The only complaint I've heard about the widely beloved Wall-E is that it works by an easy, lazy "fat=lazy" connection, relying on society's long standing prejudice against the over-fat (that is the PC term, right?)
I have one quote for you: "(guy to now-obese Homer) Let me guess, computer technician? Computer repairman? Computer programmer?...something with computers!...Hhhm, I wonder what it is, must be something to do with the non-stop sitting and snacking..."
Only fat internet losers who live on Livejournal and Secondlife would complain about Wall-E being anti-fat. The movie is anti-consumerism, anti-junkfood, anti-sitting in a chair beind mindlessly entertained by television, low-quality corn-based junk food and advertisements for the same.
The only problem I had with Wall-E is that is is a virtuosic CGI product mass-marketed to huge movie theaters that make all their money off of 2000% mark-up popcorn, candy and soda.

Naming Problems

Well, it's official. Sarah Palin names her kids Gutch, Fanbelt, Trambler and Snake-Eyes--Her kids name their kids Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston (they would have thrown in 'IV', to make it sound more "classy", but at the last minute someone told them about the whole multiple generations deal, thus ruining their wacky zany baby-naming fun). If you give your kids weird ass hippie/GI Joe names (in short, the brand of stylized, misguided, CMTV sanctioned masculinity), they will flip out and return to a misguided notion of classicism that they've never, ever encountered before. It's so sad, the harder people try to seem like WASP's by turning their kids into advertisements (for their parents), the more it exposes them as (what WASP's label) hillbillies.

We saw the Revels today. The few times I've been asked to explain what "revels" are, I've always been hard pressed to answr, other than, it's what my parents take me to every year. It's a sort of Holiday, medieval, Christian/proto-Christian holiday pageant that's kind of the precursor to musicals, but with the dorkiness of Monty Python.
Even though, at least as my mother sees it, it's about pointing out the fact that a lot of Christmas traditions are "borrowed" from Pagan nature worship type junk, only white aging yuppie recumbent bicycle-riding Cambridge intelligentsia members ever go to it. Only WASPs with liberal guilt go to it. So even though it's ostensibly a paean to acknowledging our heathen past, it's got a sort of sanitized, safe feel to it, and this is in no small aprt due to the fact that every who goes to the revels looks exactly the same. The ladies are all short and squat in esigner glasses and jaunty scarves and brightly colored eco-friendly coats, and the men are all tall and gawky with balding shagg gray hair, dorky glasses, often beards, corduroy pants, sweaters and extremely practical Edie Bauer winter coats.

Weather

Weather is New England is always vague. It's sort of misty, cold, wet, but not really extreme in any o those diections. It's always between several etreme weather patterns. I never experiecned reall scorching heat, really freezing cold, or any weather pattern that lasted more than a short period before changing to somethign else. In other parts of the world,
the weather is more distinct; you'll see a huge white bank of clouds, and when it passes, the clouds are gone. In Boston you'd just be stuck inside a big wet gauzy field of humidity for days.
We don't have tall mountains, clear blue skies, bright blue water, or blazing hot sun. We have
short eroded hillocks, hazy skies, murky green water and mild sun gauzed in mist and clouds.

Teaching

I finally told my mom that I was thinking about becoming a teacher. I don't know why I hesitated. She and my brother spend so much time talking about autism and learning disabilities and teaching from the perspective of a learning disabilities specialist, I just felt like they would expect me to think about teaching in exactly the same way. They get on such tangents, and I just hae absolutely no interest in going that route. I think of children as students, not as test subjects. Or that is, when I become a teacher, that's how I'll look at students. I want to spend m time reaching people, finding out how they learn, how they think, and reaching them, rather than studying them as experimental subjects. I'm less interested in making a general statement about how such and such type of student learns than I am in finding an approach to reach particular students. I've always been a good one on one teacher, a tutor, and I can't think of anythign less interesting to me than studying education as a field. I'd hate to teach teachers; I want to teach students.
My mom was very supportive, fo course, and offered lots of good advice. She mentioned the iea of adult education, of writing as therapeutic exercise, and similar ideas. These were things I'd barely even considered before, but that suddenly struck me as being phenomenally interesting. This is sort of the way I've viewed every job I've ever had, as opportunities to see listen to people who've had harder lives than me talk about the ways they think, and the things they think about.

Unequal Partnerships

This morning Beanz wrapped the presents I had gotten for my mom and dad and wrote the cards on them. I got upset, because these were presents that I picked out for my family. They had nothing to do with her, she just took them over and decided how to deal with them. I often feel like she needs to be in charge of everything, and she asks me what I think only so she can play devil's advocate, to help her make up her mind. To me, this feels like she doesn't think I'm capable fo making even an arbitrary decision. I feel like her assistant sometimes, doing the menial tasks so she can make the important decisions. Whenever her decision had nothing to do with me, when it's a totally personal subjective thing that affects only her, she can't flip a coin without asking me what I think. What do I think? I don't. It doesn't even enter into my head. She gives me all kinds of superfluous information that I don't need and don't want to deal with. If something is not relevant to me, I choose not to let it enter my mind. BUT when the decision is large and affects us both, she charges ahead and does everything herself without even consulting me. I know she's just trying to help, to take care of certain things without bothering me, but it's like she's totally incapable of judging which decisions matter to me and which don't.

Text-ual Analysis (womp wah!)

I think these ads for a new texting device (is it a blackberry? I don't know what these things are or how they work) with a full keyboard, "So you can text it the way you'd say it!" To me, this is a total false dichotomy. Most of the people I know talk the way they text--they speak in such a stylizedly conversational ("casual") way, that listening to them I picture what they're saying as text.
Is this what people want? Something to help them transmit non-information to people who don't care what you're not-saying in a more detailed way? What's the fucking point?

Defining Shoveling Techniques

There's only one way to really shovel. You start as soon as you can bear it, as soon as the snow has started to settle. Shovel shovel shovel, getting as close to the cement as you can. Make a path from your front door to the sidewalk, and down as far as our building/house is. Then turn the shovel over and scrape the remaining slush until you get to bare pavement. You don't want to leave a smooth layer of hardpacked slush. Even if the snow hasn't stopped, you want to start early. It'll feel totally pointless, even impotent, because your work will get erased. The point is you want to clearly define the basic path, the borders of the fundamental channel that you'll be tying to get back to in the coming weeks, as more snow comes and your path gets covered again and again. It's always easier to get back to an almost perfect path than to dig through a general swath of slush and snow and define a path. You'll want a curved push shovel, preferably not too heavy, with a straight handle, and hopefully a straight bladed shovel for doing steps. Either way, you'll also want to have a stiff bristled, outdoor (or indoor/outdoor) broom. You can use the push shovel for the patio and sidewalk, and the brush for the stairs. If you're really ambitious, after you scrape the path, use the broom to really grind the snow and slush away. You'll feel really ridiculous at first, but in the next few days, if you start dealing with freezing rain, or even if it gets warm all of a sudden, the path where you got to the pavement will melt quickly, and the rest of if will gradually pack down harder and harder as you and other people walk on it. One year I scraped a tiny one foot's breadth path down my chronically heavy sidewalk, an the next day I found myself walking on a sidewalk covered with hard packed snow and a rivulet of solid ice running down the middle! Why, oh why did I work so hard? well, the next day the ice in the middle melted away completely and the rest of it stayed the same.

The One True Religion

I love this time of year, when people who go to church four times a year suddenly decide to get super self-righteous when anyone even begins to suggest that anyone might celebrate a holiday other than (OR in addition to!) Christmas.

Nip

The other night I left work and as I was trying to cross Boylston street a bus that was painted like the Partridge Family bus drove past me. There were strobing lights inside the darkened vehicle and people passed each other laughing and shouting, wearing party hats. The exterior of the bus said something about The 80's Station, or something close to that. I assumed it was an eighties radi station. A girl leaned out the window and shouted and unintelligible question, exhorting me to say something. I guessed and said Yes, Happy Holidays. She leaned back in, shouted something to the man next to her, then remembered to ask me if I was twenty-one. When I said I was twenty eight she tossed me a nip of Bacardi.
A few weeks ago I was standing in the Public Garden looking out at the pond, where the water slowly froze inward from the edge. I noticed a grayish blur in my peripheral vision. I assumed it was a small dog wandering over, but it was a squirrel. It hopped towards me in that weird, mechanical brush-like way they move, with their unblinking bulbous sidehead eyes goggling towards me. It snaked its way closer and closer to me. This happened once ebfore to me, on a coffee break at our summer job landscaping at Reed, where a squirrel just wouldn't leave me alone. It kept hopping towards me, and then, right when I started to think the whole thing was becoming funny...the squirrel leapt into the air and grabbed onto my calf. It's little claws were cold and prickly, and its body warm.

Food

I think all competitive eating shows should have a complimentary segment where a different host enjoys a reasonably sized and seasoned meal, a meal that is mean to be savored and enjoyed, rather than forced down to prove that someone could do something that no one else has done, to show the disparity of how much better in all ways it is to eat for satisfaction. I think it's appalling and offensive how fat white middle class Americans, who are so much richer and more privileged than the vast majority of people in the world, will make food, something that precious, into a chore, a lark, a gimmick, a notch.

One Note

Watching Kanye West perform live (on TV, at least) is indistinguishable from watching a music video, or an iPod commercial.

