June 1994

I started getting disenchanted with The 700 Club, though I still watched it. One, I'd never quite gotten over Sheila Walsh's sudden disappearance freshman year. I missed her last episode because I could only watch occasionally then, and never found out what happened to her. (Years later, I found an article in which Sheila explained why she left. It was supposed to be an extended hiatus while she dealt with an illness. Now, she's a popular Christian speaker at women's conferences.) I had always feared her disappearing from the show and never coming back, just as a past co-host had done (Teri Meuwssen). Besides, she was such a bright point on the show, and she made it fun to watch. If Pat was gone, they might put on this one guy that joked right along with her and made the whole show more fun and interesting. Whenever she went on vacation, the show was mostly dull. I didn't know if she died or got fired or left to concentrate on her singing career or got fed up with Pat Robertson's ideas on the equal rights movement or what. I knew she said once, on the air, that she thought the women's movement had done a lot of good, not just harm, that it was a good thing that women now had more career options. After all, though I don't think she mentioned this at the time, she was working outside the home. She had a singing career (I loved Shadowlands and Say So), and was, obviously, working on what she called The Club. According to Wikipedia, she left after depression and "ideological differences" with Pat Robertson led her to change her life's direction and get a doctorate in theology.

Two, there was a controversy in the news and columns at this time, either spring or early summer '94, about a southern school board or committee trying to get its school system to teach history that focused on the white contribution to history and showed the whites as always good guys. I read an editorial in the paper about it, and I could see why this was a bad thing. After all, white people aren't the only ones to contribute good things, and they've contributed bad things as well. If we don't recognize the contributions (good and bad) of all cultures, we won't be fully educated in history. And whites are relative newcomers in history. Until the Roman civilization reached its height, the biggest players in history were Mediterranean and Asian and North African. But on The 700 Club, they blasted the uproar against the school board's policy, and portrayed the curriculum as a good thing! Pat Robertson said something like, "What's wrong with teaching history that focuses on white contributions?" Their news report even showed an obvious bias toward the school board, even though they said they were the fairest reporters of anyone on TV because they weren't liberally biased like the rest of the media.

I told Phil how outraged I was over this, how I couldn't believe The 700 Club would defend the school board on such an issue.

Plus, well, there was that thing over Pat's predictions of who'd be elected president in 1992. I was waiting and waiting for the lovely day when Bush would be re-elected and I could laugh quietly over the people who supported Clinton. I knew it would happen, and I could almost taste the feeling of victory. But it didn't happen. Pat was usually right in his predictions, and his only explanation was, "I guess I missed it." It made me wonder what he really listened to--was it all God, or did he let some political desires get in the way of God's voice?

Phil's driving often got reckless. Back in the spring, my friend Carrie said once that he didn't seem to notice her, but he nearly ran her off the road when passing her or turning. Oddly enough, I usually didn't notice, but there were times when he did things that scared me--like taking both hands off the wheel and dancing around.

Phil claimed my red tabby cat Hazel didn't like him. I doubted this at first.

One day Hazel peed in a bag of mine. It was full of important things, and some of them were ruined. She was upstairs in my room, but the door was wide open, and she could have gone downstairs to her litter box. I had no idea why she did this. Nowadays, I wonder if maybe it was a protest that I was with Phil, and she didn't like him.

One cause of my headaches was removed. I got a wisdom tooth pulled on June 3. There were supposed to be two, but they could only find one. An old high school classmate worked there; when I first went to an appointment to see what needed to be done to my teeth, he saw my White Heart T-shirt, and asked where I saw them. I'd seen them in Whitewater; he asked if I was from Wisconsin; I said I went to college there; he may have asked how I ended up in South Bend, and I said, hey we used to be in German class together! Then he started to recognize me. I now discovered he was a Christian, which I had never known before.

It was awful--on the side where they did exploratory surgery and found no tooth, it hurt the most, took the longest to heal, and kept "seeping." I had to use Listerine, and kept waiting for the stitches to dissolve. It felt like the doctors had opened a hole in my sinuses where none should be. As for the surgery itself, I had been afraid of pain, but a moment or two after they pricked my arm with the anesthetic, I was out. I didn't dream or anything, just totally blacked out until after the surgery was already over. Then I woke up, groggy and nauseated, cotton stuffed in my mouth. Mom took a staggering me to the car and then home, where she put me on her bed. I stayed there most of the day, nauseated, eating soup because I could eat no solid food yet. Phil sometimes came in to visit me, but much of the time I slept.

The next day, I felt a little better, but still icky.

I read Interview With a Vampire by Anne Rice. It's a good, intriguing book, but gory. I had to skim over some parts, but some others I just couldn't stop reading. After that, I read The Thorn Birds--which, surprisingly, was also a bit gory at times.

