Dear Screwsan

New Blog

2010-06-15T16:28:00.001-07:00

Well hello blog friends (er, crickets). I'm moving my enterprise to another forum and changing the tone a bit. Now that I'm in grad school for a Piled Higher and Deeper degree (as an academically challenged stranger on the street saw fit to categorize my life choice the other day), I'm supposed to be doing this thing they call "professionalization" which, as far as I can tell, involves learning how to beg for arts funding monies, buying student-proof clothing (nothing translucent or low-cut, nothing short, nothing you can trip over, nothing that produces arm-vag or muffin top, nothing that clings, nothing with stains, nothing with tears--even artful ones, nothing too dressy lest they think you are pretentious and talking down to them, nothing with accessories that tinkle or jingle or otherwise disturb you when you are looking out at them, those half-asleepers, listening to your own voice rattle around in your suddenly vacant head, no t-shirts), and giving yourself a "voice" in the writing community so that people can look you up when you write something they enjoyed reading.

Actually, in all seriousness, I like it when I can find a blog or a website by and for authors I like and know, and in the hopes that someday, one day, maybe in my wildest fantasies I may have a book I would like to publicize and promote, the new blog is the first step towards providing that platform.

So without further ado, I present my new blog: which you can find on my Facebook page, under "websites."

The new blog will be a little, uh, tamer than this one. And will mostly be stuff I've published and stuff other writers I like have published. I'm sure I won't be able to stay out of hot-head territory forever, but if there's one mantra of this new, strange life it's: don't put anything online you wouldn't want your students/committee members/future employers to stumble across.

So I guess that's it. Perhaps I'll come back here if I have something I really need to get off the old (well-covered, unstained) chest. We'll see. The future!

I Should Always Be Reading Right Now

2010-01-29T10:42:00.000-08:00

Oh blog! Here's what's been going on: reading reading reading writing papers reading grading grading grading reading (writing) reading grading drinking.

There. You're caught up. I'm here because I was all riled up and commenting on a stranger's blog and was signed in anyway so. Hello!

I realized last year that I don't have a hobby or anything I really enjoy doing because going back to grad school has meant making my hobby my career. Which is great! But a bit one dimensional, especially here where people who are amazing writers are also amazing musicians and pie-bakers and craftsmen of various species. I think hobbies are, like, the expression of your ultimate entrepreneurial fantasy. Rock star! (that counts, right?) Bakery owner! Furniture maker! Accessories designer! Microbrewer! etc.

What I'm saying is: I got a bass for Christmas and I need to learn how to use it.

Other news: one semester left of coursework. Have assembled my illustrious committee for my reading year which will begin sometime this summer. Also on the to do list this summer: finish my short story collection and begin to shop it. It's almost there--or anyway, some iteration is almost there. It's a mess right now. I'm trying to figure out how thematically linked the pieces need to be. But that's structure stuff. That will be fun. Have an essay coming out in the Iowa Review this year which, because I am a small, small person, makes me feel better about never getting in to the Writer's Workshop. There are many other reasons to feel good about that, but every townie who's been rejected from that place feels at least a drop of bitterness about it. Also news: got a fellowship to work with the innovative publisher FC2 next (academic) year. Excited! Mom and Jim's new house, fyi, is gorgeous. Right off the Res off of Dubuque St. and most importantly off the flood plain. Thinking of roadtripping home this summer for some R&R&Writing.

Dogs, rabbits, boyfriend: soft and fed and happy. Life: suspiciously lovely.

Writer with a Capital W?

2009-10-20T21:50:00.001-07:00

There's this website I read sometimes called HTMLGiant. It's about writing and reading and such. Today, there's a post about a project some people have put together to investigate "process-based questions about writing habits." The questions they ask are, no doubt, intended for more well-known writers. Writers whose work you read and think to yourself: how the eff do they do that? But because I have been questioning my own identity as a writer lately, and because I am in post-workshop mode (thinking about writing; slightly too tipsy to be good at it right now), I thought I'd answer some of the questions these people have put to other writers. Let's see what happens.

Q: How do you write? That is, do you write in shorthand, longhand, or do you use a typewriter or a computer?

Computer. Since college, I cannot write longhand, although my ideas come out longhand because I'm usually away from my computer when I get them. I love the computer because it's fast enough to keep up with thought processes almost in real time. Also, I almost need a visual when writing, to get a quick sense of what I've already written and since my handwriting is awful, there is much less translating that needs to occur.

Q: Are materials important to you, or can you use practically anything?

I am not a writer-artist. Not a poet. Only a visual thinker in a diagrammatic sense. So no, materials are not important at this point in the sense that the only materials I have any deftness with are language materials.

Q: Has your approach to writing changed as new technologies have become available?

It's hard for me to think of myself as a writer, even now. I'm not sure I ever felt myself a "writer" in college or shortly thereafter when computers and laptops specifically were becoming more common. I guess having a blog has helped me plug into a writing sense of a sort, but I don't mine my blog for fiction ideas, though perhaps I should. Blogging has, I suppose, in some ways, changed my writing to feel less formal and private. For some reason, trying to write a journal or diary always felt like more of a put-on than writing a blog does. I suppose that might speak to the idea of the consumption of writing. I don't know how to write when there's no sense of consumption involved. I always assume (mostly wrongly) that there is an audience involved and when the audience is myself or an unknowable future "I" or descendent (as in private writing), I feel too self-conscious to write. It's only when there is a perceived audience, or even just the possibility of an audience that I feel freed to write. And I don't think that stems from a narcissistic place, I think it just stems from a place of wanting to communicate. Writing to communicate, but not necessarily with myself, who often bores me. I'd rather bore you with myself.

Q: And in regard to methods that change: are these structural methods? Or the ways in which you begin a project, or research it?

Oh the internet. I often write with a Google screen open. It's so easy now to access very quickly an idea or sensation or fact that might fit nicely into a story but which I have no prior knowledge of or experience with. That this information is out there, for everyone, strikes me as a pretty amazing thing. I'm writing something for a Comp Lit class now, and it involves some creative non-fiction work. Last night I was trying to remember the details of the murder of the criminology student Imette St. Guillen (but did not have her name or the name of the bar where she met her murderer) so I Googled something along the lines of "manhattan student bar murder" and very quickly found the relevant reports. I also found out that she was murdered by a bouncer after leaving the bar The Falls which was owned by the Dorrian family, also the owners of Dorrian's Red Hand, the bar where Robert Chambers and Jennifer (and just now, I had to Google the victim's last name) Levin met. Levin was later murdered in Central Park, by Chambers, after they left Dorrian's.

The fact that this is all right there when we want it still just blows my fucking mind. And I think it helps explain why a lot of contemporary writing embraces fragment and collage. There is so much information out there. We are flooded by it, constantly. Writing is a selection process that involves privileging certain aspects of that information. Which is cool.

Q: What do these first drafts look like? How detailed are they? It sounds as though they help you to find the work’s character, so that you can then “saturate” yourself with it — is that a fair way of putting it?

My drafts are slow and methodical. I can't just bust something out and go back later and revise it. Because I don't map out what I'm going to write before I write it, what follows, in my writing, from something else, usually feels more or less integral to me to the rest of the story. Like a Jenga piece. You might be able to take one out without the whole thing crashing to the ground, but you it's just as likely that the structure of the whole thing will be compromised if you do. That's on a conceptual level. On a sentence level I'm usually a mess for the first couple of drafts.

Q: Do you have a set schedule?

Going to graduate school to write has given me less general writing time than I've ever had. This works for me, in some ways, because I have to squeeze it in where I can. It almost feels like I'm doing something illicit when I write (because, really, I should be class planning or grading or reading Kant or whatever) which makes it kind of exciting. I also work well under deadlines. I worked on a piece all last summer but it didn't turn into anything until I realized I had to turn something in to my workshop in a week and a half. Writing under deadline and writing when I have no time to write (even if antithetical to my whole raison d'etre for being in grad school) helps me produce pieces that have a certain pressure or drive to them. If I'm really being honest, I probably write 0-3 hours per week, except weeks when I have writings due, and then I write 10-15 hours. But a lot of the "writing" I do is in my head, too, so if I were being all lawyerly about it, I could be billing far more hours than I spend actually typing. In fact--and I think this is true of a lot of writers--I'm never really not writing. But I'm often not typing.

Q: What kind of environment do you prefer to work in?

I thought for a long time that the kind of chair or desk I wrote in or on (or specifics like how tall the desk was) mattered. Or that a space had to have a certain balance between charming mess and pristine organization for me to be productive in it. But in grad school shit comes due and you just have to write and there's not really a lot of luxury of space or time to be hemming and hawing over what setting puts one in the mood. Especially since I moved this summer, I've had to sort of abandon the romantic idea of a perfect setting. I've even been trying to write in coffee shops and been marginally successful with that. I can write to classical music or free jazz (math and anti-math) but not to, say, indie rock, unless it's Modest Mouse, which for some reason works for me.

Q: What do you find to be the discomforts of writing? Are there aspects of writing that are unplanned or uncomfortable?

Everything about writing is uncomfortable. It is almost always the last thing I want to do but the first thing I should be doing. The trick is to get into a space that is so focused and obsessive that the idea of doing anything else, for a little while, does not even cross the mind. It's like the opposite of meditation, but within the same sort of nothing-space.

And now that I've answered these questions, which presuppose the existence of an identification as a Writer, am I any closer to being a Writer? Dunno. But I just might be tired enough to finally go to bed.

Holy Fuck It's October

2009-10-16T18:00:00.001-07:00

What is it about falling and being in love that makes writing so difficult? Or maybe it just makes for a boring blog post. I don't know; I got nothing. The update is that I'm currently cohabitating with M and his two dogs, who have been (tentatively, safely) introduced to the rabbits, but who are not proving themselves mature or responsible enough to handle having pets yet. When the dogs are grown up enough to do a little more work around the house, or perhaps get jobs, then we may revisit the matter.

In school news: getting a PhD is fucking hard. I find myself fantasizing about reading the Twilight books under the Christmas tree at my Mom and Jim's new house this December. That is how bad it is right now. The good news is that I'm starting to make my "reading list" which is a list of approximately 150 books I will be responsible for reading next year, otherwise known as my "reading year." Which: let's face it, who can read 150 books in a year? M suggests I buy the book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" and just read that instead. Brilliant, however I am suspicious that he, currently in his reading year, has not taken his own advice. The breakdown of my reading list is three categories: history, theory, and contemporary*. My history and theory lists will be canonical but largely focused on Modernism, since Modernism is rad and I'm not really convinced that we are post- it at all. My contemporary list will be canonical (or "important" as such--think David Foster Wallace) contemporary fiction. Probably circa Lolita or Beckett novels and ending with the aforementioned Twilight series. Oh to dream.

In other news, there is no other news. I realized earlier this year that I don't have a hobby, unless you count going to yoga occasionally and being annoyed by it a hobby. I watch a lot of movies, I guess. But I don't think "watching" anything is allowed to count as a hobby, besides, I guess, bird watching because of all the hiding out in bushes and whatnot.

So I may start to cultivate a hobby. I used to play piano, quite badly, and M has a keyboard in his (past)/our (present) basement. The only problem with hanging out in the basement is that there are giant spiders. There is also a suspicious, walled-off room like something out of Poe where, I'm convinced, if we broke through the concrete and started digging, we would unearth hooker bones.**

Other than being annoyed by and watching things, I don't really have any other talents or interests. This is the main problem with making something you did that was other-than-your-job into your job.

And that's it for now. Oh, I guess I should say that I'm working on an actual website (working in my head only, for now) since I've started to send out crap for publication again and it's a hallmark of a mature, responsible writer (working on that too. Kind of.) to have something "official" out there. Any host suggestions?

xo
S

*It is annoying to me that contemporary, in this context, is not a noun but an adjective and thus sits all wrong with history and theory. And thus, I am a total dork.

**This is a house we rent. If it were M's actual house, there would be no doubt in my mind about the hooker bones, but that's another tale for another time.

The breeze is so busy it don't miss a tree

2009-07-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

I guess you know it's been a long time since you posted when your Safari doesn't recognize, then fill in for you, your own blog address. And by you I mean me. And is there a word for that filling in URL thingy that happens when I type, say, "fl" and the computer adds "-eshbot.com" and then I know I've been spending too much time looking at porn this summer?

How are you? How is your new marriage/baby/divorce/book tour/as-yet unidentified medical problem/organic farm coming along?

Despite the ominous tone of my last email, I am doing quite well, and am even, for me, slightly tan. Problem with that last post is it was written during a confluence of difficult events. It was finals week and CT and I had broken up and, heartbreakingly, my grandmother died. I'm still mourning my grandmother, but the rest is water under the bridge, more or less.

I will not take this space to say much about the breakup, except that it involved me realizing that for a while I'd been trying to fit square pegs into round holes for the sake of romance, and not in a sexy way. It's good to be a writer, but it's bad when constructing a fictional narrative becomes something one attempts to do to one's life, as opposed to on a computer, in Word, usually to make a deadline. Because there are no drafts in real life and the baby jesus knows that I, for one, have never nailed it on the first try.

The good news is that, rather naturally and without much story structuring, I have met someone I am very very extremely like super taken with and he with me and we together have been adventuring about this summer, making everyone sick with our hand-holding and neck-nuzzling. (He is a writer, therefore, he shall here be called M, because if I call him W you will picture our former president and that is really not at all what he's about, except for the part where he sometimes gives me awkward backrubs when I speak to him in German.)

For instance, we took a road trip to L.A., where we ate so much good food, we probably did some brain damage in the form of mercury-and-garlic poisoning. There is very little excellent, affordable sushi here in SLC and no Cuban at all, so we ate the shit out of everything we saw and spent a bit of time lying around, moaning, clutching our torsos in pleasure and pain.

We also saw an underground stand-up comedy show featuring the stylings of one Paul Jay who was the best of the bunch and also a member of the West High Class of 1995. You might remember him as fedora-wearing, coin-flipping Paul Rhead. Which I can make jokes about on my blog because he makes them, himself, in public, to hundreds of strangers. He performs regularly in L.A. and around the west coast. I recommend, no, demand, that you see him next time you find yourself in his general vicinity.

Also in L.A. is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which M recommended and which lived up to his praise for it. I don't want to say too much about it, because part of its charm is its mystery. But you should go there for sure. It's my favorite museum now, although to compare it to other museums is difficult but also part of the point of it. It's a paradigm-shifting place and may change forever how you think about museums.

The last significant happening on our L.A. adventure was the made-for-sitcoms accidental drug dosage, involving someone's medical marijuana prescription and a well-disguised cookie. Let's just say it made for some excellent afternoon record-and-t-shirt shopping on Melrose. That was the afternoon we discovered fried olives at a place called Burger Bar. There is maybe no more delicious stoned eating on the whole entire planet.

Even though we could not have been less hungry after many days of this sort of behavior, we stopped by In-N-Out on the way out of town because it was mandatory.

Here is some beautiful food

And the beautiful desert

And my beautiful grandma, who loved to hum "Oh What a Beautiful Morning." It always was when she was near.

Brewing

2009-05-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been so long since I posted. Mostly because the latter half of this semester has been trying at best. There have been awful bits. There have been beautiful bits. Mostly there have been bits and bits and bits; so many that I had, for a little while there, difficulty remembering myself, remembering to eat, remembering to do anything, sometimes, but sit in a dark room and breathe.

But this is okay. It has been a difficult year, to say the least. It has been a year in which I've come to know that raw pocket of living that exists between the life you think you have and the life you actually have. It has been a confusing year, a heartwrenching year, a successful year and a year full of loss and sadness. It's been a year in which I begin to learn what it is to be unsafe. In a good way, I mean.

I know how this sounds. And I'm sorry for the obscurity. For the vague and vaguely new-life-sounding abstractions. I'll be able to fill you in good and hard soon. So soon. Distance and perspective. These things are important.

But no matter what, it's been my first year of grad school (2nd run), and now it's finished. And I'm going to clean my house and treat myself to a meal I can't afford. And then, so soon, I'll let you know how it all went.

Postscript

2009-02-25T18:23:00.001-08:00

That last post was inspired by Kate Harding's wonderful musings on her excellent blog Shapely Prose, which is a safe space monitored by Kate and her whip-smart co-bloggers. I posted there about the content of "The Ugly Truth." But it got me thinking: Why do I feel like I should only talk about this in a "safe space"? And the answer was: Because I am ashamed. Because I still think it's my fault. Because my first response to the violence directed at me was, "That was crazy, but I probably deserved it." On her blog, Kate discusses the gendered nature of violence like this (and not just the violence itself, but the victim-blaming as well) as symptomatic of a deep and enduring misogyny in our culture.

The Ugly Truth

2009-02-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

So, the whole Chris Brown and Rihanna thing. Wow. Didn't want to comment on it, but...here I go.

I was initially flabbergasted by all of the quotes from celebots putting in their two cents about how Chris Brown is really, underneath it all, actually a nice guy, and it's not like this has happened before. It's not like he has a *history* of beating women. He just screwed up! She was probably being mouthy! I couldn't believe that people actually think this way, in this day and age. Until I remembered: up until very recently, you thought that way too, Screwsan (and just because you thought it about yourself doesn't make it any less of a shitty sentiment).

I knew a nice guy once. We dated for awhile. Then, one time, after we broke up, when I was arguing with him on his front porch, he strangled me. He'd never been abusive before. He wasn't violent to me when we were dating. It was easy for his friends to take his side--after all, he's nice and I'm...well, I'm a mouthy bitch. And even those people who stood up for me and helped calm me down didn't really see this as a domestic violence issue. Neither did I. After all, victims of domestic violence are a certain way, they live with a pattern of abuse, and it often takes them years (as made-for-TV movies starring Candace Cameron tell us) to bust out of their terror-filled lives. Those kinds of domestic violence victims and abusers are all over the media, seared into our brains. It's a horrible reality that many victims of domestic violence live this way. It's very important to educate the masses about the cycle of domestic violence so that victims of it may feel empowered enough to leave their partners before they are killed.

But this trope of domestic violence is only part of the story. Then there's all the rest of us (and by "us," I mainly mean women here), who lead "normal" terror-free lives. There's all the rest of us who have nice boyfriends, boyfriends who, you know, only screwed up once and felt really really bad and would never do it again. (Or ex-boyfriends who only screwed up once and even then, after the fact.) There's the rest of us, who will not lead violence-filled lives, but may just be touched by violence. And we will ignore it. We will internalize it. We will learn to not talk about it, because he was a nice guy and he didn't mean it and it was only once. We will blame ourselves and our bad luck at relationships and our big, bitchy mouths. We will think that because there is no "cycle of violence" present in what happened to us that there won't ever be one. We will shrug it off and tell ourselves, "It's no big deal. i walked away from it. I'm not a victim of domestic violence."

But that's not true. And that kind of thinking is dangerous. That kind of thinking gives violence a foot in the door. That kind of thinking makes polite excuses for something we can't afford to be polite about. Violence in relationships (whether they are new relationships or old relationships or over relationships), violence against women, is never ever ever okay. Even when he's famous. Even when you're famous. Even if he's never done it before. Even if he's a nice guy. Even if you're on his front porch and you are angry. It's not fucking okay. It's abuse. And it's common. And it's probably happened to someone you know.

Black Silk Boxers With Hearts

2009-02-14T23:10:00.000-08:00

When we were 16, I gave you a pair of black silk boxers with red hearts for Valentine's Day. They frayed, looked a bit tawdry, were older than our years, silly, slightly creepy, easily stained, warm. Like us. Cheap and happy. I miss you.

Letter from Cat

2009-02-01T14:46:00.001-08:00

I've had a lot of coffee today, which means another blog post! I kind of feel bad about not posting since November and I just had what could end up to be a really dumb idea, but I'll roll with it. This semester I'm taking a fiction workshop. Every Monday in our fiction workshop, we write "creative responses" to the book we've been assigned to read the previous week. The responses are only 1-2 pages long and they're freewriting exercises, which means I can write whatever weird and stupid crap comes into my head without having to worry about polish or revision. I thought I might start posting some of my creative responses here because a) they're short and b) that way I'll potentially be posting at least once a week again and c) the three of you who read this blog can see firsthand the sort of silly crap one produces when one is in the process of being overeducated in writing. Plus maybe the anxiety of knowing that my creative responses will be posted will make them...not better but more productive somehow? Anyway, so here's my creative response from this week. I should explain that my workshop has an experimental bent; that I've recently been playing with collage and appropriation (aka stealing and plagiarism); and that I've been obsessed, all week, with the blog True Wife Confessions. So to make my slackitude work for me, I decided to write a piece that used my favorite sentences or clauses from a number (and what a number) of TWC posts and work them into a...not really a story, but...something. The rule, more or less, was I could use no more than one sentence or clause from each post. Here's what happened:

-------------------------------------------------------

Letter From Cat
(as excerpted from the blog True Wife Confessions)

Hey you,

These weak, underachieving drama queens are out of control. I put up with a string of asshole roommates. But you take the cake. True, you are affectionate (greatly so!), playful. I don’t dislike you, but I feel like I have way too much weight on my shoulders. I just want to be the freaking cat. I am not your friend. I do not want to sit by your bedside table and watch you fade away into your final slumber.

Living with you sucks the joy out of my soul. Your body is seriously out of proportion. You stink. Your gibberish makes my skin crawl. You do anything I ask at the snap of a finger, and you know what, it’s annoying. When I don’t feel good, you inquire as to my pooping. Just how hard is it to change the litter box?

You asshole rat-fuck gutless piece of shit bastard. Your girlfriend is a crazy ass bitch. I swear she is the ugliest human being I have ever seen in my life. One night in September, while you were sleeping, I peed on her toothbrush. I wish I could just kill her sometimes.

Your best friend…I tempted fate and decided to sit with him and watch TV. I really screwed up!!! One thing led to another, and we indulged in some very inappropriate touching. I don’t know what happened exactly. I’m glad it has stopped but I still think about it often. It makes me so sad.

I miss you so badly when we aren’t together. I’m starving for attention. I’m starving. Chopped liver? That’s what I want. Nothing more and nothing else.

I think I am starting to forgive you. You cuddle with me, rub my back. This is how you stole my heart to begin with. You were always under the surface. Yes it took a long time, but you were dedicated to pleasing me. I love you. I mean…I don’t dislike you, managing your ego. Get a job, seriously!

Here’s a confession…I hate you. I’m tired of smelling spit on your hands. I’m tired of all your excuses. Just so you know, you won’t be able to find three of your favorite sweaters ever again. When I see you I will act like everything is fine, but under my breath I will be saying have a nice day bitch. Lol.

After 45 minutes of licking, I’m going to take a nap.

Shut up shut up shut up,
The Cat

-----------------------------

Which I think basically sums up my feelings about cats and their feelings.

S

Fucking Yoga (A Rant)

2009-02-01T11:41:00.001-08:00

You know, I like the act of yoga. I do. It makes me feel better than anything in the world. Without it, I’m prone to back pain and sore joints and strained muscles, especially now that I’m a wizened old hag. Yoga keeps me off the anti-Ds. Yoga feels really good to my body. But the culture of yoga, I have to say, often annoys the living shit out of me. It’s so restrictive. Good yogis don’t eat meat, or smoke or drink or toot a line now and then because they’re out on the Lower East Side and the DJ’s really good and beautiful people are dancing and some cute boy invited them into the bathroom and gave them a bump and then made out with them all night long. You know what I mean? I’m speaking hypothetically here.

I’ve never been much of a joiner, especially not when joining means behavior modification in pursuit of a “better” self via enlightenment or spirituality or whatever, which I’ve noticed can sometimes lead to viewing those around you (beneath you, really) with pity and disapproval, because this helps you to justify the fact that your life is now bacon-and-cocaine free and maybe a little bit boring. I think this is the same reason I’ve been resistant to organized religions. I don’t do well with proscription and I’m not a very goal-oriented person. If I had any, my mantras might be something like: “Make tremendous mistakes” and “Are you going to eat that.”

I think the culture of yoga can be incredibly helpful for many people. Yoga teaches you to have compassion for yourself, which many people—say addicts, or abuse victims, or people who, for whatever reason, don’t like themselves very much—could use a lot more of. In that respect, the belief system behind yoga can be good and healthy. But the thing about yoga culture and some of the people steeped in it is I get the feeling that they never lacked a healthy amount of compassion for themselves. And now they have permission, via a faux faith-based exercise regimen (which is the way it’s often practiced in America), to think about themselves all the time.

And look I’m a no stranger to narcissism—I’m a writer. This blog is like a tribute to narcissism. But at least I don’t pretend to be doing good works while flexing my awesomely toned muscles in front of a room-sized mirror. I mean, I’m still, metaphorically flexing the muscles in the mirror, but I goddamned well know I’m not helping anyone or putting any good vibes or auras or whatever-the-fuck out into the world. And I certainly don’t talk in an irritatingly soft voice and pretend like nothing ever pisses me off. Fucking yoga instructors.