Dude. My landlord has been trying for weeks (months?) to get a carpenter to do some work on our apartmen, replacing the front and back doors and their locks, and putting a shelf into our closet and the pantry cabinet. After two weeks, he finally gets someone to arrive. Now, I didn't really think about how difficult or involving a job it would be to o all this. I assumed the doors would come fit to "door size", with pre-drilled holes, but I was wrong. The carpenter had to cut the doors to size, drill the hole and install the locks, and get everything in alignment so that everything would fit together properly. But dude has been here for ten hours and he's not quite finished. This also means my landlord has been coming in and out of my apartment. He's an interesting, nice guy, but he's very eccentric, mildly condescending and very nosy. He still thinks of our apartment as part of his house, like we're roomers in his home, rather than renters in one unit of the building that he owns. That's the double-edged cliché about landlord's who live in the building: he's always there (when you need him?)
Don't get me wrong, it's by far preferable to the opposite, the absentee landlord, which we had in Somerville. I just get tired of feeling like my landlord is my Aunt Dot, the relative that hovers over you, always with somthing midlly (but palpably) negative or bossy ("why are you doing it that way?") to say.

Blech

I've all but decided to become a teacher. I don't know what route I'll take to get there, but I think being an English teacher in an inner city school or a special ed teacher just about anywhere, would be more mentally stimulating, more personally fulfilling, more of a draw on my natural skills and more of a benefit to the city and the world than anything I can picture myself doing with the skills and resume I have now. I just started to wonder why it was I haven't tried harder to get ahead in publishign by schmoozing and so on, and I realiced that the people who work in publishign are fucking boring. They're just really generic office work jaggoffs who think about nothign other than vacation, having vendors pay for drinks at a party, getting a bigger lawn and retiring. How can you retire if you've never done anything? The people are so fucking ordinary, such a pile of generic, uninspiring morons, it's impossible to make myself imagine writing a resume that would appeal to such bland, one-note suburban retards. Middle-brow, pseudo-serious suburban materialists.

Viable

I'm beginning to really feel like I'm wasting my time with this pointless job. I used to feel like I wanted to have a good job that wouldn't interfere with my "other life", but I'm starting to feel so bored, so stultitfied by struggling to get ahead in a pintless field that has nothing to do with anything relevant. I feel like if I was a special-ed teacher, or taught English in a "troubled" neighborhood, like the one I live in, I would be exhausted, but inspired to the point where I wanted to actually sit down and write, as opposed to forcing myself to sit down and make myself write. Plus, the job market is so bad, and job security is starting to seem like such a joke, why should I hang onot such a retarded job? The people who work as editors and production specialists and so on are such unebelievably ordinary, generic dumbshits, it's almost offensive to me sometimes. They're sort of vaguely "artsy", but totally uninspiring. They're just run of the mill office drones who dream of nothing other than being higher level office drones.
Maybe my "other life" would only be improved by having a more consuming, exhausting, mentally challenging and stimulating job. I don't really want to work harder, having a more involving, consuming job if it means sitting around thinking about expense reports and the bullshit of making pointless textbooks for generic suburban white kids fiscally viable.

Hell is Other Cable Providers

Comcast is fucking satan! I hate those dick-lickers! Never before have I dealt with a company that builds more hidden fees, more astronomical prices, that abuses its almost total monopolization of a highly desired market, that changes prices more arbitrarily and refuses to accomodate the customers with the lower advertized price, that tries to dazzle you with numbers, acronyms and cutesy terms and then tells you, essentially, "Shut up and pay us. You think that sounds too expensive? Well you must be some kind of uneducated hillbilly. Pay me!"
Comcast is worse than Wholefoods. It's worse than Hitler.

Stet

I reappropriated a complimentary pen sent by a publishing company to someone who no longer works at my company. The company is called "Stet Publishing". A stet, I learned in my class, is a copy editor's mark that means literally 'Let it stand'; it cancels out the editor's mark in favor of the author's original word, phrase or punctuation mark. As if to say, "Maybe it would be better if you said '...' No, you're right, you're right. Leave it; never mind me!"
Naming your publishing company Stet is kind of like naming a driving school "Speed Through That Yellow Light!". It's a cute sounding name, but any editor would tell you the term implies over-eagerness, clumsiness, and lack of confidence. It's like a pornstar calling himself "The Premature Ejaculator."

Limits

I doubt I'll have time to apply to grad school for next year. Due dates for Emerson are January 5th. For some reason I thought I'd have part of the spring to take the GRE's, apply, get my references, etc. I hoenstly don't really want to do the program. I want to take classes, and I like the idea of being a student again, but I'm really just going back to get a better job. Really, I just want to start working on books. The sad thing is, at this point in my life I really ant to be an unpaid intern, but I don't have the choice. now I have to work for a living.
When I was in college, when you're 'supposed' to be an unpaid intern, I was so tired and mainly burnt out on the work I was doing, that I couldn't bear the diea of volunteering to learn mundane skills in a field I wa sonly midlly interested in. I was totally cynical, scalded on the idea of sitting around talking about books, writing about high thought and life and the world. All I wanted was to live a 'normal life', as according to
the stereotypes and concepts of the working-class people I knew, the kind of people who were made cynical by lack of opportunity, as opposed to the people I knew, and to myself, who were made cynical by a surplus of opportunity, by being told by our parents ot just find ourselves and do what we thought was important. In the past, the people we idolized (maybe idealized! I typed that by accident. Freudian slip!) formed their concept of what was important by the limitations placed upon them.

This has been a weird week. Work was canceled on Monday due to an electrical fire in an underground cable running through Backbay in downtown Boston, which caused smoke and smoldering flames to burn out through a string of manholes. Wednesday is a half day, and everyone has been planning around it being a half day. Thursday is Thanksgiving and we have "Black" Friday off, then the weekend, and then I have Monday off to move into our new apartment. Because this week can barely be said to exist, everyone seemed to be trying to cram a whole week's worth of work into a single day. To top it all off, the other old retard was working the morning shift instead of the usual old retard. He's even worse; one of them is terrified of getting in trouble, of getting caught making mistakes. The other one couldn't care less. He's copletely absolved himself of any and all responsibility to ever succeed at anything ever. One is incapable of doing the simplest thing, and the other has long since given up on bothering to care.

Pains

I’m lucky to have such smart, intense and interesting friends. This weekend my good buddy D, who seems to be in a much more positive, open-minded, less judgmental mindset than he has been in the past, came up to Boston and we hung out, hat some beers and talked on Friday night, and then after I recovered from it on Saturday morning (the dry air dehydrated me even more, and an over-long walk in the cold definitely did nothing to strengthen my immune system) I hug out with my old friend K and her husband J. I love those guys, but I worry about them.
K has an illness that she can live with, although she is often in some pain, but which is very unpredictable. She felt great for weeks, but then last weekend she had a painful coughing fit that sent her to the emergency room. J is struggling to deal with his own feelings about it, his own worry and his natural sense of…dislocation? Having no choice but to give up some of himself for his wife. It seems like people who have a loved on who is sick, frequently feel some resentment towards the sick person for saddling them with their problems. How could you not begrudge the fact that someone else’ being sick is interfering with your life? And yet, the guilt over resenting someone for being sick, which is obviously not her fault, causes a sort of anxiety feedback loop that is unhealthy. Not admitting your anger only makes it fester inside you as the overwhelming evidence of it continually stops you from being able to deny it’s existence to yourself. I think men have a particular difficulty with this, because we naturally react with a form of aggression when something difficult happens, but our culture spends so much time teaching us that we can’t take out our anger on other people, especially women, but it does nothing to teach us what to do with it, how to alleviate it, it only narrows its eyes and minimizes its importance, its relevance and reality. Society always demands that men accept their emotions, but constantly minimizes the relevance of them by belittling them.

Employee Evaluation

This afternoon I filled out my self evaluation for work. It's a bizarre situation to be in, because of the competing desires to not be arrogant, and yet knowing that if I give them any excuse to give me less than a perfect score, I won't get all of my tiny, tiny, tiny possible raise. Performance evaluations, especially if you work in a traditional corporation (it's not exactly a traditional corporate environment, but it's a lot closer than if I worked in a restaurant or a small-time retail situation like where Beanz works). It's also hard to think of goals for a job that I've been over-qualified for since before I was hired. "Don't say 'Get a better job'..."
Although it does feel good to describe myself, when I actually am proud about how hard I work, and to realize that I really am trying to make the most out of my job, trying to learn about the industry as much as I can, stuck up in the basement or between the walls or in the attic, depending on how you mangle the "foot in the door" metaphor. I'm sometimes embarrassed about how much harder I work than I should have to, but I still am happy about how much I've made the best of my situation.

Auto

My gut says Fuck the auto industry. I'm usually loathe to say Let the Market Sort it out, because positive social progress is always seen as unfamiliar and scary by average Americans, at least if we're talking about gay marriage, gender equality, civil rights, etc. But we're talking about cars, and the car industry in America, here--these are not social or political minorities that deserve to be defended by hordes of meat heads. The American car industry has always sold the idea of being American, which obviously means nothing more than Big, macho, homophobic, xenophobic, short-sighted, self-interested, my penis is not small and is very satisfying to women!
I would say that the American public is starting to shift away from being center-right to being center-left; it's starting to realize that we actually can't guzzle oil from the Middle east for infinity without even thinking about the two wars we've been waging there. The market has spoken, and it's saying that giant gas-hogs are no longer viable. Maybe when GM and whoever else figure out a way to build cars that run well, are affordable, fuel-efficient and comfortable and even attractive!, and figure out how to create a moderate amount of good jobs with benefits, as opposed to a large amount of terrible jobs with shit benefits and a tiny tiny tiny mount of super high paying bullshit sinecures...THEN maybe I'll consider voting to send my tax dollars (I work like a fucking mule. I don't know why) to bail out your fat asses.

