Today I would like to argue in favor of "where are you at," largely because I have started catching myself saying it and feel sheepish, but in some measure because I also feel it has a place in our lexicon.
Caveat: it should only be used figuratively and should never allude to a geographical location.
Acceptable: "Cummings! Where are we at on the creation of that Doomsday device?"
Unacceptable: "Winn Dixie? Where's that at?"
Thank you.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
what we have here is a failure to communicate
I am by no means a Luddite. In fact, I am one of those people who tend, after all this time, to be astounded by what technology can do. It still amazes me that I can write this and you can read it moments after from practically anywhere. I’m still blown away that Google has a picture of my house -- or at least the roof -- that you can look at by typing in my address, or that the information from my retina can be used as a security device.
I am, however, skeptical of technology for technology’s sake, and there are at least a few devices concocted over the last couple of decades I find troublesome and even downright sinister. Most of them have in common an underlying function: they are anti-communication devices. Even in our millennial telecommunications wonderland, where we can communicate with people from across the world and talk incessantly into cell phones, we haven’t stopped coming up with devices to neglect, ignore and disrespect the people with whom we interact face to face. Here are just a few that spring to mind:
Evil Anti-Communication Device #1: The knee defender. Have you heard of this thing? Next time you want to see me start frothing at the mouth and shouting long streams of obscenities, talk to me about the knee defender. This is a sort of lock you can apply to the airplane seat in front of you to prevent the passenger ahead of you from reclining his/her seat and painfully banging your knees.
I am not a tall person and riding for several hours in a crowded airplane is already unpleasant, so I can only imagine it’s next to impossible to be both tall and comfortable on an airplane. For this reason, if someone said to me, excuse me, I’m tall and sitting behind you, could you please refrain from reclining your seat, or at least warn me before you do, I feel I’d be sympathetic to that. Perhaps naively, I venture to say most people would be. If, on the other hand, I went to recline my airplane seat and found I had been foiled by a plastic tool from the Sharper Image section of SkyMall, I would be likely to come unglued and provoke the kind of full-blown confrontation the knee-defender was undoubtedly designed to avoid.
Because to me, the subtext communicated here is “I am tall and have no character, while you are not a person who can be or deserves to be reasoned with. Fortunately for me I can preempt your lack of consideration and restrict your right to use the airline equipment you’ve paid for – all without having to deal with you on a human level.” Lucky for tall people everywhere I can’t afford to travel very often. I think I need to go lie down.
Evil Anti-Communication Device #2: TVs in the car. Do you remember the first commercial about this, back in the nineties? Two young parents listening to their kids bickering in the back seat of the family minivan, then they pop in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and stick headphones on the kids? The camera pans to the backseat, where the children gape, slack-jawed, at the screen, while up front Mom and Dad exchange placid smiles.
Okay. Where to even begin with this one. People who talk on their phones and drive take their share of flak, but I’m worried more about the accident I’m going to get in because I’m tailgating somebody’s TV, trying to figure out which Murder, She Wrote episode the driver ahead of me is watching.
Independently of that, though, and call me old-fashioned, but I thought family road trips were supposed to be tedious, cranky affairs where children went for hours at a stretch without being entertained, without even the expectation of being entertained. The monotony of being in the car with one’s siblings and parents, charting the trip on the odometer, getting sick of waiting for a “La Quinta Inn” sign to get past the Q in the alphabet game, the rise and fall of interminable Indiana corn fields outside the window, that was all part of it. Subtext here? “Isn’t it great that we can plug the kids into the TV just like at home, so that we can continue to not talk to each other until we get to wherever it is we’re going to Spend some Quality Time All Together As a Family?”
Yecchh.
Evil Anti-Communication Device #3: Political correctness. Technically this is not a feat of technology, but still. I’m with Rhodesian author Doris Lessing about this one, and she knows from politically correct. For starters, it’s just real dumb to think you can slap a new name on something and change the underlying prejudices that created a sense of taboo about whatever it is in the first place. Any negative connotation attached to the out-going term will just bleed onto the new term until you change the underlying discourse. Meanwhile, you’ve often taken a perfectly good word out of circulation. In some cases, the topic being discussed is so politically, historically or emotionally charged that we burn through nouns and adjectives faster than anyone can keep up, and we all end up scrambling to remember whatever it is we’re supposed to call Polish people these days. Do you see what this notion is doing to our word-scape?
