You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2007.
A Moment of Silence to Commemorate What’s Not Happening Right Now: As you may know, at the end of last semester Sofia and I found out that the campus theater group in charge of orientation programming was planning to put on the nightmare-come-to-life Great American Trailer Park Musical. Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds. Yes, every single punchline (we highlighted them) relies on poverty being funny. And yes, the two of us and the LGBT center director had to go up a group of people who had no idea why it wouldn’t be a good idea to have all the rich first years bond over crooked teeth and alcoholism. Sofia was far more patient and able to argue productively while I felt differently implicated and tried to beg while also brainstorming radical steps beyond the administrative channels.
“We won’t be making fun of poor people,” the director told us, “we’ll be making fun of the stereotypes people have about poor people. In the end they will be like– wow, that’s so ridiculous it can’t be true.” His argument actually made a graceful finish to my year since the year before I made the complete opposite in a presentation about the movie Mean Girls and the notion that something is “funny because it’s true.” (I’m using the quotes now as a shout-out to my overuse of quotes in that presentation. I think the major drawback of the internet is that it relies too heavily on text. I don’t want the quotes I all the charming connotations of airquotes without the finger wiggling.)
Anyway, Sofia and I didn’t have to call in all our combined progressive muscle. The director decided it would be better to not cause a fight and— maybe, also, decided it would be better not to contribute to a hostile and humiliating culture of wealthy elitism and poverty stigmatization and alienation already prevalent on campus.
Meanwhile, orientation is raging and I’ve been in training all day to lead mandatory programming on sexual assault, stalking, and relationship abuse. It’s hard to believe that five years ago I was doing a crossword while diligently ignoring the matriculation speech in my New Yorker jean jacket when I met my bestfriend-to-be. And look at us now. It is possible that my time at The University has quashed me into an even jaded-er person. (The jaded type who still cries about mothers and daughters together, certainly, but nonetheless…) I was surprised to be partnered with an awesome person. When did I abandon all hope of meeting good people at school? (Answer in the form of a workshop activity question: agree or disagree: October of my freshman year.) Maybe the person who paired me up, the same LGBT director, was feeling affectionate. Whatever it was, don’t think I’m not grateful. I’m making a new term up for her instead of Queer Ally–since ally, these days, seems to mean someone doesn’t actively hate homos. Instead she is a Queer Awesome. I am confident our workshops will be really productive even if I do have to survive two days of being read to from a redundant instruction manual that I could probably be trusted to study myself.
*Insult overheard on the subway by A. “Healthy Shine” Weissman my departing ladywife.
In what has so far panned out to be a perfect day, I went to the library to retrieve a lot of sexy new texts: a whole stack of memoirs (mostly written by autistic people), some short stories by Charles Baxter, Greta Garbo films, and poetry. For more information you should get addicted to goodreads like I have. I learned to precariously sit on my fire-escape and read a book, ate a mango and discovered that some creative writing programs have fellowships to support you while you’re there. Imagine that. Defer loans, work on writing, be moderately unburdened by coursework and teaching— it’s sounding better and better. Now all I need is a glowing recommendation from someone who doesn’t know me yet.
I was reading a book outside of the bookstore earlier and I overheard a mother catch her toddler tearing the petals off a handful of pansies. She leaned over and gave her daughter her complete attention to have a very gentle talk with her in an adult voice, inaudible to me. Presumably she was explaining why the pansies where there and how ripping them up sort of ruined the point. Then she swept her daughter up and kissed her face, “You’ll get it,” she reassured her, “We’ll work on it together.” They were both glowing and I almost teared up but then realized I had used up my senseless crying jags on Joaquin’s death in Ladder 49.