Tradition-alism

Bill O'Reilly was on the Daily Show last night, peddling his tired schtick about being a traditionalist against the "far-left elite." I find it hilarious that so many people seem to adhere to this mythical, traditional paradise of the suburban fifties. Our country is just over two hundred years old; where do these traditions come from, and what exactly are they? When blacks and women wanted the right to vote, I'm sure the outcry was exactly the same, "It's too soon, that's too crazy, that sort of thing simply isn't done..." We cite these "traditions" without examining what they are or what they mean, or where the idea comes from. It seems to go as common sense because it's just a stereotype that we're conditioned to take the natural, sensible way the world has to be. If you balk at this kind of notion, the "traditionalist" counters by associating you with stereotypes that have nothing to do with politics, totally non-political items that carry stereotypes of elitism, effeminacy and liberalism. "Latte-sipping book reading musical theater singing gay-marrying journalist-type!" What is this type, and how can it be associated with so many things?
This argument, the "It is what it is" argument, is just a way of excusing ourselves from thinking, from confronting our predispositions.

I'm so tired of the people I work with. The people in the mailroom are the biggest bunch of illiterate, ignorant, retarded lazy bums, and the people in the offices are just a bunch of spoiled WASP scum floating from one bullshit office handjob to the next. I don't want to work on textbooks for upper middle class white prep schools, and I don't want to work in the underclass with stereotypical lazy, do nothing with their lives, blames the world for their problems sons of bitches.
I'm just tired, so tired. Tired of showing up every morning and working hard for no reason, and not having anything extra to work for. I need to take another class, or get a better job or both. My god, and I sick of the routine my days have become!

Stuff Before Bed

governor)I'm relieved. I really don't have anything more to add: I'm relieved that Obama finally won (I had my doubts, despite how clear the signs were, just like when Deval Patrick was running for, and I'm relieved that my class is finally over. I was getting so sick of those fusty, OCD old ladies and WASPy lisping little girls, and getting up early and jimmying my schedule around just to sit in a chair for three hours going over sheets with seemingly pointless exercises on them. I just hope this class actually makes me more employable.
I've been getting more inspired to write something that I'd been putting off as too obvious, or too goofy. It might be time for me to write a story or novella about Tony. I started reading Angels, Denis Johnson's first novel and it's really pleasing to read something that makes perfect sense to my natural writerly sensibilities. It's the style I got so used to in workshops.
It's definitely the Platonic form of whatever Peter Rock was trying to do; it's all about mildly deranged, deeply sad, lost people fleeing from something they're not quite sure what, drifting in and out of drug-induced stupors, and the language changes perfectly to fit what the character is feeling and going through. It's the weird harmony of the polyphonic novel. I could do something about working with Tony, going in and out of his ADD point of view, gradually unveiling the painful past and truths about himself he's almost convinced himself to stop remembering.

Voting

I've been waiting eight years for tomorrow, for the chance to finally, really, once and for all to vote George W. Bush's party out of the White House. Four years ago I told myself to get more involved politically, and in small but, I think, meaningful ways, I have. I've gotten much more informed about politics, I read a lot more political news, I try to understand the opposing viewpoints, I try to understand the perspective of people who think only about the economics of world politics, and ignore all social issues (not that I can really sympathize with this view). I try to challenge my own political ideas, and I try to engage the people I work with and their ideas, too. I feel I have a certain responsibility as an educated person, not to convince the less educated people I work with the error of their ways, but to really see where they're coming from, and to challenge their preconceptions. I feel it's my duty to broaden their horizons, but not to come across as condescending, as elitist. I think the main reason why, for example, farmers vote to spite the city (say in upstate New York, or most of the rest of Oregon
that's not Portland) is because they feel that the elite overclass tries to force it's self-righteously forward view of culture on those they look down upon as rubes. And they feel that way, largely because it's true. I've felt it necessary to understand "the common man" not from the perspective of a benefactor but as an equal. In Boston, there's a huge, visceral class divide between the "townies" and the "yuppies", and this two-way resentment and sense of superiority causes a huge amount of political divisons that don't need to, and wouldn't otherwise, exist.

Gender Stuff

We met with a friend of ours who always annoys me when she talks about her ex boyfriends or future possible boyfriends. With her, it's all about guys being disappointing, not measuring up, being too nice, not being 'manly' enough. I have a huge issue with this sort of thing, and obviously a certain degree of self-consciousness is part of it. I don't understand how a women can expect men to treat her as an equal, in a progressive way that doesn't rely on traditional gender role stereotypes, and yet think it's perfectly acceptable to talk about men in a totally regressive way. She'll talk for hours about how she only likes guys who are tall, dark and manly in front of someone who's not tall, dark or manly. If I ever even hinted that I broke up with a girl because I wasn't attracted to her, because she wasn't small, curvy and 'girly' (my wife is hardly a Barbie-type, and I appreciate many different body-types on women), it would sound soooooo offensive, patriarchal and blah dee blah blah. I can't stand hypocritical double-standards. I, as a progressive man, try to get past societally impressed stereotypes about how women are supposed to behave, look and present themselves, and I expect women to do the same.

Cuban Sandwich

I had a delicious Cuban sandwich the other day, and it occurred to me that fastfood hamburgers, specifically McDonald's, have more in common flavorwise with Cuban sandwiches than with "traditional" American hamburgers. They're thin, with crusty white bread and most of the flavor comes from a tangy, vinegary sauce and pickles. I wonder if, even though McDonald's makes its bank by selling the idea of middle-American comfort food, it knows it's biggest consumer base is actually Hispanic, black and Caribbean.

Living Stereotypes

Today I was looking at an electoral map of the country and this guy I work with, A1 said, "Agh, look at that sea of red. I hate to see all those red states." I was surprised, because I'd thought A1 was one of those moneyed white-trash Republicans (the Sarah Palin-type)
Then he said, "Oh wait, which is red and which is blue? No, I like seeing red Republican states! That's the good one!"
Every day I'm stunned by how ignorant, stupid and illogical my co-workers are. I was, as usual, dumbstruck. If you can look at a map of the US and see the big "wild west" heartland states and they're all red, and not remember what red means...if you've been a lifelong trustfund republican from Massachusetts (!!!!!!) and can't remember which are red states and which are blue...you lose your right to vote. Sorry!
I thought, when I was in high school and college people would say things like, "The only people who could really be Republicans are lazy, incompetent, white trustfund kids who are afraid of minorities. I would always say what a cheap, tacky cliché this was. And then I met A1, who fits every inch of that stereotype to a fucking T.
One time, T said, "Some of my friends said Iraq had nothing to do with 911. I don't think so! Otherwise, why else would we have invaded Iraq? I thought, are you an actual individual human being or are you a human microcosm of the American Public (tm) (r)?
I generally feel a kind of mixed guilt about coming down from my elite high horse to tell ignorant hillbillies that evidence has to support claims, rather than the reverse, but that day I blew up. That logic is completely backwards, T, I said. The White House used 911 as a smokescreen to invade Iraq, because they wanted people to be too afraid to question it, they implied, or allowed the public to assume, a connection, to justify what they wanted to do all along.

Yul Brynner

T had the most hilarious dream I've ever heard of. It was like the kind of anxiety dream you would have if you were in a sitcom. He said he woke up in a cold sweat, almost screaming. "B-I-L-L was there, and he was dressed like Yul Brynner, you know, in that movie, dressed like a gunslinger and he said 'Draw...' and then he shot me, and as I was dying he says 'It is what it is!'"
I said, "Are you talking about Westworld?" Unbelievable! Every time I talk to Tony, it takes me a fair bit of time and a huge amount of concentration to distill from the details of what he's saying what he's actually referring to. He constantly jumps from one diea ot the next, and uses generic pronouns like Him and That.
A is kind of the same thing. It's not that he makes zero sense, it's that he totally ignores the existence of or possibility f segues, and he draws totally off the wall conclusions from facts that don't in any way imply what he seems to think they do.

Insistent

We went to Ikea this afternoon and I found myself in the unpleasant situation of being along for the ride in my own life, not caring about what happens, and unable to make any change in it. Beanz made a plan for what she wanted, she orchestrated the trip, she drove, we walked around and she asked me what I thought every ten feet, and nine times out of ten I had no opinion whatsoever, and when I did, she insisted on the opposite. I feel like this happens all the time: I let myself get dragged along, and choose not to care one way or another because I won't be comfortable defending what I want. So I wind up not caring about anything, choosing not to care about anything. I feel like I'm too non-confrontational, but I've always believed men should be extra careful about being too pushy, too controlling. My mother always told me not to tell women what they should want. But no one ever told me that sometimes, women want to have someone make the decisions for them. It's emasculating enough being dragged along to Ikea, pretending to have any opinions whatsoever about what kind of bookshelves we choose. I'd be happy with milk crates and cinder blocks, honestly, as long as they were dust free and covered with books and music equipment.

Controls

We went to a dinner tonight hosted by the company that makes the supplements for Beanz' store. I kind of like meeting natural health/food people, because they tend to be a nice blend of socially progressive political types, pragmatic small business types and intellectual types, without being too over the top in any of those areas. Although, they do tend to take themselves and what role they play in the world awfully seriously for people who sell organic pies to yuppies. But I'm just being cynical; we all sell organic pies to yuppies in one way or another. Grad students going into debt to spend your life studying post-Colonial theory? Bull shit! You teach luxury education to upper middle class white kids.
Anyway, we talked with this one guy who is the rep for the supplement manufacturer. He was interesting because he came across as a very typical glad-handing grown-up jock turned salesman, but he turned out to be a pretty interesting guy, with much more nuanced ideas about life and health than the initial impression I got. But he did say one thing that made absolutely, positively zero sense to me. He was talking about how powerful the placebo effect can be on people, and described how he used to talk with his ex-wife, a rep for a pharmaceutical company. He had said to her that the very fact that you rely on a placebo group as the control implies that you ultimately don't know why things work, and therefore all these hippy-dippy supplements might work to cure God-knows what!
To me, this was so assbackwards. The point of control groups is to prove that drugs actually do work beyond the placebo effect. Science isn't about trying things at random and relying on placebos to see what might happen, it's about trying to deduce what should happen and then using a control to prove whether or not the drug (or whatever) works as we expected it to. Controls don't show that science is afraid of not working, they show how vigorous the standard for success is.

