Blog Post #7: Orbiting Izzy

Opposites attract. It's an undeniable scientific fact. The positive end of a magnet is attracted to a negative end and vice versa.

But, sometimes science has its exceptions. And, even though the rule is that opposites attract, sometimes opposites are just too different to truly be able to coexist for long.

For my English class, my professor, Cynthia Pittmann, assigned my group to read another excerpt from Wally Lamb's Couldn't Keep it to Myself. The first story read from this book was Hair Chronicles by Tabatha Rowley and spoke of a woman's bad decisions before she landed in prison.

Nancy was all kinds of trouble

But the most recent story, Orbiting Izzy, didn't detail a woman's life of crime before she wound up in legal troubles. Instead it took on a more novel approach by following a woman's life after she had served her term and the hardships she found when she tried to reintegrate to normal society.

Nancy Whitley was a woman that was very much aware of how illegal the things she had done truly were. And she didn't try and deny how she had come about a dishonest lifestyle. If anything, she was accepting of how meeting Aldo, her dark and mysterious lover, had put her on a course of life that had landed with her in the big house.

Nancy wanted only the finer things in life. No matter what.

Still, one of the reasons why Nancy is so interesting isn't because of her life of crime. Her crimes were of a rather subtle and rather uninteresting nature when compared to things like murder and kidnapping: simple credit card fraud. Of course, it spanned over quite some time and gave her a monetary status that left her with just about everything she ever wanted, but it feels to me like a rather unassuming crime.

No, one of the reasons this short story felt so new was because of the focus on her relationship not with her trouble-making ex-husband, Aldo, but rather the one with a dull, seemingly uninteresting man by the name Isadore Weintraub. Or, as she calls him, Izzy.

The dynamic between Izzy and Nancy is rather interesting. For the first part, there's the visual ques. A short, nerdy, fat middle-aged man standing beside a tall, beautiful, busty, and well dressed woman proves to be a very stark contrast between body types that would intrigue anyone. And then there's the fact that, not only are these two characters complete opposites in physical looks, but also personality wise.

Nancy was fire while Izzy was water. She was likely to burn you if you got too close, yet Izzy was a calm and serene individual that barely did anything exciting.

The Chinese philosophy of yin and yang speaks of opposite forces actually complimentary to one another. And that, surprisingly enough, one may even give rise to another. In essence, order within chaos and chaos within order.

These two characters brought out the hidden opposite within themselves. Nancy brought out Izzy's playful side, all the while Izzy brought out her responsible side she never thought she'd ever find. They were good for each other. Until Izzy mistook their friendship for romance and everything went down the drain.

Unaccustomed and ill prepared for Izzy's feelings, Nancy did the only thing she could think of. She fled her responsibilities and went back to Aldo. And this wound up with her in jail once more.

Although Nancy most probably learned her lesson after her second visit to the big house, there was a song that kept playing in my mind as I read. I'm usually a very empathetic person and I believe in second chances. But I'm not all that big on third chances once someone has thrown away their chance of reforming their life.

Hopsin is a rap artist I'm not all that familiar with. I've only really heard one of his songs and it's the one I placed in the square above. Although from just this song, I am able to deduce that he is the kind of person that doesn't sugar coat any of his beliefs. Many people won't like that. A lot won't agree with what he says. But I have to admit that there is something admirable about not trying to tone down one's beliefs just to gain acceptance.

The reason why I place this song here is because of a specific piece of it that had me thinking on Nancy. If one were to skip ahead to 2:42, they'd hear a verse of decisions and making them. And Hopsin makes a point of showcasing that we are all responsible of our life choices and we should not make excuses for them.

Nancy didn't try to tell us that she had made mistakes nor that it wasn't her fault. But she didn't own up to them either. And she continued making mistakes simply because she didn't want to adapt to a new life. And this is why I thought of this song most of the time I was reading this interesting short story.