Meanwhile, at the table behind me, two men and woman in their late thirties/early forties were engaged in a very deliberately-worded and elaborately-annunciated awkward conversation. Two of them were techies but apparently one of the men was in theater and just finished directing Cabaret, which, In his opinion was the best directed play they’ve had in ten years. I’m sorry to have missed it. Especially because he kept starting stories “And then I was wearing my costume in public, which of course was a nice gray suit with swastika arm-band and I mean, don’t people know what the play is about? It was a hit movie 30 years ago…” They segued to issues of cohabitation and how hard it is to have a bridal shower because you get so much new stuff. Finally they inventoried their remaining fried chicken when a fourth person showed up and announced that he was, “ready to go to game” and it was revealed that they had been waiting to meet their carpool group for their regular Dungeons and Dragons date.
Bonus Question: Why in the world does a director need a costume?
Last night, in an attempt to outweird our last RI weird date (return of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in a smoky, white-stout-breeder packed, electronic slots casino ten minutes northwest of Providence) J and I ate at Texas Roadhouse.
J managed to find the only way to be déclassé in national chain steakhouse with peanut shells on the floor: she ate her ribs with a knife and fork.
We followed it up with a MacBook screening of a film her father billed as a documentary about firefighters– which turned out to be the boxoffice flop Ladder 49 featuring Joaquin Phoenix and John Scientology-Pie Travolta. Halfway through J realized that her father describes most movies as if they were documentaries. I thought about the magical way my mother transforms every plot into something between historical fiction and tragic melo-crime-drama. Snow Falling On Cedars, as you can imagine, is her favorite book/movie.
And just to top it off, I learned who River Phoenix was. Information J was shocked to discover I did not already know. Wikipedia has always been my best source of cult-related information on the web. Just to top it off, it turned out that yesterday was River’s birthday. I’d go as far as to say I’m a little blue about his death, too. Who can resist such a girlish cult-raised boy? It’s so American!
Speaking of which, word of warning to those of you traveling to the Bay Area. J and I drove over to San Quentin and I know that I should have been filled with some sadness and some rage about wrongful imprisonment and then some confusion about capital punishment. But all of those feelings were overcome by sheer terror at my proximity to Charles Manson. You would have been frightened too if you had no aversion to seeing really, really bad movies and consequently believed Manson looks like he did in Thir13en Ghosts.
Sleep Tight.
Weight, in ounces, of all the information that passed through the Internet last year: 0.00004
NC Does Debutante
Man-Eating Jackrabbits and Killer Cacti
Gen X
And this, at last, posted to a site that requires you to register before you read the user comments. Have we learned nothing from reading the youtube bickering? I know that in the last five years I’ve become shockingly quick at typing my name, address, birthday, phone number, billing information, and 18 “Very Difficult” character password but maybe I should be a little more conscientious with how I use it.
Estimated amount of oil, in barrels, used to make the bottled-water containers sold in the U.S. last year: 16,000,000
Ratio of the amount of water used to make the containers to the amount of bottled water consumed: 2:1
(”Harper’s Index,” Harper’s Magazine. August 2007)
It’s not like I’ve been hanging out in public. In fact, yesterday morning I went out for a few groceries and realized I hadn’t left my apartment since I went to the cemetery with MBCarryadyne on Saturday morning. That’s why it’s weird that independent of the encroaching anniversary of her death, I was already planning to write about Princess Diana today. First business was to wiki her for a couple of dates and then to do some ebay fact-checking and her face started popping up all over the internet. Am I subconsciously obsessed with her to the point that I remember her deathdate?
When Princess Di died, I got pretttty infatuated with her. “After she died?” J asked, “not before?” I assured her it was only after, “I hadn’t even heard of her before.” But I shared the immediate fallout of her death with an ominous shroud of depression and an urgent longing feeling. (Similar to the feelings that caused me to write very ardent letters to Lisa Lefteye Lopez and Andrew Keegan in the sixth grade.) Even then I had the same compulsion to organize a stranger’s life after news of their death. I did a whole series of subtractions to figure out how old she was when she died, divorced, got married, met HRH Ole Big Ears etc etc.