Third Debate

Normally when people go on about how John McCain should be ashamed of himself, I feel like they're being overly PC, trying too hard to line up behind their party etc. I generally don't hate McCain the way I hate, say, Sarah Palin or George Bush. But tonight, he really pissed me off talking about Roe v. Wade. The fact that anyone can get away with calling someone pro-abortion, and make light of the "health" of the mother (which can meaning practically anything! 'Waaah, I was raped and I'll die if I give birth to this rapist's seed. Waaah!' Fucking slut lesbian.), and yet if you implied any Republican was pro-war, you'd be labelled a tree-hugger. Who the fuck is pro-abortion? Is this really such an unbelievable position?

Spazzers!

I mentioned to R, my manager, today, that the more I work with A, the more he reminds me of T. R said that he'd noticed the same thing. Both A and T are grown men who act much younger and more childishly than their chronological ages would suggest. They're both self-conscious and thin-skinned about being slighted and fear being blamed for things (which are usually their fault), and about getting older. They both ask the same questions over and over again, fail to learn from their mistakes, and more than anything, they get very easily overwhelmed by minor stresses and confusion, and then they panic. They both have logorhea something fierce, and free-associate from one idea to the next, taking for granted that the listener will both care to and be able to follow the connection from one thought to the next. They both seem to have a deep need to be listened to, attended to and reassured. They monologue and don't seem to care that you've heard them say the same thing a hundred times. Actually, everyone in the mailroom does that to some extent. They both have terrible trouble reading (and seem self-conscious about reading out loud), paying attention and sitting still. They sound like typical ADHD, dyslexic nine year olds, don't they? T is about fifty-two and A and thirty-eight.

MacGuffins

Another clerk, A, is basically a good guy but drives me up a fucking tree with his chronic immaturity. He's a huge sci-fi geek of, to me, the worst kind: the pointless detail cataloger. He's that guy who obsessively points out that, in Predator 2, there's an Alien skull inside the Predator's trophy cage, and that at the end of Cloverfield, if you watch closely you can see a meteor falling from the sky, and that's where the monster came from! Wow-wee! Who fucking cares?
To me, obsessing about that sort of mundane, banal detail is a symptom of crippling literal-mindedness and ultimately lack of imagination. He started talking about his intense curiosity that drives him to need to know, for instance, why the dead start coming back to life in zombie movies. I immediately balked, saying, "Nobody cares why the zombies come back. Radiation, or Indian burial ground, or ancient curse or whathaveyou; all the best zombie movies don't bother to explain why because it's ultimately irelevant. All you need ot know is 'When Hell is full, the Dead will walk the earth'."
I then explained the idea of the MacGuffin a la Hitchcock, the plot device whose detailed explanation is ultimately irelevant to the whole movie. You don't care what's written in the documents the spies are trying to steal; all you care about is how they steal them.
He came back with, "So you don't care what was in Marcelus Wallace's case in Pulp Fiction? It's his soul, you know because there's a bandaid on the back of his neck and blah blah etc."
I would argue that the case in Pulp Fiction is ultimately not a macguffin, because what's in it ultimately affects the way you understand and appreciate the film.
In the first part of the movie, it is a macguffin, because it's contents are not really relevant. The point is, he really wants it back, and they really don't want to give it back to him. It's merely a device that drives the plotty/atmospheric story. Later on, it becomes a fairly clunky and obvious pseudo-metaphor for his soul/innocence/the human element that would stop a normal person from doing these horrible things, etc etc.
My point is just that nitpicking over minor details in movies, which in the end have no importance to the way one reads the movie, is a pointless and dreary exercise. Look at Donnie Darko; all the ambiguity that makes the film so fun and interesting actually has, if you listen to the director's commentary and/or watch the director's cut, a very dry science-fiction--science explanation having to do with God making a time loop that gives Donnie super powers and so on. The abgiguities are actually vagueries.

I just read a really excellent short story by David Foster Wallace called "Mr Squishy". It's about a corporate focus group for a giant company called Mr Squishy that sells a Twinkie type foodproduct whose mascot is a blandly iconic smiling cartoon character, a generically likable cartoon that's meant to be familiar, easily categorizable and unthreateningly pleasant to everyone around. The focus group is for a new product by the same company called Felonies!, which is trying to capitalize on resentment of healthfood, that's trying to sell an idea of being a renegade, going against trends, being unrepentantly into immediate personal satisfaction.
At first it's told from what seems to be an omnisceint narrator, and only gradually does a protagonist emerg, in the person of the focus group facillitator, a sort of lonely loser type, plugging away at his pointless job, feeling worthless because he sees through all the bullshit he has to peddle to people, and sees through the way the company manipulates statistics so that they appear to say what they wanted them ahead of time to say, and is trying to tell himself that his job has meaning.
Meanwhile, the narrator, presumably speaking in the suposed-protag's voice, talks about how easy it would be to poison some of the cakes undetectably, and thereby destroy the company and perhaps the whole snackfood industry.
Meanwhile, emanwhile, some sort of human fly begins to crawl up the otuside of the building (Are we even certain it's the same building where the focus group takes place). A group of people outside begin to wonder if he is some kind fo psychopath about to open fire, or fi it's some kind of publicity stunt. At the same time, the narrator suddenly speaks in the first eprson and it very slowly becomes clear that the narrator is one of the focus group subjects, and he has some kind of contraption in his person to make it look like he is vomiting after having eaten the test product.
As the story nears its close, it turns out that the company knows exactly how bullshit the focus group is, and how they cook the stats, and really the test administrator (the former protag) is being tested, to see if how much he influences the meaningless tests he gives. If he makes too much of a difference, he will be fired, and if he truly does have no impression on the people he tests, then he will be allowed to continue in his meaningless job that he knows is meaningless, but that he doesn't know all his superiors also know it is.
It's all about advertising, and counter-advertising to the idea that everyone thinks they're beyond advertising, somehow special and unique.
The human fly climbs up to the top of the building, being watched by what seems like a test group, people who don't know if they are being tested. He has some sort of device attached ot his body, and an inflatable suit that blows up. We as readers don't know if his suit blows up and he's just a guy dressed up as Mr Squishy, and/or if he's going to open fire or spray poison, or if he's just a harmless ad stunt.
We also don't know if the former protag was going to poison those people, or if he's being set up, or if the company itself is going to poison people, so that they, like Tylenol, can make a big show of making ammends for their negligence (which in this case may be full-scale malevolence) and wind up actually having a better reputation after having killed people.

Sophie Problems

I'm struggling to finish Sophie's Choice, not because I hate the book, but because I have major problems with the way he decided to tell the story he did. The plot is told from the self-obsessed and extremely verbose young southern struggling writer, Stingo, as he essentially wallows in self-pity
in Brooklyn until meeting a brilliant but tempermental Jewish scientist named Nathan and his beautiful and almost masochistically doting girlfriend, Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor. The main meat of the story is Stingo recounting what Sophie told him about her experiences in the Holocaust, struggling to survive, to protect her children, her learning to overcome inborn anti-Semitism ingrained by her father, her struggle to reconcile herself with her break with him (her guilt at having accepted horrible views, her resentment of him for teaching them to her, and her guilt for hating her father, and so on). While this is the interesting part of the story, we have to wade through reams and reams of Stingo whining about his lack of success in love, career and life in general. And when we do get Sophie's backstory, it's all exposition from Stingo's perspective.

"If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seems, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie were the helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war's end." (p. 411)

I would have said 'blood-less', or 'dry' rather than 'abstract' or 'static'. The point of the novel seems to be, from very early on, that everyone excused themselves of having any responsibility, and the true horror is that people allowed what they knew to be or should have known was awful, happen anyway, and that Stingo and Sophie were guilty of the same thing: overlooking their own white privilege, wiping themselves of any social responsibility. But it still seems like the most boring, least visceral, least engrossing way to tell a story that must have been, to Sophie and people like her, shattering.

Tonight at copyediting class, one of my teachers mentioned that if you tend to notice bad grammar and poor word choice in articles and so on, and it bothers you right off the bat, then you're born to be an editor. I felt a sort of warm sense of belonging at that moment. I always notice what seem to me to be awkward wording or phrasing. In fact, I tend to think first about the poetics level of what I'm reading, how does he say what he says and why did he choose those words, rather than what is it saying, the hermeneutic level of interpretation. I always felt it was a more natural method to look at the surface first and drill slowly down into it, using that to understand what those choices say.
On the other hand, the ladies in my class can be so fucking annoying. Some of them are just kind of bland, uninteresting flakey types, others are these WASPy daddy's girls with that rich girl lisp, and a bunch are these fusty, musty anal retentive weird middle aged permanently offended effective-lesbians (by effective lesbians, I mean that type of super progressive, asexual middle aged white ladies who listen to NPR twenty three hours a day and carry Wholefoods tote bags) who sit around quibbling about unbelievably pointless minutia of grammar, like the female equivalent of Trekkers.