Which brings me to the real, secret, selfish reason behind today’s yoga rant: My local yoga studio has a “public-school teachers and single parents discount” that just makes them affordable. Since they have no student discount, I thought I’d take them up on the teachers’ prices because, hey, I teach in the Utah public school system. I went for a trial class but was turned down for the discount on my first visit by a yoga instructor named Jim who refused to speak above a whisper. So when I got home I emailed the owner, explaining my situation (I teach at the University of Utah and would like the teacher discount) and was turned down again:

I offer the discount to teachers to honor their work with our youth. Not so much the money or lack of it, but the stress they are under and the good job they do. This is the same reason I offer the deal to single parents.

I’d just like to draw your attention to that phrase, “honor their work with our youth,” because that phrase in particular makes me want to punch this person in her calm yoga face. If you haven’t been to a lot of yoga classes before, this might sound like a totally normal and reasonable sentence. However, “honor” is a big yoga word and for me it conjures the image of a middle-aged, social X-ray-type in two hundred dollar yoga pants bowing to herself in the mirror and reverently whispering “namaste” in order to “honor” herself. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Maybe I’m jealous that the hot-for-50 lady is hotter than me, mediocre-for-31. Or maybe I’m jealous because she can afford $200 yoga pants and mine are Old Navy brand and six years old. Or maybe, looking at that lady, I sense she’s never lacked for being “honored” in her life. Probably something like all of the above.

So that expression, “honor,” just galls me in the first place. And then there’s the rest of the email which is galling in general because it insinuates, by negation, that the work I do is less stressful and “good.” Forget for a moment that the line between teaching college freshmen and high school upperclassmen is flimsy at best. And let’s assume that I don’t do “good” work at all, that my desire to become a college professor is completely self-absorbed and maybe I’m bad at it. Maybe I’m poisoning young minds and bodies with episodes of “Family Guy” and the occasional donut. That’s fine. I’m not a special ed resource teacher who works with behavior-disordered and mentally disturbed youth. But you know what? Not all teachers are good and deserving of awesome yoga discounts. In fact I’ve met some pretty shit ones in my day, including:

-the pretty girl who teaches kindergarten until her doctor-boyfriend becomes her doctor-husband.
-the jock who may know something about coaching football, but not much about American history.
-the Dude who loves to sub because it’s easy.
-the “Mostly, I wanted to keep having summer break” teacher (note: actually the majority of teachers, according to a recent survey I read somewhere once).
-the one who sleeps with--or gives the appearance of being willing to sleep with--students. (related, tangentially, to the arrested-development high school teacher who cannot or will not relate to adults and instead seeks to relive glory days of own youth.)

I mean, as long as we’re going to generalize about groups of people and the “good” “work” they do or don’t do!

Look, I know most teachers work like crazy and that it’s a demanding job. I’ve seen season four of the “The Wire.” Seriously though, I get it. Teaching is hard. I’m not saying teachers don’t deserve an awesome yoga discount. I’m just saying I do too. My stress levels since beginning my PhD are absolutely through the roof. Not to mention that, no matter the false distinctions this yogi’s email makes between “money” and “stress,” when one’s annual salary is $12,000 (approximately 1/3 of the beginning annual public school teacher’s salary), the two cannot be pulled apart. And although from a professional standpoint I think education reform is very important in this country, personally, I just kind of get annoyed when people say shit like “honor their work with our youth.” Think of the children! I kind of hate the children, if you want to know the truth.

(sidenote: why isn’t she offering discounts to social workers and cops, whose burnout (and suicide) rates are far higher and faster than those of teachers?)

But anyway, you know, whatevs. If this yogi had just said, like, “Sorry, I can’t offer you a discount because I can’t afford to” and stopped there—fine. I would have had some measure of respect for that. But this flimsy and illogical response to my assertion that I should, under the terms of what’s listed on the yoga studio’s website, qualify for this discount, is sheer bullhonkey. And maybe that’s what this comes down to in the end—a sort of side-stepping of reality. The reality is: there’s something on your website that says I should be able to receive a discount. Don’t hide behind the pretty, silky veil of “honoring good works” when really, you just want me to pay full price.

I’ve noticed over the years at different yoga studios around the country that there is a nearly pathological resistance to discussing money or discounts, and yet yoga is incredibly expensive and very much caters to the sensibilities and cultures of a certain class. And I do mean “caters.” I don’t for a minute take for granted that yoga instructors or studio owners are necessarily of the same class as their clients. Maybe that’s why they don’t talk about money—it’s just not something they think the upper-middle class likes to do. Maybe they’re right. Maybe instructors and studio-owners are a bit trapped by the class system in which they’ve chosen to do business, which causes people like me, who have weird class hang-ups anyway, to throw shitfits on their personal blogs. I don’t know. As usual, I don’t know anything. Except that I should probably just buy a DVD and shut the fuck up already.

Election Day: This Time It's Personal

2008-11-04T07:03:00.001-08:00

Work up way before the alarm clock this morning, nervous and excited. Took a picture of my living room in the early, rainy light because I needed to take a picture of something to hold this day in my brain. My brother will be in Grant Park tonight, one of 2 million strong. I've drunk the Kool Aid. I'm ready.

Patriots

2008-10-22T16:45:00.001-07:00

Governor of Alaska...

Meet the Senator from Wisconsin.

You guys have a lot to talk about, just in time for Halloween. It's witch-hunting season, after all. Good luck routing out all those anti-American Congressmen and women.

Here Then Gone

2008-10-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

CT was here for a whole week and I forgot to take pictures. Mostly, we got up late, laid around, ate food (some good, some bad) and watched movies. It snowed here for two days over the weekend, which smooshed us into a cozy huddle that we never quite recovered from, even when the snow melted and the sun came out and it was 65 degrees in the valley where I live. There is something about snow on mountains that demands hot chocolate and fresh croissants. Luckily, both are nearby. Real, dark hot chocolate mere blocks from my house. It's going to be a lovely winter.

The thing about visits from boyfriends is that it's not always possible to enjoy them fully when they're happening. There's always anxiety about having fun and making the most of your time. This eventually turns to anxiety about the impending departure. Then there was all the work hanging over my head the whole week. I think, though, that just maybe we pulled off a couple of perfect moments right there in the middle.

He left yesterday and I cried and, still crying, sat down to finish a very difficult paper--the first official academic paper of my doctoral career and that made me cry harder. It sounds pathetic but it was closer to hilarious, me sitting there in sweat pants, red and wet in the face, leaning over my post-it covered copy of Jean Genet's Querelle to write about anal sex and blow-jobs, which yes, made me miss CT and cry some more. Hilariously pathetic perhaps.

Later, after I had collected myself and texted CT the location of the smoking lounges in the Cincy airport, I saw his shoes sitting in the bedroom, cuddled up with my things. He calls them his work shoes but really they are just his shoes. I'm not sure what he flew home in. I should probably send them back soon, but I like having them here. I've put them in the hallway with my own shoes. They look like they're waiting for him, like any minute he'll walk through the door, home from wherever he's been.

Fear and Change

2008-10-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

McCain’s campaign sideshow has not only gone off the rails, it’s gone out of its mind. I’ve been catching up on the news from the last week (thanks, grad school) and I’m appalled, stunned and revolted by the racist epithets and death threats against Obama that are now making regular appearances at McCain-Palin events. The Nation describes a recent rally in Florida as a near race-riot, with the crowd turning on reporters. One African-American TV crew member was told to “Sit down, boy” by a white Palin supporter.

Fucking terrifying.

And McCain-Palin have not done anything to stem the tide of hate-speech from supporters.

Fucking unacceptable.

Is this what it comes down to? Pandering to the lowest common denominator? The ignorant, the racist, the—hello—possibly sociopathic?!?!?

Well, M-P, there you go. You finally found your untapped voter population. It’s not young single women, it’s not Hispanics, it’s not college students or first time voters or any of the other target groups we’ve been hearing about for the last year.

No, quite simply, its the insane, the deranged, the inhumane, the disgusting, the psychotic, the moronic, the afraid.

Is this the Republican legacy? Is this the future they see for America? If I were a Republican, I’d be tearing up my membership card right about now.

So this is what it all comes down to: Do we as a country cower in fear of and condemn the new, the unknown, the different, the foreign? Or do we step out into the world as the face of progress, invention, diplomacy, and tolerance?

Sorry, I know the political posting tends to get old, especially in a campaign year but I am absolutely beside myself. "Sit down, boy"? "Kill him"?!?! What. The. Fuck. is going on?

Butts

2008-10-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today that my pets are like 65% butt, which somehow feels appropriate since my own body feels more like 65% butt lately than not. Oh pants. When shall I ever find a pair of you that fits and flatters (for less than $100)?

Truthfully, on the grad student budget, that figure should be more like < $30. I've found a Nordstrom Rack here, which is kind of like Filene's Basement, in that there you will find drastically reduced black polyester clothing by BCBG and wonder who really, anymore, wears black polyester clothing to work? and then buy it anyway because you read in a magazine once that wrap dresses flatter every figure.

I'm taking a non-fiction workshop this semester, which has been tough. I'd like to do longer, researched, journalistic pieces but my schedule is too packed for that, so I end up writing about myself, which, as long-time readers of this blog know, is boring. It's one thing to write a kicky, 400 word blog entry about one's ass. Just you try and sustain that for 15 pages. I did. Wow. Yeah. Fiction? I miss you.

In a recent attempt to write about something other than myself, I emailed the SLC popo this weekend to see if I could do a ride-along with one of their officers then write about it. In my email to them, I used the word "infrastructure" (as in: "as a new resident of SLC, I'm interested in how the infrastructure of the city works"). Apparently in SLC, examining the "infrastructure" is synonymous with spying. I got back a polite but suspicious email implying that if I were interested in ferreting out then exposing the inner-workings and secrets of the SLC police department, I should take my business elsewhere. I emailed them back and tried to explain what I meant by "infrastructure" without making unflattering comparisons to, say, the sanitation department or mayor's office. They haven't written me back yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm now on some list that, at some point, may involve my black-balling or deportation. I'm not sure, so in the meantime I'm just trying to be an upstanding citizen. Which means taking out my trash on time instead of letting it fester in my apartment for a week. Which means this morning (trash day), dressed in my professorial best, I took the trash out before heading off to teach class. When I got to my car, I smelled something funny. Maybe funny is the wrong word...maybe...horrible? Awful? Wretchingly acrid? Something along those lines.

I was confused--I'd cleaned out my car weeks earlier. I couldn't remember leaving any kind of foodstuff moldering beneath a seat. And yet something in my car reeked like the dead. I puzzled about this all the way to the parking lot at school. Then I got out of the car with ten minutes to class and realized that I still smelled the smell. I looked down at myself--as if a little part of my brain already knew--and realized it wasn't the car that reeked, it was me. One entire be-tighted leg all the way to the skirt was dripping with garbage juice. It was chilly today and my tights were thick--the moisture hadn't seeped to my skin yet and so had gone undetected. Well. It was too late to drive home and change. I made a spectacle of myself in the girl's bathroom and tried my hardest to get rid of the stink, but there was little I could do. I will tell you something about 18 year olds: they notice everything. Faced with the choice of letting my students think I was either completely unhygienic or just plain stupid and probably incompetent to teach a class they were each paying a thousand dollars to take...well, which do you think I chose? I'm just an American, after all.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Emptied Bank Account

2008-09-29T12:43:00.001-07:00

Dear House Republicans,

I'd also be interested to hear what you think about fluoride in our drinking water. And them doomsday machines.

The Thing That's Missing

2008-08-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

Here I am, in Salt Lake City. The past three weeks have been grueling, to say the least. Emotionally, physically, financially, etc. The trip out was quick and smooth, but the adjustments have been difficult, though the city is beautiful. My apartment is quite lovely too, but when I moved in, I found out almost immediately that, worse than sewer rats,

I have toilet bunnies. Gross. I've put out traps and cheese but I can't seem to catch the suckers.

Though the area is lovely (I see mountains when I walk out of my front door! It's always sunny!) and the people are so nice they make Midwesterners seem like Bostonians, we've all been having some difficulties getting used to not being in Iowa. Bailey was so disconcerted with his new environment, that he promptly stopped pooping, then eating, then drinking. He was hospitalized for three days for what was basically an extended colonic. Maybe we should have moved to L.A after all.

But the danger seems to have passed for now and he is his old goatish self again.

Here he is mid feeding-frenzy. His eyes kind of roll back in his head, like a shark's. After recent events, if Bailey could disembowel me with one bite, he probably would, and who could blame him.

While he was gone, Kevin and I passed our Bailey-less nights eating blueberries (her) and drinking beer (me) and watching Denzel Washington movies (us). Single girls in a crazy new city! It was almost like a sitcom, except instead of two hot young things in New York, it was a thirty-something grad student and her overweight rabbit in the LDS capitol. Hmm...that just made me depressed.

Kevin was thrilled at Bailey's return. She groomed the vet-smell off his head and ears and then rolled over on her back with joy. Then she humped him, which sort of killed the moment.

I have not been so lucky. My boyfriend has not been getting colonics at the animal hospital, nor humped by me. Instead he's back there in Iowa, kicking the restaurant into high gear for the start of classes, the first football game, the post-bar hours. Leaving him was really hard. We talk on the phone a lot, but you know, it's not the same. And Birdie, my stepdog, the pig on the carpet...I lay awake in the mornings thinking about them, spooned together in a big, half-empty bed, waiting for me to come home.

The One Abroad

2008-07-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

Flood cleanup has been going well. I'll post more about that soon. Right now, I'm just excited about the press coverage of the Obama world tour. Frank Rich's excellent analysis from today's Times, "How Obama Became Acting President," is a must-read. In it he links to a photo of Barack Obama speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans. Rich's point about this being the first time many American children have seen foreign audiences waving American flags instead of burning them is a powerful one. This is the man I want repping our country to the world. And this is the man the world wants. What an exciting time.

Worse Before Better

2008-06-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've buzzed my hair.

Or rather, CT has buzzed my hair. It feels great, in all senses of the phrase. It is soft on my hand. The weather here is hot and very wet. My hair is cool and dry. It makes me feel stronger. Plus, hey, free haircut! All those shiny strands that catch the light just so? Those are all grays, btw. With many more TK.

So, we moved what we could out of my mom's house and my stepdad's house yesterday by pontoon. It was very terrible to see, but also beautiful. The river raged beside us, feet away. A storm blew up. The water rose so fast. We had to leave with what we could shove quickly into garbage bags. We boated out along the treetops.

I just got back from the grocery store, which was a madhouse. I bought tuna and saltines and water. The water was difficult to navigate. What is the difference between stocking and hoarding? I mean this in a practical sense. How much water should one person buy when it is difficult to know--when the power goes out, when the water treatment plant loses its last pump--how long we will be without clean water and electricity? Am I incorrect in buying now, before these things have happened (but which, the media tells us, are likely)? How much water does one person need for a day? For a week? A month? What if my family members--who are understandably a bit slow right now, a bit shell-shocked already--don't buy enough water or food for themselves?

Well, now that I am back at the office and in front of the friendly, helping internet, I see that the Red Cross recommends storing one gallon of water per person per day. But the question remains: how many days are we looking at here?

I bought what I thought was reasonable.

I'm full up on gas, have a store of cash, waders, a poncho. As more bridges, roads and interstates close every hour, Iowa City feels more and more like a remote island. I hesitate to use the word escape, but how else to say what it feels like here? It feels like very soon escape will not be an option. But that is okay. My family is here. We are all on high ground now. I wouldn't want to escape if I could. I'm very glad to be here right now and not watching TV, helpless, in a studio apartment in New Jersey.

CT and I are going out for a ridiculous, expensive, wonderful meal tonight at my favorite restaurant. I am going to get really drunk on red wine. I am going to sleep in tomorrow.

As Good As It Gets

2008-06-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of my mom's house yesterday. The water has not yet gone over the dam spillway. Right now it is literally inches from the top. When it goes over, very soon now, Mom's house will likely flood another 4-8 feet. My stepdad's house is down the road. We couldn't get to his place because the currents were too strong to safely navigate in a canoe. This is as good as it gets. It will be a 500 year flood.

Right now, I'm basically on-call for my family. The waters came so fast, we couldn't get all the irreplaceables out of my mom's house before it flooded. But at this level, it's still not quite high enough on the road to be able use her pontoon boat to move things. So we have to wait until it really floods in earnest--until today, most likely--to be able to salvage whatever is left of her stuff. But it's a Catch-22, because to get to her stuff, the waters have to be high, and by then, there may not be much stuff left to salvage.

My sister and her husband live with my mom and are now minor local celebrities. They were the last two to leave so the news stations have been stopping by and interviewing them. They have been moving everything out, including their cats, by canoe.

My mom has rented storage space. She's now trying to find a house or pair of apartments to rent for everyone for the rest of the summer. She hasn't had much luck. Because Iowa City is a college town, almost all leases in Iowa City end on July 31 and begin on August 1. They will likely need housing into September. In addition, the competition is high. There are a lot of homes on the Iowa River and a lot of people newly homeless. More likely, the four of them (my sister, her husband, my mom and my stepdad) will move into an extended-stay hotel for the rest of the summer. The cats will have to be boarded until fall.

FEMA, in true FEMA form, has not yet declared Iowa City a disaster area. This essentially means that there is no widespread and organized relief for displaced people. FEMA has said they will not claim a state of emergency until the water is over the spillway.

My mom and stepdad are lucky: they are fully insured and financially stable. They have family members in the area and places to stay. Some people on the river don't. Unlike a lot of waterfront property, the Iowa River is not necessarily a high-income place to live, especially outside of town where my family lives. Some of their neighbors don't have insurance and are literal inches away from losing everything. Some don't have family on higher, drier ground with whom they can stay. A lot of people are out of luck. The Red Cross is helping out here. If you'd like to donate money or your services, please go to their website or call a local chapter:

Cedar Rapids Area: (319) 393-3500
Dubuque Area: (563) 583-6451

For The Motherfucking Love of All That is Left of This Country

2008-06-03T11:20:00.001-07:00

CONCEDE!

Best Headline Ever?

2008-05-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

"Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts"

Not Buying What She's Selling

2008-05-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

1) If Barack Obama is a sexist, then I am Mary Tyler Moore. Seriously, either Geraldine Ferraro has finally fallen completely off her rocker, or she’s taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook--Spin Rule #2,334: If you say it, it is so.

Only one candidate cut her teeth smearing and harassing other women in order to protect her philandering husband’s campaign and presidency and, uh, her name is not Barack Obama. Possession of a vagina and a degree from a women’s college do not innoculate one from being sexist or misogynist. I know of what I speak.

2) All this talk of Hilary winning the working-class whites is sort of irrelevant. Many, many working-class whites are union members. Many, many union members vote, and when they do, they vote in blocks. They all vote for a pre-approved candidate. In Iowa, John Edwards had early union support, now Hilary Clinton does. I’m willing to bet that if Clinton concedes and Obama spends some time with the union reps, those same votes that went to Hilary in West Virginia and Kentucky will go to Obama in the national. Racism is, in this case, a red herring. It’s all about throwing the unions some bones, which is part of every political campaign and will certainly be part of Obama’s once Hilary steps out.

Only one candidate cut his teeth organizing and speaking for working-class people and, uh, his name is not Hilary Clinton.

Recursion Theories

2008-05-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

I have not known how to talk about this really, so I haven’t said much on the subject for many reasons such as: I’m still working out my own feelings on the matter; and, it’s kind of weird. But anyway, here’s the thing: I’m dating my landlord. Okay, you say, fine. Maybe a little strange, especially if your current landlord is anything like your previous landlord. But no big. Here’s the part where I tell you that my landlord is actually the first person I ever dated. Chief Truthseer, subject of a long-ago interview and blog post.

Things have been a touch, well, mortal around here lately, which of course always performs that clichéd trick of making you feel your own mortality pressing up against your heart like a blood clot. And so CT and I went away for a couple of days. We spent almost all that time in bed. Some of it, in a cozy triple-spoon with his sweet and elderly Chesapeake Bay Retriever. There was a little fighting (we’ve both been stressed and worried for our various aggrieved loved ones) but it was productive in the sense that it led me to say the most embarrassingly romantic thing I’ve ever said aloud, which was, “We could really be in love. I could love you…if you’d just let me.”

Reader, is it not obvious? My years in romance publishing have paid off. Silly, teary proclamations aside, I think it suddenly occurred to us both that we were actually sorta in love and it was finally okay to admit it and act like it. Like I said, it’s not been something I’ve been talking much about…not even to him. I think that’s because what has been going on has a tinge of the unreal to it: that dream feeling—light as tissue—that if you concentrate too hard on something it will tear. In two months I’m moving to Utah. I’ll live there for four years. Because of his work, he can’t come with me. Is it foolish that I am looking forward to this as a challenge? Is it ridiculous to think we might be okay?

As I said to him in a letter once, in some ways he represents the last vestiges of the home of my youth. The last year CT and I dated was the year my parents got a divorce, the year I moved as far east as possible for college, the year I discovered booze and drugs and the random hookup. As much as my break-up with CT was influenced by these things, that year before we split, he was the part of my life that was sane and grounded and safe. And so I ran away from all that, into my wild years. Fuck you all, I thought. I will get along just fine without you. And I did. But I have to say, it’s nice to be back here. To rediscover his kindness and intelligence and how our similarities sometimes border on disturbing. He sometimes feels like my brother. He is, in a way—we grew up together. We grew each other up. In some ways I feel responsible for him. And he takes good care of me, so I know he feels the same.

In a short story, this would be the perfect ending: surprising but inevitable. But this is not a short story or even an ending. He is a complication, but this is nothing new. He has always been there, all these years, someone I had separated from but who never quite felt separate from me. Being with him feels like the completion of something, even as I get ready for yet another beginning.

I guess we’ll see how this goes. After all, there is nothing I like better than a nice, dirty complication.

D.A.R.E. to Be Stupid

2008-04-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

A personal blog post is coming up, but I just wanted to bring your attention, quickly, to this disturbing article in the Times today. Apparently, the U.S. has more prisoners than any other country in the world, and in fact ONE QUARTER of all imprisoned people are U.S. prisoners. Um. This is really fucked up. Especially when you cross-compare that statistic with this factoid from Human Rights Watch:

"Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national 'war on drugs.' The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges."

I have two brief anecdotes to relate here. 1) I know a federal judge clerk. She has been having trouble with her job because the majority of the cases her judge prosecutes are drug-related. She's literally seen people put away for their natural lives for selling weed. These people are mostly black, even though the state she works in is one of the whitest states in the country.

2) I know of someone whose brother is dying. Her brother lives in another state and has cancer that will kill him. Right now, the concern is making the brother as comfortable as possible for the rest of his life which is a matter of days or weeks, not months. The only thing that keeps the brother relatively pain-free, conscious, and able to eat, is weed. This law-abiding family now smuggles drugs across state lines in order to bring some comfort to their dying son.

I've been beating this drum since I was in high school. But the issue's been coming up a lot lately in my life and my friends' lives and I just don't understand why we can't put the dogma aside and actually just agree that drug laws in general and marijuana laws in particular are not just backward and unfair and fucked, but also they are probably creating a culture of incarceration that further disenfranchises enormous numbers of people. Specifically, black people.

Furthermore, they make criminals out of people of all colors, who are just trying to lead normal, non-criminal lives, doing their best to get by.

Along those lines, I wonder about this quote pulled from the Times article:

"There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much."

The article later cites studies and quote judges, but it also points out that there are counterstudies and counterarguments to this assertion. Interestingly, the article doesn't address an issue that social scientists often debate: that excessive and inappropriately harsh (three strikes laws, anyone?) punishments may actually *create* criminals by creating a culture of incarceration. Also, as the article points out, America's nonviolent crime punishments are far more severe than in other countries. It's a simple equation really: You want to make more criminals? Make more felony-count laws or re-dedicate yourself to enforcing the laws that are already there.

Anyway, you should read the Times article. It's an alarming reminder that no matter how progressive America may seem at this political moment in time, it's all just window dressing. The infrastructure of the country is actually quite medieval. And not in a sexy, Excalibur sort of way.

Sprung

2008-03-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

Och, I'm falling in love every day--it must be spring! I wore knee-high socks to work today with a knee-length skirt and felt positively immodest. It really is kind of shocking when flesh starts showing up again in public. In March, I start the season like an Amish wife ("Please cover your ankles dear, there are children present.") and then by August, when it's 100 dripping degrees in the shade, I'm wondering how little clothing can I wear outside of my home before I am technically breaking the law. In any case, that more or less brings us to the subject of this post: horniness (and its dissemination through provacative black and white photographs of attractive men).

Here is my new crush, Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls.

He is tall, sinewy, dark and gorgeous. Plays a mean drum. Looks v. hott in lipstick or clutching stuffed duckies.

Mmm...versatile. He joins my list of Boston crushes which also includes the writer Steve Almond

and the publisher/zombie, Janaka Stucky.

(publisher)

(zombie)

It just so happens that my third crush knows the other two. Maybe he will introduce me someday, when we're all at the coolest party ever thrown in Boston, and a wild, tall-man orgy + Screwsan will ensue. Maybe he will just eat my brains.

In a word: Yum.