The three products of her death:
1. I read all my mother’s collected articles including one that gimmickly wrote the ABC’s of Princess Di and exposed me to some new and titillating vocabulary. I learned bulimia, post-partum depression, and philanthropy all in one sitting. The dictionary according to my mother– bulimia is when you are famous or a gymnast and you are really worried about your weight because of external pressures so you binge and purge. That definition fell flat since I had No Idea what binge and/or purge meant but was subsequently unable to watch the women’s Olympic gymnasts without asking my mother to gauge who was comparatively most bulimic. And post partum depression– when a mother has a baby and then she feels like her whole role on the earth is over and sometimes she kills herself. Now I’m wary of this and wonder if it doesn’t have more to do with the realization that her earth role will now never be over. Philanthropy is when a rich person gives a whole lot of money at once to something and usually abroad; sometimes they do it because they are touched my something like orphans in Africa or sometimes it’s because their manager is.
2. I took three or four blue plastic binders with my father’s company logo on them (a gift from the generous man himself) and printed out every single page of history section from the national British website and three-hole punched them and planned to study them later. This seemed like the very least I could do if I expected to understand England once I moved there. Read the rest of this entry »
(more facts brought to you by quantitative thinking)
Misc unnamed British researchers have finally disproved second-wave feminism in a SHOCKING new study. These intrepid brainiacs endeavored to get to the bottom of whether girls really prefer pink using the scientific method, a dark room, and a computer. I’m so glad they’re finally working on this pressing issue with godknowswhos funds. The experiment had 1000 British adults look at colorful rectangles on a computer screen and then pick out which they liked best. Then they graphed the results and make conclusions like:
“Boys like blue, girls like pink..” (adult men and women in London are apparently representative of universal girls and boys.)
Somehow they also deduced that the reason that boys like blue and girls like pink is evolutionary.
“…females developed a preference for reddish colors associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.” Meanwhile men don’t need to pick ripe fruit: “For men, thinking about colors was less important because as hunters they just needed to spot something dark and shoot it…”
This reader enjoyed MSNBC’s sparkling coverage of the story— especially the resigned attitude the journalist took to the newly reveal facts. “Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn’t much anybody can do about it…” Sigh. How true… how will I ever make peace with my inability to overcome inherent desire for pink, Pink, PINK?
Fortunately, the scientist interviewed does bring it back to a universal point I think we can all agree on, giving me a newfound sense of trust in his dedication to scientific inquiry and the pursuit of Truth:
“As for Eve, Hurlbert added, maybe there was a different reason she picked that apple.”
for 
Having just got back from California, all I can think about it going back. I just finished A Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and I’m trying to figure out how to say goodbye to Oakland without putting it completely out of my mind. I don’t think I know how to properly hold anything departed without making a new life that dismisses the void by forgetting the object.
I tried NC’s preemptive mourning towards preventing grief but it was unsuccessful. But it’s made me realize that my obsessive and intricate compulsion to commit things to memory is my own version of this.
Three goodbyes while I was there, indulgent in sentimentality:
Just yesterday morning, J and I took our last vacation run through Huckleberry Botanical Regional Preserve in the Oakland hills. The whole 1.7 mile trail is slender path cutting right across a steep valley. It was one of the first places J took me when I arrived in Oakland and made a perfect final day– especially since on our way out we heard a mountain lion screaming about 100 feet up into the bushes. Huckleberry’s microclimate is full of plant species from warmer days in the bay. J and I were both immediately charmed by the red manzanita trees, despite the fact that whenever separated we were each visualizing the other’s bloody death-by-puma around the next bend.
The day before I bid the state goodbye on my own with a seven mile run through the redwoods at Samuel P. Taylor Park in Marin. Later that day I got to see my friend from high school, DG, and we both had Pakistani food and liked who the other person, I think, had become in all this time. I’m ready to live a lot closer to her and we meant to get matching dead insects mounted for our apartments: butterflys or grasshoppers. In the end time and money limitations, interfered. I went home to finish reading a scary book with J and then go out to a messenger bar with three of her friends.