Metal

Went to see Dylan's show tonight. Well, his band was the first on the list, the only one not highlighted/linked on the Middle East website, the first of like six in a night, all leading up to some supposedly awesome Swedish band called Watain. Isn't that some stupid Walpurgis NAcht witch reference?
I enjoy metal, mainly for the visceral power and the technical dedication it requires
. And yet, I find it ultimately boring. Metal is more about conformity than any other genre of music, particular pop music. The difference between a mediocre metal band and
a terrible one and a great one are all barely noticeable to anone but a true "connoisseur". And yet, connoisseur here seems to have a different meaning than it would in other situations. Would a connoisseur talk about how great the Godfather and Goodfellas are, and think these were outrageous, interesting, dangerous opinions? Metal is more formulaic than blues, which could hardly be any more formulaic. And discussions of metal are more formulaic than anything: it's either more or less brutal than the last "most brutal" band. Why is it any better or even different than hipster bands being trendy or not his week to the next? Blah; the whole idea bores me to tears.

Hedwig

We watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch the other night. I really enjoyed; in fact, much more so than I had thought I would. Movies about transexuality, cross-dressing, any kind of gender-bending are always either condescending, patronizing, or embarrassingly pseudo-sincere, dripping with bathos. This was somehow the perfect balance. Something about the way it only barely sketched the notion of a plot, and the way realism was only implied. The characters and the story are so stylized it couldn't be sappy, and they were so gutsy, so unwhiny that it really sucked the viewer into the over the top fun of it all. It's so much better than the outwardly similar camp-romp, Breakfast on Pluto (which, by trying to be slightly realistic and weave in IRA stuff into the plot, totally failed to be either fun or gritty)
The music was quite good, too, much more early seventies glam and punk than Broadway/American Idol. Although there is one sappy acoustic folk-rock ballad that had been an 'our song' in an earlier chapter of my life (Well, she had thought it was). It was very strange to listen to a song that had been represented what someone else had felt about me, and which had failed to move me then, with someone who actually does move me in the way I had mvoed the previous person.

Computer Porn

I've sometimes wondered how anorexic white girls with no pubic hair, dyed black hair and swallows/naval star tattoos posing nude on the internet for whoever bothers to pay a few bucks a month can be an exemplar of "post-modern feminism."

VP Debate

The vice presidential debate was weird and frustrating. Biden did a fairly good job of
making substantive points and treating Palin with a measure of respect while still talking to her as if she were a non-threat; treating her seriously without taking her seriously. Of course, the bar was much much higher for him, who we all expected to do a solid to excellent job, whereas all she had to do was not make an gaffes.
It was definitely a weird moment for women. On PBS after the debate Jim Lehrer interviewed a few historians and academics to see what their reactions to the debate were. A female historian mentioned Geraldine Ferraro vs the elder Bush, vis a vis the danger for Biden to seem condescending. She pointed out that Ferraro was asked if the country would be in danger if she were elected, and she answered in a very straight-laced, unemotional way that in no way acknowledged the fact that she was a woman. Rather than reacting to the inherent sexism in the question, she had to answer it as if she existed in a genderless vacuum, as if she were neither female nor male, as if this were the case for male politicians. Sarah Palin constantly referred to her being a mom, a small town home-maker, hockey mom, blah blah blah. She got flustered, she implied that the media was against her.
The historian made the rather unimpressive, but also unoffensive point that gender roles have changed. She said that if Ferraro had said the sort of things Palin had, she would have been accused of pandering, of palying into feminine stereotypes. In fact, Hillary was pilloried (heh) for supposedly playing into gender stereotypes, for crying for sympathy, etc. It seems obvious to me that Palin is only acceptable as a candidate because she depends upon stereotypes of the non-threatening little woman who agrees with everything the big strong older male soldier thinks. And furthermore, the only reason McCain's campaign (I still do him the service of separating him from his current White House bid) considered picking her was because Hillary broke down the door for a viable female candidate, and left a vaccuum when she lost the Democratic nomination.

Tired

I had a really long day today: I worked nine to five, after having gotten not quite enough sleep, and I've been hearing this bullshit from HR saying I can't apply out until a whole year as a full employee!!! Everyone else, including some HR people, and the policy which I've read several times, but whose link is broken, says it's only six months, with your supervisor's approval.
Of course, on this particular day I tried to step up my game, be a little more responsible, and of course people were condescending and obnoxious to me.
Then I went to class, which was a long and frequently confusing lesson on grammar. I learned some confusing terms, such as noun phrases ("Give the box to whoever asks for it", whereas I assumed it would 'whomever') Towards the end of the evening, I started to feel really spacey, like my brain was shutting down.
Then the subway stopped at Jackson, two or three stops from my place, and I had to walk a couple few miles from the skanky part of town, half asleep, in humid weather, with a dying phone and no real dinner in my stomach.

Second (!!) Anniversary

We had an incredible second anniversary date yesterday. Beanz asked me to plan a day for her, which I found intimidating at first, but once I made a general plan for the day, it turned out to be fun and rather empowering. I realized how often I avoid making a decision or a plan, because I always expect her to disagree with anything I suggest. She wants me to suggest things, to help her weigh options. To me, that feels like no matter what I pick, she'll always pick the opposite.
Anyway, yesterday we had breakfast at out favorite JP breakfast place, Sorella's. It was raining quite heavily, and our rain coats made us sweat like we were being microwaved covered in Saran wrap. We had a wonderful breakfast, and then moved on to downtown Boston.
It was a wonderful change of pace to actually navigate myself (oh, so wonderful). We went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which we both love. We had gone there once when we were first dating and she visited me in Boston, and neither of us had been there in many years, so it was a nice change. We almost went to a classical performance happening there, but we decided to spend more time enjoying the art. The amazing thing about the Gardner museum is that it's not only one person's house, but it feels like a home. Some of the room are unbelievable indoor gardens with classical Roman sculptures and gorgeous flower displays, and others are almost folksy quaint little American rooms with a huge fireplace and little china knick-knacks and deer-patterned lace doilies that look like 8-bit video game characters.
Afterwards we went down to the waterfront and walked around, smelling the heavy, cool salty sea-breeze. Later we went to a fancy Italian restaurant I found on Phantom Gourmet (listed as 'Best Undiscovered Gem') I had a lobster diavoli (?), a sort of wavy, wide and thin linguine, with a mildly spicy tomato sauce and lobster, with saffron and fennel (couldn't really taste either one), and Minna had loin of venison (!!!), with mashed pumpkin (!!) and stewed kale (meh...too watery). Venison was incredible! It was moist, tttteeennndddeeeerrrrr, and juicy, ver much like steak, but with a slightly gamier, stronger flavor.

Rebecca

I tried to write about Rebecca last night and would up getting side-tracked, writing about whatever was on my mind lately, namely, the satisfaction I derive from reading as opposed to watching a good film or show.

What I had intended to write about is the nature of suspense in Rebecca. Du Maurier does a truly masterful job of slowly unfurling a mysterious plot. The opening to the novel is like a master-class is showing, not telling. It's quite incredible; from the first line, the narrator provides us with a simple statement of fact that implies a question, and sets up a structure wherein we are given a morsel of information and stay hungry for several more. "Last night I dreamed we were in Manderlay again," runs the first line. What is Manderlay? Why was she there? Why did she have to leave, because clearly she's been cut off from it. The whole story moves that way: we wonder who Rebecca was, what the dark secret in Max de Winter's past is, how he and the narrator wound up together, and just who is the narrator, this mysterious cipher of a girl? The book is just a masterful example of clever plotting that leaves the reader hungry to find out what happens next. I'd forgotten that novels could be pleasing in that way.

That's what I was trying to write about last night.

TV and Books

I've ben reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It's a fantastic book, definitely one in the loooong line of English and American naturalist/realistic books of the late nineteenth and twentieth century about flimsy, uncertain little girls who dream of stepping up into the upper class and do due to marrying into this higher society, and struggle to succeed merely by being blank, by having no affect and allowing other people to project the persona they wish to see onto her.
Rebecca is an interesting twist, though. From the very first sentence, the reader is put into the position of wondering just what is the narrator talking about? She very, very gradually gives us one clue after the last that lets us gradually begin to understand what the plot is and wonder what we don't yet know. Information is made available to us tantalizingly slowly, but just enough is fed to us to make us interested for more.
Lately I've been really impressed with the way TV shows keep the delicate balancing act of a complicated and sometimes convoluted plot in the air, each ball leaping from one hand to the next in a parabolic arc, and really disappointed in modern novels' ability to do the same thing. The novels I've read lately hve been sort of pseudo-intellectual exercises in examining themes that mdoern reviwers say are important, whereas some fo the shows I've been watchign have actually subtlely examined the sam themes, all the while weaving them into complicaed, soap-operatic plots involving multiple characters with realistically developed motivatiosn (all those things they told us were bourgeois when we were in college). For instance, every idea about race ad colnialism that The Darling by Russell Banks crammed own our throats, Battlestar Galactica handled rather deftly. Maybe my expectations of literature are unrealistically high and mine of TV are abnormally low; I'm not sure.

Class

I had my second class tonight and I'm definitely feeling like I can easily handle this class and a more serious job. It's a relatively interesting, more than fairly practical and quite easy, straight-forward class. And there are much worse thigns I can think of then sitting around in a room with a bunch of fusty English nerds talking about what's the best way to say this, and what exactly is this person trying to say anyway? That's more the way I first look at writing anyway, rather than, what does this mean? It's more the mechanics of the poetics of writing, rather than the hermeneutics of writing. I dunno, it's kind of fun! The teacher is so weird. She's a kind of crunchy, spacy but not necessarily flaky English teacher who clearly sees editing as a means to an end, and makes no bones about it.
The only thing is there's this one horrible girl who looks just like Ann Coulter and is equally insufferable. She's the kind of person who says something supposedly witty about her own impressiveness in a loud voice to no one in particular, and then gives a forced little laugh, as if to say, 'That's what you should be doing, laughing at how witty I am.' Just a deeply insecure little person who can't stand to not be looked at and stroked. Actually, there are a few precious little Barbie girls in the class, and a bunch of stuffy old lady grammar geeks, and one guy who I think is a journalist. And me, who makes dismissive comments about people he barely knows.
Sha-zam!