Amazing, too, how political correctness has a way of imposing a value judgment on topics that don’t warrant them, sparking off whole new prejudices. For instance, someone once said to me “you’re not short, you’re vertically challenged.” Until then, I had lived in a safe little bubble in which being short was acceptable, but clearly I was deluded. I should have been aspiring to be taller all along ( note: naturally I told this person I wasn’t “challenged”, merely “differently abled”).
In my book the worst part about political correctness is that it makes certain meddlesome and self-righteous people feel as though they’ve accomplished something for some misrepresented sector of society by changing the rhetoric the rest of us use to talk about them when they’re not around. It’s what allows me to continue doing nothing about the under-enrollment of urban blacks in U.S. universities, all the while feeling warm and fuzzy about tossing around the latest and greatest in hyphenated terminology and still excluding them from the dialogue.
In short, political correctness = gaytarded.
So there you have it, gentle reader. I’m givin it to you straight. If you don’t agree with me, you know, that’s cool. You can tell me so. Just do me one favor: use your words.
I am, however, skeptical of technology for technology’s sake, and there are at least a few devices concocted over the last couple of decades I find troublesome and even downright sinister. Most of them have in common an underlying function: they are anti-communication devices. Even in our millennial telecommunications wonderland, where we can communicate with people from across the world and talk incessantly into cell phones, we haven’t stopped coming up with devices to neglect, ignore and disrespect the people with whom we interact face to face. Here are just a few that spring to mind:
Evil Anti-Communication Device #1: The knee defender. Have you heard of this thing? Next time you want to see me start frothing at the mouth and shouting long streams of obscenities, talk to me about the knee defender. This is a sort of lock you can apply to the airplane seat in front of you to prevent the passenger ahead of you from reclining his/her seat and painfully banging your knees.
I am not a tall person and riding for several hours in a crowded airplane is already unpleasant, so I can only imagine it’s next to impossible to be both tall and comfortable on an airplane. For this reason, if someone said to me, excuse me, I’m tall and sitting behind you, could you please refrain from reclining your seat, or at least warn me before you do, I feel I’d be sympathetic to that. Perhaps naively, I venture to say most people would be. If, on the other hand, I went to recline my airplane seat and found I had been foiled by a plastic tool from the Sharper Image section of SkyMall, I would be likely to come unglued and provoke the kind of full-blown confrontation the knee-defender was undoubtedly designed to avoid.
Because to me, the subtext communicated here is “I am tall and have no character, while you are not a person who can be or deserves to be reasoned with. Fortunately for me I can preempt your lack of consideration and restrict your right to use the airline equipment you’ve paid for – all without having to deal with you on a human level.” Lucky for tall people everywhere I can’t afford to travel very often. I think I need to go lie down.
Evil Anti-Communication Device #2: TVs in the car. Do you remember the first commercial about this, back in the nineties? Two young parents listening to their kids bickering in the back seat of the family minivan, then they pop in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and stick headphones on the kids? The camera pans to the backseat, where the children gape, slack-jawed, at the screen, while up front Mom and Dad exchange placid smiles.
Okay. Where to even begin with this one. People who talk on their phones and drive take their share of flak, but I’m worried more about the accident I’m going to get in because I’m tailgating somebody’s TV, trying to figure out which Murder, She Wrote episode the driver ahead of me is watching.
Independently of that, though, and call me old-fashioned, but I thought family road trips were supposed to be tedious, cranky affairs where children went for hours at a stretch without being entertained, without even the expectation of being entertained. The monotony of being in the car with one’s siblings and parents, charting the trip on the odometer, getting sick of waiting for a “La Quinta Inn” sign to get past the Q in the alphabet game, the rise and fall of interminable Indiana corn fields outside the window, that was all part of it. Subtext here? “Isn’t it great that we can plug the kids into the TV just like at home, so that we can continue to not talk to each other until we get to wherever it is we’re going to Spend some Quality Time All Together As a Family?”
Yecchh.
Evil Anti-Communication Device #3: Political correctness. Technically this is not a feat of technology, but still. I’m with Rhodesian author Doris Lessing about this one, and she knows from politically correct. For starters, it’s just real dumb to think you can slap a new name on something and change the underlying prejudices that created a sense of taboo about whatever it is in the first place. Any negative connotation attached to the out-going term will just bleed onto the new term until you change the underlying discourse. Meanwhile, you’ve often taken a perfectly good word out of circulation. In some cases, the topic being discussed is so politically, historically or emotionally charged that we burn through nouns and adjectives faster than anyone can keep up, and we all end up scrambling to remember whatever it is we’re supposed to call Polish people these days. Do you see what this notion is doing to our word-scape?