Surf or Ski

2008-03-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

So, USC just let me into their PhD program. The remarkable Aimee Bender called me last night to tell me the news. I stumbled and quivered and even said something embarrassingly fangirl ("I love your work!"). I'm calling the department head to find out more info today. USC was such a long shot for me that I hadn't even considered what would happen if I got in. They accept like 2 people in fiction per year. Hope that doesn't smack of horn tooting. I'm as surprised as anyone. I've had a long winter you guys. The thaw has finally come.

On Wishing I Could Set Your Hair On Fire With My Mind

2008-03-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

The thing about the end of relationships that always gets me is not the heartbreak or the rearranging of my life, or even the inevitable, generalized disappointment (“I gave two years of my life to this?”)—it’s the anger. And by anger, I mean the white hot, eyeball-melting demon-driven fury. Whenever I get out of a relationship, my feelings of sadness and relief are soon overtaken by a shaking rage that transforms me into a hoarse, screaming, bug-eyed sasquatch with long claws and fangs that drip poison. This usually happens around the time the ex starts dating New Girlfriend. Coincidentally! Hah hah!

Really though, it is around this time after every breakup that my inner postal worker shows up to my brain with an AK-47 and starts firing rounds into the crowd. It would be easy if I could chalk this up to simple jealousy, which has been enraging ex-girlfriends since at least 1856. But jealousy is too easy. Besides, I’m the one doing the breaking up here! The only thing I’m truly jealous of is the fact that the house I eagerly moved out of in December has a lot more counter space in the kitchen than my current apartment. No, it’s not jealousy. I think it’s something far weirder and more embarrassing. On the downward spiral toward a break-up, I usually manage to get myself worked up into such a self-righteous lather (often fueled by the advice and encouragement of well-meaning girlfriends and mothers) that when the whole thing falls apart and my life as I know it (or at least, have known it lately) ends, there are two things I am sure of and two things only: 1) Absolutely none of this is my fault and 2) the person who’s fault it is deserves never to be happy again. Ever. And in a perfect world would grow old and die alone, deeply regretting his behavior during the two years we spent together and his choice to date a teenager after we broke up. I imagine Tom Hulce as Mozart in his final, filthy, drunken days.

It’s a shameful and oxymoronic combination—being a vengeful martyr—and it makes quite the asshole out of me. My punishment is that I then I turn the fury inward. And soon all that’s left of my soul is a black, smoldering fist-sized lump of pity and disgust. Sure, death be not proud, but it’s nothing compared to breakups.

So anyway, yes, I seem to be a little bit insane right now, but hey, let those of you without mental health issues cast the first pill, right? Besides, I’d rather be angry and irrational than sad and lonely. Let me to my infantile emotional deflection and I will leave you to whichever specific personality disorder you prefer to indulge.

Luckily, before I wasted too much time trying to think people into spontaneous combustion, I was accepted into the Creative Writing PhD program at the University of Utah. They’ve offered me a full teaching fellowship and I’m inclined to take them up on their offer. It’s one of the best programs of its kind and my trip to Salt Lake City last fall convinced me that I can definitely live there. It’s a beautiful town and there’s a whole population of zealots about which to express intellectual liberal bewilderment. The well of my indignation shall never run dry again! If nothing else, it will be an interesting cultural experience. Plus: Mormons are hot.

In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I have some arts and crafts projects to get done--these voodoo dolls and dartboards aren’t going to paste clumps of hair and photos on themselves!

Update: I changed the title of this post. This was the original title, then I switched it, fearing, I don't know, a psychic restraining order or something, but sincerity won out. I really do wish I could set your hair on fire with my mind, Ex, but only for a second or two. And: Does it make it better or worse that New Girlfriend is not just a teenager, but a teenager who believes in Intelligent Design? Oh gah, raaawr ugh. That makes me want to roll violently around on the floor. Last, I realized that if the Ex is Tom Hulce as Mozart, that would make me F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, which is disgusting but pretty much correct, except for the syphilitic rot part.

Snow is General All Over Iowa

2008-01-23T13:46:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are. In the dead of winter, recovering from a dead relationship, surrounded by the actual dead. They make good neighbors actually. Quiet.

Since moving into the second story of a pretty, sunny house off the graveyard, I’ve been having strange, not totally unpleasant dreams about people dying and ghosts coming to visit me at night. Of course, that could be the Chantix in me brain, but the romantic Goth maiden in me prefers to think of it as nightly visits from the welcoming committee. If only they would bring Rice Krispie treats instead.

Here is my most famous dead neighbor: The Black Angel, erected in 1912. The stories are many but supposedly she was commissioned by a distraught husband upon his wife’s death. The monument turned black because the wife had been unfaithful. Legend has it she will turn white again if a virgin is kissed below her wings. The punchline, of course, is that there hasn’t been a virgin in Iowa City for nearly a hundred years. It’s funny because it’s true.

(I took this photo off the Iowa Center for Paranormal Research website because a) it seemed appropriate and b) that photoshopped fog was the best approximation of the winter weather I could find. Just add 20 feet of snow to everything, and that’s basically the view from my drive.)

The best part of living in my new apartment is my landlord and downstairs neighbor, Duncan, aka My First Boyfriend, From When I Was 15 Years Old. It’s been negative eleventy million degrees outside lately so instead of warming up my car for ten minutes, struggling into my puffy winter clothes and scraping the layers and layers of accumulated ice, snow and salt off of my windows in order to drive somewhere, I’ve been hanging out downstairs with Dunk. We sit around eating cereal, watching movies and playing Super Puzzle Fighter on his gigantic homemade projection screen, which is basically exactly what we were doing 15 years ago, probably right this second. The more things change…

Oh and don’t worry about the new notch on my Belt of Spinsterhood. I’m okay. Brad’s okay. Even the bunnies are okay. I told them that being from a broken home will make them stronger, and they responded by eating a hole in my new shoe, which is exactly how I would have responded to my parents’ divorce if my teeth had been sharper.

Here’s something that happened to me in the blog world: my friend Kate Harding, who is a fantastic writer with a fantastic blog , tagged me with a “Roar for Powerful Words” meme. Unlike Kate, I’m a lazy, sloppy, inconstant blogger, so I don’t really know anything about these so-called “memes,” (including zilch about links or link-ups or link-backs or sausage links or nothin’), but I am very honored to be tapped by Kate (and honored by the lovely things she said about this blog, none of which I agree with or deserve). The “Roar For Powerful Words” project “aims to celebrate good and powerful writing in the blogosphere. The idea is for recipients of this award to also choose five blogsters they would like to honour.” In addition, winners should “list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing.” Also: you get this picture of a hot pink lion.

Just look how pink!

Okay, so even though it’s a month since Kate named me, I’d like to list my five bloggers and do something that I almost never do here, which is write about writing.

So first, I’m going to totally be a bastard and break the rules and name three bloggers I love because, um, I don’t really think I read five blogs consistently. Online, I basically read the NY Times, some Gawker media sites and Kate's blog, Shapely Prose, and then write a lot of emails and sort of do my job when necessary. I no longer even have the Internets at home anymore. Instead, I’ve been reading these weird kind of heavy things made out of wood pulp and glue. I think they’re called books?

So here goes:

ThatKidIntheCorner and Bounty Bowl

The man behind the That Kid in the Corner and Bounty Bowl blogs is a hilarious and astute writer who could post about laundry lint and I would read it. In fact, he’s the first person I knew who was posting legitimate writing online, way back in College. And with each new blog, he hits a new cultural bullseye. Dude, I didn’t give a shit about football, until I met you.

Blogging Like I’ve Never Blogged Before

Mike Toole is just some guy who used to live in New York and who now lives in Cleveland. I don’t know him and I’ve never met him. His blog has no focus, purpose or brand whatsoever. Yet he’s writing some of the funniest shit I have ever read in my life. The end.

Muddy Farm

My friend Dave is a farmer in New York state. Dave is a wonderful person and a wonderful poet and I love him dearly, but I really can’t imagine him doing things like tilling fields and driving tractors, even though he’s been a farmer for years. It’s hard to explain what I mean, so I’ll just give you an example of typical Dave behavior: Once Dave was driving the two of us somewhere and he overshot our destination by 60 miles. Dave’s mind works in mysterious, slightly hysterical ways, which is why I love his blog and reading about his life. It’s as if someone asked Baudelaire to run a Home Depot.

Writing About Writing

I’ve been reading some of the excellent ideas about writing that my fellow Pepto lions have shared and they’re great! They pretty much cover all the advisory ground I could ever think of (and much more). So instead I’ll just rant about some writing stuff I’ve been knocking around my noggin lately.

I seem to be getting fed up with the way so many stories to me feel so clever and contrived. Who wants to feel like an author is TRYING to knock your socks off? It doesn’t work if impressing or even entertaining the audience is the key goal of a piece of writing. Here’s an example. I just bought and read the book A Secret History by Donna Tartt. I’d been told by many upstanding sources for years that it’s a great book and I should read it, blah blah blah. Even the sales clerk at Prairie Lights told me how good it was, and that’s crazy because those Prairie Lights people read every book that is ever published in every language twice, I think.

Anyway, so I was prepared for this awesome read, and in some ways it was awesome. It was a fun and I finished it in a weekend. It was a suspenseful book. No sagging middle. Etc. But it was so so so contrived. The miasma of money and the Long Island lockjaw accents and mannerisms, along with the annoying, confusing, distracting attempts to keep the novel timeless yet contemporary almost ruined the experience for me. So often anymore I find myself having to “get over it” when I start a new book. Donna Tartt’s an honest-to-god good writer with interesting things to say, but, at least in A Secret History, her prose was so faux-prep I could barely stand to read the first few chapters. Then of course I became numbed to the voice. It fell away and I could concentrate on the really excellent plot.

I guess what I want to know is: Is it possible to read and write great fiction without all the fussy furniture in the way? I want Bauhaus but I’m getting Rococo. Or would that just be boring and terrible and the only people capable of doing that are imparting genius ideas anyway so they don’t need gold inlaid toilets (like Michel Houellebecq, for instance).

My friend Paul says that many authors use “cleverness as a surrogate for beauty,” which I think sums up the problem quite nicely. I think of the McSweeney’s crowd and I want to get “Cleverness Is a Surrogate For Beauty” printed on a bunch of t-shirts and send them to one of Dave Eggers’s 826 clubhouses.

Some of you may be choking on that word, “beauty” but I mean it (and so does Paul, I think) in the least purple way possible, in the classical Greek way. The starter of wars, the killer of gods. The sublime.

If I only indulged in literature that was beautiful, I would not have much to read, and I could kiss writing goodbye forever. But there is maybe something to be said for simplicity and honesty in writing. It was fun for awhile, but I’m getting sick of footnoted novels, and plays within plays within plays. I get it. Let’s move on.

As an homage to beauty in literature, I will leave you with what I consider to be one of the most beautiful (and appropriately themed!) passages in all of English literature: the last paragraph from "The Dead" by James Joyce. Enjoy.

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Hating on Hil

2008-01-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

I was trying to view this race as fair and square. I have been voting with my political mind, not my vagina or my heart. But Jesus Christ, if you ever had any question that misogyny was alive and well in today's "liberal media" (oh how I laugh and laugh and laugh myself silly at THAT particular misnomer), you need look no farther than TearGate. Hilary gets a little emotional frog in the throat talking about how important she thinks this race is for her country and all of a sudden it's a pile-on. The media has disrespected Hilary throughout this race and it's disrespected female voters by assuming we can't think for ourselves.

Why don't you, "liberal media," go back to ignoring the war and murdering Britney Spears, inch by inch, like the despicable bullies you are?

Yeah the press may be hysterical, but at least the voters aren't. Congrats to Hilary from an Obama supporter. This has just started to get interesting.

UPDATE: I've been reading the ladyblogs all day and there seems to be a rising tide of pro-Hilary sentiment that mirrors my own vague feelings, especially from women who had not previously identified her as their candidate. Rebecca Traister, Kate Harding, I feel you. I've been wondering lately, if perhaps the political war for my soul is not yet won. Have I been undermining my own interests as a woman by not supporting Hilary? Or have I, as I've contended (and thought I believed) been protecting the nomination from a woman who is ultimately unelectable because she's so polarizing (I think this might be another way of saying "because she's a woman")? A cynical yet practical maneuver? On the third hand, do I really want another Clinton in office?

These are things I'll be thinking about from now until Super Tuesday. Will update as my womanly waffling continues.

Do Not Heart Huckabee

2008-01-04T06:56:00.000-08:00

That is not just a statement about myself, but also a plea from me to the universe. Because as tasty as Obama's victory was last night, Huckabee's was, in the same measure, terrifying. I mean, all the Republicans and fence sitters I know caucused for Obama last night. I'm hearing that was a statewide trend, which left the Republican win to the crazies. In some senses, it will be easier for Obama to win against a nutbag like Huckabee, in another sense: at least having John McCain as a president wouldn't make me want to jump in front of a speeding bus.

Anyway, I wrote this long thing about caucusing for the Boston Magazine blog. I am sort of overloaded on political impressions and reactions right now, so follow the link to BoMag and read about my evening over there. I do want to add one thing in re: the BoMag blog post, and that is that my skepticism for Obama's campaign is really more about his staffers and volunteers than the man himself. Obamania is not a joke. It is a real, dogmatic thing. Don't get me wrong--I am thrilled at Obama's victory and I am very proud to be an Iowan today. But that "too good to be true" feeling has snuck up on me. Or maybe it's just that the loss in 2004 was too painful and I've closed my heart to the possibility of true love. Maybe Obama is the man who will pry it open. We'll see.

(And yes, I am dreadfully hungover.)

The Iowa Olympics

2008-01-03T09:48:00.001-08:00

Sorry the blog has been silent for so long. I have much to catch you up on and will do so soon, but first you've doubtless been beat over the head with the news that the Iowa caucuses are today. I'm popping my caucus cherry after work tonight and from what I've heard it will be just as bloody and drunken as my literal first time. Can't wait. Will update you all either later tonight or in the throes of my hangover tomorrow morning.

Tough Guys Don't Die

2007-11-11T08:44:00.000-08:00

(Mailer's death cab. Thanks to MP in P-town.)

Norman Mailer died yesterday and with him, a great chunk of literary machismo. And I mean that in the most fawning way possible. Even into his 80s he was taking on the likes of God and NYTimes book deity Michiko Kakutani. After my recent trip to Utah, I'm currently re-reading Executioner's Song, which is simply badass. Tough Guys Don't Dance is my favorite though--a noir novel set in Provincetown, where Mailer lived in a pretty brick box on the Bay. I lived there too, for a little while after college, and used to run into Mailer at Michael Shays, the restaurant where I waitressed and barkept. A couple of line cooks there talked about the crazy parties Mailer's son used to throw at the house. About how they used to break in when they were underage specifically to raid Mailer's impressive liquor cabinet. If I'm remembering correctly, the cooks were fascinated by the amount of naked-lady art in Mailer's house and were almost caught by him once, as they stood with bottles of his stolen tequila stuffed into their backpacks, transfixed by a titillating sculpture in his front hall.

Here's the AP article from the Eastern Iowa Gazette, with some extra local flavor in the last few paragraphs. My reporter friend Adam called yesterday, remembering something I'd told him once about Mailer and quoted me on it for the paper. It's pretty awesome and hilarious that, after all the famous writers and intellectuals they talk to about Mailer, in the local version of the story, I get the final word. I'm glad. The way a man tips says a lot about that man, which is why Mailer will always be A-OK in my book.

PERSONALITIES
Author Norman Mailer dies at 84
NEW YORK (AP) — Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such books as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song,” has died at the age of 84.
Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, J. Michael Lennon, the author’s literary executor and biographer, said.
“He was a great American voice,” said a tearful Joan Didion, author of “The Year of Magical Thinking” and other works, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer’s death.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” the twotime Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.” Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as bellicose, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York City on a “left conservative” platform, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women’s liberation.
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests in the late 1960s. While directing the film “Maidstone” in 1968, the self-described “old club fighter” punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn’s ear in another scuffle.
But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “In the end, it is the writing that will count.” Mailer, he wrote, possessed “a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era.” Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn.
Mailer earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard University, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of soldiering to provide a basis for his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris.
The book became a best seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.
Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture, defining “hip” in his essay “The White Negro,” allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, “Barbary Shore” (1951) and “Deer Park” (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.
Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” had made the difference in John Kennedy’s razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard Nixon.
While Life magazine called his next book, “An American Dream” (1965), “the big comeback of Norman Mailer,” the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, “The Armies of the Night,” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was listed in the top 20 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
When he covered the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper’s Magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. “I was in a moral quandary. I didn’t know if I was being scared or being professional,” he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.
Jorge Herralde, editor of Mailer’s Spanish publishers, Anagrama, said Saturday that Mailer was a titan of literature who, like Kafka, was never awarded a Nobel Prize. “He surely had too excessive a profile for that award,” Herralde said.
Mailer’s personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying.
His other wives were: Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley, Carol Stevens and Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
“He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original,” friend William Kennedy, author of “Ironweed,” said.
Mailer spoke in Iowa City at least twice in the 1990s, both times at events sponsored by the UI Writer’s Workshop.
Susan McCarty, a 30-yearold Iowa City native who now works for a publishing company in town, regularly waited on Mailer at a restaurant on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where she lived after she graduated from college.
“Every Friday he would come in for the prime rib special and I’d serve him a whisky sour and a prime rib,” she said.
People at the restaurant left him alone, but everyone recognized him. “You couldn’t help — when he walked down the street or walked into the restaurant — but look at him,” McCarty said. “He commanded everyone’s attention.” She said they didn’t have any long chats while she was taking his orders or bringing his drinks, but he was quiet, unassuming and kind to her.
“He was a great tipper,” she said.
In “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: “Cannibals and Christians” (1966); “Why Are We in Vietnam?” (1967); and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (1968).
“The Executioner’s Song” (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
“Ancient Evenings” (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.

#100: Let's Start It Off With A Positive Jam

2007-11-07T22:33:00.000-08:00

So I guess this is the 100th post on my blog which just makes me feel old. I mean, the whole thing started with the Republican National Convention in 2003. Jesus.

The point is: I complain a lot on this blog, which can be a downer and is certainly annoying. That’s why I’d like to take this time out tonight, while I’m spectacularly drunk--but STILL not smoking cigarettes thank you--to appreciate a group of people I do love dearly: my local video rental store guys.

Let’s start with the basics: My local video rental store is three blocks from my house. And it’s independent. And, even besides the fact that some of the employees seem to be making a zombie horror movie trilogy (who isn’t these days? Also: hot.), I love the staff of the local video rental place (LVRP) because, for one, they are just so doggone cute. It’s as if they were all cast to play the same role in the same movie--local video rental place guy (of course)--but they all got different casting sheets. One says, “Smart and nerdy antisocial Tarantino type,” and another: “adorably chubby film-geek reprise of Jack Black in High Fidelity,” yet another ‘Twee leading-man role in romantic comedy about cool girls who don’t get laid much.” Seriously, it is almost frightening how movie-hot all the LVRP guys are. I mean, they could make a calendar. The best part is they have no idea how cute they are and yet, for some reason, they all seem to follow proper hygiene and grooming techniques. Let me not beat around the bush when I say: this is a first in LVRP staffing across the country.

Also: they’re nice. It would be so so easy for them to play to type here. All my LVRP guys are already cute. Do they really need to be kind too? Probably they should be having hour-long conversations about the best “Blade Runner” re-cut (10 or 15 years? Analogue or digital?) at any given moment including the ones where perfectly nice people who couldn’t give less of a shit about Ridley Scott are trying to rent movies. But for some reason, they don’t. I swear--try to rent three seasons worth of Sex and the City episodes, and some adorable LVRPer is more likely to tell you which of the four friends is his favorite rather than dead-eye you into embarrassed consumer submission. Ask what the difference is between “Catch and Release” and “The Last Kiss” and the LVRPers will tell you in terms fair yet slightly breathless, as if they were finally able to divulge to you a Hollywood secret after years of unbearable silence.

They just know. Sometimes I walk in wanting nothing more than a shitty straight-to-DVD romantic comedy and I am always treated with the utmost respect from the cutie behind the counter. Sometimes, like tonight, I walk in drunk, practically cross-eyed, and I throw “Disturbia” on the check-out counter, and say something stupid and boozy like “I give up,” and the LVRP guy totally gets me and laughs and rings me up for less than the charge of a new rental, late fees forgiven, just because.

Dude, you guys are the fucking best.

Politics, as Usual (Or, What I'm Doing With My Sunday Morning To Take My Mind Off The Cigarettes I Really Want to be Smoking Right Now)

2007-11-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so I quit last week with the help of Chantix. It's at once easier and harder than I thought it would be. Harder in the abstract (unless I'm actively reading something that really interests me, cigarettes are basically all I've been thinking about for the past week), easier in practice (when I'm hanging out with smokers, I have no problem declining a smoke--this is because Chantix works by blocking the pleasure-receptors in the brain that nicotine hooks on to. Basically, smoking right now gives me absolutely no pleasure or rush. It's just mechanical--inhaling smoke and blowing it out, which, when you get right down to it, is a gross waste of time, no? But don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly annoyed at this drug for working.) So, I'm going to write a little about politics right now, something I've been avoiding since moving to Iowa; the air has bascially been thick with it since last spring. The Eastern Iowa Gazette, where I had my brief but wonderful obituary-writing stint this summer, had a huge front page story last week headlined (I'm paraphrasing) "Okay, Everyone Is Really Sick of Politics Right Now."

I don't know what the campaigns are like in the rest of the country (or even in the rest of Iowa--there seem to be a lot of Ron Paul supporters in Des Moines. WTF, Des Moines?) but blue Johnson County is and has been for awhile, in the grips of campaign madness, mostly of the Democrats variety. And though John Edwards seems to be around all the time (here again on Monday to talk about foreign policy) the race locally and nationally is undoubtedly Clinton v. Obama. In fact, with our human love of binary opposites, I really could not envision the race for the Dem. candidate to boil down to any but these two. They are, of course, superfically opposites: a black man, a white woman; an urban community organizer, a wealthy suburban commuter. And certainly of all the Dem. candidates, they have already become iconic--more than the sum of their political parts in the public eye. I would venture to say that even Giuliani, the most iconic of the Rep. candidates, does not have the cult-of-personality pull of these two. Even in the politcally irrelevent University of Iowa homecoming parade, the Clinton and Obama parade blocks were the largest and most vocal.

But back to binaries: Clinton and Obama have risen to this status perhaps precisely because they've had each other to play off and answer to in debates. While they are surface opposites, they are also ideological opposites (or at least that's what the media would have us believe, and because it's the media asking the questions and writing the stories, this opposition is what's come to pass--certainly Obama and Clinton have similar opinions about most political issues, compared to, say, either one of them vs. Kucinich). In the NYTimes Magazine today, there is an interesting article, written mostly from the Obama side, that supports the simplification of these ideological differences and comes up with this:

Clinton = old school
Obama = new school
Clinton = cynicism
Obama = idealism
Clinton = experience
Obama = inexperience
and, perhaps the simplest of all:
Clinton = fear
Obama = hope.

I mean HOPE is literally one of Obama's campaign posters. But fear...fear rings of Bush and Cheyney. Is Clinton riding our post-9/11 fear? I don't think so. The NYT Mag article points out that she answers questions about war and terrorism in the ways that you'd expect most seasoned campaigning politicians to: with acceptable test-driven rhetoric and careful fence-sitting. Obama, however, is exciting because he dares to say Yes and No. No, I wouldn't use nuclear weapons on Pakistan. Yes, I would meet with leaders of unfriendly nations in the first year of my presidency.

Anyway, I'm rambling (too much coffee this morning) and probably stating the obvious (as I try to keep my fingers typing to distract me from pulling a smoke from the pack a neighbor left sitting on our porch last night) but I really think what this race for the Dem. contender will come down to is not whether people would rather vote for a white woman or a black man, but whether people will vote for someone who is saying the reassuring politician-type things they've been hearing all their lives, or take a chance on someone who seems to have a different outlook. I don't want to overstate this or make it sound so dramatic, but it will, ultimately, be a race about the ideological future of this country, possibly for generations to come. With civilians making no sacrifices during the Iraq War, we're never going to see an organized effort to influence the government through protest or grass roots organizing--there just isn't an incentive for most people, sad as that is to say. Therefore, unfortunately, a change in foreign and domestic policy will have to come from the top, and will only happen if someone is elected who has no stake in the old wars, isn't tied to old financial scandals and lobbies contrary to their stated political beliefs, someone whose "inexperience" may be the only hope for a nation that seems to be slipping day-by-day into an economic and diplomatic abyss.

So anyway, I guess you know who I'm voting for now in the caucuses. Read that NYT article! It's good.

Your Kids Are Not Cute, Interesting or Important

2007-11-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

(With apologies and exceptions to Jack, Henry and Aiden, whose mommies and daddies would not behave like this in the first place.)

So, I'm going to yoga class this morning. Ah yoga class on Saturday mornings how I love you. Time to chill out and stretch and recharge my batteries. I walk into the enormous classroom with maybe 5 minutes to go before class starts. My plan is to stretch a bit and lay there like the dead, enjoying the silence for a minute. Not this morning. No, this morning, for some inexplicable reason, there are three children running around this enormous room at full speed and someone has cranked up a Roxette song ("Dangerous") full blast on the classroom stereo and those children are fucking flying. Flying and screaming. Okay. Fine. So no relaxation before class for me. I pass a couple of my classmates who are standing in a corner talking and pick my way to my usual spot in the northwest corner of the room and set about rolling out my mat and pulling off my sweatshirt, when I hear a voice, barely audible over the incredible din.