The Sunday before I left, we cooked a big family breakfast. Sara Seinberg and Ginger Robinson hosted and I made bacon and I met last two of a group of friends. Riotous laughter. Biscuits and gravy. Four southern queers who have been friends for 15 years all sitting around with their lovers telling outrageous stories about one another. Most of them– actually maybe all but J and I– are working on a big project that pairs visual artists with writers. It really was a family breakfast and I’m relying on plans to see Sara and Ginger in November to stem tearfulness. After eating too much J and I went to a Giants/Pirates game with J’s bestfriend and her homolover– where we could all talk about the ethics of steroids together and shout things in the sunshine for a few innings.
On the first leg of my flight I boarded the plane to find my window seat occupied by a repulsive, large man. He and his repulsive, large friend had decided to take the aisle and the window and leave me the middle seat just because I was smaller (and, as it turned out female).
Femmephane: Excuse me, that’s my seat.
Aisle Guy: Oh, you need to get in? [Turns his bulk so that I can force myself through, presumably requiring me to rub one side of my body against his thighs, paunch, and face]
Femmephane: [Standing still] No. I need to get to the window. I need him to move first. [Window Guy is listening but reading a magazine, letting his friend do all the talking.]
Aisle Guy: You will sit in the middle. It will be very nice for us.
Apparently they were 1) confusing airplane seating with back seat of a station wagon, 2) banking on sheer force of asshole to get the two choice seats, 3) radically underestimating me.
I can kind of understand trading seats with strangers so that friends can sit together. (By friends I do mean lady friends or ladyfriends or sisters or maybe children and parents and very, very, rarely polite breeder couples.) But these assholes wanted me to switch so that they could sit apart! The nerve. Fortunately I am much more frightening than two hulking white guys and I prevailed– with plenty of window to sleep against.
Dear Erik Estrada,
Erik, you might not remember, but I grew up with pretty limited television. So you can imagine how it might have confused the tween I was to see your face every time I looked up at the tube. From the TBS reruns of your cheesy 1970s movies (with all the smut edited out) to the renowned series CHiPs, you were like a rascally cousin no one really wanted around but had to watch in the depressing daytime television purgatory. When I watched tv with my sister and brother after school, there you were– guest starring your ass off all over Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. When I woke up in the middle of the night with puberty nightmares, it was you who tried to sell me infomercial real estate. By the time my public school teachers showed us Dos mujeres, un camino, in a foolish attempt to improve our Spanish with telenovelas, I started to wonder if you were the only actor in the wide whole world. In fact, when I saw you on VH1’s “Where Are They Now?” I thought they were being facetious!
We’ve been through so much together. If I were a little more dedicated to my cause I would put together a opening-credits-style photo-montage of our relationship set to Air Supply’s “Making Love out of Nothing at All” or Journey’s “Any Way You Want it.” In the meantime, this will have to do. If you get a chance, drop me a line with your home mailing address so that I can send you whole bunch of pictures of myself as a child and young adult. Then we can be on even footing.
Sincerely,
Femmephane
Dear Keanu Reeves,
This is my second letter to you. I’m beginning to think that you might have dropped my first one into the sea while you were on location or possibly used it as a bookmark and left it in a public library copy of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I’ve lost some paychecks that way and so I can totally empathize. Fortunately for you I also put it on the internet.
Anyway, you don’t have to explain. I accept your apology. I just wanted to point out that you have yet to heed my friendlyadvice-style mandate. IMDB revealed that you are currently making a new film called The Night Watchman about some LAPD cop torn asunder by complex mores and an intricate innerlife. All in all this makes 10 films that rely on the audience believing that the insides of your brain are complicated enough to constitute a feature length plot. I realize you do a lot of movies so I’ve enumerated the offenders in the post script. But just tell me this, what– in god’s name– is wrong with a few nice action movies and a doughy romantic comedy here and there? You can be very believable as a sleeping athlete or even as the best friend’s almost silent boyfriend.
Sincerely,
Femmephane
The Night Watchman, A Scanner Darkly, The Lakehouse, The Matrix trilogy, The Gift, The Watcher, The Devil’s Advocate, Little Buddha,
It happened for the first time. Sure, I’ve heard myself use my mother’s expressions, seen short clips of myself where I look and sound like my father. In pictures, the resemblance can be uncanny. But this morning I woke up and immediately realized:
“Wow, I sleep naked all the time now. I’ve turned into my parents.”