Amazing, too, how political correctness has a way of imposing a value judgment on topics that don’t warrant them, sparking off whole new prejudices. For instance, someone once said to me “you’re not short, you’re vertically challenged.” Until then, I had lived in a safe little bubble in which being short was acceptable, but clearly I was deluded. I should have been aspiring to be taller all along ( note: naturally I told this person I wasn’t “challenged”, merely “differently abled”).
In my book the worst part about political correctness is that it makes certain meddlesome and self-righteous people feel as though they’ve accomplished something for some misrepresented sector of society by changing the rhetoric the rest of us use to talk about them when they’re not around. It’s what allows me to continue doing nothing about the under-enrollment of urban blacks in U.S. universities, all the while feeling warm and fuzzy about tossing around the latest and greatest in hyphenated terminology and still excluding them from the dialogue.
In short, political correctness = gaytarded.
So there you have it, gentle reader. I’m givin it to you straight. If you don’t agree with me, you know, that’s cool. You can tell me so. Just do me one favor: use your words.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
remembering Betty Jane
My maternal grandmother, Betty Jane Greer, died Tuesday morning in her sleep in hospice care in St. Augustine, Florida. She was 86 years old.
She stood about 4 feet 10 inches tall and shrinking. She wore her hair, still naturally black except for one silver streak I pray to inherit, in a careless bun prickling with bobby pins, and her blue eyes were always magnified by enormous thick glasses. Decades of chain-smoking slim cigarettes had left her everyday attire of sweatpants and men's undershirts uniformly full of burn-holes. Although toward the end the cigarettes were, more than anything, a prop to be left burning in an ashtray or waved around at the end of her hand for effect. She'd leave a trail of ash on the things and then gesture with them while she spoke in a guttural, unexpectedly forceful voice that seemed to emanate from beyond her, and we'd wince, recoiling from that dangerous cherry threatening to fall with every emphatic thrust of her little fist.
Her face looked like a withered apple and she'd lost most of her teeth before I was born. She hated wearing her dentures but despised being seen in public without them, and as a consequence left the house as seldom as possible. When she did go out, accompanied by one of my uncles or my mother, she had a tendency to discomfit others with impertinent questions and "inappropriate" observations. She carried a variety of tupperware containers in her purse in case her outing resulted in leftovers.
Politically my grandmother fell somewhere to the right of Scary Fascist. As far as she was concerned even the most conservative elements in the U.S. government were wrapped up in a socialist conspiracy to undermine white people everywhere. She spent most of her time in one small back bedroom of her house, furnished simply with a sofa, a television, a coffee table, and ninety bazillion cassette tapes she used to record everything that happened on C-SPAN. She used cassette rather than video tapes because they afforded her the chance to superimpose her own analysis over that of the commentators. Tapes were piled up past the window frames and an arm's-depth into the corners of the room. To my knowledge she never listened to what she had recorded, and despite the fact she never catalogued or dated her tapes, she believed that they would one day constitute a valuable historical archive. Tragically, my grandfather, who died in '93, started the family tradition of recycling her tapes and if she ever noticed she didn't say so.
My oldest uncle and my mother remember a time when Betty Jane was coherent, gentle, lovely. Their younger brothers for the most part do not. Now she's the maelstrom they have to navigate in every conversation. Our family reunions are few and far between, but when they happen they tend to result in late nights around the kitchen table sipping coffee and trying to figure out where and when Betty wandered off. We cousins, I think, have a heightened sense of our parents' afflictedness, and have no illusions about the fact that we are to some extent afterthoughts, epilogues to a family drama that hasn't played itself out yet. Remarkable that such a small, eccentric and otherwise ineffectual person exerts such power over us in my family.
When I was little I used to be afraid of my grandmother: her loud voice, her cackling laugh and rough touch, the live end of her cigarette and her opaque rhetorical questions. As I got older she became an unpredictable source of amusement -- the few of my friends who met her found her fascinating, and I laughed with them, always with a trace of resentment, a trace of guilt.
Here's my favorite story about my grandmother: she went to a busy doctor's office after she had her hip replaced. The waiting room was full of grumpy, defeated-seeming people. After a couple of minutes, she turned to the young girl across from her, perforated with piercings, and said, and what made us decide to do that? The girl paused, obviously taken aback, and then answered. Soon they were in a conversation about which piercings had hurt the most, how much they cost and why she would choose to pierce this or that part of her body. Next she engaged a woman whose husband had just left her in telling her life story. So your husband left did he? Yes, so did mine, she said, and then another lady turned out to be that lady's neighbor, and this sparked off further conversation, and pretty soon the whole waiting room was laughing at this little old lady cursing and being honest, and she looked around her and said, well, I guess we aren't as sick and miserable as we thought.