Analog Delay

My dad offered to get me a guitar pedal for my birthday, so the other we picked up an MXR analog delay pedal at guitar center. It's got an incredible, warm, incandescent tone that just...gives me a wicked boner. It's super easy to use, and doesn't have any useless, extra functions like most digital delays. It also, obviously, has a much nicer, livelier tone. But, it has far fewer features, and doesn't have all that long a delay. But, it has all the features I would ever actually use. It also has a modulation switch, which seems to basically just give a mild 'harmonizer' effect to the delayed (wet) tone, which results in a sweet but subtle, chorusy tone that reminds me a lot of Bill Frisell's heavily processed tone, which he frequently uses but never relies on. Also, compared to most of the other analog delays I've read about, it's about half the price (at $150) and seems reliable and easy to use. And it's got this beautiful, piercing blue light that's much easier to see in the dark than the dull, red, HAL-like light your vast majority of other pedals have. Now I've got to get my strat fixed up (replace the input, maybe switch out the pups for higher quality versions, maybe get the intonation and action tweaked. Then I'll get a higher quality trem pedal, run the strat through the delay and trem right into the reverbed clean channel of my hotrod and just get a wicked Marc Ribot hard-on.

First class

I had my first copyediting class last night. It was a strange experience, due partly to the flakey,
one-foot-in-another-dimension aspect to the teacher, partly due to it being from six to nine-thirty, after an eight hour work day, and I didn't get enough sleep the night before and also was shit-ass drunk right before bed.
In a way, it was the most honest, frank introduction to a class and a field I've eve had at any school. The teacher explained, in her round about, meandering way, that she had gotten started as a copyeditor for math and science text books, then gone on to magazines and eventually fiction, now she's a writer, an English and editing professor at Emerson and a freelance copyeditor. She explained that the class is basically just something to be got through so you can say you have a certificate, which you can sue to fake your way into our first job. You'll be faking it because at your first job you'll have a whole different set of rules than what I'll be teaching you, but that's just how it works. As she was talking, she clearly has no particular interest in copyediting as a field it's merely a means to an end, something that allows how her pay for writing and reading and gardening, which are what she actually gets excited for. The whole evening was a far cry from the pomposity and ego-stroking that came with every other school I've ever gone to, or heard about from friends. No mention of notions of purity, no looking down our noses at "ordinary people" who go to "State Schools," (this spat contemptuously from the mouth like a morsel of rotten meat...Sorry, I've been reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
The people in the class seemed like a bunch of fusty grammar nerds. Which I don't have much of an interest in, but it is a nice change after the vigorously unliterary guys I work with. Some of them are actually really smart (in the mailroom, I mean), like Keith and Russell, but they're just the kind of guys that would consider "being an intellectual" pretentious and self-defeating. I feel a certain duty as an educated, somewhat priveleged person to try to get through to people like that, smart people who feel they have a certain place, and that certain things, like college, are either denied them or wasteful. I feel I have an obligation to let these guys see that most "intellectuals" are interested in making the lives of normal people better, not in looking condescendinlyg at them.

Anna Deavere Smith

We saw an excellent Anna Deavere Smith play tonight. My friend Jane who was someone I wished I had hung out with more when we were in highschool now lives in Boston and is a grad student teaching speech or speech for actors or something (I honestly don't understand how you can spend all day for two years teaching actors how to enunciate) had two extra tickets to this one woman show, which is apparently all ADS does, at the ART so we went after work.

It's a one woman show where she switches back and forth between different characters talking about grace, in terms of the soul and the body. All the text is taken from interviews that she gives. So basically, she asks questions of academics and religious figures and real people who've gone through disease, genocide in Rwanda, and being abandoned by their government and country during Katrina, and so on, and then she acts out their responses to her questions, so she sort of weaves a polyphony (wow! Did I just mix that metaphor, THAT much?!)... composes a polyphony of different voices (mostly she brings this out through the voice, less so through body language) each touching on different aspects of the same subject.

To me, my concept of grace is much informed by Heinrich von Kleist's essay In the Puppet Theatre. To me, grace is the zone where the human approaches the unhuman, the beyond human. Where action or thought or performance loses self-consciousness and therefore performs at a level of effortlessness where human error is erased, where it ceases to feel like a real, live, person doing something and starts to seem like an android, an automaton mimicking a human, but inhumanly perfect.

The play (that's not quite the right word, is it? It was more like a performance art/lecture) was extremely moving, but somewhat unfocused. She didn't at all make it clear (at least not to me) where the connection between bodily grace and vulnerability and spiritual grace is. It's not an essay, an academic attempt to make an argument about a subject and then examine the whys and hows of how she came to that conclusion, and it's not a fictional piece with a narrative (why do people always say 'narrative' when they mean 'story'? Why does the 'n-word' [heh] sound so much more powerful?) that examines an idea from multiple facets, so what is it? What is i trying to say? Why did it have to be made? It's a total cop-out to say, to foster dialogue, to make people talk about such and such. Because it's an elite art piece performed exclusively for ultra WASP Harvard professors in the poshest neighborhood of the poshest city in an elite, ultra liberal state. The point is clearly not to encourage elite liberal white people to voyeuristically glimpse into the lives of poor people.

Voting

I love voting; it's one of the few simple, easy to exercise inalienable rights that I feel fulfilled in
doing as much as people tell me I should. But I hate voting for small local elections, where your choices are between the unbelievably entrenched incumbent familiar face, and the upstart rebel without a cause. In Massachusetts this is almost always the case: you've got Ted Kennedy, or the old townie crank from Hull (where the fuck is Hull? I've lived in Massachusetts over twenty years and I've got no idea where Hull is) who's running not on any platform, or for any particular purpose, but merely running against Ted Kennedy, merely because he's Ted Kennedy, a famous famous with an old name.

Encounters at the End of the World

We saw Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog tonight. It was a very interesting , if a bit unfocused doc about Antarctica and the researchers and explorers who go there, to the end of the earth, as they describe it and why. All of them seemed to be people who had either always or late in life begun to avoid mving through normal normal channels. They are all people who brought themselves to mroe and mroe desolate locales, as if searching for the blankest wasteland, the closest place to a blank page, an empty white spot on the map, perhaps to see themselves better, without the distractions or distortions of normal social life, perhaps to see themselves completely unadorned with pre-exiting social ideas, and some f them seem to want to see the world more clearly by traveling to its most forbidding, least inhabited place, the last place left untouched by human hands, to understand man's effect on the world, and his place there. It's not really clear what his point was with the movie; in Grizzly Man he made a film about a misguided nature conservationist who tries desperately to believe that nature is pure, and inherently meaningful, and ultimately wound up failing to imprint a western, human conception of 'meaning' on something far beyond man's scope. It's not clear if Hezog made this movie because he feels these researchers have a less deluded idea of nature, if they succeeded where Timothy Treadwell failed, or if he is also mocking them. His narration is so heavy, bleak and Teutonic, it always sounds like he's making fun of the person speaking, or perhaps himself.
I love watching movie with Beans, and I love going to dinner, where we can feel anonymous in a crowd, our little conversation made private by the drowning rush of babble around us, and talk about books and movies together at dinner. She's so smart, and not just academically, rigorously smart, but unaffectedly curious and thoughtful. She's just as smart, as educated, as socially-concerned and as disinterested in academia, as me. Intellectually we're on not just a level playing field, but we have the same level of interest in the game: as as enjoyable, cooperative activity.

Devil's Backbone

Saw the Devil's Backbone today--it was more or less satisfying, and extremely creepy. It's a billed as a "spiritual prequel" to Pan's Labyrinth (or maybe the latter is a spiritual sequel to the former). It is to Pan's Labyrinth sort of what Evil Dead is to Evil Dead II, or El Marriachi is to Desperado--not a narrative prequel, but a scrappy early rendition of the same ideas, themes, images and character types, with all the unpainted spots showing.
As in the more famous, bigger budget version, this is a story about tough but innocent orphans running from creepy, but not necessarily harmful, ghosts and an utterly, unambiguously evil man with long floppy black hair, all set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. And I do mean backdrop; it's not explored in any way, and the movie has no apparent interest in the history of the war. The characters are just as one-dimensional as in P.L., but D.B. portrays itself as a mostly realistic story with a ghost story element, as opposed to slipping back and forth between a fairy-tale and a gritty "real world" that may not be any more real than the fantastic world, and is seen from the point of view of a child. Because of that, Jacinto is harder to really hate, and the girlfriend victim is impossible to care about and worry over.

Reactionary Psuedo-Conservatism

I find it kind of hilarious and dismaying when more or less intelligent people go searching for ways to debunk global warming. I'm not saying An Inconvenient Truth wasn't alarmist; maybe we won't really be fifty feet underwater in the next ten minutes....So what? Should we all jump in our hummers and start blasting Toby Keith out of our stereos while eating Chik'umm MgNugats and drinking a two liter medium-gulp of Moxie brand cola (now with twice the quinine and aromatic bitters!)? Global Warming alarmists might be alarmist, but they're not a harmful force that needs to be debunked. Especially now, when we have a reformed "hawk" who now votes with the worst president in history--or whatever, maybe making broad generalizations like that is nonsensical, and comparing presidents as if historical context were easy to manipulate is foolish and ultimately unproductive...but does that mean George W. Bush isn't a bad president? Maybe it doesn't make sense to argue about who's the worst president ever, but he's still a shit president who's done more harm than good and defending him out of reactionary contrariness is even less productive than decrying him.
All I'm saying is, eco-psychopaths may be annoying...but they're nowhere near as annoying is fat lazy trustfund kids with enormous egos who contribute nothing to society other than singing elitist rich people muzak to elitist rich people and reading novels about spiders from outer space.