Last night J and I had dinner/drinks with the illustrious same-sex lovers Sara Seinberg and Ginger Robinson. They were both still fuming– or at least markedly frothy– over some vociferous man-type person who had been muttering to himself all through the produce department in a distinctly pay-attention-to-my-impo(r)tant-innerlife way. And the indispensable analysis he was offering to our fair protaganists? White corn is a gimmick.
Ginger, a long-haired southern Butch, deteriorates into pure genius whenever confronted with idiocy and/or grandstanding: “There are 300 varieties of corn. And he’s decided white corn is a gimmick?! Please. ‘Oh, I’m not gonna buy that blue corn, that’s a gimmick.’”
In honor of the men who take up too much space another tale. This, my own, from trying to study just once in Providence while young and attractive. I moved outside to the bench where I thought J still had a good view of me, not realizing that I was effectively blocked out by the edge of the building. I was not much more comfortable out there but decided that at least with the time constraint and the lack of distraction, I could get through a few more lines.
“Hey,” the man saw me sitting, innocently, absolutely absorbed in something very difficult on the bench, “we don’t have to be back right away. Let’s sit down for a bit.”
His friend looked at me and then looked over at his BMW M3 (1998) parked a full four feet from the curb, requiring traffic to swerve around him, and then followed him to the bench. He sat down a few inches from me and it became immediately clear that his companion was a dyke and he was the kind of man that thinks that the right way to talk to dykes is by acting like an asshole. Or possibly he was just an asshole.
“I can make girls’ skirts blow up just by thinking about it,” also the type who didn’t require a second person in order to have a conversation, “yeah, it’s true. I sort of think of it like my gift to men. Sometimes I’m waiting for the bus or something and I see a girl and I just make the wind blow her skirt up as sort of a public service for all the guys around me,” also the type who has probably never been to a bus stop. Read the rest of this entry »
Diesel Cafe, a dyke-owned/operated coffeeshop in Somerville’s Davis Square, is spawning. Earlier this year Diesel made public their plans to open another store in Somerville’s Union Square, this location called Bloc 11. One of the only remaining historically African American neighborhoods Somerville, Union Square is also currently home to working class communities of Brazilian and Korean people. In recent years Union has become increasingly popular for young, predominantly white, mostly college-educated, queer and non-queer people looking to move to a cheaper area. Because Union Square is not yet accessible by the Green Line, gentrification has been a little slower– the bus-phobic caving to “pay a little more than they can afford” to live elsewhere. Most of the businesses in the area– a cafe included– are locally owned and operated.
Diesel Cafe’s invasive move is unethical and irresponsible. It will endanger other businesses in the area, attract more and more students and former students who can afford to pay more rent than families already living in the area, and drive people and businesses out. Beyond these obvious and material changes are another set of (equally obvious) disavowed changes. Colonizing one community as another population’s recreational area is divisive to the original population.
And as if it weren’t outrageous enough, Diesel Cafe’s owners have planned to open a large art space above Bloc 11. As if the cafe weren’t imitation-highbrow enough on its own.
It isn’t the responsibility of the people already living in Union Square to mitigate the divisive effects of Bloc 11, despite Diesel’s assertion to the contrary. First it is the responsibility of the owners of Diesel Cafe– who have already clearly demonstrated their unabashed racism and disregard for ethical decision-making. Second it is the responsibility of queer people to not contribute to this sort of thing. Not contributing to the gentrification being the absolute least one can/should/must do. Especially it is the responsibility of white, middle-class people– who are not off-the-moral-hook just because they can identify that what Diesel Cafe is doing is wrong. Recognizing privilege and feeling guilty about it isn’t actually enough.