"Do you mind? They're just going to run around for a few more minutes," a woman near the front of the room asked me.

"No, it's fine," I said. Really, it was fucking annoying, but what was I supposed to do--tell the woman to get her kids out of the yoga studio? That this wasn't a playground but a place where adults come to escape things like children and Roxette? I'm a relatively nice person, so I let it go.

"No," said the woman. "I mean, DO YOU MIND. They need to run right there for a few more minutes," and she made a little sweep sweep gesture with her hand to illustrate that she'd like me to clear out for her kids. I looked at the kids who were now tagging each other, collapsing to the ground and roaring like lions about 25 feet away from my yoga mat.

"Are you serious?" I said. I didn't know what to say after that. "I just paid for this yoga class. It's about to start," I said. What I really meant was: I'm an adult who pays to have a quiet relaxing experience here. Who the fuck are you and why are your devil spawn galloping across the floor like a heard of elephants with hyperactivity disorder? And who the fuck listens to Roxette? You know the guitar player used to be in a white power band? Nice one, you racist self-important midwestern housefrau. Not to mention it's an absolutely gorgeous day outside--perhaps I could interest your children in a park or a busy intersection?

Her face clouded over and she scowled, "Well, if it's a big problem for you, I guess you can stay where you are."

(Oh can I? Gee thanks!)

So ignored her and started stretching, keeping my hard-to-rile-but-once-riled-a-wrecking-ball temper from flaring right before my supposedly relaxing yoga class by imagining roundhousing her right into the stereo which would then explode in a shower of sparks and go silent. I did a downward dog and could see in the back mirror that she was staring daggers at me, doubtless having similar thoughts ("I wish Roxette was here to pound that child-hating heartless yoga fuck into a small bloody pulp on the stinky yoga carpet").

"Dangerous" ended. I sighed and sat up to stretch out the old hips. She was still staring.

"Come on kids!" she yelled over their screeching, never taking her eyes from me. "Let's go!" She rounded up the banshees and as they all duck-walked to the door she passed by me and practically screamed, "There, wasn't that fun! See what happens when you do something NICE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!!??!? GOOD KARMA KIDS, GOOD KARMA WHEN YOU ARE NICE TO OTHER PEOPLE!!" I'm not sure, but I think the youngest kid started to cry. And they filed out the door of the studio.

It's obvious I've been in Iowa for awhile. If this scenario had played out in New York (which, by the way, it never would have because New Yorkers understand that you don't want to play with their kids, or watch their kids play, or at all have anything to do with their stupid fucking kids; but out here in Breederland, we're all supposed to be thrilled to spend time with other people's teenage mistakes), my parting words would have been something along the lines of "Fuck you, lady," a good, strong, New York standby appropriate in almost any sort of unpleasant situation involving a lady, or suspected lady. I've made good use of it before. When you live in New York, no matter how patient or normal or kind you are, at some point some crazy motherfucker is going to force you to have a terse, nasty confrontation in public. That's just how it goes. But I didn't expect it in Iowa, where people are generally polite to a fault (except when it comes to their kids though, I guess), so I didn't have my armor on. I said nothing as the icky woman walked past me screeching about karma to her terrified children. What would, in past years, have been an automatic response on my part (Fuck you, lady) was silence instead. Although I was seething, I just didn't feel like escalating it, and what could I say to her that would make her look like more of an idiot anyway?

So I didn't say anything. And although it was kind of annoying, holding my tongue, it was also kind of nice not having a screaming argument in public with a total stranger. So thanks, Iowa for chilling me out. But please, keep your hatchlings out of my adult playhouse. Namaste.

The Heart of Hypocrisy and Adorable Babies

2007-10-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

While the government is making is more and more difficult for women, especially poor women, to get abortions, it’s also making sure that those unwanted babies never have a chance. In the last three weeks, George “Baby Eater” Bush
vetoed a bill that would give universal healthcare to children and Congress struck down a bill that would help children of illegal immigrants eventually become American citizens. WTF? What about the sentiment “no child left behind”? I thought our country was supposedly in the grips of kidmania, but I guess it’s only the rich, white, Burberry-wearing kids that count. You guys! Haven’t you seen little Chinese babies? They are totally the cutest!! Anyway, the House is voting again on the thing today. Keep your chubby toddler fingers crossed.

In further hypocrisy news, America is urging Iraq (via Iraq’s Kurdish President) to put down the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) uprising in northern Iraq to make Turkey happy. Do you remember several years ago (feels like a lifetime) when we were supposedly getting into the Gulf War to protect the besieged Kurdish people? I think that may have even been the entire argument behind Christopher Hitchens’ call to arms (which he does not recant in this month’s Vanity Fair, but sorta kinda almost apologizes for after one of his believers dies in Iraq. Good work, Hitch.).

Let me just say right now that I would bet $20 that this current snafu with the PKK rebels attacking and killing Turks and Iranians is going to somehow get twisted around by our government’s spin doctors and eventually lead to a war with Iran. Even though that doesn’t make any sense. Hey, we could even switch back to supporting the Kurds again and vilify Iran for killing them once in awhile. Also: fuck Turkey, one of our last allies in the Middle East. Gulf (and World!) War III: Revenge of the Kurds. Dick Cheney, you can have that one for free, baby.

Speaking of babies, meet Henry, spawn of Laura and Jeremy. Henry totally wants to take on Jack in a cute-baby smackdown.

Henry.

Jack.

They’re both so ridiculously adorable. I just can’t decide. That sunflower outfit is hard to argue with. But Henry’s perfectly round, bald head is just delicious.

Any other week this would be a clear tie, but today I think this round goes to Henry. He’s living through his first fire season in San Diego, which gives him my sympathy vote. Hey, I never claimed to be fair and balanced.

The Bloating

2007-10-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

I just spent a fabulous 10 day vacation out West, flying first to Salt Lake City to see friends Jacob and Tim and to check out a PhD program there. Then I drove to Olympia, WA, to cavort with Nate, his lovely fiance Michelle and their two dogs (Roya and Paige) and kitten (Ganky Roundworm--named after his current unfortunate condition. I was assured by all parties that roundworm cannot be passed to humans. I'm too afraid to check WebMD to make sure this is true). Then up to Seattle for oysters (good but Long Island's are better), art (Seattle Art Museum--delicious) and a haircut (given to me by a guy named Bash who was wearing pink boots and ripped jeans. My hair was scared! But it all turned out okay.) and some face time with ex-New Yorker and former bedbug-sufferer, Gabe. One more flight to San Francisco to enjoy the company of the lovely ladies in my life, Jen and Carolyn, and then home. Needless to say, I kind of need a vacation from my vacation. But everything was perfect and wonderful and fun except for this: I spent so much money on stuff that I have been suffering staggering waves of nauseau whenever I spy my overstuffed suitcase hulking in the corner of my office. I have not yet been brave enough to unpack it.

Truthfully, I had prepared for this and financially, I'm okay, but it got me to thinking about why I buy so much stuff (some pretty, some crap, some pretty crap) and whether or not it actually makes me feel better after I get it home. I mean, the answer to that question has usually been "Not really," but between spending so much last week, reading the really excellent nonfiction book THE TRAP: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in America by Daniel Brook, and envisioning my life in a graduate program that pays approximately 1/3 of what I'm making now (which is nothing to write home about), it's finally time to take seriously this issue of overspending and overconsuming and do something about it. So I've decided not to buy anything non-consumable for a year. Okay, I'm going to TRY not to buy anything non-consumable for a year.

Not that this is anything so special or novel. I'll still get to eat out, order drinks, smoke a few of my bittersweet butts and wash my hair with Pantene Classic Clean. For most of you, that's probably the extent of your "entertainment" spending anyway. But that's because a lot of you are willful, intelligent, forward-thinking people who have been able to avoid being sucked into the new hyperconsumerism spiral. Not me.

Call it a function of living in New York for so long. New York, where you're mostly supposed to look like a million bucks, even if you're barely breaking $30,000. My rookie year as an editorial assistant, I blew most of one month's rent on a gorgeous blue suede skirt and then had to hail a cab home in hurricane-like weather conditions with my remaining $20, lest my beautiful stupid purchase be ruined in the rain. I wish I could say this was a singular situation.

Call it part of being raised in a lookist, bored and upwardly mobile society, where depression rates have skyrocketed hand in hand with Tivo and HD TV subscriptions.

Call it all those women's magazines that have convinced generations of the fairer sex that if they just had the perfect pair of open-toed pumps, their lives would finally be complete and that elusive thing called happiness, theirs (until next season, anyway).

Call it a lifelong lack of impulse control and practicality on my part.

I'm calling it boring. That little rush I get from buying French-Canadian weatherproofed Italian-leather boots leaves me dry as Ann Coulter's cooter on a hot day when the brand-spanking newness wears off. I'm not proposing anything revolutionary here--after all, there's a whole movement of people who have vowed not to buy ANYTHING for a year. Those people have my best regards, but I do not look to lead a saintly, monkish life. I enjoy whiskey and lobster chowder far too much for that kind of sacrifice. Nor is my proposition unselfishly spurred by my disgust with the foreign sweatshop labor that keeps stores like H&M in faux-designer tailored motorcycle jackets. (After all, who else but the little children can get those tiny stitches just right?)

No, this is a purely selfish and incomplete kind of social experiment, but I'm interested to see what happens. Maybe this will help reset me somehow, thus enabling me to start planning for the awful inevibility of adulthood markers like house ownership and (gulp) babies? Maybe I will successfully deprogram myself just in time for the middle class to crumble and disappear, thus inuring me to what would otherwise have been a devastating blow to my (cute-jacket-and-frock filled!) quality of life. Also, all signs point to graduate-school induced poverty up ahead. It's time to save money and dust off my library card. Last, this will certainly impact my new music and book sensibilities, perhaps in awful and irreversible ways. Please refrain from pointing and laughing when I wind up at your party wearing a threadbare dress, ignorant of the new McSweeney's wunderkind and prattling on about the last Arcade Fire album I bought in 2006. Sigh.

Goodbye dumb and indescribibly beautiful new things!

Motherfuck, I Am So Glad I Left

2007-10-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

"A studio apartment in Manhattan now goes for $1,958 on average, according to local rental agency Citi Habitats. A one-bedroom rents for $2,632, and a two-bedroom for $3,721." Also, "Average rent in Manhattan increased almost 12% in 2007 from last year." -From an article published in today's Wall Street Journal

Shame

2007-10-03T06:46:00.000-07:00

I hadn't read a blow-by-vicious-blow account of the latest Blackwater incident until I saw this article in the NYT this morning. It's truly brutal. I don't know what to say.

I have to admit: I don't read the paper every day. It's easier not to. Every single time I do, I come across stories like this, which make me feel like I might go crazy with anger and grief. But lately I've been thinking: Oh well. Driving ourselves crazy is the least any of us can do. Someone has to bear witness to atrocity. And that's one thing Americans (myself included) aren't doing very well. Sure we hear the word "Blackwater" and we see Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert make some jokes about them, and we vaguely know, from the buzz in the air, that there was a "shooting incident" that is a little muddled and someone's ass is probably going to be shipped home and fired for it. But that's all politics--it's dancing around the issue, which is that 17 Iraqi civilians are dead and 24 are wounded and possibly not a single one of them fired a shot.

Hey, I love the Daily and Colbert Shows as much as the next young liberal. I know a lot of people who get their news solely from these guys (opinions already included) and they're probably more up on current affairs than your average American, but the problem with the Stewarts and Colberts of the world is that they neuter the news. When a current affair or international problem is being framed for a joke (no matter how cynical), you're never going to hear about how one woman was towing her already-dead 11-year-old son's corpse along by the wrist; or how another woman was killed cradling her dead husband's remains (which were later mistaken for infant remains, since the two were bombed shortly after and the husband's body burned up so much there was only a baby-sized bit of him left when the smoke cleared), or the young guy with the destroyed head whose mother screamed for help. That stuff's just not funny.

But maybe it's stupid to single out Stewart and Colbert. I don't know that we can hear about any of that stuff on TV. It's what happens when our television content is federally controlled.

So, I'm asking you to read this story because it's disgusting and horrifying. I'm going to try harder to read these accounts as often as they're published. I think it's really important not to turn away from what is actually going on--from what our country is responsible for. I've been negligent.

Cancer: The New Morality

2007-09-28T10:13:00.001-07:00

Scientists released findings from a breast cancer study that shows women who have more than three drinks per day will see their risk of breast cancer increase by 30%. To this I say: Hello, breast cancer, come on in and make yourself comfortable! Say hi to your roommate, cervical cancer. You guys take a look around and get a feel for the place. My main groundrule is: no metasticizing. This is not your place, it's mine, so kindly stay out of my colon, brain, throat, liver, lungs, uterus, pancreas and stomach. Especially the stomach.

Seriously, what the fuck doesn't cause cancer? I just find it interesting that sex and drinking are often linked to various types of "female" cancers. Personally, I think next surgeon general should be The Church Lady: "Sooooooo, out at a bar all night were you, Sweetie? Meet a boy, did ya, Cupcake? Weeeelll, isn't that spaaayshal. It's a good think you enjoy getting poked by strange men because you're going to get a whooole lot of that in the hospital when your ladyparts are being rotted off by The Cancer, you Babylonian whore!"

In conclusion: yes a person can get cancer after a lifetime of risky behavior. So can a strapping 21 year-old with a huge cock and his whole life ahead of him. So it goes.

A Few of My Favorite Things (This Week)

2007-09-20T10:10:00.001-07:00

In lieu of boring you with a long post of my boring borepinions, I thought I'd recommend some truly great shit to you with prodigious use of links and short, palatable bursts of borepinions.

Here is my current favorite...

-answer to people who claim America is not a fascist state.

-new song (well, new to me): “Punchlines” by Mates of State—catchiest bastard ever, especially the second half. It’s definitely worth a dollar.

-peon: Carla Bird, a TV assistant, actually collected her overtime. I’m so impressed with this woman and her refusal to be exploited by her employers. As a publishing assistant, it was made clear to me that no one ever collected overtime and an attempt to do so would basically be viewed as an act of aggression against the company. This is so completely typical in the media and entertainment industries. Also sadly typical is that it is mainly young women who take these low-paying, long-hours assistant jobs, maybe because (if I may editorialize a bit) they tend to place less value on their skills and abilities in the workplace than young men do. In my experience, when young men do take assistant positions they get promoted much faster, probably because they speak up more and aren’t afraid to push for what they want. One hard-working female editorial assistant I knew, certainly no shrinking violet herself, was passed over for promotion twice. Each time she was told to “wait and see” for six months and maybe there’d be opportunity for her to advance then. It was only the third time she was given the same line that she quit and found a new, much better job that rewarded her work. I don’t know any guy in publishing who would “wait and see” even once.

Anyway, this is all to say, Carla Bird, you are one brave, smart cookie. Nice work. May you be given your own TV show to run one day and your own assistants to not-exploit.

-baby replacement: Gorillas are now critically endangered. I don’t know why this bothers me so much more than, say, the same information about snow leopards. Maybe because “Gorillas in the Mist” was my favorite movie when I was little. In any case, you can “adopt” a gorilla (or a snow leopard, if that’s your thing) through the WWF. The money goes towards helping gorillas and you get an adoption certificate (adoption: so hot right now!) and, if you’re a big spender, a stuffed gorilla. The perfect gift for the childless spinster in your life.

-hater: Even though it shit talks my future ex-husband, I must insist that you read this essay about Brooklyn Books of Wonder. This is precisely what is wrong with popular literary novels now. The author’s points are scathing and spot-on and nothing short of revelatory for me as a writer and a reader. If I taught a class right now, this would be on the syllabus.

If I were a doctor and this, a disease, my prescription would be Mary Gaitskill.

Enjoy!

Jack

2007-09-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

Also, I just needed to share this with you. Meet Jack. Jack is Angela and Dustin's new baby.

He is obviously the cutest baby who has ever lived. Suri Cruise looks like a total pile of barf by comparison.

A Tale of Two Jimmies

2007-09-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Yeah so James Frey landed a million-dollar book deal at Harper Collins. I would go off about this but I have almost completely exhausted my interest in talking and reading about him, which is too bad for me, especially since he seems poised to become The Writer of Our Times. Yes, it's completely retarded that he landed a million dollar book deal but there are far worse fake writers out there--I don't mean people who lie, I mean people who can't actually write, but somehow manage to string together 100,000 insipid and cliched pieces of the English language and then sell a million copies of their disasters. Plus, it's obvious that any shred of dignity left in the book publishing industry was dumped down the garbage disposal with the proposed publication of IF I DID IT by OJ Simpson. Public outcry made the book (and it's publisher, Judith Reagan) go away, but some small press snatched it up and to no public outcry at all the fantastical tale is scheduled to print with a tiny publishing house/vanity press and pretty much no one in the whole world cares anymore except for the Goldmans and Browns.

Oh, but I have an idea! Instead of ever buying another James Frey book again, you could buy this one instead:

It's written by my friend Jim McGarrah, who was a tunnel rat during the Vietnam war. Jim would eat James Frey's tiny testicles for lunch and then belch the alphabet, if he wasn't busy being an amazing poet and inspiring college professor. And for you who prefer your memoirs truthy, I can vouch for Jim's. He has not had an easy life, but lucky for us, he's had an interesting one.

p.s. I don't know what happened to my little link-maker so just go here to buy copies of Jim's book:

http://shop.indianahistory.org/index.html?lang=en-us&target=d40.html

Back in the Matrix

2007-08-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

The new job is going well. Here I am showcasing three of the many wonderful perks: the iMac digicam and Photo Booth program, free bottled bevs and company-wide shared iTunes.

The people are great and the work is interesting and creative and fun. For instance, last week I researched and wrote a 1500-word essay about shape-shifters that will be published in an 11th grade educational workbook. Something I didn't know before last week: a few historians theorize that werewolf and vampire legends arose as explanations for serial and mass murders in the olden days. Clearly this is information that children in public schools need to know and I'm glad to provide it for them.

In other news, the stork has been busy this summer. Has everyone I know given birth in the last two months? Yes. Stay tuned for a baby round-up. No babies can escape the incredible reach of my magical lariat!

And last, but certainly not least, a summer crime update update: Jill--she of the improbable-but-accurate kinship association, common-law-step-sister-in-law (I'm hers too)--told me last night that someone she knows was attacked for sport a block from my house last week and nearly beaten to death. Attackers put him in intensive care, smashed his skull and face and didn't take his wallet. He's out of the ICU now, but his jaw is wired shut and he never wants to leave his house again.

Dear reader, I have lived in St. Louis and Jersey City and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I've traveled all over the world, including some of the most crime-ridden parts of Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam and Thailand. I've never felt as unsafe as I feel in Iowa City right now. Today, after work, I'm going to buy some pepper spray. Seriously. This is fucking ridiculous. Also, Iowa City police force: yeah, um, I know arresting 19 year-olds downtown for drunk walking is like, really profitable, but people are being brutalized in my neighborhood. Is it really so much to ask for JUST ONE BEAT COP TO PATROL MY EFFING STREET BEFORE SOMEONE GETS MURDERED? Thank you. (and p.s. yes, I realize I'm turning my voice to the heavens here, but a friend and I are planning to write a letter to the editor this week about the recent crime wave and the utter lack of interest on the part of the city to protect its citizens because everyone is too busy playing in loco parentis to the college students. Also, boo college students!)

Trouble in River City: A Summer Crime Update

2007-08-19T14:28:00.001-07:00

Iowa City likes to bill itself as “the River City” which--considering that we don’t live on the Mississippi or Missouri, but rather the small (though lovely) Iowa River--is a little piece of Midwestern hubris. Still, it’s a nice catchphrase that invokes the quiet, peaceful, bucolic town that Iowa City usually is. Lately, however, “River City” is a woefully inadequate slogan for a friendly town that seems to have suddenly become crazed with Crime Fever. It’s like—you know how trucker hats are just catching on out here and the radio stations and bars still play Will Smith on heavy rotation? Well, I guess it’s sort of the same with sex assaults and arson.

This summer, my historic Northside Neighborhood has been haunted by a mystery groper who knocks women over, pins them down and fondles their business. He is described as a white male, about 5’8, usually wearing a baseball cap, which helpfully describes almost everyone who lives in the state of Iowa. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a couple of weeks ago, several blocks away, at ten in the morning, four houses caught fire at the same time and burned to a crisp. Cops are calling the fires, ahem, “suspicious.”

Luckily, so far I’ve avoided a run-in with the perv. But imagine my surprise last night, when, returning home late from the state fair, Brad and I turned the corner for home and almost ran headlong into a flaming, exploding van that was parked on our street. We beat the fire trucks who were already on their way (we were told after calling 911) and most of the neighbors who had apparently written off the first few smaller explosions to drunken college kids with leftover fireworks. For a few minutes, it was just me and Brad and a towering inferno blocking our entrance to the back alley where we park. It was actually quite breathtaking. I didn’t get a picture even with my cell phone, I was so entranced by the thing. Also: worried that if I turned away from the wheel even for a second we’d be tomorrow’s headlines--Couple Decapitated By Burning Shrapnel. I kept my foot on the brake and the car in reverse and we watched the thing blow it’s gas tank until the fire trucks arrived and we felt safe going around the back way to our house.

One of our neighbors, a lady I don’t know but who seemed trustworthy enough, said she heard a crash and looked out her window to see someone biking like crazy away from the van, which was just starting to catch fire.

Cops are calling the fire “so weird! Huh. Yep. Anyway, anybody up for a Donutland run?”

To top it off, in the ensuing melee, someone walked off with Brad’s dill plant from our front porch.

So in the spirit of keeping open the lines of communication in a troubled neighborhood, I would just like to use the rest of this post to write an open letter to my hometown:

Iowa City, I get you. I know you’ve always had this chip on your shoulder about your perceived lack of sophistication and culture in comparison with other cities like Chicago and even Minneapolis. I understand that. I’ve often felt the same way in my own life. And you do an admirable job--you can be as pretentious as SoHo; as decadent as L.A. I’ve seen it, Iowa City. I know what it’s like when you go too far to try to prove that you are an urbane and chic community with contributions to make to bourgeois society (we’ve all been snubbed by Writers Workshop students, Iowa City). But listen: The New York Times has written travel features about you! Denis Johnson set his iconic novel Jesus’ Son in you! Kurt Vonnegut curmudgeoned up your nubile coeds for years!

I get it Iowa City. You’re hip. I really, truly believe you. Trust me, you don’t need soaring urban crime rates to prove it. That is not sophisticated, Iowa City. That is Newark. And I didn’t leave New Jersey for this bullshit.

You Employ Myself

2007-07-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

For the past six months almost exactly, I have been “self employed” meaning that until last month, when I took a part-time job at a newspaper, I’ve been working freelance, paid-by-the-project work. During the last month, I’ve been both a self- and part-time employee, and I have to say, the whole working at home thing has been pretty awesome.

Basically since I moved, I’ve been spending my days doing yoga, going for bike rides, napping, swimming, having morning coffee at my favorite café, reading books I’ve wanted to read for years, going out late on weeknights and generally living the life of a student or a particularly well-nannied, self-absorbed stay at home parent. Basically, it’s just as possible to waste time when you’re self-employed as it is when you’re working full-time in a cubicle farm, except more fun because, duh, naps.

Over the last 6 months, as a self-employed person, I made a little less than half of my yearly salary in New York. It’s also on par with the full-time job I will start in August at an educational publishing house. So why the change? Why leap from the lap of luxury back into the life of harried despair of the American worker bee?

It all boils down to two things: benefits and the ease of having my time budgeted for me.

As I get older, words like “health with vision and dental” and “401K” have the same effect on me as “Northern Californian hydro” used to when I was a teenage pothead. I long to walk the sterile, no-slip tile floors of a doctor’s office. I look forward to picking out my new gynecologist and GP like some people look forward to picking out new furniture or a wedding dress. I am jonesing for that Chantix prescription that will finally rid me of my horrible smoking habit forever. I’d like to know that all the lumps and spots and moles I’ve found on my body since December of last year don’t point to end-stage metastatic cancer. I’d really really like to get my teeth professionally cleaned.

Furthermore, working for yourself takes a lot of project front-loading. You have to make sure you’re always covered in case a project falls through, or doesn’t pay, and that basically means constantly overbooking yourself. In the last six months, I’ve held positions as: copyeditor for a national magazine, copyeditor for a regional weekly, associate editor for an independent press, prose editor for another independent press, newsroom assistant, obituary writer, college lecturer, romance novel consultant, freelance editor for Iowa Book Doctors, freelance editor for The New York Book Editors, contributing editor for two different literary journals, and online college comp tutor. Which is something like twice the number of jobs I’ve held in my entire life. Granted, I didn’t get paid for all of these positions, but you never know when something might turn into a paying job. It behooved me to accept everything that came my way and then some.