Tombstone

When I die, I want to be cremated, but I would like a tombstone. And I would like it to have this inscription:

"Suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from both sides, from ten sides, and from all sides."


It's one of the last lines from the Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy.

The Wire

I have been a fan of the Wire since about halfway through the first season, when I first began
to have any idea what the fuck they were talking about and what was going on beneath the surface. For one thing, this is a show that shows rather than tells in a way that practically none of the fiction I've read recently has. Everything's in the little details, the way Bunk and McNulty gradually begin to see the same details, the missed clues that allow them, wordlessly, to reconstruct the events of the murder that took place in a room, the same murder we've listened to Dee Barksdale guiltily describ, all without uttering a word to one another other than several muttered "Fuck"'s.
What I really like about the show is the subtle use of parallel story-lines between different groups, usually the street drug-dealers and the police. In TV shows they love to use parallel stories, where the big brother learns the same lesson as the little brother, and its always heavy-handed, eye-roll-inducing and forced. Somehow the Wire manages to nail it. While the police finagle their budgets, Stringer Bell takes community college business classes where he learns the same lesson the police are failing to, and applies it not just to his "legitimate business", but to his drug-dealing operations AND city councilor (and later mayor) Carcetti struggles to find a way to balance his budget for both the police, and the business venture he doesn't realize Bell has been involved with.
In season five, which we just started, the show gets just a tiny bit meta, in a was that another show (Six Feet Under maybe) would have belabored to the point of ridiculousness. At the end of episode two, McNulty steels himself to do something he knows is wrong, that rankles his bent but still strong sense of ethics and the greater good, in order to disturb the details of an accidental death to make it look like a murder. It's like a twisted reflection of the scene with Bunk that I referred to above. Wordlessly, McNulty alters the position of the body, implying a story that is totally unlike what they assume really happened, which presupposes that the rest of the police will now read a new story, the one McNulty wants them to, interpreting the details in a totally new way. Everything is a story, and the way you present the details completely changes the way the 'reader' will interpret those details.
Meanwhile, the fourth group, which is new to this season (the drug-dealers, now joined by Michael and Duke; the police, and the city government) are the reporters. There job is to read details they see in the world, find out what happened, the story hidden (on purpose or accidentally) within the details, and then present the same details in the paper so that the reader will come to the same conclusion that they did. The have to balance presenting the facts objectively, with bringing out the story they think is the right one. They spend all their time arguing abut and worrying over the best way to tell a story, the little details of writing.

...
Everyone wants to come to the same conclusion, that the criminals need to be stopped, but the police can't afford to devote all their time to that one project, the government can't "sell" the story to the tax payers, so they can't pay for the police wire-tapping project, the reporters want to report on the developments of the story, but they need the police to continue with the investigation or them to do so, so McNulty bends the rules to create a plausible story that will allow them to get funding to continue their investigation. But, there is of course a real story, a real criminal, but because of all these inter-depending details, they can't unearth the 'real story'--he has to concoct a fake story to make it possible to pursue the real one.

Politics

For awhile but especially now I've been shocked at how many people I've heard say that Obama has the election in the bag. I feel like we need a little refresher curse on the electoral college, and the blue/red state map of the country. It doesn't matter if 49% of the votes are laffy taffy over Obama and 51% is lukewarm for McCain, McCain gets it. I think there are significantly more very conservative people in the country who will vote for McCain just because he's on the right side of the ticket (pun intended) than there are very liberal people who are excited to get rid of the familiar faces of the boomer-dominated political scene.
The fact of the matter is there are only a handful of swing states whose outcome is even in question, and they tend to be filled with blue collar white voters who have taken quite awhile to cotton on to Barrack. And I can hardly blame them: I used to be very excited about BO (wow. I hope no one else takes up that joke...), and frankly I've forgotten why. He gives a great speech and he's on the correct side of the major issues, as far as I'm concerned. Gradually pull out of Iraq, against the war all the way (luck for him he didn't have to make the no-win choice Hillary had), not actively anti-gay marriage, not actively anti-choice, not pushing universal health-care like the world will explode without it. But he's become what I'd hoped he wouldn't be, yet another Democratic party choice--the alternative to a raging hillbilly right-wing crank. McCain's website and policy stances are very cut and dried, and laid out in a concise, easily digestible portions, like an entrée at Chili's, and just as nutritious.

Neighborhoods

We went to a community barbecue this afternoon, which is always a little awkward. The thing is, I just don't really care that much about my little community. My neighborhood is really ncie, but it's mostly thirty something parents with fairly good jobs who own their first condos or little houses, buying up properties because prices are low in this area, since for years this is a black and hispanic neighborhood, and before that it was an Irish and Italian one. I have very mixed feelings about being part of the gentrification of a neighborhood I like: on the one hand, wealthier peoplebring money and businesses into a community, and on the other hand we push the original inhabitants out and to worse places.
At the little shindig in which I struggled to hobnob with lifelong urban gardeners (I exaggerate, but this is a type of tofu-eater I have real trouble communing with. Heh.) a state senator showed up. She's a fourteen year veteran of state politics, logn-standing ties with the black communities, very liberal, seems like a party-line Democrat, very pro-gay marriage, etc. But she's had a few shady accusations about weirdnesses (she "forgot" to register to run, so she had to run as a write-in...), some people say her time has come, she's too entrenched, and she's also the apple-of-my-eye and the cream in my coffee (see, I'm making fun of myself for using a cliché) so a young former teacher is running against her. Our neighborhood is totally for this up and comer (who is, if it wasn't horribly obvious, not black [although she's half Hispanic and half Chinese; it's not like she's a WASP...]). It couldn't have been a more obvious symbol of what our presence is doing in the area. Realty and politics--together at last!

Books

I'm reading The Darling by Russel Banks, which I started as a break from Sophie's Choice by William Styron. The interesting thing is that both books have the same problem for me: they're each written from an entirely interior point of view. They're almost 100% exposition or explanation, which means that a huge amount of both books is telling not showing. Hannah Musgrave drags out this long-wined description of her journey from America to Africa and back again, and tells us what she was thinking at the time, and why certain thigns were meaningful and what they mean. And yet he keeps the story itneresting by constantly teasing us with unanswered questions that the narrator, Hannah, reminds us of as she postpones revealing their answers. The fact of Hannah's relative self-consciousness as a narrator of a story makes us wonder how reliable her explanations are. It's not really the classic Turn of the Screw situation where you're not sure if the narrator is crazy, lying or confused, or if you missed something.
On the other hand, Sophie's Choice has a similar self-consciousness but lacks the same self-awareness. Stingo constantly mocks his younger self, and shows ironic embarrassment at the self-centered waftiness of his younger self.

Sarah Palin's Theory

If in 2004, the Republicans' strategy was to pit the working class against the upper class by reinforcing the illusion that the Democratic party favors the wealthy, then this election season they seem to be pitting the middle class against the poor. Sarah Palin pretends to embody so-called "Blue-Collar small town hockey moms" (if you can afford hockey equipment, you've got some money kicking around somewhere) who actually have lots of money. I read an interesting article in Slate about how living in Alaska, manual jobs such as laying bricks, commercial fishing, etc. can make a huge amount of money compared to doing the same job in any other state. The Palin's apparently made over 200,000 dollars this year. And yet, they perceive their social status as "rednecks". They're like the people who drive a Japanese SUV truck to the megachurch/mall to worship Jesus to the strains of a Christian Screamo band and buy giant stereos to play their Toby Keith mp3's. In fact, Toby Keith or Garth Brooks or Big and Rich, Rascal Flatts, those are the musical analogs to what I'm talking about: utterly mainstream, commercial public figures who pander to a fictitious and vague notion of 'old-fashioned country values'. in order to convince the unsophisticated wealthy that they are actually down-trodden. Yet now that the upper middle class of my generation are all permanent grad students, the educated are now lower middle class, and the people who avoided student loans and went straight into corporate jobs are now upper middle class, the "traditional wisdom" that educated people are wealthy and uneducated people are not no longer makes the same sense.

Mz

I got into an argument awhile back about women using the term Mz ("Mizz"). To me, the term sounds ridiculous, but of course I got tons of flack from the super PC crowd I was with.
I totally understand the idea behind Mz, and in fact I like the theory. Why should women be judged by inherently sexualized terms, and ultimately imply that women have value only in relation to their sexual status vis a vis their husbands. BUT, my whole thing about Mz is that it's like using Life-Partner instead of husband or wife. It doesn't side-step the whole idea of identifying people by their sexual status, rather it replaces the outmoded, offensive (?) term with a clunky, artificially neutered fake sounding lesser version of the 'bad' term. It doesn't sound strong, it sounds wishy-washy. It doesn't say, "I refuse to be judged by my marital status," or even, "I demand to be judged by what I say and think and do, not by whether I'm married or not," it says, "I am asexual."
In a way, it calls attention to how stupid the whole thing is, as in, "Look at what I'm reduced to, using this ridiculous 'safe' term because you insist on looking at me that way," but is that the point?
I would just say, "Call me Susan."

