Salon.com > Jennifer Miller

Interview With My Bully: The bully who asked me out

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My prep school may have been home to the offspring of politicians, federal judges and national media personalities, but first and foremost we were teenagers. And so in the spring of 1998, my class gathered in the school library to plan our senior prank.

“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.

“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.

I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”

I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed -- a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

After Arafat

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 20:06:00 +0000

Yasser Arafat's gravesite is effusive. The plot is an explosion of color: a garden of flowers and rose wreaths, of ribboned banners from around the globe proclaiming respect and sadness for the deceased Palestinian president. A mausoleum of glass shields the site from weather, and three guards flank the grave day and night, keeping stern vigil over their patriarch. At the foot of the site is a Quranic verse: "God will give victory to believers."

Though the gravesite, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, aims to exalt Arafat, it is a lonely place. Arafat died on Nov. 11, 2004. Three months later, on the afternoon of my visit, I saw few mourners. Those who did come paid their respects to the rais, as Arafat was known, and then drifted away, as quick and quiet as ghosts. The grave's location adds to its isolation: It's tucked into a far corner of the Muqata, the Palestinian presidential compound. The Muqata, the former British military headquarters from the old Mandate days, is an enormous expanse, but a virtually empty one. In 2002, after a series of Palestinian terrorist bombings killed dozens of Israelis, the Israeli army reoccupied Ramallah with the goal of destroying the city's terrorist infrastructure, smashing the Palestinian Authority and isolating Arafat. This incursion, part of a massive military campaign in the West Bank code-named "Operation Defensive Shield," destroyed most of buildings inside the Muqata. Today only two modest structures remain; the rest is pavement. Operation Defensive Shield marked the beginning of Arafat's confinement: After it, Israel forbade him from stepping beyond the front door. In this sense, Arafat's grave is as isolated from the life of Palestine as the Palestinian leader was himself during the last two years of his life.

Dragonfly’s demise

Thu, 01 Mar 2001 20:12:00 +0000

My mother rode a Harley 45. And so did her mother before her. In matching Motor Maids of America uniforms, on light blue bikes with broad tires and a kick-start "that sometimes kicked back," they roared through the hills of rural Kentucky. Perhaps it is genetic that I now long for the challenge, the freedom, the risk that a motorcycle offers. But where do I put my kids?

It's front and center for me right now, the issue of where I put my kids. My son's preschool is closing this week. This is the second day-care center I've lost in three years, and will be the fourth to close in Berkeley, Calif., in the past year. Naturally, this comes during the last three months of my dissertation writing, so that, at a time when I am completing the hardest task of my decade of graduate school, the last hurdle before I can finally enter the workforce and leave grad student wages behind, I'm suddenly without child care, as are the parents of 32 other children.