I was already going to blag about Bloc 11 today when I received a disturbing article from my ladywife on insanity-watch at home. For those of you who don’t know Boston– Dorchester is a densely populated group of neighborhoods, (still) working-class Irish, African American, East Asian and Southeast Asian. But uncomfortable white queers, fret no more, developers plan to turn it into the next Southend– with “upscale” shopping and “classy” restaurants to draw in the gays. Just another opportunity for queer people to engage in the “time-honored tradition” of gentrification with a dash of progressive lip service before we scamper away to latte land.
Condition: Fake Allergies (Type I) see also “Food Allergies as a Lifestyle Choice”
- Most common faux allergies: Gluten, soy, wheat, refined sugars, nuts, dairy, alcohol, pesticides.
- Symptoms: Reported but rarely seen symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraine, stomach cramps, gas. Sufferers may complain of specific food-related anguishes that mysteriously disappear or become less severe when the sufferer is confronted with a version of the supposedly noxious food that they really, really like. Sufferers hijack dinner plans, complain loudly and/or divert conversation to topic of their limited lifestyle, and can miraculously discover the allergy is over if they accidentally consume the food. They are also well known for using the phrase “I can eat a little bit of it.”
- Causes: Telling waitstaff to hold the offending product because “[you're] allergic” so many times that now you think it’s true. Heavily interpolated interest in a specific and discredited fad diets of the 1990s. Obsession with weight. Fussiness, middle-child-syndrome, center-of-attention-complex, desire to be quirky. Residual attachment to environmental illness and word “toxins” combined with awareness of stigmatization.
- Correlations: Requires a certain amount of access to Three P’s (Power, Privilege, and Gourmet Natural Foods) and willingness to talk about oneself. Oft-encountered in supporters of the Yoga Industrial Complex.
- Treatment: See Lysistrata— don’t sleep with them, they’ll never learn
Famously Fake Allergic: Madonna, Yoko Ono, Pontius Pilate (unconfirmed.)
Condition: Hysterically-inflected Faux Allergies (Type II)
- Symptoms: Psychosomatic symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraines, sore throat, shock, hyperventilation, bruising, and heart palpitations. Sufferers believe it so hard it becomes true. They are quieter about their faux-allergies and pine for the days when they didn’t break into hives when they ate certain things.
- Causes: Admirably complex psychopathology. Nervousness. Anxiety-disorders.
- Correlations: Strong imagination. Contested correlation: A Womb.
- Treatment: Because they cause real symptoms, you should avoid the foods you are hysterically-inflected faux allergic to. Go to therapy. Try not to get upset when people with Fake Allergies (Type I) give you their advice which will probably include suggestions to meditate and participate in the Yoga Industrial Complex. Don’t engage them in conversations about the colonization of Buddhism and Hinduism by New Agers.
Famous Hysterics: Dora, Ms. EM, Emily Dickinson.
Condition: Feline-Intruder-Related “Fake” Cat-Allergy (Type II.b)
- Prognosis: trouble in paradise.
- Symptoms: Skin problems, sinus problems, sore throat, watery eyes, discomfort, headaches.
- Causes: Justified hatred of cats. General interest in keeping a clean/dust&hair free household, commitment to staying independent of the house, distaste for Litterbox.
- Correlations: Otherwise good character, preference for dogs or petlessness, reticence to talk about allergy with lesbi-friends.
- Treatment: OTC medications can mitigate effects of FIR allergies although there is no real cure. Also, Benadryl can’t outsmart your hysteria and so you can’t hope for a normal life unless you live in a cat-free environment.
Oakland and internetless for the most part. Aspire to blag longer, faster, better– not about blogging. There have been many ridiculous things here: including but not limited to an evening in a speakeasy and a lot of good food.
Since I obviously don’t understand horoscopes, have decided to use astrology only to judge films I will and will not see. I will then evaluate them for my amusement and your sift ‘n’ skim using phrases cobbled from descriptions of the moody and leonine or the two-faced gemini.
Since I obviously don’t feel ready for school, have decided to read a lot of memoirs for my thesis. Suggestions happily suggested. Especially looking for anything that banks on “hope.”