Phil's first summer job, selling satellite dishes for cable TV for country homes, had the potential to pay $100,000 a year. Just a couple of promotions would do it, so he considered not going back to school in the fall if he did well at the job. He seemed like the type of person who could be a salesman. We thought it would be a good start for our marriage for him to have such a good-paying job, but I still hoped that one day he'd pursue his dreams of being an actor. If I never saw him act again in a play or anything else, it would be a huge loss.

We had a little birthday party for my dad on the 5th. He was 56 now, and trying to tell us he was 32.

"What does that make me?" I said.

"Chopped liver," Phil said.

Actually, I would turn 21 on the 22nd. I didn't intend to start drinking, though. I wasn't raised to drink, and the stuff was stinky and unappealing. Besides, even if I did, Phil couldn't join me because he would not be legal for another six months.

When I left for the summer, I thought, Next year my friends and I will say good-bye for good. Some of our friends already had. But as it turned out, my friends and I did not say good-bye for good. We still keep in touch and try to see each other whenever we can.

My Senior Writing Project was a novel (Jerisland) which I started in 1988 or 1989 and wanted to finally finish. I told a pen pal that for romances in my stories, I liked to match the main character with another character I liked. It's fun to be in control of that in stories. On TV or in the works of other writers, the matches aren't always the ones I would make.

Phil kept coming home and saying that his name was on everybody's lips at his job. They kept saying how well and how much Phil was doing. Yet he had to spend a lot on his transportation and clothes, they didn't reimburse him, they only paid him if he made a sale, and he made few sales. So finally, after maybe two weeks of working for them, he quit. When Mom told my brother Jake about it, she said he finally came to his senses.

He found another sales job soon after, selling Kirby vacuum cleaners. Mom hated them, and now Phil was selling them.

This job depressed him. One night, as he and my mom were alone in the kitchen and he ate a late dinner (as usual because of his hours), he seemed close to tears. I think his employers treated him a little better, compensating for gas and such, but he thought none of the other sales people in his group liked him. He stayed there for maybe a week.

June 13, 1994. The South Bend Tribune came before anyone got home from work, so I was first to see the headline: OJ Simpson's ex-wife and "her friend" had been murdered the night before. This shocked me, but OJ himself was not under suspicion (as of yet). I read the article (or articles--there may have been two) all the way through. For the next few days, I paid attention to any news I heard or read. That was enough for me. But soon, the news media got so enamored and saturated with this case--and the suspicion of OJ as the murderer--that I couldn't get away from it. It was too much, so I went into an anti-OJ news kick. I didn't want to avoid hearing news altogether; I just didn't want OJ to be the only news I heard. I think I was impressed with The 700 Club at this time because they gave it only a few minutes and then went on to the next thing.

Friday, June 17, 1994. On this night they showed cop cars chasing a white Ford Bronco with OJ Simpson and a friend in it. It was nothing but the cars driving slowly, never speeding up to catch up, because they didn't want OJ to shoot himself. Cars driving...cars driving...cars driving....Very little variation on that same theme, except, of course, when a radio announcer in a helicopter tried to get a message to OJ. What really annoyed Phil and me was we wanted to see Picket Fences on channel 28, but instead all we got was this annoyingly dull chase on every channel. We didn't have cable to escape to, since my parents took it out to help pay for college. We only kept the TV on because we hoped that any moment they'd stop showing the chase and turn on Picket Fences. We couldn't believe the "human interest" reports the next day that said people were actually riveted to their sets watching this dull chase! Or that they were even interested much at all anymore in the OJ situation, after the media oversaturation.

Phil chugged Mountain Dew and Pringles so fast that my mom made him start buying them himself. After he started at the factory, he began to put a pizza in the oven every night when he came home, rather than having my mom save him something from dinner. He had Little Debbie snacks for lunch and/or breakfast sometimes. His diet was so unbalanced and unhealthy that I think only his factory job could explain his thin, increasingly muscular physique. He constantly got nosebleeds; Mom thought he was anemic.

I got hungry by the time he got home, after 11pm, so I asked for a piece or two of the pizza each night. He complained at first despite how huge they were (probably large pizzas), but finally let me have some. But it started to make my stomach hurt afterwards. It seemed frozen pizza might not agree with me anymore. I hoped this wasn't the case, but it persisted.

June 22, my 21st birthday. It wasn't celebrated some mundanely typical way, like my friends taking me out to get smashed. No, it was quieter and more what I'd wish. I said if I got any special drink for my birthday, it would be sparkling grape juice. I didn't get that, but I don't think I cared. I did get a pleasant dinner at a restaurant. To my surprise, Phil gave me nothing, despite having a job, but gave no apology or explanation.

