April 21st, 2025 - Jenny Annie Fanny Addie
Dear TNY,
I’m on time and “Jenny Annie Fanny Addie” has got me fired up to talk!
Well, I was on time. Then some friends came out for dinner and I didn’t have time to publish this day of. Apologies.
Firstly, I’d like to explain why I was so late with last week’s entry. I went a-traveling and it ended up in work. I was in Portland on a visit but that visit, in a matter of days, erupted into an opportunity to do some woodwork in an older transit bus on a razor-sharp timeline. So, here we go again, I’m whisked away from Portland to Tacoma to grab tools and then to Walla Walla where I bartered for space to live and work (TBD on payment for that, but it starts tomorrow with timber-framing). And I just worked straight through until the project was done, which was yesterday, all the woodwork complete, but then the bus broke down and I fixed it and now it’s being piloted back to Portland, in shape for the sell, and I’ve gotten about half of this day off from work, couple of faps at the ready (y’all know what I mean), and now I’m writing this to you. I was occupied, okay? Things were afoot. And I lightly placed the needle at the end of my tonearm onto the groove of this record and listened to the song it wanted to play. And that’s moving me forward. I’ve got some building to do this week but then I’m in the wind for a fortnight until I land in Grand Junction again, on the second of May, one more job complete and two more jobs scouted, and I can sit pretty in an edit that’s heading my way (I got my 25th story picked up in ten years of writing!), and I’ll attend my youngest’s final concert of this school year and then my oldest graduates. GRADUATES! All of this is happening so fast and…I’m in love with being alive. Right now I feel it. It feels like I’ve made a lot of hard, right choices and those have led to paths that have or will fulfill on the promise I saw in them. Which is crazy because I love YouTube Shorts and all the dopamine rush of flipping through immediate gratification, but my life goals have longterm pulls, particularly in parenting and relationships. Who knew? Life is crazy.
As for this story?
Okay, it’s a dude writer. And I know I’ve read work by him that I enjoyed. This piece is short. And it’s…provocative. So, I can’t say that what he wrote is an accurate or even remotely realistic mindset that a girl would have, particularly at a young age. I can’t speak to the authenticity of an event like this described as it was described in this story. This is a world beyond me.
With that being my prologue to the following, I’d like to say that this story seems to have been written with the intent of posing some questions to the writer and to us at large. I adore (at this point in TNY reviewing) that the story was short. It moved swiftly, but never left me behind nor did I feel like I didn’t have enough information. Where my beef was was in regard to the MC’s level of human understanding at an age. I don’t recall on first read what her age was. But she seemed young. Right around 12? I don’t know. So it seemed like the questions she was having internally were very fleshed out for someone that age.
But that’s it. That’s my main quibble. Because the questions, regardless of whom is asking them and why…they are fucking relevant and super interesting and I was way in. Like, I forgot to be mad at this story for being the scaffolding around the purpose of this piece, which is the questions. Again, maybe these aren’t real questions that happen in a girl’s or a woman’s mind after an incident, or the mind of anyone after an incident. I don’t fucking know. But they sure seem relevant and relatable and fucking realistic. I was thrown back to Baby Reindeer from this story, when he goes to tell his dad (honestly, I could pick a million times in the show where he froze in the headlights and was vulnerable with the audience while it was happening about how it was the wrong choice, etc) about the incident and his dad said: Would you see me as less of a man?
WOULD YOU SEE ME AS LESS OF A MAN?
Fuck my face, guys.
We have all these inner prisons. Fear of judgement. Shame. Being lesser. Etc. Or, in both Baby Reindeer and this story, narratives based on others’ experiences and/or feelings being placed on us. It’s all so hard. Why can’t we be more kind? Less compartmentalizing? More accepting?
The answer is what this story was talking about. Shame, embarrassment, humiliation. And here it specifies where that comes from. But it could come from anywhere. Traditionally passed down. Or self-imposed. It doesn’t matter. The end result is more acceptance. Less judgement.
Anyway, I like this story and I’m going to read it again. This week. Because it’s short. But it also asks some fucking important questions without accusing men, who are the predominate perpetrators and have done terrible things, of being outright monsters who cause all problems.
Alright. Eviscerate me.
Nick
