restraint. We were busy having our own fight about a Jamaican beef patty.
The weekend gets weirder.
Rewind to Friday, post-drunken family photos at the first bar, mid-bathroom trip at the second as we’re scolded by our favorite bartender for breaking her number one rule about bathrooms.
“NO MORE THAN ONE IN THE BATHROOM AT A TIME,” she yelled six or seven times, my girlfriend’s ass still pants-down and firmly planted on the seat – door wide open. Like a disappointed parent, she promised she still loved us and swore she’d never send us packing. We were given a “get out of jail free” card so she could see how far she could push our livers, Instagram our reckless rendition of “American Pie” and ban Brendan for (likely) life. What started as a pregame-party called “family cookies” with one too many games of “Fuck You Pyramid feat. wine” (everyone fucking Jen) had led us here — and we wouldn’t have had it any other way. This was a signature senior Saturday with friends turned family (best friend-bartender/seductress Silkie included).
We left long before closing time but friends that braved the bar a little longer say her parting words at 3 a.m. were, “You know, one pubic hair is stronger than the Brooklyn Bridge.”
They all agreed and called a cab. They’ll be back next Saturday.
Fast forward to Sunday night, my girlfriend and I en route to reality. The R-train doors opened wide at Atlantic Avenue as we silently regrouped to welcome a wary train guitarist with dirty hair and perfect timing. Cue the acoustic cover of Green Day’s “Time of Your Life.” We looked up, glancing first at him, then at each other. We broke our five-stop silence only to ask, “Is he fucking kidding?”
A letter to my 18-year-old self
Posted on December 6, 2013 3 Comments
Originally published by IonianNews.com on December 5, 2012. One year and one day later, these life lessons still strongly apply (although I’d also suggest wearing flats to senior formal).
Dear Meaghan,
Mazel tov, high school is over. Somehow you managed to make it four long years in gray man-pants and itchy knee socks. Congratulations, you survived an all girls’ high school and years of awkward pre and post-pubescence. Now you’re off to college.
It’s early August and in a few days your six or so bags will be drastically over-packed and you’ll be en route to New Rochelle. Don’t be scared. It looks a lot like Brooklyn, minus the brownstone stoops and the ethnic dollar stores. The streets aren’t numbered so just remember Chauncey comes before Coligni and if you hit KFC, you’ve gone too far.
You over-packed because you’re overcompensating for years of uniform. Don’t worry; you’ll get the hang of dressing yourself—and your roommate is on her way from Albany with a full-sized wardrobe.
That same roommate will become your sister and you’ll be forever thankful your childhood best friend chose Iona too. The suite of three you’re placed with freshman year will quickly evolve into a pack of ten girls you brave sketchy frat parties with and call your best friends. You’re going to fight about cleaning and clothes and things that don’t matter, but you’re going to love each other unconditionally. Try not to let that fight you have over Red Mango get to you. They’re still your best friends come senior year (and everyone ends up fitting in the car).
Take your finals seriously, especially second semester. Your first-semester grades are going to scare the living hell out of you. Consider this a lesson learned that studying doesn’t equal up to the amount of trips you take to Deli Mart in a one-hour cram session. Be grateful. Deli Mart won’t be 24-hours forever.
You’re going to get an awful haircut prompted by a boy across the hall telling you “you won’t.” Try not to panic. It grows in pretty nicely. Remember not to jump at every “you won’t” because sometimes you just shouldn’t.
Sophomore year you will date a nice, tall boy on the Pipe Band and you will fall head over heels in lust and love. He’ll introduce you to new music, the movie “Elf” and his family. Brace yourself. You will break up, think the world is ending and sit back and watch as all of your roommates fall in love and stuff. You’ll find refuge in the school’s gym you never really knew was there and you’ll write more. You’ll find a new love in yourself (and Verizon DVR).
You will make it to 21, and you will be happy. You’ll meet plenty of boys and make more friends than you know what to do with.
When you’re 20, I’ll thank you for never going to Tropicana. There will be one night you almost go but you’ll be halted by a $40 cover charge because the “Jay Z of mariachi bands” is playing. The friend you’re with will try to haggle the bouncer but he’ll lose with only half the shame you felt agreeing to go to Tropicana in the first place.
I’ll also thank you for never dropping out, setting fire to your apartment or losing your debit card. You will chip your front tooth at Beechmont and run out of off-campus money every single semester.