I loved Q101. U93, and every other Chicago and South Bend station which played pop, played Lisa Loeb's "Stay (I Missed You)" every hour or two. Even good songs can get on your nerves if they're played too much. But Q101 played it maybe once, if at all, each afternoon.

My favorite song that summer: "Shine" by, I believe, Collective Soul. I didn't care how much it got overplayed on U93. I told my parents about the line "Heaven, let your light shine down" to impress them with its spiritual content, since they hated rock music. Other good songs from Q101: "Millennium" by Killing Joke, "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (though I didn't like the lyrics), "Emperor's New Clothes" by Sinead O'Connor, "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan, "Everyone is One" by Godschild, "It's Over Now" by Cause and Effect, "Burn" by the Cure, "Insanity" by Boingo, "Come Out and Play" and "Self Esteem" by Offspring.

Soon after quitting his job selling vacuum cleaners, probably late June or early July, Phil found a job at a Mishawaka factory, second shift. Second shift in Wisconsin, he said, usually meant two to ten p.m., but in South Bend it meant three to eleven. (I think those were the times, but my memory could be a little off.) Since he now missed Picket Fences on Friday nights, he had me tape it for him. Whenever he wanted to see it he would say, "Ficket Pences?"

He wouldn't brush his teeth, wouldn't shower. When he worked at the factory, I begged him to get up so he could have time to shower and eat a proper breakfast, but he yelled at me, later accused me of lowering his self esteem for trying to get him up on time, rolled over, and deliberately slept so late (mid-afternoon) that he could only throw on his work clothes and scarf down a Little Debbie snack. When he came home, he didn't wash off the soot. Sure the full bathroom was in my parents' bedroom, but he could at least wash his hands and arms. The soot permanently stained his sheets, so I eventually had to throw them away. I asked him to please clean up when he came home; he did it, but complained about it. He neglected his worn-out brake pads, until I finally had to beg him and drag him out of bed--on the last possible day before he drove me back to school--to get them fixed. Though I asked him for reasonable things, he treated me like a nag. (By the way, hubby Cugan constantly praises me to me, his father and others for not being a nag. He says that even if I do nag occasionally, I do it nicely.)

On November 13, 1998, I watched a young woman on Montel tell her ex she hated him because he had physically abused her and cheated on her. She said one thing that was chillingly familiar: that she would get called many names--slut, whore, f-word, b-word, "and that was just to wake you up every day so you could go to work!" Phil rarely used profanity, but his yelling and putdowns were just as bad when I woke him up for work.

I wanted us to go to Sunday School together. He refused--no room for discussion--because he feared they'd try to "convert" him. I just wanted to go to Sunday School with him, and highly doubted they would try to "convert" him. Sunday School was usually a time for studying issues and socializing.

Since I went to church with him now rather than with my parents, this meant, no Sunday School.

One Sunday evening, the congregation (usually smaller for evening services) divided up into little classes in the Sunday School classrooms (I forget why--this was unusual). I was excited about it and wanted to go to one, but Phil refused to go with me. I said I didn't want to go alone. He said he didn't want to go, maybe for the same reasons he didn't want to go to Sunday School--avoiding indoctrination or confrontation? He said we should either leave, or he'd wait in the van for me as I went to a class. I said people would wonder why he wasn't with me. He didn't care. I got frustrated, and really wanted to go to a class, but I refused to let him make himself an object of my embarrassment by sitting outside in the van, and said we might as well leave.

In September, he would complain about us going to get lunch or dinner "just because you're hungry." (If I recall correctly, we went to meals not early but at a normal time or late. If I don't eat in a timely manner, I get migraines, and feel lightheaded and nauseated.)

Once, when I pulled out a heating pad (the fastest and most effective remedy for menstrual cramps), Phil said, "I hope you're not going to end up like my mom, always sitting on a heating pad." By the way, his mom had serious health problems.

I eventually began to wonder why I kept ending up with the wrong kinds of guys, when I specifically looked for the right kinds. I'd only date Christians, whom I expected to be godly men, but even the Christians ended up turning away from the faith or mistreating me in some way. I'd look for nice, sweet, romantic guys; I'd end up with guys who seemed that way at first, but could actually get mean. I didn't grow up in an abusive home, so why did I keep dating mean guys? Later on I began to think that I couldn't trust my own judgment, that if I found another guy I wanted to get serious about, I'd have to ask my friends what they thought of him first. Because of my learning disorder, I may have been an easy target for these guys, and easily fooled with my trusting nature; maybe they acted like what I wanted until I fell for them, then began to show their true colors as time wore on. My friends and family would dislike the guys early on, but say nothing; they'd start giving me their opinions after the breakup, and I'd realize they were right, that I'd been blind.