Self-employment also means establishing a money net in case payments for projects come late or never (which in only six months has happened several times). I spent my entire time in New York just this side of broke, which has made me completely neurotic about money—not in the good way, the outcome of which is you’re better at balancing a check book and you always know to the cent what’s in your accounts, but in the bad, ostrichy, head-in-the-sand way, in which the ignorance that my account is overdrawn is the same as it not being overdrawn at all. Needless to say, the sort of attention one must pay to ones accounts as a self-employed person is not for the financially faint of heart, like me.

In fact, it’s a good thing that being self-employed allows for naps because it can often be exhausting and emotionally draining—and that’s before any work is actually done on a project.

The last six months have been great, and I’ll probably feel at least mildly regretful when I’m sitting in my temperature controlled office the next time it’s 85 and sunny outside, but it will be nice to have one job, one title, one source of income and a steady paycheck.

Carma

And on a totally unrelated note: We have neighbors who live catty corner behind us and with whom we share the ill-defined parking spaces in between our two houses. I won’t bore you with all the nastiness, but suffice it to say we got into a bit of a scuffle over one parking spot in particular, which we were under the impression we could park in, but the neighbors were not. (Relevant fact: our neighbors have more parking spots than they can use, but our house has to crowd five cars into the equivalent of three spots.) It could all have been handled in a civil and adult way except that our neighbors aren’t adults—they’re spoiled adolescent students who took to leaving threatening notes on our windshield and giving me the finger whenever our paths would cross in the parking area. In fact, they started inviting friends over to park in the spot in dispute—people who didn’t even live in their house—in order to keep us from parking there.

Well, there was a really bad storm today while I was out and about and when I turned into the alley behind our house, there were trucks everywhere and people milling all around. I pulled in and saw that a giant tree branch had been struck by lightning, cleaved off it’s huge oak tree of origin and completely smashed flat every single one of the four cars parked at Le Maison des Bebes.

As Brad pointed out later, nobody happened to be parked in our spot-in-dispute. (After the neighbors were satisfied that they’d “taught” us not to park there, they never used the spot again). It was the only parking spot on their lot the tree completely cleared.

I laughed for a really long time when I got home. I mean, nobody was hurt, and duh, the sucky neighbors will all get new cars from insurance (assuming they’re insured), but that will take a while, and in the meantime their lives will be more difficult and annoying. They can’t even bum rides off of each other. And for this I am thankful.

Working Stiff

2007-05-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

I got a new job! Starting next week, I'll be a newsroom assistant at the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The main (and most important) responsibility of my new gig will be...(drumroll? Uh, organ dirge? "Taps"?) writing obituaries! Yes, that's right--like my friends Janaka and Joe, who cut their teeth in the undertaking biz, I'm crossing over to the dark side to become intimately acquainted with dead people. Considering that it's a struggle for me not to end every short story I write by killing off at least one of my characters, I'm quite comfortable with the idea of writing obits. Must have been all that Stephen King when I was little. Mom was right to worry, I guess.

Second bit of business: Please say hello to the newest member of our family--Bailey!

Bailey's a baby, but he's already almost as big as Kevin. The animal shelter people suspect that he's a Flemish Giant--the largest breed of rabbit known to man. If everything goes as planned, by this time next year he could weigh as much as 30 pounds. Like this fellow, a Flemish from Germany, weighing in at a piddly 22 pounds:

Oh please. You call that a rabbit? I call it Bailey's midday snack.

Obviously, our lives are becoming stranger by the minute out here, in a good way, of course. Maybe that's the biggest difference to me between New York and the Midwest. In New York, everything is so fast and furious, it's all you can do to hold on tight and maintain a normal routine. In Iowa, everything expands outwards and you get to indulge in the weirdest experiences. It's pretty awesome. But if you'd told me two years ago that I'd be a giant-rabbit owning obituary writer by the time I was 30, I would have been skeptical, to say the least. Stay tuned for next week, when Brad and I explore the ins and outs of training rodeo monkeys! Just kidding. I think.

This Post Is Not Yet Rated

2007-04-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Wow, two posts in two days. Last night, I was sad. Tonight, my ire is up. I am Irish, after all--being sad and being angry are the two main catalysts of far too much of my general output.

Anyway. I was watching the film "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," loving it, obviously, for the fact that we get to see a lot of material cut from various films that took their ratings down from the dreaded NC-17 to a more respectable and marketable R, but also because I'm a raging (literally) liberal. My favorite amendment has always been the First. The movie talks about the shadowy ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America; how they are more likely to rate a movie NC-17 because of sex (and more specifically gay sex, or sex centered around the female orgasm) than violence. This of course reminded me of the time I saw "Enemy at the Gates," aka, "Head-Shot Blitzkrieg!", in the theater. I was sitting behind a kid and his dad. There must have been eleventy billion people who got their brains blown out in that movie; kid and dad enjoyed popcorn through the splatter. But when Rachel Weisz and Jude Law got down to the business, the dad put his hand over his son's eyes until their naked, writhing bodies had faded to black on the screen.

It might just be me, but um, following the logic behind that hand block, if I had a son (or a daughter), I would want my child growing up to eventually have successful, enjoyable sex. I wouldn't want them growing up to plant sniper bullets in the brains of German or Russian citizens. But, like I say, maybe that's just me.

More to the point, I watched "TFINYR" with growing dread while they described the movie industry as a conglomerate, vertical industry--just the words now used about book publishing--and was struck by how likely it is that, at some point, books may be subject to similar ratings. After all, movies aren't the only ratings-based game in town. FCC anyone (that's shit-piss-cunt-fuck-motherfucker-cocksucker-tits, to you)? Tipper Gore?

I used to think a good book will always get through. I mean, Nabokov's Lolita eventually found a major American publisher in Putnam, and that was in bad old stodgy 1958. No problemo in our enlightened times.

But now it's bad old stodgy 2007. Books, which are often (sometimes? Maybe my reading list skews in a certain, nasty direction) much more explicit in every way imaginable than movies, TV, radio or music, are simply the next target.

And then I realized: Duh, Kojak, it's already happening.

When I was working at a major publishing house in New York, one of my co-workers, a top editor in our department, came to me one day, flustered. Apparently, she'd sent out manuscript copies of a book she was editing to various book buyers she knew at large franchises around the country to stir up early interest in the book, which she hoped to land on best-seller lists. Not uncommon, and actually a very savvy move. She got a phone call back from a book buyer at a particular discount chain known for its low, low prices. She would have to cut a scene from the book, she was told. Well, she didn't HAVE to, but if this particular discount chain was going to even consider carrying the finished book (which would make up a considerable chunk of final sales), she'd have to kiss this scene goodbye. It was a romance novel, and the scene was a kinky, serious sex scene that "played too much like rape" in this buyer's eyes. The scene was changed.

If you think the fight to stop censorship of literature begins and ends at the public library/high-school reading-list level, you are wrong. It begins with the buyers, it begins pre-publication. And yeah, sure, this is a romance, one of hundreds published in a month. It's not like these buyers would phone up, say, Jonathan Safran Foer and ask him to pull 9/11 photos of a man jumping to his death from the World Trade Center. They wouldn't drop a note to A.M. Homes and ask that she give fist-fucking jacuzzi incest a rest. Or would they?

It's a slippery slope, my friends. I think the only reason the publishing industry has not, up to this point, been subjected to some kind of ratings system is that the industry and the buyers are only now becoming conglomerate. In the old days, your sales reps hand-sold books to important, independent bookstores, like McNally Robinson in New York or Prairie Lights in Iowa City. That's not where the money is anymore. The money is with a very small handful of giant chain buyers who can guarantee hard sales of one title into the tens of thousands of copies. And with publishing companies (and thus editors) under pressure to produce more best-selling titles in less time, I guarantee you'll begin to see more market-based censorship. And eventually, it will go public. And that is the day that the novel--regardless of what other writers and thinkers (Kurt Vonnegut, even) have said before--will actually be dead.

Or maybe I'm being too bleak. Perhaps the one thing that has (relatively) saved books from intense maternal scrutiny for all this time is the fact that to be offended by them, one has to be able to read and comprehend them. We're actually quite fucking lucky that a lot of the censoring elements in this country tend to be, eh how shall I put it, functionally illiterate in anything pertaining to art or free expression? Yes, that's how I shall put it. Sometimes I think the only thing that keeps real art churning in this country is the morbid incuriosity of some of it's most upright citizens.

So! Just to reiterate:
-Buy from independent bookstores, not chains
-Buy books that are published by independent publishers, not huge corporations (difficult, I know, but getting easier as indies gain cred and market-share)
-A lot of Americans are fucking and willfully stupid, thank god.
-Thus, I can write and publish stories that, if made into movies, or, say, gangsta rap albums, would generally be censored (and I'd be rich).
-At least, for now.

Kilgore Trout is dead. So it goes.

2007-04-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

I have lots of things to write about soon, but Kurt Vonnegut has died. I don't think there's a reading person my age--much less a writer--who has not been stopped in their tracks by a Vonnegut creation. For me, and for a lot of us, Vonnegut was one of the first writers that tore us out of the slumber of junior high, high school and college reading lists. He wrote comics, comedy, sci-fi and horror with a healthy pinch of porn thrown in. Up until yesterday, he was probably the single most influential living writer in America. I can't imagine later Philip Roth or Jonathan Safran Foer, Douglas Glover, Tim O'Brien, James Morrow, or anything ever published by Dave Eggers or McSweeneys, etc. without Kurt Vonnegut. I know he's informed almost every piece of fiction I've loved since I was 13, when, one rainy week, I devoured Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions (the entirety of the Vonnegut section of my junior high library)--hardly grasping the hard-won truth of any of it, but feeling it, feeling Something Important (and Really Fucking Funny, With Drawings of Buttholes and Everything!) anyway. I've gone back to him again. And again, and will again. It's horrible, but part of his genius is that the world as he foretold it has slid even further down the morass to strongly resemble that place. Or maybe it hasn't changed much at all. That might be even worse.

He taught me the word "luddite." He wrote about what it was like to be a human being, as pathetic and sorry as that enterprise can be. He was a cynic who wanted us all to be kind to each other.

The NYT has a nice, long obit. My favorite lit blogger, Maud Newton, has links and links to links.

Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Green Bay 'Pacas

2007-03-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

I've posted here about alpacas before, but this weekend I attended my very first alpaca show ever in Neenah, Wisconsin, which, as my mother pointed out, sounds like someone let a toddler name the town.

My uncle is a farmer and a veterinarian and has been breeding and showing alpacas for a decade now. My mother has recently gotten into it and has a couple of alpacas of her own: Blackberry and Brandy (together, they are named after my late grandmother's boisson of choice--oh those crazy, drunken farmer's wives!).

Mom and I drove up early on Friday morning, passing through many adorable towns in southern Wisconsin before we got to Oshkosh, otherwise known as the largest strip mall in America. I've been thinking a lot about going into college teaching, knowing that the field for creative writing and English is very competitive. That is, I know I would have to "follow the jobs" as they say. I hadn't really considered what that meant until we got to Oshkosh, which is in theory a college town, but in practice is just one big parking lot. If someone had asked Sam Walton design a town (as they did Thomas Kinkade--gag), his vision of Eden would have looked a lot like Oshkosh. There was not a tree, a car (remember those?), or a person weighing less than 200 pounds for miles in any direction. In fact, even here in God's country, the sole holdout from the franchise frenzy seems to be the independently owned and operated stripclub, Beansnappers.

Suffice it to say that if I had to move to Oshkosh or somewhere like it for a university job, I would probably not be long for this earth. But that’s okay because we weren’t there to teach composition or watch French films, we were there to show alpacas.

First up was Brandy, my mom’s pride and joy. The problem with Brandy is that he’s a bit too small for his age. He’s won championships before because of the quality of his fleece, but he’s also lost a few competitions because of his size. One judge actually told my mother that he wasn’t “macho” enough to be a top competitive male. When I think about machismo, a lot of things come to mind--New York City cops, Hooters, football—but never, if I listed out all the machoness in the world, would I ever arrive at male alpacas. On the machismo scale, male alpacas are down there with Ryan Seacrest and quiche, regardless of their size. Sadly, Brandy could not seem to convince the judges this weekend that he was anything more than a dandy. His threads were fine, but his wrists were weak.

Here he is with my uncle, trying to put on a convincing show. Fifth place out of five was his lot. Nice use of the rear-up, though.

Afterwards, I consoled him with a fine neck scratching.

And we walked off the loss as the sun set in the west.

That night, he jumped his pen, went on a bender and was later apprehended snorting coke off a dancer’s thigh in the champagne room at Beansnappers. Oh Brandy, don’t you get it? You’re man enough for me.

There was also the hilarious children’s hour, where all the little kids got to lead their alpacas into the show ring for a limbo competition. I tried to disguise my laughter as the “Aw, isn’t that adorable!” sort of sated parental chuckling, but when one little kid walked head-first into the limbo bar and fell down on top of his alpaca, I just couldn’t contain myself. My guffaws drew a few dirty looks from the stands and my poor, mortified mother.

This is Black Ice. He got second place in the competition where Brandy placed last. Black Ice will steal your soul while you sleep.

All in all, the weekend was excellent. We ended it by eating at an Outback Steakhouse. I’d never had the pleasure, and ended up making a fatal mistake. When dining at a franchise restaurant, one should never attempt to order healthy food. Everyone (but me, apparently) knows that you should order the Aussie Beef Bucket with a side of fried lard, or something equivalent. But after all the cheese and hotdog (and cheesy hotdog!) consumption over the weekend, I decided to get a side salad, “steamed” broccoli and rare tuna appetizer. The broccoli had obviously been steamed by microwaves (as opposed to the traditional, boiled-water method) and covered in what tasted like movie popcorn butter. The tuna came in identical slices that were suspiciously gel-like in their consistency. I could almost see the long, squishy tube in the back labeled “tuna” from whence the slices were cut, could almost taste the horse hoof. All in all, it was not terrible, but yeah, I should have ordered the Bloomin’ Onion with Down Under Buffalo Wings and Wild Sauce.

Mostly, the weekend was awesome because I got to spend it with my mom. I don’t remember the last time that happened. I highly recommend it, although she’s going to be pretty busy this spring with other alpaca shows, so schedule your weekends early.

In other news, Kevin lost a claw last week while making her usual Daytona 500-like speed laps around our front hall and living room. Because rabbits are very susceptible to pain, and I am very susceptible to being a sucker for my rabbit, I took her to the vet where they cut down her remaining claws, weighed her, looked in her ears, asked her to turn her head and cough, and gave her a shot for the pain.

She was pronounced fit as a fiddle but did not particularly enjoy the experience.

And now for pictures of our apartment! (Can you tell I just got back from the 1-Hour Photomat?) I thought this would be a nice chance to give folks far away a peak at the new place and make my New York friends nauseous with jealousy. Just kidding. Hey, space is the one commodity we have out here that you guys don’t. Please, just let me hold onto that.

Here’s the front porch, sans jug band. Notice the painted cement accents and the peeling floorboards. 100% class.

The living room. That green man in the corner is a hillbilly zombie and is Brad’s creation, as is the spindly ink drawing above it. That big pillow in the middle of the window seat is called a “husband.” I found this out in college, when Carolyn brought her “husband” to our dorm room. I love the term because it’s somehow kind of naughty and inappropriate, although I’m not quite sure how or why. Perhaps because we used to share the pillow and, once in awhile, have sex with it in exchange for jewelry.

This is my green office. The light comes in through the green curtains all day and makes everything glow a light chartreuse. Since green is the color of nature, Kermit the Frog and horniness, I find my office a very pleasant place to spend time.

Here’s our bedroom. You can’t really tell from the photo, but the blanket on our bed is a triple-threat, photo-realistic rendering of a deer head, an eagle head and a wolf head. It’s very Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

That’s our house, minus Brad’s studio and the kitchen. I guess I left out the bathroom too, but if you want to see my bathroom, you’re going to have to come to Iowa and view it in person, perv.

Things is Differnt Out Here

2007-02-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

Hello from the vast and frozen prairies. It’s been awhile since I posted, I know. Besides a two-week jaunt to Vermont, I’ve basically been napping and reading non-fiction books (oh fine, and becoming inordinately engrossed by “What the Fuck Happened to Tom ‘Crank-Face’ Sizemore” or whatever his reality show train-wreck is called) for the last two-and-a-half months. Two-and-a-half months! That’s like three hours in New York minutes.

Brad and Kevin and I are pretty damn happy out here. Although the lack of Corner Bistro burgers can be demoralizing at times, we have found (much to our surprise and delight) a fantastic Israeli falafel joint and a heart-attack’s worth of cheap, amazing Mexican food. Kevin, specifically, is adjusting very well, for a native Jerseyite. She spends most of her days running joyful circles around our front hall and living room, and chewing the dried snow-salt from our front-hall welcome mat. We have a new favorite organic/local foods store that, for all it’s BoBo/neo-hippietude, is still cheaper than your average Key Foods. Kevin’s palate is becoming very refined.

I’ve made a conscious decision not to make this a culture-shock blog, but there are two major cultural shifts that have taken place in my life since moving from the New York area--namely snow-shoveling and hip-hop clothing.

Hip-Hop Clothing

On average, I’d say I used to walk a mile and a half every day when I lived in Jersey City and worked in New York. A half-mile to get to and from the PATH stations on either side of the Hudson, twice a day, and an extra half-mile at lunch. A lot of days I probably walked more like two or three miles. My last month in New York, on a temperate and windy evening when I was feeling a particularly strong wave of pre-nostalgia, I walked from work at 32nd and Madison all the way to the Lower East Side.

Now, in Iowa, I drive. I drive to the grocery store. I drive to the bank. I drive to Mom’s and to Wal-Mart (natch). I drive to yoga. I told myself I wouldn’t do this. I told myself one of the great things about where we live is that it’s so close to the bar- and coffee-shop-ridden downtown Iowa City area. I could walk everywhere I needed to go. But there’s one thing I forgot about winter in Iowa: It’s fucking cold.

You think you know. “Sure, cold! Brr!” you say. New York is cold. Once a year, three feet of snow falls on the city and you don’t have to go to work and you get to make snowmen in Central Park. But you aren’t really cold. Apparently, the last three or four winters in Iowa are the warmest that anyone can remember. It was negative twenty degrees here for the better part of February. Unseasonably warm, the weathermen say. And it’s true. When I was little, the mercury used to fall below negative sixty with wind-chill. We didn’t just have snow days, we had cold days; days so cold it was dangerous for people to go outside. Then we walked barefoot, uphill, both ways. In comparison, negative twenty should be cake.

This is all a very circuitous way of saying that, as a result of the cold, as a result of the driving, as a result of not walking two miles every day, my badonk has officially become a badonkadonk. Among other things, this means I have had to buy new pants.

There aren’t a whole lot of clothing choices in Iowa City. There’s no H&M, no Forever 21, no cute LES boutiques, not even a respectable Macy’s. Basically, there are department stores and places where MILFs go to spend $300 on last season’s designer castoffs from Chicago. So, my new shelf-ass and I bounced down to Dillard’s for some jeans. The choices were depressing, to say the least. Mom jeans everywhere my ass and I looked. Mom jeans! I may be fashion-flexible or even fashion-negligent at times, but, hey, when you’re on the verge of 30, and you make a major life change, and that life change involves being assaulted by racks and racks of mom jeans, well, it’s enough to make a ma’am-aged, unfortunately expanding, yet girlishly charming person cry.

Until I found the Baby Phat. Yes, I know—Kimora Lee Simmons, the Devil knows thee by name. And there’s the ghoulish embroidered gold cat on the ass-pocket, followed by the garish, faux-golde label on the waistband. But you know what? They fit, and not in that stuffed-sausage, bleached-thigh-trompe-l’eoil sort of way. They fall straight and even give me a nice, low, flattering pocket on my Puerto Rican curse. And the thing is, I would feel weird wearing Baby Phat in New York, because, let’s face it, I am a lot of things, but urban streetwear diva is not one of them.

The great thing is, in Iowa, no one knows the difference! (FYI, fashion-foward in Iowa means not wearing a sweatshirt and stone-washed jeans to the office.)

Whew. Okay. And then there’s snow-shoveling:

Snow-shoveling

We have to shovel the snow off of our sidewalk after more than an inch accumulates, or else our evil neighbors call the City, which then tickets us $50 plus snow-removal fees. Shoveling snow sucks. I understand now why middle-aged men are always having heart-attacks while shoveling snow. Middle-aged men can run marathons and scale Mt. Everest and govern the country, but they drop like flies when they have to shovel the driveway. It’s that hard.

Also, fuck you, evil neighbors.

Besides that, the people who live upstairs from us are a jug band, which is obviously awesome. And: I was driving home from a day of speaking about New York publishing at a local college last Thursday (very fun) and here is what was on the radio in one commercial-free stretch:

“Fallen Angel”—Poison
“Don’t Stop Believin”—Journey
“Photograph”—Def Leppard
“Things Can Only Get Better”--Howard Jones (now that I’m almost 30, and I don’t care about being cool anymore, can I just say that I love and have always loved Howard Jones? And does this make me ineligible for re-entry to Brooklyn at any point in my life? Or more eligible?)
“Take Me Home Tonight”--Eddie Money
“Funky Cold Medina”—Tone Loc

Take that, New Jersey.

Home!

2006-12-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, after renting a UHaul in Philly (note to future movers: Philly rentals are MUCH cheaper than NYC/NY/NJ prices), driving it back to Jersey City, loading all our shit, taking off around 8pm last night (after a final coffee/tearfest with my Russian landlords/adopted family), and heavy rain and fog in PA, Brad and I have finally made it to Iowa City. We are currently getting drunk on champagne, sitting in front of Mom's lovely Christmas tree, trying to pound it into our skulls that we aren't actually going back to our jobs after the holidays. Oh, we're also reading the internet (Judith Regan got fired! My old publishing habits die hard), which constitutes "alone time" after 18 hours in the car together. Kevin, by the way, came through with flying colors. The truck was big enough that she got to sit bitch in her cage, up front with us. After a couple of hours of paralyzed quaking, she chilled out and is now officially a car bunny. She'll be happy to know that we have a new (old) car!--a very adult-looking burgundy Honda of some model I have yet to determine, in the dark.

The stars are amazing. It's quiet. Happy to be home. Officially moving in tomorrow. Talk to you all soon.

Why ________ Aren't Funny

2006-12-16T00:07:00.000-08:00

So, of course everyone’s all pissed off about the Christopher Hitchens article in Vanity Fair this month. It’s called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” and it’s basically about, um, why women aren’t funny. But here’s the thing: Explaining how and why someone (or some group of ones) isn’t funny is also not, in itself, funny and therefore difficult to credit. It’s kind of like being told you’re out of shape by Orson Welles. Also, I suspect that you could probably take the word “women” out of the title of the article and substitute it with practically any other group of people in the entire world and come up with a similar thesis. Let’s try it out!

Why the British Aren’t Funny

Be your national identity what it may, you will certainly have heard at some point about the legendary wit of the British. “They’re so off-color!” your friends may say after having watched The Life of Brian, stoned, for the forty-third time since eighth grade. “The British are sardonic and wacky!”

But I want you to shine the flashlight of truth deep down into the guts of your soul and try to remember the last time you really, actually thought something a British person said was funny. You can’t, can you? The Ab Fabs--Patsy and Edina--are all plastic-surgery jokes and fake cocaine. One can’t help but equate Hugh Laurie’s tired, desiccated one-liners on House with the fact that his head-skin seems to be shrinking onto his skull, mummy-like, with each passing episode.

And does any American who’s ever read P.G. Wodehouse actually think he’s funny? Or are we just afraid of looking like we didn’t get the joke?

Even the original British TV show The Office has been outdone by the American version. What could be funnier than watching Dwight Schrute drive Michael’s car into a telephone pole, stagger out, and concussively vomit on the back windshield? Sorry, Ricky Gervais, the answer is: Nothing.

Admit it. The last time you sincerely laughed at something British was the first time you saw The Holy Grail, or possibly People magazine’s unveiling of Elton John’s latest hairpiece. Even Princess Di jokes don’t make anyone laugh; not because we feel bad about her untimely and tragic death, but just because there has always been something so inherently unlaughable about every single member of Britain’s aristocracy and/or ruling party. Unlike our beloved bumblers in the White House, the Royals and members of Parliament are just not funny. Dick Cheney shot some guy in the face, for crying out loud!

I would almost allow for Sacha Baron Cohen, except for the fact that there is nothing even remotely amusing about hearing his signature Borat or Ali G lines recited incessantly by annoying coworkers and frat boys in cube farms and Irish pubs across America.

Here are some more examples to illustrate my point:

Tony Blair: Not funny.

Soccer hooligans: Not funny.

Jack the Ripper: Not funny.

Earl Grey tea: Not funny.

Colonialism: Not funny.

Hedgehogs: Okay, kind of funny.

Oliver Cromwell: Not funny.

Boddington’s Ale: Not funny.

The Sex Pistols: Not funny.

Stonehenge: Not funny.

Roses: Not funny.

Big Ben: Not funny.

Christopher Hitchens: Not funny.

See what I mean?

I Did It.

2006-12-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

I'm finally cool.