Call your mom. Every day. She misses you and she misses dad. Sophomore year, she’ll learn to text. Look past the all-caps, she gets the hang of it junior year. Save her voicemails and always say you love her more.
Don’t forget your Brooklyn roots. People are going to ask you if you’ve ever shot a gun and why you don’t sound like Steve Buscemi. That will keep happening. Chin up, you’re in Westchester now.
Remember your friends back home. They’re the ones who loved you even when your hair was pink and you quit Girl Scouts to pursue your “acting career.”
Most importantly, keep writing. That pit in your stomach when you declare your journalism major will disappear once you see your name in print. You want to spend your life writing, trust me on this one.
The next four years will be spent questioning your talents, your religion and yourself. Trust your instincts. Take a mental health day, or week when you need to. Befriend the boys across the hall. Go on scavenger hunts and take late night trips to the diner. Miss the 1:52 train and sleep on the floor of Grand Central Station.
Make it count. You’ll be fine.
With love,
21-year-old you
Face to face with Ground Zero
Posted on November 27, 2013 3 Comments
Amidst the papers, the photos, the holiday themed snow globes and a lone Hilary Duff caricature, my childhood home left behind a bevy of sentimental offerings when the second of my two parents passed away. From birthday cards and divorce papers to love notes — handwritten on computer paper from one parent to another, not a stone was left uncovered and not another memory told to wait ’till I’m older.
Buried five feet below full sets of golf clubs, high-end sports coats and unwrapped pleural catheters was one department store envelope of developed disposables. Inside that silver sleeve were 30-something photos taken from the floor of Ground Zero on (what I can only assume were) the days, weeks and months following 9/11. I can only figure that my father was the man behind the $13 dollar lens, but I never got the chance to ask.*
Butchie, as all of the borough knew (and loved) him, was one of thousands of iron-workers willingly placed in the line of duty that day. Scared of snakes but not of heights, Butchie was forever grateful to serve Brooklyn Locals 40 and 361 (as long as he could still get his 18 holes in on Sunday). But for the days, weeks and months following 9/11, tee-off waited. Day in and day out, my father pulled from rubble twice, three times and ten times his size, looking for bodies. Looking for the floor. Looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Just 12, I never stopped to ask about it and, even in the years that followed, I rarely even stopped to think about it.
And yet, I still remember what I saw that day.
I saw a classmate, peering out from our fifth floor window at the New York City skyline, instead of at his SIMS math test. I saw teachers fight to keep their composure and students choke back tears as they discerned that this classmate wasn’t crying wolf. I saw the panic in my mother’s eyes as she struggled to keep tabs on my father (though, only years later would it truly register). I saw the aftermath from the old-school television set in my upstairs bedroom, my best friend to my right and her younger sister to my left. I saw that same friend’s mother hold mine in her arms, both with one eye on the cordless phone.
I didn’t see dad ’till the next morning and, only years later would I know just how much he saw.
It was this very day and the x number of months to come that left my father gasping for air and draining his lungs anywhere from two to four times a day. It was his work at Ground Zero that left him clinging to life just seven years later. Like thousands in his shoes (or beat up work-boots, rather), he succumbed to asbestos-triggered Mesothelioma in August of 2008.
If I’ve learned anything in the years since 9/11 (seven of them I was lucky enough to still have my father for), it’s the weight of an “I love you,” and the importance of “How was your day?”
Also, that he wouldn’t have regretted a thing.
* From what I remember, photography was never his forte. If anybody has any additional information about these photos or the people in them, please contact me at mcgoldrickmeaghan@gmail.com.
Also featured on Huffington Post Women
Live and let hoard
Posted on November 24, 2013 3 Comments
Yesterday, a handful of friends and I came face to face with a dozen donuts, two pizzas and a two-story house that was no longer mine.
Somewhere in between the initial assessment and Sarah unintentionally rummaging around in the ashes of my dead cat, we came to terms with my mother’s incessant hoarding. From decade-old magazines, high school uniform order forms, a bootleg copy of Stuart Little 2 and the Furby I’d hoped was burned at the stake, my mom kept it all. In boxes that were in boxes in other boxes.
By the five-hour mark, a friend was knee-deep in the horrendous hoarding that became my parents’ room (literally), a mess he only conquered by standing atop the five-foot wreckage like a king.
I use the word conquer very loosely.