Here's to Betty Jane; may she rest in peace, or in theories of chaos and conspiracy, whichever she prefers.
She stood about 4 feet 10 inches tall and shrinking. She wore her hair, still naturally black except for one silver streak I pray to inherit, in a careless bun prickling with bobby pins, and her blue eyes were always magnified by enormous thick glasses. Decades of chain-smoking slim cigarettes had left her everyday attire of sweatpants and men's undershirts uniformly full of burn-holes. Although toward the end the cigarettes were, more than anything, a prop to be left burning in an ashtray or waved around at the end of her hand for effect. She'd leave a trail of ash on the things and then gesture with them while she spoke in a guttural, unexpectedly forceful voice that seemed to emanate from beyond her, and we'd wince, recoiling from that dangerous cherry threatening to fall with every emphatic thrust of her little fist.
Her face looked like a withered apple and she'd lost most of her teeth before I was born. She hated wearing her dentures but despised being seen in public without them, and as a consequence left the house as seldom as possible. When she did go out, accompanied by one of my uncles or my mother, she had a tendency to discomfit others with impertinent questions and "inappropriate" observations. She carried a variety of tupperware containers in her purse in case her outing resulted in leftovers.
Politically my grandmother fell somewhere to the right of Scary Fascist. As far as she was concerned even the most conservative elements in the U.S. government were wrapped up in a socialist conspiracy to undermine white people everywhere. She spent most of her time in one small back bedroom of her house, furnished simply with a sofa, a television, a coffee table, and ninety bazillion cassette tapes she used to record everything that happened on C-SPAN. She used cassette rather than video tapes because they afforded her the chance to superimpose her own analysis over that of the commentators. Tapes were piled up past the window frames and an arm's-depth into the corners of the room. To my knowledge she never listened to what she had recorded, and despite the fact she never catalogued or dated her tapes, she believed that they would one day constitute a valuable historical archive. Tragically, my grandfather, who died in '93, started the family tradition of recycling her tapes and if she ever noticed she didn't say so.
My oldest uncle and my mother remember a time when Betty Jane was coherent, gentle, lovely. Their younger brothers for the most part do not. Now she's the maelstrom they have to navigate in every conversation. Our family reunions are few and far between, but when they happen they tend to result in late nights around the kitchen table sipping coffee and trying to figure out where and when Betty wandered off. We cousins, I think, have a heightened sense of our parents' afflictedness, and have no illusions about the fact that we are to some extent afterthoughts, epilogues to a family drama that hasn't played itself out yet. Remarkable that such a small, eccentric and otherwise ineffectual person exerts such power over us in my family.
When I was little I used to be afraid of my grandmother: her loud voice, her cackling laugh and rough touch, the live end of her cigarette and her opaque rhetorical questions. As I got older she became an unpredictable source of amusement -- the few of my friends who met her found her fascinating, and I laughed with them, always with a trace of resentment, a trace of guilt.
Here's my favorite story about my grandmother: she went to a busy doctor's office after she had her hip replaced. The waiting room was full of grumpy, defeated-seeming people. After a couple of minutes, she turned to the young girl across from her, perforated with piercings, and said, and what made us decide to do that? The girl paused, obviously taken aback, and then answered. Soon they were in a conversation about which piercings had hurt the most, how much they cost and why she would choose to pierce this or that part of her body. Next she engaged a woman whose husband had just left her in telling her life story. So your husband left did he? Yes, so did mine, she said, and then another lady turned out to be that lady's neighbor, and this sparked off further conversation, and pretty soon the whole waiting room was laughing at this little old lady cursing and being honest, and she looked around her and said, well, I guess we aren't as sick and miserable as we thought.
Here's to Betty Jane; may she rest in peace, or in theories of chaos and conspiracy, whichever she prefers.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
peregringa: a users’ guide, special Valentine’s Day edition
Congratulations. For whatever reason you’ve managed to get yourself to where you and I and Valentine’s Day could be construed as having something to do with one another, either that or you stumbled onto this blog by accident in your unending quest for cheez whiz and porn. Here at peregringa we have until recently upheld a time-honored tradition of scoffing at Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately for you, we have been noticing lately we are much more of a princess than we previously believed, so downer for you on that one.