Does this balance out the fact that my going away party is on the embarrassingly lame Saturday night?

No, it's simply proof that I will never be able to afford to live in Jersey City again. It's been a swell five years. Welcome trustafarians, hipsters and grups!

P.S. Come to my party if you want to live! (Saturday, December 9, 7:30 The Magician, 118 Rivington at Essex)

Happy Motherfucking Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T23:23:00.000-08:00

In keeping with the tradition of my last post, there's a little unnecessary swearing to brighten your holidays. Cock, cock, jism, Grandma! (I'm looking at you PJD.)

Sorry about the Tourette's. I've pretty much spent the last 72 straight hours copyediting a new beer magazine (BeerAdvocate! The first of its kind!) under heavy deadline and penalty of death. Time to let off a little steam and drink my absent landlord's whiskey.

Let me tell you about copyediting. Copyediting is cool. It's kind of like solving a jillion little puzzles, plus, you get to learn all the things about the English language you should have been taught at some point, but weren't, because this is America, goddammit, and only pinkos and faggots learn proper hyphenation and comma (commie!) usage.

But 72 hours straight of it, and you end up with a sentence like this:

"Weizenbock--a big Bold beer of heading promisely,."

So, I'm taking a 2:30 am whiskey and water break. The beer porn I'm editing gave me such a hankering for Oatmeal Stout earlier that I wandered around in the cold, holiday rain (ah, just like that awesome Dan Fogelberg song about bumping into an old lover at the grocery store. Lover is such a 70s word, don't you think? It reminds me of hairy armpits and cocaine.) searching for something to quench my powerful thirst, alas, to no avail. Instead, I bought the makings for oatmeal cookies, which I will create tomorrow after I put this project to bed. Perhaps I will eat them while drinking a Red Stripe. That's about as close as I can get to Oatmeal Stout out here in Jersey City.

I don't even really like beer (in the sense that I appreciate it more for the happy, slutty feeling it gives me, than for the actual taste), but I'm sold on this magazine. It's made me crave something I never really think about. If you're even slightly interested in beer, you'll enjoy BeerAdvocate. Just don't come crying to me about split infinitives and whatnot, you hippies.

Eat It, Bitches

2006-11-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

Santorum's out, abortion is in, and we have our first female speaker of the House! Gays are still disfavored, but that's what you get from a country full of ID enthusiasts. Really, I expected a lot less.

I feel more hope today for our nation than I've felt for years. For the first time in a long time it's a hopeful thing to be an American.

(How about you and me make a Cuban sandwich, Menendez?)

The Cuteness

2006-11-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

I mean, what can you say?

Crash Cab

2006-10-25T16:58:00.000-07:00

So, I was hoping, before I left New York, that by some fluke of karma I would get into the Cash Cab and become an instant reality gameshow contestant celebrity, thus securing my fame, fortune, and access to Paris Hilton, forever.

Instead, last Friday night, after a dinner with my San Francisco visitor Jen, I got into a crash cab.

We were on the West Side Highway and not wearing seatbelts. In other words, it could have ended really, really badly. Luckily, we weren't going the seventy miles per hour that some New Jersey assholes get up to on that road, and I heard brake-squealing long enough before the three hits (from behind, pinballed forward, then back again) to brace myself fairly well. Jen was not able to brace herself, but since she's made of NASA space foam and rubber, she was okay too.

I can't stop replaying the last moments in my head. There was enough time after the first hit to feel relief that I was still alive and apparently, not badly hurt, but then the next two came and the driver's airbag deployed and the cab filled with smoke. I wasn't really able to feel relief again until Sunday.

Jen--who has flipped her Jeep enough times that I'm convinced she has a calling in stunt-driving--was fine. I kind of freaked out though. The shaking, puking kind of freaking out (although to be honest, the puking came later, and may have had more to do with my butter-with-a-side-of-crab-meat entree than the accident). Not fun.

However, it does occur to me that this cab accident has a certain poetic quality to it, as I enter my final few weeks in the greater New York area.

After college, on my very first day as a worker bee in New York--before the credit card debt and the rocker boyfriends and the Sabrett addiction, when I was still a sweet, optimistic Wellesley graduate--I came down from my bedroom in New Jersey where I was staying with Carolyn and her parents until we (me and Carolyn) could find an apartment. As I went to the kitchen cabinet to get a bowl for my cereal (Cereal! Can you imagine! I'm currently two breakfast sandwiches short of a quadruple bypass) I was stopped short by a newspaper article taped to the cabinet door: "Woman Dies in Cab Catastrophe!" Carolyn's mom, Mrs. Sivitz, had even circled the line "The victim was not wearing her seatbelt." Happy first day of work in New York to me!

I think I actually did buckle up in cabs for a short time. However, soon after I moved into a studio apartment in the East Village with Carolyn, the Taxi and Limousine Commission introduced those horrible "Buckle Up" voice-overs in cabs. You know, the ones where slightly washed-up yet still famous New Yorkers tell passengers to put on their seatbelts. "Hi, I'm Diana Ross and I want you to (sings a little) STOP! In the name of safety!" Anyway, I deliberately stopped putting on my seatbelt in cabs at that point. "Fuck Elmo and Joan Rivers," was my motto. After a few months of being a rebel, it sort of became second nature not to buckle up.

So here I am, about to leave, and I'm in a potentially deadly cab accident. Okay, okay, I finally get it Mrs. Sivitz. I will wear my seatbelt, even in cabs. Especially in cabs. Thanks.

Douchebags of the Day

2006-10-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

Define irony. (via Galleycat)

...And I Feel Fine

2006-10-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

Hey, long time no blog! Sorry, there have been extenuating circumstances that have kept me from being a good and steady blogger. For instance, my evil teenage rabbit, Kevin, was spayed a couple of weeks ago, which generally made me too anxious and broke to blog. That's her above, engaged in her favorite activity, eating fibrous objects that aren't technically food. She also enjoys ingesting doors, wall trim, clothing, the floor, rugs, boxes, paint chips and books. Especially books.

Here’s a fact I didn't know before I rescued Kevin: Rabbits are considered "exotic" pets and the vet bills reflect this. I'm not saying I would have left Kevin on the floor of that Cuban restaurant to be squished by a busboy if I’d known that ahead of time. I’m just saying I might have.

All in all though, the surgery went well. Kevin, who is nothing if not stubborn, refused her pain medicine, and instead took to violently attacking her litter box, whose plastic lip pressed painfully against her stitches whenever she tried to take a pee. She got the stitches out last week, but has yet to make up with the litter box.

Also, I'm now working what feels like 15 jobs, 16 if you count going to yoga so my slowing metabolism doesn't drown me in my own fat before I turn 30. Most people probably enjoy and are soothed by their yoga classes. I, however, attend Bikram yoga, which means that I pay over $100 per month for the privilege of twisting my body into painful and unlikely positions in a room heated to 105 degrees while some small, loud person with 0% body fat yells things like: “Stretch harder! Bones to skin! I want to see your ribcage pop!” and “Farther! Bend so far backwards you can see the floor! I don’t care if you feel like you’re gonna puke, just go!” for ninety. Minutes. Straight. And don't even get me started on the smell. Still, afterwards, I feel like I've just smoked a fat doobie, and it's keeping some of my cellulite and most of my generalized anxiety at bay, so there are benefits.

Still, it’s hard not to feel the generalized anxiety ooze in and begin to set after reading an Iran War roundup on Wonkette. My hair was practically standing on end by the time I got to the end of this post. Then I read the links to the real media reports, and it turned white.

Also, if we survive the nuclear winter, we could be heading into another Great Depression! And Condi’s been caught in a lie that will, likely, result in absolutely nothing happening to her! Ditto Mark Foley! Sometimes it is really really really really really fucking hard not to despair. I should have known better than to start reading Wonkette again. I don't have any idea how people in Washington manage to get out of bed every day. Thank god I live in New York. More celebrity beaver shots please!
However, there are at least two reasons for joy this week: the weddings of my long-time boy pals Tim and Ryan. Perhaps fearing that an Iowa wedding would lack the exoticism necessary to attract enough guests, both Tim and Ryan opted for destination weddings (Utah and Hawaii, respectively). I couldn’t attend, but I’ll see them in Iowa this weekend, where, rumor has it, much drinking and football watching, but very little sentimental reflection, will occur. And that suits me just fine. Congratulations boys! Keep the beer bong warm for me.

Scribbles and Bits

2006-08-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

It's been an exciting couple of weeks at chez Screwsan. First and foremost, the household has a new member: the lovely Brad, pictured here holding a baby boer goat, with the help of my mom. It is wonderful to have him around, plus now my bunny have a baby daddy. Kevin's a bastard no longer...well, not in the literal sense, anyway.

Doesn't that just make you want to puke from cuteness? What is cuter than that? If the baby boer goat was holding a kitten, maybe that would be cuter. Maybe.

Second, I'm enjoying a spate of publications this week. When I got home from work yesterday, my copy of the literary anthology I helped compile and edit last year was in the mailbox. The book is called THE WAY WE KNEW IT: Fiction From the First Twenty Five Years of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College (1981-2006). Can you say that without running out of breath? I can't. Let's just call it TWWKI. So I spent a lot of time working with my co-editors Christopher Noel and Kate Harding last year, sifting through an amazing, high quality body of submissions to find the stories that fill TWWKI. We also asked a lot of Vermont College graduates whose work we know and love to contribute. As a result, we have a great mix of new voices, like Alex Enders (who just sold her first novel to Plume this week! Congrats Alex!) and more established writers, like Alicia Erian and Naama Goldstein. Here's the cover. First the front:

Now turn around and let's see you from behind.

So obviously I'm biased, but I really do think the stories in the anthology are fucking awesome. And while I love the cover and think it is absolutely beautiful, the classic look of it sort of belies the feeling of the collection itself, which I think strikes a great balance between very strong traditional narrative stories and pieces that are more experimental--strange, sad, funny funny stuff.

Vermont hasn't decided yet how they want to sell it yet, so I can't actually tell you how to get ahold of a copy if you're so inclined, but I'll put out an update when they figure it out.

Finally, on September 6, my very short story "Magic Trick" is going to be posted live on the Daily Palette website, which is sponsored by the University of Iowa and the Iowa Review as part of the Iowa Writes project. A few times every week for two years, starting this summer, the Daily Palette will feature short stories or poems by writers who self-identify as Iowan. Luckily, The Daily Palette can see into the future--my story is already archived. Link here, or visit The Daily Palette website to browse other writers stuff. It's a pretty neat-o site.

And last on my list of small wonders this week: I have the internet at home now! All I had to do was go to Best Buy, make some hand signals at one of the blue-poloed salesfolk and cough up $40 for a wireless router. Convincing my crazy Russian landlord to let me mess around with his magical Verizon set-up was a little trickier, but with some native-speaker, electronics-instructions-reading skills (mine) and some vodka (his) we figured everything out. Ah, my pretty interweb, how did I ever pass the evenings without you?

Time Travels

2006-08-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

About six and a half years ago, I traveled through Southeast Asia with my then-boyfriend, Tattoo Mike. My camera was stolen at the airport and never made it to our travel destinations: Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

(This was just one of many ridiculous travel woes on that trip. Shortly after my camera was stolen, I had to rebook my flight because I didn’t know I needed a visa just to be in a Chinese airport for a layover. I had to stay in L.A. for another three days to fix it. Later, I snuck into Vietnam on a bad visa. Someone in the state department had fucked it up right before the week-long celebration of Tet, during which time all government offices were closed. We had two options: try to get into the country and hope we didn’t get caught and arrested, or wait another week for the offices to open, another three weeks for the visa to come back to us, and cut our trip to Vietnam short by 20 days. I’m glad we risked it, but I was sweating bullets at customs. Vietnamese airport security guards were military and had semi-automatics, which was disturbing back then.)

Instead, I got a little point-and-shoot and took about 15 rolls of film. After we got back from Asia, Tattoo Mike turned into Psycho Mike and, fearing for my physical safety, I had to flee our apartment in the middle of the afternoon with the help of my boss. Needless to say, I left a lot of stuff behind when I moved back to Iowa, and even more stuff behind when I moved from Iowa to NYC. I’d never thought much about all that missing film until the other day when I was starting to dig out the apartment to make space for my new roommate, the lovely Brad. In the back of a closet I haven’t used since 2001, I found a whole bag of undeveloped film. I got back the first two rolls today.

I had pretty well committed the trip to memory, resigned myself to the fact that I would never have a visual record of it. But now I do. I wonder if everything will look different than I remember? I wonder how it will feel to look at my life before Psycho Mike, before grad school, before 9/11 and the war in Iraq and all the strange, heavy, inevitable stuff that has given me wrinkles and gray hair and made me into a reluctant adult. Weird.

I’ll post the best pictures from each roll here and tell a little story about them. Here’s the first:

We went on a dayboat tour of the Mekong river delta. We went up and down different tributaries in this boat and eventually parked and took a tour of a local rice winery and coconut candy factory. The word “factory” made me think it was going to be like Necco or something, but really it was just a little brick hut in the jungle that popped out a few hundred candies a day to sell at the local floating market, which is a bunch of boats tied together, like spring break in the Ozarks.

I don’t want to get into too many details here, but that day I experienced some unexpected lady problems. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that one thing about trekking around the deltas and jungles of third world countries is there’s no convenience stores. It was then I began to realize that traveling is harder for girls. This would continue to be a quiet motif throughout my travels, culminating in my experience of being publicly groped in Cambodia.

Pre-psycho looking kind and happy. Beware, future self, beware!

www.writtenonthecity.com

2006-08-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine just launched this new and beautiful website.

You should visit it, enjoy it, and contribute. He's looking for message graffiti from all over the world.

xo
Screwsan

Love Letter to Claire Hoffman

2006-08-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

I'm late on this, but Claire Hoffman, a 29 year-old Iowan and writer for the LA Times, wrote a fantastic piece on Girls Gone Wild fucker Joe Francis. The story is great, definitely read it, and then prepare to want to murder Francis, who manhandles, hurts and later threatens our heroine. She keeps her cool, even when he tries to get her fired by calling her editor and accuses her of behaving inappropriately due to her crush on him. I tried to find her email on the masthead of the Times, but to no avail, so this is my official public declaration of love for Claire Hoffman, who punched Joe Francis in his ugly, rapey face. Thank you Claire.

Teenage Investment Bankers and a Starbucks on Every Corner: Welcome to the New East Village (or So Long and Thanks For All the Sushi)

2006-08-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

I complain a lot about being broke, I know. But that's because being broke takes up so much brainspace. It's hard to think of anything else when your credit card is maxxed out and your landlord can't wait another week to get the rent. I've literally had to choose between buying shampoo and contact solution as recently as last month, because I couldn't afford both (answer: contact solution--this is why I keep the shampoo from every hotel I ever stay in). I do a lot of math in my head and I worry all the time. I worry so much that various people who love me have suggested at various times that maybe it would do me good to invest in some Xanax. But I've realized recently that it's not me that needs to change. There's absolutely nothing wrong with my brain chemistry. The problem is New York.

Fair New York, where citizens wallow in filth and stink and maggots and blackouts and murder and poverty. And that's just the well-educated, white collar luckies like me!

Of course, I don't even live in New York. I live in Jersey City, the sixth borough. But I work in New York and I have lived in New York and Jersey City is becoming just as expensive as New York, so let's agree to do away with the semantics.

I've never really been able to afford my very humble studio apartment. There have always been options, I realize. I could move farther out in Jersey City, where hoards of teenage boys have been shooting, robbing and generally terrorizing people all summer. Or I could go the other way, and get a place in Queens or outer Brooklyn (even dirty Billyburg is too expenso for me now). But I don't know a soul in Queens or outer Brooklyn. I only see my friends who live in inner Brooklyn every few months as it is. And pardon me for not wanting to double my commute again this year. I could look on Craigslist and move in with some strangers and hope that all the horror stories I hear about people who look on Craigslist and move in with strangers don't happen to me. Forget about Manhattan entirely. Artists and musicians and writers are fleeing the East Village like its on fire. The only people who can afford to move into the neighborhood where I first lived when I came to the city are freshly graduated investment bankers accompanied by all the behavioral stereotypes they seem happy to reinforce.

I read a good article recently about the housing crisis in New York. A square foot of apartment space in NYC costs $1100. Approximately ten $100 bills take up one square foot of floor. Literally in New York, you can spread your money out across the floor of an apartment, and if you can still see the floor, you can't afford the place.

(I include Hoboken and Jersey City in this equation, since, like the outer boroughs, their rents are relative to the Manhattan market. But that doesn't really matter anyway: New Jersey real estate is the most expensive in the country.)

So a change of venue seems out of the question. What I really need is to make more money. Having recently taken on two part-time jobs on top of my full-timer, I'm nearly at the point where I can both pay rent AND live acceptably each month, but of course I've given up my writing time. Hence the scant blog entries since June. And my fiction? Forget about it.

This is the thing: there are ways to live in or near New York, but only at a great sacrifice to my quality of life. I already spend half my existence on the train so I don't have to spend half my paycheck on my apartment (except that I do spend half my paycheck on my apartment anyway, and of everyone I know, my rent is the lowest).

This used to be okay, this sacrifice. Used to be that you sacrificed some amenities, some comforts, for the privilege of living in the epicenter of culture, art and invention that is New York City. But now the artists are leaving, unable to afford the rents even in the outer bouroughs, which aren't as friendly to them anyway. They're moving to college towns and smaller cities where their work is still valued, and they can afford apartments with separate rooms, fresh air, electricity and (dare to dream) maybe even a dishwasher. And it's sad to think that the artists who stay might be forced out of art altogether to pursue the kind of employment that pays, but demands so much of their time and attention they have nothing left at the end of the day. Used to be everyone in New York had their day job and the thing they did for their souls--their novel, their comic book, their movie script, their acting career. More and more I feel like the day jobs are taking over. And I have no idea how freelancers afford this place. That seems an impossibility anymore.

(What's really dumb is I say "used to" like I've lived here forever. I've only lived in or near NYC for a total of 6 years. That I can say "used to" just attests to the fact that things seem to be going downhill quickly.)

It's sad that this housing crisis--which has been getting steadily worse since I graduated from college in 1999, despite a brief uptick after 9/11--could be the death of New York as we know it. With all the chain stores and Starbucks and high-rise apartment buildings going up in formerly-affordable, even rundown neighborhoods, where liveth the people that make New York diverse and interesting and something more than an overgrown Hartford, Connecticut? More and more, they live in Section 8 housing. What a consolation prize.

And so it's time to do the inevitable and leave NYC. Fuck surviving, it's time to live.

I know I sound bitter in this post, but all I feel now that I've made the decision to move is relief. I know none of my complaints are new or novel. But it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. At some point, it ceases to be charming to be the house salad girl, and I have hit that point. I'm 29, staring down the barrel of 30. I'd like to be able to afford an entree before I turn 40.

I'll be applying to PhD programs this fall and moving to Iowa City in December where I will work part time and write full time till I hear back from schools and decide on the next big move. I can't wait. It's going to be fictiontastic. Also, the lovely Brad will be moving with me to work on his own art in one of our two bedrooms in our future apartment! My little mind quivers with anticipation.

I am excited, but still a little sad about leaving New York. For every five things I won't miss (excessive horn honking, crowded sidewalks, rats, roaches, black mold) there is one thing I will miss (cheap flowers). (Human feces in the subway, electrified sidewalk grates, grocery extortion, hipsters, filth) (fabulous sushi).

Still alive?

2006-08-05T21:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm not dead, or at least, someone has gone to a lot of trouble to convince you of that. Hacking into my stupid blog, claiming I'm not dead. Col. Mustard in the Library with the lead pipe. Etc.

No no, I'm fine, everything's fine. I've just been busy and will have exciting Life Changes to announce shortly.

In the meantime, I want you to know that I was watching Shark Week tonight and apparently--I'm not making this up--there is a place in the world called Sperm Whale Point in the Bonin' Islands. I just thought you should know that. Also, I spelled Bonin' Islands phonetically. You should probably know that too, in case you're planning to take your honeymoon there and you need to Google hotels or something.

Home Sweet Home

2006-06-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

Say what you want about New Jersey, but my adopted home state is being sued by the government for attempting to protect its citizens from unethical spying.

Thanks New Jersey, for having big, fat, hairy balls.

Love,
Screwsan

Write What You Know

2006-06-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

Oh the poor reading public. We’ve been swindled and lied to. National Treasure Oprah has been publicly embarrassed for Christ’s sake. Between Frey and LeRoy and Viswanathan, how can we believe that any writing is true or at the very least original anymore? It’s all so confusing.

Which is why people who write things should probably be in prison, or at least monitored very closely.

Hmm. I guess this means I am a potential suspected rapist, murderer and pedophile, not to mention junkie, Cambodian and retarded teenage boy. You are what you write, after all.

Or at least, what you write must reflect some real and prosecutable desire. Ben Metcalf tests this theory in Harper’s. It’s a fun game! Let’s all play. Me first: I would like to wrap the president’s head and genitals in bacon, truss him up with razor wire and lower him so that he is horizontally suspended over a tank of Amazonian jumping piranhas. (Legal disclaimer: Not really!) Now you.

Stranger in a Strange Land

2006-05-31T12:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes New York feels like a foreign city. I mean, I can read the street signs, but once in awhile I feel like I don’t have a clue what’s going on. Take this week for example. This week, I’ve felt like the pawn on a Eurasian version of Candid Camera not once but three times.

It started last week, when I went to a spa near work to get my upper lip waxed (sorry men, bear with me). My waxer was a Russian woman with a heavy accent. She asked me to lie down on the table and as she leaned over me she screamed, “I’m going to rip your lip off!" She cackled as she spread hot wax on my face. Not knowing how I was supposed to react to this, I laughed nervously. Her face got serious as she did her job. When she was done, she handed me a mirror and I saw that she had drawn blood. “You see?” she asked. “Now we have paid for our laughter.”

Then yesterday, I went to Dunkin Donuts and ordered a small, hazelnut-flavored iced coffee. The woman behind me, a nicely dressed Filipino lady in her forties, was wondering aloud what to order. When my drink came up, she asked me what it was and if it was good. I told her I didn’t know; I’d never had it before. Then she asked if she could have a sip to determine whether or not she wanted to order it. No, Perfect Stranger, you may not sip my virgin iced coffee. I didn’t know how to tell her she was a lunatic, so I took a sip myself, told her it was good and walked out the door.

And just now, I went out to get some frozen yogurt at this new Korean fro-yo and tea cafe on 32nd st. called Crazy Bananas. On my way out, I noticed a good portion of the wall counter near the window was taken up with a ten piece sculpture garden composed entirely of wooden dildos. Large, thrusty, bigger-than-a-babies-arm wooden dildos. Crazy Bananas indeed.

I love New York.

Waiter, There's a Christian in My Hoohah!

2006-05-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

If you like having sex without making babies, better enjoy it while you can because the end is nigh, my slutty friends. The Christian right is coming together to make contraception illegal (via Planned Parenthood so you don't have to pay at the Times site). No, I don’t mean abortions or emergency contraception (aka the morning-after pill). They’ve already successfully delayed approval on over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception. Who is "they," you ask? Why, the White House of course! System of checks and balances, pshaw. (And then there's abortion. I won't even bother with links on that front.)

I understand that some of you may be pro-life out there. That some of you don’t support the laws that protect abortion, or maybe don’t know where you stand on abortion. I think you’re wrong, but we can agree to disagree. But this? This is just batshit crazy. This is the Christian right extrapolating that taking birth control pills is like giving yourself a little abortion every month (every day?). Thus begins a crusade against the Pill.

Of course, without hormonal birth control, we are all basically one misaimed spurt away from becoming pregnant. So this week, in a perfectly scary, perfectly logical move, the FDA advises that all women of reproductive age should behave as though they are “pre-pregnant.” Because the health of a non-existent fetus is certainly more important than the quality of life of a very-much-existent woman. Because, hey, it’s easier than universal healthcare! Because you’re really only as important as the blessed malechild you may someday carry in your womb. Glory be to God!

In further I-wish-I-was-being-paranoid news: there’s a vaccine that actually prevents cancer. Yes, it’s true--a real miracle of modern science! Everyone will rush out and get vaccinated so they will never have to suffer the sort of cancer it guards against, right? Not so much when the cancer is cervical cancer, and the way you get it is through a sexually transmitted virus.

HPV will be carried by 80% of sexually active Americans by the time they are 50 years old. Most of the people infected with HPV will clear the virus from their systems, probably without even knowing they have it. For an unlucky number of women, however, the virus will stay and cause abnormal cell growth on the cervix which can lead to cervical cancer.

So where’s the vaccine? It's quest for approval has been slow. I'd like to think it has nothing to do with the religious right but with the current hold on emergency contraception, I wonder if the reason this has not yet been approved for use is because some conservative asshole fears it will encourage promiscuity in women. Oh wait, a bunch of conservative assholes already do.

I’m sick of this. I’m sick of, every day, picking up the paper and feeling like I’m reading a chapter out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Hey, George Bush & Cronies: If I wanted you in my twat I would’ve invited you! Really, I kid because I’m terrified. These fuckers aren’t even attempting to pretend like they think of women as anything more than jizz receptacles and baby factories.