Music Stuff

My work buddy M and my manager R, who is also a work buddy have been talking computer recording programs, computer drum machines and so on. I definitely appreciate electronic music like Aphex Twin and I'm definitely not one of those classic-rock wonks who thinks "It's not music if it's not made with 'real instruments'", but I don't and have never "gotten" lap-top music. It has less to do with the technology and more to do with the difference between writing music all yourself and collaborating with another person. Even though people who really "play" multiple instruments (I can "operate" a few instruments from time to time, but the only one I would consider I can 'play' is the guitar--even bass guitar I'm merely manipulating as if it were a guitar) necessarily approach one differently from another, there's something that happens when two or more people bounce ideas off of one another that cannot happen when one person is writing and playing every part, considering and executing the finished piece.
I'm far from being a classical musician, and I'm sure a music scholar would say that the relationship between a composer and his performers is a totally different animal from the "rock band" notion I'm talking about. Or maybe not. Maybe all compositons are better after they've been "editted" by another composer, and maybe, even in the highly regimented and written down situation of the, say, violinist playing a part written by someone else, there's a certain personal touch that the instrumentalist necessarily brings to his/her performance.
All I really know is that I can always tell when some singer-songwriter has done everything himself--there's something flat, static, something ultimately boring about it. There's no surprise.
There's also something totally separate about being in a live band. When you play with other people, you have to turn off a part of your brain and let your hands perform their part by themselves so you can listen to what the other guys are doing. Often I wouldn't realize what it was I'd been looking for until I heard a recording of practice, say. It allows you to get ideas for harmonies and melodies that just wouldn't ever happen if you had just been listening to yourself. There's something inherently masturbatory about doing all the parts yourself. And even if you're playing bar-band rock or country or blues, there's nothing like a real drummer.

I'm not down with GOP, yeah you know me

I actually watched some of the GOP convention tonight, mainly because I wanted to hear Sarah Palin for herself. She fucking pissed me off. It was kind of hilarious, because it made Obama's least substantive speech sound like an economics dissertation. Ever single aspect of it was, I'm just a small town girl who doesn't like Washington big shots telling us what to blah blah, and John McCain is such a great man, he's the only man who's really fought to protect you, blah blah etc. It's just like 2004, it's all aimed at wealthy suburban housewives who want a strong man to protect them from scary brown people.
I just hope that these PUMA types and other disgruntled Hillary voters realize that if they vote for McCain-Palin, this is the kind of worldview they're voting for. I don't think Palin even thinks her daughter's pregnancy is even really a scandal: she likes the idea of kids getting pregnant early, not using birth control, marrying the first person they have sex with and settling into small town mommy mode right away. You can either vote for a carbon copy of Hillary's policies who won because people like him more (where does this fiction of Obama's arrogance come from? How many humble politicians do you know?! And why do people have so much trouble believing that young liberals don't like the idea of voting for a former first lady who's been entrenched in the same Rolling Stone-vs Brooks Brothers Boomer politics?), or you can vote for a former loose canon (That started out as unintentional. Heh) who's swung farther right than the current administration and who will get to elect two supreme court justices and who has pledged to overturn Roe v Wade and who needs to woo right wing Christian conservatives to pay back his social capitol.
But one of her daughters is hot.

Work

Does what you do for a living have to be what you do that matters to you? Does your day-job have to be what you really want to be doing? My job is a place to put myself for eight hours, a stepping stone to something better, making books for a living, but I feel like I'm cheapening myself by still doing it, by still putting up with the bullshit. I'm sick of feeling like I'm wasting my time by showing up and working hard. I'm sick of feeling afraid to try for something better. Why am I so worried, so afraid of failing? At the end of the month I'll be able to apply out to other jobs within the company, and I'm going to start immediately.

The Rotten Apple

I took a much needed vacation last week. First I took the train down to Pennsylvania to meet my wife and visit her family in Center county for a few days. The train ride was leisurely, uncrowded and spacious. We passed through suburban Boston, urban Rhode Island rural Connecticut and the seashore and into Pennsylvania countryside. This resulted in an odd combination of verdant beauty, bourgeois luxury and the ruins of trailer parks.
Finally I arrived in a very rural nearby town, Lewisburg and we drove back to the house. We relaxed and saw several of Beanz' family members, which could have been awkward since her grandparents' are divorced and her half sister and brother in law are fairly conservative while the rest of us are quite liberal, and the Democratic convention was frequently the topic of conversation.
We went to the county fair to enjoy some carnival food and gawk at country wares. Farmers from all over the state (which I frequently forget is enormous) come and set up fully furnished tents for their whole families for the whole week and show off their prize winning canned foods, fresh grown vegetables and goats, cows and sheep. It's difficult to view these type of events without an ironic, detached, elitist perspective, as in, "Can you believe those hicks?" It's just a totally different way of life from the one I've lead. But I enjoyed it. I ate funnel cake for the first time, which is awesome, as well as a pretty good sausage sandwich and steak and cheese, and a shitty lemonade made of one lemonade, a cup of sugar, a half pound of ice and a cup of water, as well as the dregs of oranges that had wedged the mechanics of the lemon press. We played skee ball and Beanz ruled while I drooled.
Then we took the "Chinatown bus" from State College up to New York to spend time with friends in Brooklyn. We ate some wonderful slow braised and smoked pork shoulder, Domincan sausage, kosher pickles, asparagus and drank gallons and gallons of beer and whiskey. The night ended with horrendous drunken karaoke and vomitting. The next morning may have been in my bottom five hangovers of all time.
We had an amazing meal at our friend J's restaurant where he's the maitre 'D. Japanese-European bistro fusion? I'm not sure if that's at all accurate. There was a sushi menu, as well a variety of fish and flesh with exotic flavors that came plated the way food is on top Chef. Local seasonal ingredients, which I'm glad is all the rage these days. There was a tremendous wild mushroom salad, pork belly steamed in some sort of leaf and a fantastic halibut steak.
We're lucky to have friends who devote themselves so fully to bringing people wonderful, creative, delicious things.

Birthday # 28

I was having a pretty terrific birthday weekend up until the last five minutes of it. I turned twenty eight on Saturday and felt surprisingly good about it. Twenty seven was hard, because I had the shocking realization that I could no longer legitimately say I was in my early/mid-twenties, it was the beginning of my late twenties. Now, the pieces of my game are starting to align in position, and I can begin to see how I'll move them in the near future to bring them into even better position, whereas between twenty one and twenty seven I was barely aware what game board I was even looking at. I just feel much better about where I am in my life; my decisions are feeling somewhat reasoned and intentional rather than arbitrary and vaguely shameful.
I also came away with some fantastic loot. In addition to sticking with me for another year, Beans got me a Wii! She also pulled a fantastic switcheroo, tricking me into thinkign I was getting a real clunker of a present. She knew I had to read this horrible, intelligence-insulting corporate self-help book called Who Moved my Cheese (seriously, avoid at all costs), and she seemed to have bought me a copy of the same author's follow-up book, some dreck about being a better manager. She wrote a little note inside the cover about how she hadn't had time for a more exciting present, but then underneath a little paper flap it she'd written, "Just kidding, the real present is a Wii! It's in the mail!" We had had a grumble earlier when the stimulus checks were on the way, where I wanted to buy something fun like, say, a Wii, this being the first time I'd actually thought about it. I feel ridiculous because it's so expensive, and she's sooo frugal, and never spends money on herself.
Then my brother and his girlfriend got me a bottle of this fantastic scotch we both love, McCallan. My mom gave me a fair chunk of cash, and my dad offered to get me a guitar pedal! (I've been looking into an MXR analog delay, but I've read some reviews about a reliability problem in the line...)
All in all, everything was looking really good until literally moments before we were going to leave our parents' house, the phone rang. My brother is going off to grad school to get a PhD in psych at Western Michigan (he's always been more sure of what he wants to do and how to go about doing it. Or maybe he's less apprehensive about following a trodden path. OR maybe he's more practical and thorough about life choices), and we were all kind of wanting to say goodbye without drawing it out awkwardly.
The phone rang at about nine and all of us stopped and just looked at the phone. Minna offered to pick it up. Obviously, this situation is s weird as it would seem to you, if anyone were reading this other than me.
I've had phone anxiety for ages now. When I was in middle school, the phone was frequently someone callign for me that I didn't ant to talk to: girls I was too scared to talk to and had NO idea hwo to flirt with, or even if I wanted to, or guys that I'd wound up hanging around with but didn't want to actually be friends with, friends I felt too bad about getting rid of, and then one afternoon my half sister called and told me she was an alcoholic. She made all these weepy apologies about how she wanted t be a bigger part of my life and felt bad about not having been a real sister to me. I hadn't realized how true that was until she said it. At the same moment, I began to realize (or admit to myself) how much I didn't want that. Even though we have the same father, I have much more in common with my cousins, whom I also never see, than with her. She's the epitome of spoiled, entitled, ignorant, classist/racist, self-absorbed poor little rich girl drama queens. I've never seen someone who's made so many terrible choices, ignored so man people, put herself ahead of so many, blamed so many for her own failings, expected to be given so much and do so little with herself, and abdicated so much personal responsibility for everything. Obviously, I have a troubled relationship with my "sister".
Minna answered, said, "Oh, hi E," and then listened for a few minutes. Then she handed the phone to my mom (even though she's not related to my mom, she's the only one she'll talk to). My mom said, "Uh huh, uh huh, OK, oh, you can't talk now? You'll call me back, OK, when?"
Apparently, she apologized for not having called in awhile, was getting back from a wedding and stuck at the airport, called to say hi and then claimed to not have time to talk. You called to to say you don't have time to talk? I wasn't sure if I was angry or worried. Beans picked up the phone, and this didn't appear to register as unusual with E. Part of me was worried for her safety; she seems like she's made her life into such a colossal wreck, and I worry about her ability to discern reality from imagination, and even to stay alive. This is a person who can do, apparently, nothing for herself and she has two children, one of whom is severely developmentally delayed and she's of course in total denial about it because she can't admit that something could be wrong with her "perfect life" and no, she doesn't realize what a fucking cheap cliché that is.
Mostly I was angry and disappointed. For a nanosecond I thought, maybe, just maybe, my fucking sister remembered it was my birthday and called to say happy birthday. I can't help but feel cheated; I have all the resentment, anxiety and awkwardness that comes with having a sibling, and none, none of the good parts.