Eight hours in, I needed air. Maybe it was the dust but let’s call it a moment of clarity. Not only was I (newly) rich in ugly sweaters and multi-colored windbreakers, but I was (always) rich in friends. The friends that offer shelter when life comes crashing in like the movie Twister. The friends that pocket those fifth grade school pictures because your bangs are crooked, you’re posed with a tree and there’s a spot for it on their fridge. The friends that narrate every single diary entry they find, up to and including the digital Dear Diary (sup 90’s) and your first “story-book” that’s really just a composition notebook full of hand-drawn volcanos and things that could (maybe) pass for people. They alert the masses of every new picture found of you in a hot pink snap-back and a shirt that says “DON’T FEED THE MODELS.”
They ask before throwing anything away, just in case that “2 Cute 2 Fall 4 Boys” book has any sentimental value.
They make this whole “being a 22-year-old with no parents and no home of her own” thing a little less terrifying and a lot less painful – and they do it while wearing your mother’s hot pink windbreaker.
Thirty-something garbage bags and three coffee runs later, we said goodbye, jamming every Staples-bought box of fine China and cringeworthy pictures into our parent’s old cars. Here’s (just some of) what we encountered:
- This portrait sketch of Hilary Duff:
- A Magic 8 ball that told us the chances of us ever finishing were “ask again” and “not likely.”
- One third-grade science fair poster-board, complete with this star hypothesis:
My hypothesis is that leaves change color by how much it eats. I think it’s becaase of chorphyll. I picked this project because I wanted to know more about leaves.
- Pictures like this:
- And this:
- Proof (in acid-washed bell bottoms) that I once wore a size 3.
- Proof that my mom was half a size 3 in 1975:
- A full-size fishbowl for a fish we never had. Eventually it became a 50-pound aquarium full of loose change mom had left everywhere from the floors to the insides of picture frames.
- This picture of me circa 12 in a crop-top with bangs and swimmer’s ear:
- And this one of me as a model:
- An unopened bottle of Irish whiskey hidden in a suitcase full of only golf balls.
- Records like “How to Keep Your Husband Happy” and the West Side Story original score.
- Above all, this hand-written letter to NSYNC signed in gel-pen that was read aloud (twice):
At eight years old, a journalist was born, singling out stars like J.C. for knowing how to drive. Why I reserved my personal info for just Joey, I’ve yet to figure out.
At the end of a long, hard, dust-ridden day, mom left a light at the end of an embarrassing tunnel. While we cursed her habitual hoarding which, by the way, she hid remarkably well, we tugged at heartstrings that hadn’t been touched since those photos were taken; since burying Coronas in the sand at sixteen and receiving communion in an all-white tux. We laughed, we cried and we cried laughing.
Just one more day to thank her for.
In defense of thighs that touch
Posted on November 22, 2013 2 Comments
A good friend once asked, on the 90 degree side-streets of a spring break in San Juan, why my legs chaff.
I stopped walking, mostly to let my thighs gasp for air, but also to bite back, “because I am appropriately proportioned and a moderate size.” On more than one occasion during that six-day shit show, I channeled my inner Lena Dunham and openly applied diaper rash ointment to the highest, most inner parts of my thighs (spoiler alert: they touch). Let me be blunt about the Balmex. I did this so publicly that I’m pretty sure I was sitting on a monument – and the image of it was my best friend’s wallpaper for weeks.
On November 5th Chip Wilson, company founder of Lululemon, said (out loud) that their pants “just don’t work for some women’s bodies.” What that really means: it’s our own fault the brand’s $130 size 12’s wear down and Wilson would rather us take our thunder thighs somewhere else…like Khols, or KFC.
Maybe the Staten Island mall.
On November 9th, one very brave chaff-er (chaff-ee?) took to the Internet in an open letter to Lululemon on behalf of women across America whose thighs actually touch. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry wrote:
“Here’s the thing. Despite what thigh-gap thinspiration Pinterest boards would have you believe, most women–nearly all women–have thighs that rub against each other. Especially when working out, which is what your clothes are presumably for.
I mean, my thighs touch, Chip.”
A few deep digs later, she went on to explain that the coveted “thigh gap” Tumblr takeover is only possible for women with wide hips – a goal most women would have to rearrange their entire skeletal system to reach. She closed with “Sincerely,” and all the moderately-sized women said “Amen.”
My Lululemon is Forever 21.
Very few things offend me more than 16-year-olds who wear Ramones shirts and the Bound 2 video. Even more offensive are larges that aren’t really larges and jeans that don’t run past size 30 – which by the way is my size – which BY THE WAY is the biggest size Forever 21 makes. Forgive me for forgetting the two size 31s swimming in a sea of 25s that, p.s., aren’t made for every pair.