And what I’m really wondering is what about you normal Christians, who actually believe in love and forgiveness and the social good (that, as my father is wont to say, "Jesus was the first feminist.”)? What do you think about all this? And can you do something, please? Doesn’t it making you furious that these nutjobs are totally perverting your faith to fulfill their own moral agendas, which include misogyny and the installation of a sexual police state? If I still identified as a Christian, it would probably be enough to make me turn my back on the church. And to think I heard George W. speak at Madison Square Garden two years ago, amid a sea of “W Stands for Woman!” signs, criticizing Islam for covering its women.

Anyway, look, it’s time to put away your (understandable) distaste of all things “liberal” and “feminist” and take a long look at your sex life. This isn’t a hippie-dippy fringe cause. This is about the way you--a normal Midwestern American with moderate political leanings, for example--has sex. This will affect you. And don’t be fooled; this isn’t about morals and family values. This is about a group of privileged people (the people Bill O’Reilly trusts--you know, the rich white ones) making laws that will directly affect how you live your most intimate of lives. Ask yourselves this, red states: is it really any of their damn business?

Keep up on this stuff by reading Salon’s sometimes reactive, sometimes informative women’s issues blog called Broadsheet. Also, hilarious sex columnist Dan Savage has been using up part of his weekly column to keep tabs on what he refers to the war on straight rights (via Boston's Weekly Dig).

What do we do, guys? 'Cause, let me tell you, even more than I love freedom, I love to bone. And here we have a clear threat to both.

Does This Joke Ever Get Old?

2006-05-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

You've probably already seen them, but because they make me laugh and because it's Friday and because I've been incredibly grumpy all week, here are my favorite movie trailer parodies, in no particular order:

Must Love Jaws (the editors kind of go crazy at the end)

Sleepless in Seattle (my favorite)

Brokeback to the Future (best of the Brokebacks)

Big (not that well done, but very very pervy)

Happy Friday.

You Other Mothers Can't Deny

2006-05-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Salon, or New York Times, or New York Magazine, or Slate, etc. lately, but I can’t seem to escape the great Mommy debate. I’m so sick of it, I want to give it a spanking and send it to its room. Is it anti-feminist to be a stay-at-home mom? Is feminism bad for children? Why do we all live in Brooklyn and own the same two-thousand dollar stroller and $300 pair of jeans? The answers, respectively, are: shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up, because you’re yuppies.

Is it any wonder I don’t want to have kids? Because, no matter whether they side with Cleaver or Clinton, apparently all women want to do anymore is think and talk and write about their kids, or more specifically the conditions of existence of being a mother, and the truth is I don’t care. I don’t care about their kids. I don’t care how disenfranchised some women feel working at home. I don’t care how empowered others feel working at home. I don’t care that some people think women who don’t stay at home are ruining the foundation of the nuclear family. These are rich people problems.

My mother always worked full-time to support our family. In fact, pretty much everyone’s mother I knew from growing up had to work, especially when I was younger and lived in North Liberty, which used to be blue collar, when Iowa City, North Liberty and Cedar Rapids were actually separate towns, instead of one long run of housing developments.

All over the country, mothers have always had to work. And they’re the people whose voices I don’t hear in this melee. I hear lots of stay-at-homers and/or professional writers like Rebecca Traister, Caitlin Flanagan and David Brooks weighing in. But I haven’t heard from any women who actually have to get up every day and be a nurse, or a pilot, or a waitress, or a banker. I suspect that this is because these women are workers and parents and probably don’t have much time for abstract debate. It seems to me that raising a family doesn’t have a lot to do with the abstract. It’s in the specific details—the health insurance that pays for the antibiotics for ear infections, the peanut butter & jelly sandwiches that everyone eats for dinner sometimes because Mom and Dad are tired after work, the night shift you have to trade for so you can go to a school play. I’ve never been a parent, but I would think holding together a family is kind of like being in a twelve-step program: you take it one day at a time. And the idea of being the feminist paradigm for your generation of mothers probably doesn’t mean much when you’ve just pulled a 60 hour work week and have come to refer to the weekend as Laundry Day.

My mom worked as a nurse manager at the University hospital when I was growing up. She didn’t sit at the dinner table extolling the virtues of being a working mother, or bemoaning the fact that she didn’t get to sleep in on Monday mornings. She talked about work. She talked about the weird shit that went down at the hospital on her watch. She and my dad, who was a social worker, talked about the professionals and patients they had in common. The disturbed children who stole cars and robbed banks and ran away from Dad’s youth homes only to end up in Mom’s psych ward. We heard stories about schizophrenics eating magazines and Quiet Room takedowns and the political agendas of movers and shakers on the local social services scene (aw yeah, baby).

I once asked my mom about working versus staying at home and she said that she worked because she liked to work. That she had never considered not working, which was a good thing because she had to work to help finance our nice life. That she “never wanted to be one of those women who check their brains at the altar,” but that she had certain regrets about not being around to raise us during the week, as we grew. Just like anything in life, being a mother’s a mixed bag, but my mom didn’t attempt to debate this point into the ground. I don’t think she was tortured by it. I think she did the best she could, which, lucky for us, was excellent. She talked to us about the world and showed us what it was like to be out in it among the criminals and psychos and saints and comedians. She was supremely warm, loving and supportive, but she could give her co-workers a what-for when she had to and we got to hear about it over dinner. When my parents got divorced in 1994, she seemed to move effortlessly into the role of single parent. Though I’m sure it was frightening and sad and very, very difficult, she never let on.

My mom is the best. She is funny and intelligent and articulate and weird and smart and interesting and empathetic and understanding. She exemplifies the idea that being a parent is really about being a humanist. It’s about bringing the world into your home and letting your kids dissect it, and study it, and wonder about it and eventually run off into it. She is my hero.

Happy mother’s day, Mom.

Movie Review: United 93

2006-04-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Amos got me into a press screening of United 93 last night. As I tell people this today, their first reaction is, invariably, “Why would you want to see that?” And my answer is, “I don’t know.” Because I didn’t want to see it. After I watched the trailer a few months ago, I remember shuddering in the movie theater and vocalizing my disbelief that anyone would make a film like that, much less spend $10 to watch it.

But when Amos asked me to go yesterday, I agreed. I was curious. The movie was free. Also, I hadn’t seen Amos in awhile, and he was the sort of person I could count on to discuss the movie intellectually, but also to take my hand and lead me out of the theater if it left me a blubbering mess by the end. And Amos is a skeptic. He wouldn’t let himself get pushed around by a movie. I felt stronger just sitting next to him.

The movie was hard. It was harrowing, and at times pretty unpleasant to watch. For the first 45 minutes, my heart was racing and I had trouble catching my breath. I think I was feeling actual fear—which is nothing like thrilling, stomach-looping movie fear—as I watched the events of 9/11 unfold in real time on the movie screen.

I can’t really say whether I liked or didn’t like the film. I can say the movie was done well. It didn’t feel exploitative or pornographic. Half the film takes place in the offices of the FAA, the Northeast Air Defense Sector and New York and Boston air traffic control centers. This was an aspect of the attack I’d never considered before, and if it can be said that I took something away from this movie, I guess it’s the experience of watching 9/11 from this perspective, which was new and different. But from how many perspectives does one need to view a tragedy? I’m not sure. I guess none, ideally.

A little bit about casting: most of the men who commanded the aforementioned offices played themselves in the movie to excellent effect, especially Ben Sliney, who was promoted to run FAA operations, and whose first day on the job was September 11. I still can't believe he's not a professional actor. The one slip-up was casting David Rasche as the passenger who volunteers to fly the plane if they are able to retake it from the terrorists. You may not know him by name, but you would definitely recognize Mr. Rasche as the stupid, irrascible, violent cop Sledge Hammer, from the 1980's sitcom of the same name. I kept wondering when he was going to haul out his gigantic silver handgun and start wasting the bad guys over a laugh track. Okay, not really, but he was the only actor I recognized and it was pretty distracting.

Finally--and this is going to sound awful--the reason I would maybe recommend United 93 is that it gave a visual interpretation of one of the most horrible deaths I can imagine, and in that way it was cathartic. I don’t know about you, but I spent plenty of time after 9/11 wondering what it was like to be in one of those planes as it went down, imagining what it would feel like, sound like, smell like. It was an open sore on my brain and I couldn’t stop picking it. At points, I was driven to distraction by these thoughts, as I'm sure every American has been. To be able to see it in all its cinema verite horror loosened the grip of those old nightmares.

So that's it. Weirdest movie to review ever.

JSF: The Interview

2006-04-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Wherein the great light of truth shines from our author's soul, in less than 800 words (including the events listings)

The interview, when transcribed, was 15 single-spaced pages long. It took me something like 8 hours to slice and dice it down to 1100 words. Journalists are definitely not paid enough. Luckily, this was the assignment of a lifetime, so I didn't mind making Nike-stitching wages.

Also, I've already received my first ever piece of hate mail about the story. Actually, the spray of haterade is directed at JSF, but I'm mildly dampened with scorn, which makes me very proud indeed. I'll link to it here when the Weekly Dig posts it next week. (How long can I draw this out? Only time will tell.)

You can link to the interview here.

Or you can read the longer (better?) version below. (Any rabid JSF fans, feel free to request the original transcript. Your love of the Foer is nothing to be ashamed of).

* * *

For a man who has appeared twice on the annual 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list in the New York Press, author Jonathan Safran Foer is pretty damn likeable. When we meet in Brooklyn, he’s a little late and out of sorts—he’s just come from home where he lives with his wife, author Nicole Krauss, and their infant son, Sasha. As he settles into a slice of pecan pie and a cup of coffee, Foer seems serenely flummoxed by fatherhood and the duties that surround it (“Raising a kid takes as many people as you give it. If we had eight people, it would take eight people.”). We talk about his latest novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” and how his life has changed since his son was born nine weeks ago.

I’m sure you’ve seen [in the New York Press] that you’re the 28th most loathsome New Yorker this year.

That was brought to my attention. It’s incredible. [Laughs] I think that’s great.

In 2003 you were number five, so obviously you haven’t been…I’ve been doing something wrong. Or else other people have stepped it up.

You’ve lived with this media backlash. I don’t know how much you keep up with it, if at all…

Not very much. But I do have a little brother who is generous enough to forward me particularly mean things. I’m truly only aware of it when someone brings it to my attention. Like this thing, this list, was practically a cause for celebration. I guess I feel grateful that anybody cares at all. Nobody cares about books anymore.

You’re probably not aware of this either, but you’re something of a literary sex symbol.

That, I’m totally not aware of. Why didn’t my brother forward me that?

All the women I know would throw their panties at you at readings, if that were an acceptable thing to do.

Let them know it is. I don’t know. I wouldn’t go for me if I were a woman [laughs]. I feel like there’s a strong mixture coming from the same people in response to the book, or in response to me. Like I come off as someone that people like and hate.

There was noise about you writing a September 11 book so soon. Were people not ready to see a best-selling book about that?

I don’t know. I understand that it’s incredibly sensitive. I understand that something feels wrong about somehow borrowing emotion from it, instead of earning it. And if somebody’s fear was that, going into reading my book, I wouldn’t blame them. It seems like a perfectly reasonable fear. I would hope my book made them feel okay but if it doesn’t, that’s also okay. That’s their opinion. But I think there’s something else going on. I guess everybody’s hollering about this movie [“Flight 93”]. I don’t get that at all because nobody says that about journalists. Journalists are people who actually are manipulating the news because they have to sell commercials, and they have ratings to worry about, and their careers themselves. That’s why news is so alarmist--it’s the best way to get people to tune in. But nobody questions if it’s too soon for a journalist. Literally, people can die because of mistakes journalists make, or we can go to war because of mistakes journalists make.

The end of your book, the flipbook [a series of photographs of a man falling from the World Trade Center in reverse, so that he appears to be ascending], was maybe the most controversial part…

I think people get very uncomfortable when reality intersects with fiction. When it’s all fiction it’s nice, it’s pretty, we’re observing it from a distance. No one gets hurt. But when it intersects with reality, suddenly…well, what if the family members are offended? What if you’re borrowing that person’s grief for your own gain?
The picture isn’t a real picture. I made it. But I think one could have used a real picture. I don’t think there’s any ethical issue with that. I, for whatever reason, didn’t want to. I guess I didn’t want a person coming up to me at a reading saying, “That was my so-and-so.” I don’t think that’s a good test though: Would every victim’s family be happy with what you made? That can’t be a test.

You’ve written about the Holocaust and Dresden and Hiroshima a little bit, and September 11 now. What are your plans for the future?

Nothing like that. I just won’t do it again. I know I’m somebody who is obsessed with dark, catastrophic things. I don’t want to be like that. And I don’t think my book is a response to that instinct, either. I really didn’t want to write about September 11. If someone had said, “You’re going to,” I would have said, “Please stop me if I start to.” It seemed too heavy, or maybe I thought it was too soon. But I just couldn’t avoid it. That having been said, there’s nothing I know about what I’m going to do in the future, but I know it’s not going to be like that. But who knows? What if something happened tomorrow?
My life has really changed in the last year or two. Once I got married, a lot of needs that I previously had, I just didn’t have anymore. My creative output cut way back. And having a kid, it cut back even more. It’s very satisfying in so many ways. I have diarrhea under my fingernails. It’s all I do.
[My son] gives me a whole new set of emotions to use. Before, I was still somebody who was a care-recipient in the world. And now I’m a care-giver. It’s totally different. It’s the first time I’ve experienced love as not a good thing, or not necessarily a good thing. I used to think that love was a positive value. Zero is you don’t care about somebody. Positive five is you like them, and positive ten is that you like them a lot, and positive twenty is that you love them. Now, really, it’s just twenty. There’s negative twenty or positive twenty. You’re always very far from zero. Also, how do you explain loving something that doesn’t love you? My kid doesn’t love me. It’s the greatest unrequited love story of all time, having a kid.
I should go soon. It’s bath time tonight.

That sounds fun.

It’s really the highlight. I think the thing I like most about him is his body. I don’t get to see it very often. It’s rare that I get to hold his whole naked body. And it’s the sweetest thing in the world.

Does he like baths?

I don’t know what he likes or doesn’t like. He’s hard to get a read on. [Laughs] I know he loves breast-feeding.

Can’t blame him for that.

It’s such an overwhelming experience. I would really recommend it.

It sounds terrifying, but I’m sure once you’re in the midst of it, it becomes…

It becomes more terrifying. It makes everything else that I’ve done seem so easy. It’s so unbelievably hard. But that’s part of what’s great about it. That’s exactly what’s great about it.

Everybody Okay?

2006-04-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

Hey Iowans: Tornadoes rip through downtown Iowa City. Everybody's family okay? Homes, pets, places of business?

Riverside Dairy Queen is gone!

Punk Bitch

2006-04-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

Last minute notice: Maria Raha, author of Cindarella's Big Score: Women of the Punk and Indie Underground is being interviewed live on KPFK in L.A. tonight, at 7pm western and 10pm eastern. Maria is a great writer and good company at a strip club. Also, she's hot. Catch the interview live on www.kpfk.org.

Best Friday Ever?

2006-04-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

I interviewed Jonathan Safran Foer last Friday. I guess this means I will have to develop a new literary crush as I can no longer make pervy jokes about what I would do if I met him. No, we didn’t make out, but I did get to say the word “panties.” We had a very nice chat over pecan pie and coffee (him) and Stella Artois (me. I was nervous.) in a café in Park Slope. He’s very cute and slender with poofy black hair. We talked about books and writing and his new son and you’ll be able to read all about it in the interview next week.

Something you won’t read about in the interview is how, in the café, we were sitting in the back, near the bathrooms. This was my choice. I thought it would be quieter back there, away from the main dining room, which was empty, but still—what if it filled up? I had one of those ancient plastic handheld tape recorders that tend to clearly pick up every ambient sound, while somehow totally distorting the voice of the interviewee. I tried to pick a quiet spot. But from the way the traffic moved into the restaurant and back towards us, you would have thought this was the only working toilet in Brooklyn. I mean it was ridiculous. At one point a tall, pony-tailed man in a windbreaker jittered up to one of the locked bathroom doors (there were two), cupped his hand at his ear and listened through the door for almost a full minute, then engaged one of the cleaning staff in an argument about who, if anyone, was in the bathroom. Sure enough, a couple minutes later some other cleaning guy came out of the bathroom with his mop bucket. Then another cleaning guy came over and went into the other bathroom. Then, for awhile, it seemed like it was all cleaning guys in and out of both bathrooms. What were they doing back there? Anyway, this was more or less pretty distracting since the bathrooms were about two feet away from our table. Distracting and gross. Oh well. Lesson learned. At one point JSF leaned over and whispered, “Have you been watching all this? It’s very random.” I do have to say: it was fun to share a moment of weirdness with him.

Strangely, he and I intersected on a bunch of things, including the journalist Robert Birnbaum (JSF’s favorite interviewer; my old boss) and books like Postville and Operation Shylock. I got to slip in, “So I did part of my thesis on Everything Is Illuminated and Operation Shylock…” Oh, snap. Maybe that made up a little for the toilet smell that must have been making it hard for him to eat his pie. Maybe not.

Really though, it was a top notch experience, talking with one of my favorite authors about books & stuff. Very wish fulfillment-y. To top it off JSF emailed me on Monday morning to tell me he had a good time. Swoon and cut. Perfect.

So who’s next? Maybe Gabe Hudson? Stephen Elliott’s bizarrely hot, but we’re both bottoms so I just don’t think it would work. If you have any suggestions for my replacement literary crush, please let me know. And check back for the interview link next week.

Semper Fi

2006-04-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

Hey ho out there. I just spent a weekend in the Catskills where I discovered that I have become a city person. I got lost in the woods, had a wet, nerve-wracking rowboat experience, and went on a bike ride only to end up walking the last hill. Also, I will be honest here: the outside noises scared me. At home, when I hear an ambulance siren, I know it's an ambulance siren. I know, when I hear reggaeton blasting from a slow-moving car, that I am in Jersey City. Or possibly the Lower East Side. When I hear people talking or bums yelling or cars honking or trucks backing up, I know that those noises are exactly what they seem to be. Last weekend, when I heard a crunch or a scrabble in the woods, it could have been a leaf blowing around, or a grazing animal, or a serial killer coming to molest and decapitate me. All the sounds were furtive and mysterious. They could have been one thing or another. Was that a series of approaching shotgun blasts, or a construction site miles away? Is that a highway or a waterfall? The creak of a tree trunk or the unlatched door of a cannibal woodman's cabin?

Born-and-raised-in-New-Jersey Scott is hiking the Appalachian Trail right now. He’s 500 miles down and 1500 left to go. I can't help but wonder what keeps him sane alone on the trail at night. My guess is booze. Lots of booze.

Despite my paranoia and inability to navigate without street signs, I had a wonderful weekend and have decided to spend more time getting back to my outdoorsy, Midwestern roots this summer. This of course will mean a reinstatement of my Naked Navy Seals membership and the opening of a mid-Atlantic chapter.

Naked Navy Seals was a small but exclusive club that came about the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was living in Madison, but recovering from mono (read: unemployed), so I went home every weekend. A few friends at the university had one of those beautiful scuffed-up Victorians downtown that smell permanently of stale beer and bong water. There was no air conditioner, and it was a hot summer. I think it started with a game of Dare (we already knew each other’s ugly truths); something about a naked Irish jig. I believe there was a karaoke machine involved. Pretty soon we were going on “missions” as a “team.” It spiraled downward from there. We spent a lot of nude time outside that summer. We learned to love the feeling of bark against bare ass.

I think fondly on those humid, creepy nights and wonder where my brothers in naked arms have gone? And then I hum The Humors of Kilkenny and expose myself in public.

I'm Stumped

2006-04-05T07:59:00.000-07:00

Literally.

Dub Me Nervous

2006-03-30T11:53:00.000-08:00

So, I didn’t put up the post about the Pogues that I wrote after the show two weeks ago. It topped out at 500 words, but I’ll give you a short summary. It went something like this:

I FUCKING LOVE THE POGUES!!!
I’M SO DRUNK RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah.

So anyway, it was a fantastic show. Shane introduced every other song as “The Irish Rover,” even after they’d already played it. He also gave a shout out to Martin McDonagh, who is a helluva playwright. And I, apparently, was drunk.

Last weekend I celebrated my birthday up in Boston, along with my friends Janaka and Peter who are both 27 now, I think. Oh, they keep me young. Boston was fun as usual, but nothing terribly blogworthy happened, except that some yahoo stole my makeup bag and one shoe from my backpack while we were drinking whiskey at the Cellar. In place of these items I found a shitty demo cd by some kid from Denver named Travis. Travis, you homo, I’d like my stuff back please. Also, I hope you get pinkeye and athlete's foot.

I do have something exciting to report this week, but I’m trying not to make a big deal out if it, since I don’t want to muck it up and totally humiliate myself. But it looks as though in the next few days I’ll be interviewing a young man whose literary work I’ve been known to admire. My only goal is to not sound like I could be a guest host on the Chris Farley Show. Oh and also to make out with him.

If anyone has any extra Xanax, I will totally pay you for it.

Whiskey and Sunday and Tears on Our Cheeks

2006-03-17T12:43:00.000-08:00

Being part Irish (especially the liver part), I feel I may speak frankly about St. Patrick’s Day, and, to be frank, it’s pretty annoying. I take a bit of umbrage at the “everybody’s Irish on Saint Patty’s day” attitude that floats, unchecked, across the nation on March 17. It’s not as if we’re spending today honoring the accomplishments of great Irish Americans like Bill O’Reilly and Donovan McNabb. We are not taking a moment of silence at noon to remember the victims of The Great Famine, or more recently, The Troubles. Instead, we dress ourselves in Kelly Green v-neck sweaters and plastic bowlers, drink beer and pinch people.

Imagine for a moment we had a holiday called Chief Geronimo Day, wherein everyone ran around scalping each other, claiming tribal land for the building of garish casinos and drank cocktails made of methyl alcohol and Ocean Spray cranberry juice.

Being part Native American (especially the liver part), I feel I speak for all of us when I say that actually, that sounds sort of badass. A lot more badass than four leaf clovers and green beer anyway. I guess what I’m getting at is: Why can’t St. Patrick’s Day be cooler? To illustrate my point, I've posted the image above, which is a still from the movie “Leprechaun in the Hood.” Look at how fucking scary that leprechaun is. Plus he’s in the mythical “hood,” birthplace of hip hop, Dolemite and breakdancing. See what I mean? Why can’t actual leprechauns be more like this?

However you decide to spend the holiday—be it drinking beer at a bar with friends, at home with your family, or by yourself in the dark with your phone off because your sponsor won’t stop calling—try to keep your dignity about you. Try to spend it cool.

On a related note: It seems I will be attending the sold-out Pogues show at the Nokia Theater on Sunday. Provided Shane McGowan lives that long. I am beyond excited. Details to follow.

The Passion of the Alpaca

2006-03-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

With Easter just around the corner, I’m gearing up to get my Christ on, and what better way to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus than to shear the hair off a bunch of South American camel-like ungulates. That’s right: it’s alpaca-shaving time. At least, that’s how my mother is spending her Easter weekend and I long to join her. Let me know if you spot any cheap tickets to Eastern Iowa in the next of couple weeks.

To prepare the alpacas for shearing, true to the holiday, Mom will help lay them out and restrain them on long wooden planks, where they will then be stripped of their wool and dignity. Yet there is nothing Christ-like about the biting and spitting that my mother and her (Roman, Jewish) helpers will have to endure. When threatened, alpacas tend to go Old Testament.

But don’t worry: for every torturous shearing day that may or may not end with my mother losing a finger, there are scores of indulgent beauty pageant days.

You are a beautiful flower. You want to be a veterinarian. You play the euphonium like a dream.

#1 Pet Peeve

2006-03-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Unofficial Public Offering has done a great public service by explaining the correct and proper way to use the word "literally" in conversation.

Do yourself a favor and read Tim's latest post ("You make me laugh, Dwight Schrute.") so that you may avoid total public humiliation and a practical demonstration of the difference between "literal" and "figurative" visited by me, upon your ass, as in the following sentence: "I literally want to stab you with a ballpoint pen, or perhaps the sharpest key on my key ring, as we stand here, casually conversing."

alt dot nerd dot obsessive

2006-02-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

Hip to my general attraction to nerds, my friends ushered me into the odd, colorful, and occasionally acne-scarred world of comics conventions this weekend by way of the New York Comic-Con, a trade and industry show for publishers, artists, toy makers and sullen goth teens.

We arrived at the Javits center around 1pm on Sunday and managed to get hooked up with passes from friends who had a booth inside, which meant skipping the $25 door fee AND the really long line of disgruntled fan-boys who stood shivering in the brutal cold.

With a little more finagling we managed to get onto the convention floor, at which point my brain began to seize. It took a few minutes of squinting against the rows of neon manga, poseable action figures and rollicking digital displays to get rid of my vertigo, but after a few trips around the floor, I think we managed to see everything. It was a pretty spectacular display with flashy colors and yards of painted banners covered in muscular superheros and giant-eyed child-women, just for starters.

All in all, the writers and artists were really nice and chatty, while the fans and comic book traders tended, tragically but predictably, towards Comic Book Guy. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the models. And by models I mean porn stars. The heroines wore teeny little costumes and were at the con to sign the erotic artwork for which they posed, usually as a sideline to their acting careers. Hey, everyone's gotta go legit sometime, even if it means being eye-licked by a bunch of sweaty men who live in their mothers' basements. The cooch can't last forever.

The best part was meeting new, emerging artists, like Steve Uy and seeing Christian Montalvo's work for the first time. Matt and Jon Roscetti were selling their new issue of Reflux, a comic anthology, which features a collaborative piece by Will Grant and Dave Christian; West High enthusiasts take note.

End result: I have enough new comix to last me a few weeks and perhaps catapult me into hitherto unexplored realms of geekdom. New interests are healthy, and a good way to meet people! Now if you'll excuse me, I must defend my BU deck with a harbinger, then finish off my sengir vampire opponent with a dark banishing.

Good day to you.

Shit Sandwich Picnic

2006-02-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

I wake up this morning, hungover and grumpy, on a girlfriend’s couch. It's raining outside, and I have no umbrella, which means I have to go through the to-buy-or-not-to-buy debate, which ends, predictably, with me $6 poorer and my new umbrella turned inside-out and busted five minutes later. The functionally retarded people who work at Dunkin’ Donuts on East 42nd street can’t figure out how to put my coffee and hangover sandwich in the same bag, nor do they have a plastic bag. Again, predictably, the (sodden) bag with coffee rips. So there I am, sleepy and wet, clutching my iced coffee in one hand, and my sandwich and broken, bat-winged umbrella in the other, two bags heavy with manuscripts flung like Marley’s chains around my shoulders. If Marley’s chains had been made of romance novels.

I finally arrive at work, and who should I run into in the lobby, in my state of great dishevelment, with last night’s whiskey on my breath, but the cute boy who works on the floor below me, the one who reminds me of Kumar. We say nice, polite things to each other and he courteously asks me if I’m doing anything special for the weekend. I refrain from saying “Getting very drunk. Again.” and stick with the safe-if-lame “Oh, just relaxing. Probably sleeping a lot.” To which Kumar replies, “Yeah, me too. They been working me like a two dollar ho.” This makes me laugh, and for that I am grateful. It may even qualify as the high point of my month.

You see, dear friends, I have just come through the shittiest four weeks of personal Screwsan history. Let me not get into details except to say that being dumped on Valentines Day by my boyfriend of three years was not nearly the worst of it. Let your hearts well with pity, and forgive me for being such a lazy-ass blogger.

Also note: January 15 – February 15, 2006 is now stricken from the calendar. And February 14, specifically, will never be spoken of again. From now on, we will know it as The Day That Shall Not Be Named.

Yes, I think this it’s time to leave this shit sandwich picnic to the ants, pack up my blanket and roll the fuck out of here. March, I can’t wait to see you. Boston Birthday Boys: I’ll be up soon.

Love,
Screwsan

p.s.—Before the world took a short trip to hell, I promised to tell you the story of how I saved the life of one of my favorite punkers. Here it is: On the way to a Keys to the Streets of Fear show in Greater Bumblefuck, Brooklyn, a girl approaches me and asks me to walk with her because she's being followed by a big white van. Sure enough, there, a block away, idles a big white van lit only by parking lights. She takes my arm and we swoop around the corner, walking quickly in the direction of the bar to which (as it turns out) we're both headed. On the way we talk, trying to distract ourselves from our impending rape and dismemberment. Turns out she’s Molly from Bratmobile, my first and favorite punk rock band when I was a wee teen. Bratmobile was a lesbo power trio from Olympia that I think pre-dates Sleater-Kinney. Their cover of Cherry Bomb is totally fucking boss. Molly and I made it to the bar alive. Thanks Molly.

The Old Man and the Sea(foodery)

2006-01-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, sorry it's been awhile. I've been traveling for work to places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, where, outside of my hotel window, there was a pratically-lifesize plastic replica of a pirate ship which spouted water as it basked in the hotel pool and play-area, just next to an indoor/outdoor thatch-roofed bar called Rum Runner's or Caribbean Jack's or Margaritatown Pub and Seafoodery, or something like that. I didn't get much sleep because there were small metal speakers landscaped into the courtyard. They played 70's cocaine ballads by bands like Steely Dan and Chicago 24 hours a day.

Anyway, I will give a full update of my life and travels when I get back from San Diego next week (including an assessment of my first red-eye travel experience, coming up this weekend. Preview: "It's Monday and I'm really tired."). Also, I have a fun story about how I saved the life of one of my favorite old-school punk rockers while on my way to a Keys to the Streets of Fear show in Brooklyn.

In the meantime, if all the press about James Frey hasn't actually driven you to become addicted to drugs and still holds some interest for you, check him out on Oprah today as she performs the talk-show equivalent of a novocaine-free root canal on Frey's soul. Or, just read the highlights on Gawker.

Also, today is the Old Man's birthday. He's 30, which I guess means we'll have to start calling him the Very Old Man. Happy Birthday to my very special Very Old Man.

Different Hoaxes for Different Folkses

2006-01-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

I’m still sorting out my thoughts on the literary trickery perpetrated by James Frey and JT LeRoy, brought to light in the media these last two days. My initial reaction is: Fantastic! It’s about time the lit community did something interesting and scandalous, for chrissake. Jonathan Franzen may bemoan the lack of celebrity in American letters, but more juicy frauds like these could finally land contemporary writers the ignoble acclaim their Hollywood counterparts have been enjoying for years.

I think Laura Albert (the likely author of the work of JT LeRoy) is a great writer, and James Frey an okay one. I think the publishing industry is largely a gimmick-driven sham, and that the market for literary writers is shrinking in favor of novels written at a fourth grade reading level (i.e. chick-lit and Harry Potter). At some point Frey and Albert, unsuccessful as fictionists, decided to stop struggling and give the people what they want. At some point, Frey and Albert realized that what people want is stories about kids doing drugs and being raped and beaten; stories of human misery and violence and suffering. Of course, it would be too French to admit we like the rapes and the beatings enough to stand alone, so give it all a very American ending paved with the riches of a full recovery, major royalties and a movie deal. They fed us our fairytale and we ate it right up.

Some people say (and I agree) that art is a mirror held up to society; a sincere reflection of all that is beautiful and hideous about us. JT LeRoy is a celebrity artist who never existed. That is brilliant beyond my ability to express it. James Frey took a work of fiction no one would publish, changed its genre to memoir, and landed a book deal with the most prestigious literary publisher in the country. Art meet society. Now touch gloves. That is called playing the game, my friends.

If it can be said that art expresses (or tries to express) some kind of truth about human experience and existence, then it seems, on the face of it, that James and JT have betrayed us all. But if you want to make the point that a truth of existence is that everyone’s a big fat fucking liar, maybe, just maybe, they’re onto something.

Bad Back / Bad Book / Dancing, Flesh-Eating Corpse

2006-01-04T09:38:00.000-08:00

I've returned to work for the New Year with high spirits and a wrenched back. On Saturday, I went to a party attended mainly by University of Iowa graduate students, and young organic farmers from Van Buren county. The grad students were harmless, of course, but the farmers, used to bailing hay and wrestling cattle, were perhaps a bit overzealous in their approach to the basic swing step. Luckily, my paralysis on Sunday morning was only temporary and I am now just left with a fading reminder of my similarly fading youth.

In other news, I have a double book review published in this week's issue of Boston's Weekly Dig. I've wondered lately if it's somehow in bad faith to be involved in the publishing and reviewing of books, then I remember how little either pays, and wonder, instead, why I didn't go to law school.

UPDATE: My dear friend Janaka, aka J. Cannibal, aka The Hotness, is profiled in this week's Dig. You may remember his other profile in The Boston Phoenix a few months ago. I would venture to guess that he's currently Boston's most profiled poet/undertaker/burlesque-dancer which makes him famous. Congratulations on being famous!

Dead Moms--The New Lewis Black?

2005-12-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

Here I am, wallowing in the meat and cheese filled week that is my vacation at home in Iowa. Last October, an old friend of mine opened a fantastic, cheap barbeque place in town. This month, he added fantastic, cheap beer to his menu. Suffice it to say, I've spent most of my week huddled over buckets of fried mushrooms and steaming piles of pulled pork, which is only a short, metaphorical hop from the way I spent the better part of my late teens. Nudge nudge, wink wink. How I love you, The Midwest!

The only misstep came this evening, when, lured by the promise of cheap martinis, my mother decided we should have a Girls Night Out. We'd start at The Vine for happy hour and gossip. Once drunk, we'd take in a light comedy and round out our evening laughing hysterically as my mother's minivan wove us home through the dark, cold night.

Our friend Jill came prepared with print-outs of all the local movie listings. It being Iowa, our options were limited, but I'd been hearing good buzz about this new romantic comedy The Family Stone. When I suggested it, Jill nodded in agreement and my mother (on her second martini) said, "It's got Sarah Jessica Horseface, from Sex and the City. She's good." Our fourth Girl, Marion, was easily convinced and so a unanimous decision was made.

What we knew about the movie beforehand was this: An uptight, conservative girl (played by SJH) goes to the home of her boyfriend's liberal family (the eponymous Stones) to meet them for the first time over Christmas. Hilarious hijinx ensues.

***ALERT: I WILL NOW "SPOIL" THIS FILM, THE WAY I WISH SOMEONE HAD "SPOILED" IT FOR US BEFORE WE BOUGHT OUR TICKETS***********************************************

About a half hour into the movie, just as I'm thinking about how my mom kind of looks like Diane Keaton, the Stone family's hell-raising matriarch, we are told that poor Diane has inoperable breast cancer and from the way the music swells, and her husband stares stoically into the distance, it becomes clear that she will be dead before the last credits role. Hah hah, isn't that funny? Couldn't you just keel over from the comedic brilliance of that little tidbit?

If I could have actually kicked my head with my boot, I would have. Sitting on one side of me is my mom, whose own mother told her, over Thanksgiving dinner in 1992, that she was dying of inoperable breast cancer. Sitting on the other side is Jill, whose mother died suddenly, five weeks ago. Are you kidding me, Sycamore Theatres 10?

In the end we were laughing, but mostly because we always laugh together, and the situation was just so ridiculous, and plus, you know, the booze.

But still I shake my fist at the marketing crew responsible. Really guys, what were you thinking? If we present this tear-orgy as a comedy, and release it over the holidays, we're sure to make a few million American families feel really...depressed? I think for my Mom's New Year's party I'll throw on a copy of Dancer In the Dark and see if we can squeeze a few chuckles out of it before we turn on the oven and take turns sticking our heads inside.

But really everyone, Happy New Year. I'll see you in ought six.

Dictator? I Hardly Know Her!

2005-12-19T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have shared my fears with some of you that the second Bush administration has begun to smell a bit fascist. But it's hard to talk about the F-word without sounding like a raving lunatic, or like I'm comparing Bush to Hitler, which I am not. However, some of America's most well-respected publications are asking questions about the erosion of our rights as U.S. citizens. The current administration has been really great at controlling the media to their advantage. Here are some recent articles that slipped through the cracks:

This weekend the Boston Globe examines the re-release of Sinclair Lewis's scathing political satire, It Can't Happen Here. Just try to read the book without making comparisons to the W. regime.

Also this weekend, the New York Times tells us the government is spying on citizens. Note that the story was supposed to be published a year ago but was not, at request of the government, and now that it has published, it's buried in the Washington section of the Times. Hmm.

Finally, for those of you who missed it in Harper's this fall, here is one of editor Lewis Lapham's last columns before he announced his retirement in November. (via Organic Consumers)

Are we so comfortable with our idea of America, with our own patriotic myths and legends and heroes that we don't notice, or worse care, when these myths are used to keep us docile? If you're against the war, you're against the troops and that's unpatriotic. If you're against our government spying on it's own, then you're a friend to terrorists. If you question this administration, you are clearly a gay drug-sniffing commie and gay drug-sniffing commies aren't what America is all about. No, apparently these days America is all about keeping your mouth shut and reading your celebrity weeklies and letting the people in power step all over your rights as an American because that's clearly the only thing keeping us all from being blown to Kingdom Come by angry brown people.

2005-12-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

My old boss died last weekend. She was an amazing woman and a great mentor. She used to take me out to lunch and tell stories about what publishing was like in its heyday. She had to fight her parents to go to college when they wanted to send her to secretarial school. Then she became one of the first women to run a publishing house. She was kind, funny, smart and tough. At the service, her daughter told the story of her pregnant mother running ten blocks to the hospital after she'd gone into labor.

Read more about her here. She was a neat lady and will be missed.

Heart-Broken by "Brokeback"

2005-12-11T01:04:00.000-08:00

But in a good way. See "Brokeback Mountain." The movie is very faithful to the story and manages to capture the bleak and haunting loneliness of the story, even while Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have expanded the film to narrate the lives of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist after they leave their oasis on the mountain. Heath Ledger gives an absolutely astonishing performance that is the definition of nuance. He is the movie--so subtle and affecting that every twitch of his eye and quiet cowboy grunt had my heart in a vise. This is probably the best celluloid love story I've ever seen. Seriously--everything else I can think of seems fake and over-acted in comparison. But be prepared. This sucker will tear your heart out.

Update: I saw the movie again. It was even better the second time. Also, I re-read "Brokeback Mountain" and it's amazing how much of the dialogue and details come directly from a 15 page short story. Maybe this is why movies based on novels are often disappointing--there's an attempt to cover too much material in too little time, to shove it all in there, whereas there's more breathing room with a short.

Librarian on the Lam

2005-12-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

I just got a call from a detective in Missouri--a local librarian defrauded her employers of $85,000 (so far--they're still counting) by writing checks to book sellers with whom the library had accounts, then cashing them herself and keeping the money. Apparently, one of the fraudulent checks was made out to my company.

The detective, Ed, sounded like an old-fashioned, no-nonsense gumshoe. He called me ma'am in a way that was very much to my liking. I tried to give him just the facts to show my appreciation.

Personally, I like the visual of some frowning, owly, support-hosed Marion the Librarian running away to a foreign beach resort with someone else's money; only to spend her days sweet-talking tenured professors out of their 401Ks.

Watch your back, dear criminal librarian. After all, you've got such a long way to go, to make it to the border of Mexico. You better ride, ride, ride like the wind.

What a Good Wife You Will Be

2005-11-29T11:10:00.000-08:00

Behold Brandy, my mother's new alpaca, son of Blackberry, named after my maternal grandmother's penchant for the vile, fruity liqueur. I know he looks like an alien, but I'm told he is perfectly healthy. He also looks wise beyond his years, but I'm not sure how that could possibly manifest itself in an alpaca. Perhaps he will be better at eating and pooping than everyone else. I keep my fingers crossed.

Shit List

2005-11-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

The holidays have officially begun and thus so has my yearly bout of winter grumpiness. In an attempt at some sort of catharsis, please find below today's Shit List.

Construction work. For the fourth week in a row, the jackhammers in the alley behind my work building are rattling the glass windows in my office. I try to leave for lunch around 1, when the crew is at its daily pinnacle of destruction. I come back to find various items rattled off my desk, rolling around and broken on the ground. Then I wake up this Monday morning at 6:30 am to shouts and the unmistakable beeping sound of heavy machinery thrown into reverse. I look out my window and see cement-breaking tractors on all four corners of the nearest intersection. The air reeks of hot asphalt. That night, I trip over my street, which is bumpy and uneven after being stripped in preparation for re-paving. I live on the first floor; when I go to sleep my head is approximately six feet away from this street, which is about to become a hundred times noisier and smellier than it already was.

Those awful fucking Gaede twins. They have been repeatedly referred to in the media as “white pride” activists, and compared to the Olsen twins. Since when does hatred, bigotry and racism qualify as activism? And referring to their cause as “white pride” is like referring to the Grand Canyon as a hole in the ground. Worse yet, this family—which stands for everything rotten and putrid about America—is getting more sustained press coverage than your average hate-crime. They’ll probably be Senators some day.

Being lonely. As winter approaches and my three-year relationship steadily dissolves into a series of increasingly embittered arguments, it’s easy to feel a bit shut out by the world. Living in Jersey City doesn’t help. At least if I lived in Brooklyn I’d be completely surrounded by emo youths with great haircuts and perpetually tormented love lives. Instead it’s a bunch of bankers and some old Dominican ladies who call me “sir.” To be fair, Jersey City also contains one of my favorite people ever, my crazy Russian landlord Boris; friend of Brodsky, foe of Dali, pervy and often drunk. It’s good to have Boris around.
I’m glad that everybody is happy and beautiful and about to embark on that wonderful adventure called Life with a sexy, steadfast partner who cannot live without them. It’s exciting that my friends are getting engaged and married. But do I have to be excited for them all the time? Really?

Smoking / Not Smoking. I’m a failure / I’m miserable. I’m killing myself / I want to kill myself. Now that it appears my apartment is going to smell like hot tar for the next few weeks, I don’t even get the non-smokers benefit of living in a house that smells good.

Maureen Dowd-bashing. A woman attempts to create a public discussion about gender, touching on the fears, assumptions, and questions many of us harbor to some extent, about our lives and ourselves. Punish her.

Bitching. Bad Screwsan.

Quitter Wins

2005-11-17T16:20:00.000-08:00

I always thought people joined gyms to get in shape. How painfully wrong I was, how naïve. Now, after my free trial week at New York Sports Club, after sampling the various classes offered—from spinning, to boxing, to cardio-kickboxing to some yoga-based exercise involving giant rubber bands, hand weights and pure evil—I can say with some authority that only people who could right now if you asked them run the Boston Marathon, belong to gyms. And this is just NYSC, the basic cable of national fitness franchises. I’m sure if I had the money to join a gym like Equinox or Clay, where the towels are refrigerated and mint-scented, I’d probably have to pass some kind of fitness test, kind of like the Presidential Fitness Test in grade school, except this one would involve BASE jumping and heli-skiing.

Look, I’m no stranger to fitness—I used to be a lifeguard, and a strong forward! And the anonymous nomination to make me dorm “health rep” in college couldn't have been completely ironical. Right? But after three measly NYSC classes in one week, I am hobbling around my office, positive that my hamstrings are about to snap. The arches of my feet feel as though I’ve just run the aforementioned marathon in stiletto heels and I can’t lift my arms above my shoulders. Can’t even feel my shoulders. But I must persevere. Apparently two years of Bikram yoga, combined with a decade-long appetite for cigarettes and booze has not kept me in top form as expected. I hope there’s someone I can sue when I need to get reconstructive surgery for both legs since all this aerobicizing is surely destroying every tissue and nerve-ending in them. At least, that’s what it feels like.

Probably, I’ll end up joining Crunch, which is one of the cheapest franchises in NYC, and seems at first to be the coolest. Their motto is “no judgment” and in their literature they talk about cigarette smoking, not in a The Truth kind of way, but more like “Crunch: our personal trainers will bum Marlboro Ultra Lights from you at Orchard Bar on the weekends.” Great, you think. A gym for lazy slobs like myself, a thin-fat person on her way to becoming fat-fat. And inexpensive! And then you actually visit a Crunch gym and realize that every single person who goes there is 6’1” and weighs 135 lbs. And then you visit the Crunch website and see that they have a personals section with over 1800 entries. A sample:

"You’re wearing dark colors...you seem a little angry so you dress bohemia like.....you might be wearing glasses and your hair is clean but not well groomed....it's time for a manicure pedicure eye brow wax....you're bored out of your mind so you're in sneakers...."

It's a Franz Ferdinand video! It’s Missed Connections for the healthy crowd! Trust me, whether this person is gay or straight, guy or girl, I guarantee you s/he is 6’1” and 135 lbs. Guarantee. Clearly the world of urban gymnasiums is confounding and, at times, even frightening.

When I worked downtown I had my New York Parks & Recreation pass. For $75 a year I had access to all NY rec centers, which sometimes have pools. They were dirty, and smelly, and small and dank, just as gyms should be. The patrons wore enormous t-shirts and torn sweatpants. We were fat and old and red-faced and no one cared. For awhile, a midget with a limp and a facial tic was my Stairmaster buddy. His name was Danny and he lived in Queens and would ask me out once in awhile. “I have a good job, you know,” he would say, “I have insurance.” It was my kind of gym—dirt cheap and full of freaks.

But now I’m in midtown. The nearest NY rec center is far enough away, I know I’ll never go when it gets cold. So I’m stuck with NYSC and Crunch, or a place called Synergy Fitness. Synergy, if you’ll recall, was the computer that turned Jem and her pals into rock 'n' roll holograms in the hit cartoon series Jem and the Holograms. I wonder whatever happened to holograms and how come nobody talks about them anymore? Remember that one National Geographic with the hologram of the bald eagle on the cover? That was awesome.

But why all the gym-hopping, suddenly? The answer to your pretend question, Dear Pretend Reader, is that I’ve decided to quit smoking as a gift to my mother for her birthday on December 1. I’m far too broke to buy her a real gift, and not smoking will actually save me money, and allow her to rest a tad easier at night. Everyone wins! And if I’m going to be a horrible bitch for however long it takes me to get these toxins out of my system, I may as well not become a puffy, enfattened bitch. Thus, the gym taste-tests.

I hesitate to mention my intention to quit smoking here, because I feel like it commits me to actually quitting or something. Like for real. It's weird--I’ve smoked regularly for 10 years now. 10 years! But it hasn’t looked really cool for almost 2 and plus I have a new job and my rent’s gone up and my apartment is finally clean and not-smelly, so it seems as good a time as any to stop smoking.

My friends’ wedding is on Saturday. I’m going out drinking tonight with a couple of work buddies to practice the fine art of Drinking Without Smoking. I’ll let you know how it goes. I'm sticking with red wine. Red wine somehow fills the nicotine void better than other alcohols, which tend to enlarge it. Chocolate also fills the void. So does sex with strangers and cutting.

Three Way

2005-11-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin: I totally want to make hot monkey fun with you and then birth your love child. Thank you for forcing a closed session of the Senate.

A Visit from Mrs. Butterworth

2005-10-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this story's getting any national coverage based on the oddity of it alone but in case you hadn't heard, last night west Manhattan and parts of Jersey were blanketed in what the New York Times--in a charmingly awkward way--calls, "an unseen, sweet-smelling cloud" for hours, leaving everyone to wonder if they'd perhaps sat in a puddle of syrup on the subway, and to dream of IHOP and autumnal New England.

Your typical walk down a New York City street is an assault on all the senses, but especially the olefactory. Piss and shit are de rigeur. Once in awhile you hit a pocket describing a special sort of gangrenous decay that can only mean you've stumbled, eyes watering, past a sleeping spot of the homeless, a space demarcated in the daytime by the spice of its stink alone. So you can, perhaps, understand what an unexpected and pleasant experience it was to walk home last night enveloped in a constant and steady (but not overpowering) breeze of maple. Therefore it was kind of
surprising this morning to read that so many sharp, cynical New Yorkers had called in to report the smell, fearing it was an indication of toxins being released into the air (read: a terrorist attack). But air toxicity was and remains normal. Or anyway, normal for a stinking hellhole where 8 million people literally live on top of each other.

And while I feel confident that it wasn't Osama making me wanna leggo my eggo last night, the conspiracy theorist in me wonders at the possibilities behind this strange occurrence. Maple syrup is such an American product, after all, invoking log cabins, and hard-working ingenuity (tapping trees for goddsake?). Mrs. Butterworth is one of the most recognizable commercial characters in a typical American child's life. There's an almost religious sense of wounded individuality in the farming of maple syrup--all those trees, standing along in the cold, snowy winter, bleeding stoically into cups at their sides. And where does it come from? This golden brown succor of our proud nation? Why from Vermont and New Hampshire--New England, birthplace of the Union itself; places where men still live off the
land, where politicking is still an integral part of life. A part of the nation that is iconic to our nation's idea of itself--free-thinking without being shrill and traditional without being fundamentalist. Walking down the street last night, sniffing the sugary air, I felt the bittersweet minnows of patriotism stir in my shuttered heart. I thought of Rosa Parks, and Sinclair Lewis and that time in college my friends got a cabin at Attatash and played truth or dare for 10 hours one night until we were all naked and drunk. The smell invoked in me some sort of America's Greatest Hits playlist of some of the things that have made this country, and my life in it, great.

Or maybe it just made me want to sit my fat American ass down at some chain diner and shove scrapple down my throat until my veins hardened and propelled my still-beating heart out of my chest cavity and onto the travel bible of the morbidly obese five-year-old southerner praying over his Meat'normous omlette at the table next to me.

No, this wasn't al-Qaeda. I'd believe Howard Dean, or perhaps some sort of last minute confusion campaign by Scooter Libby. Did someone throw a bucket of water on Harriet Miers last night while she was secretly gaying it up in the West Village, and was the steam from the resulting meltdown the source of the aroma?

Alls I know is I got a hot date with a short stack for dinner. And afterwards I'm going to write to my Congressman and watch 4 hours of syndicated Friends episodes, then make shameful and awkward love to my overweight spouse, like the good American I am.