Take it from a girl society deems big. I’m 5’2 with a 32″ waist and a G cup. My thighs touch and if I drop food, it’s probably somewhere in the crevasse. Clothing companies that confine women to a size no smaller than A and no bigger than B are even worse than those controlling boyfriends Catholic school girls watch PSAs about. Especially when the margin is so significantly small.
Big is beautiful and, God willing you don’t work near a Chipotle, still healthy if you do it right.
Don’t let Forever 21 be a bad boyfriend. Take every quote, unquote large with a grain of salt and remember someone, somewhere made that to be a medium. Break up with brands that don’t love you back and break up with the fucking “thigh gap.”
It’s not just playing hard to get.
On losing your virginity to the Used
Posted on November 21, 2013 Leave a Comment
I’m not sure what’s funnier: the fact that this actually happened or that sometime between 0:45 and four o’ clock in the fuckin’ morning, I almost asked to turn it up. Rock on. #tbt
Cancer can’t kill Kid Rock
Posted on November 15, 2013 2 Comments
I pack up what’s left of my adolescent bedroom, once plastered with poorly ripped pages of Seventeen magazine, high school horror stories and Sharpie, now a deep teal I had taken months to pick out of a catalog with two “grown-up” Home Goods boards full of precious moments (up to and including my 21st, 22nd and that night I slammed my head in the cab door). Also pinned to the panel is a three-year-old fortune that reads,
“Doesn’t this cookie look like a cunt?”
The words “Joyous Christening” hang by a string on the left-hand wall, gifted from two boys on my seventeenth birthday. A drum-head hanging from the center wall reads, “Tonight’s theme: Happy Birthday Meaghan,” gifted from the very same boys at an over-crowded basement sweatshop/birthday the following year. My armoire, broken since sophomore year Saint Patrick’s Day, is empty.
My suitcase isn’t big enough and I keep forgetting to pack the Keurig.
The last words my mother ever spoke to me were about a sponge-bath. They were over a 30-something second phone-call from the intensive care unit and she was only half-coherent. She told me all about her dirty hair and the nurse that called her “sir.” I bet her my life she looked beautiful. She said she had to go but that she loved me, so I said, “I love you more.”
Her last to me were “got me” and “goodbye.”
Our house is hoarded with the belongings of three or more generations of dead people, tucked away tightly like a game of Jenga in my (dead) dad’s room. I pull from the bottom of a heap what looks like a bag of boots and hope for the best. I was never any good at this game.
Cue the panic and the Jack.
When I was stressed at school, mom would send a shaky picture message of the $16 Amazon poster on my bedroom door that (un-ironically) read, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Last weekend, I kept calm and told cancer to go fuck itself (literally, it was written on a cake) at a benefit concert called “Cancer Can’t Kill Love,” organized by the best of my friends. Somewhere in between the sounds of my sweaty friends playing sweaty music with sweatier rock bands and the sweet, sweet sound of “Picture” by Kid Rock, I felt it. The warm, tingly feeling you get when you’ve had one (or six) too many jell-o shots which, ironically, is the same feeling you get when you’re in unconditional love with your friends.
A la Erin Conlon, the “always” friends. The ones who stood by you when you stripped your hair and got a buzz-cut. The ones who rubbed your back when you got so high you thought you were blind. The ones you drank in dug-outs with, pissed in driveways with and comfortably cried in crowded bars with. The new friends you know will be forever friends, and the old ones. The ones that will drop everything, drape a bar with streamers and cheers to your dead parents, all while simultaneously dancing the Cotton Eyed Joe.
The ones that celebrate her life, and subsequently, yours.
By 8 o’clock Sunday night I was 100 percent hammered and 60 percent asleep, overwhelmed by the six-plus hours of alcohol-induced intimacy packing out our usual hole-in-the-wall. That, and that “Picture” was playing again.
Today, I have 15 days to get out of this house.
See also: over a dozen pit-stained pictures set to the tune of “Timber,” a thousand somewhat dollars towards finding a cure and an army of friends that would’ve gone to war for mom, and subsequently, for me. Cancer can’t kill that.
On life, loss and our crazy, wild, drunken family of friends
Posted on November 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
“We’re already in our twenties and lost, let’s not get lost any further.”
Meaghan McGoldrick 