I feel like a lot of the guys I know –except you, of course, gentle reader – tend to do a crappy job at Valentine’s Day on principle. They’re smart and anti-consumerist, free-thinking and profound guys. As a consequence, their perfectly lovely and wonderful girlfriends silently sit out a day when other women unflinchingly demand diamond jewelry, candle-light and roses, listening to their boyfriends bluster about Hallmark holidays and marketing ploys aimed at our essential loneliness and inability to communicate our love for one another through everyday acts and blah blah blah. And when compelled by society or their girlfriend or whomever to observe Valentine’s Day, I suspect they go out and, in protest, they buy a clump of red roses and a cardboard box of Hershey’s chocolate and call it a day.
I used to agree with the whole Hallmark holiday thing, but then I realized that’s hooey. It’s only a Hallmark holiday when people like you – not you, of course, gentle reader – make it one by neglecting to see past red roses and Hershey’s chocolate. Mind you, there’s a whole industry hell-bent on seeing to it you don’t see past these repeat offenders. They’re sending you the message: “Women are CONFUSING! There’s no way you could EVER anticipate what the girl who loves and trusts you and has shared her innermost fears, desires and aspirations with you might enjoy receiving from you as a thoughtful gesture of love. Plus you’re a dude, not some romantic pussy who SHOPS. Buy her one of these here fat f*ckin diamonds and you should be safe.”
Retailers also know that, given item x that they don’t usually buy, all men – except you, of course, gentle reader – will go straight out and buy the largest quantity of the worst quality variety of x, and also pay too much for it. Given their generally superior shopping acumen, it’s surprising how many women buy into this. Case in point is the way, as soon as a girl gets engaged, they’re all scrambling to get a glimpse of the ring, often an unsightly, sweater-snagging lump of rock that overpowers her hand.
But that’s no excuse, gentlemen. You know better. Ironically, it’s the same guys who feel affronted by the emotional manipulation of the Valentine’s Day racket who are getting duped by it, cornered either into empty mercantilism or inaction. That’s a damn cop-out. This year I challenge you to protest Valentine’s Day by doing something authentic, creative and personal. Oh and by the way you aren’t nearly as inept at this as you think you are.
Maybe this all seems picky, but come on, I’d rather have nothing than get a gift that says “I know I’m supposed to give you something but don’t really want to take the time to think about you as an individual.” Having said that, gee whiz flowers sure are purty. Flowers are great, actually, as long as they’re not yellow and purple. Too pep rally. Dark chocolate is never a poor choice although I’ll thank you to stay away from anything nougat-related. A guiding rule should be that less is always more. Instead of blowing 20 bucks on roses and baby’s breath, go for a single, potted orchid. It’s sexier and more exotic and will still be blooming months from now, as long as I remember to water it, which is, frankly, doubtful. Rather than a dozen grocery store bon-bons, spring for one truffle hand-made by your neighborhood chocolatier with some weird-ass ingredient like lavender or chili powder. Then feed it to me. Naked.
All I ask is that you remember that, while I haven’t mysteriously morphed into one of those mall girls overnight, I’d still love to be acknowledged on the one day of the year you can be as smarmy as you want and people have to suppress their gag reflex. And get ready because I’ll probably do the same to you.
I feel like a lot of the guys I know –except you, of course, gentle reader – tend to do a crappy job at Valentine’s Day on principle. They’re smart and anti-consumerist, free-thinking and profound guys. As a consequence, their perfectly lovely and wonderful girlfriends silently sit out a day when other women unflinchingly demand diamond jewelry, candle-light and roses, listening to their boyfriends bluster about Hallmark holidays and marketing ploys aimed at our essential loneliness and inability to communicate our love for one another through everyday acts and blah blah blah. And when compelled by society or their girlfriend or whomever to observe Valentine’s Day, I suspect they go out and, in protest, they buy a clump of red roses and a cardboard box of Hershey’s chocolate and call it a day.
I used to agree with the whole Hallmark holiday thing, but then I realized that’s hooey. It’s only a Hallmark holiday when people like you – not you, of course, gentle reader – make it one by neglecting to see past red roses and Hershey’s chocolate. Mind you, there’s a whole industry hell-bent on seeing to it you don’t see past these repeat offenders. They’re sending you the message: “Women are CONFUSING! There’s no way you could EVER anticipate what the girl who loves and trusts you and has shared her innermost fears, desires and aspirations with you might enjoy receiving from you as a thoughtful gesture of love. Plus you’re a dude, not some romantic pussy who SHOPS. Buy her one of these here fat f*ckin diamonds and you should be safe.”
Retailers also know that, given item x that they don’t usually buy, all men – except you, of course, gentle reader – will go straight out and buy the largest quantity of the worst quality variety of x, and also pay too much for it. Given their generally superior shopping acumen, it’s surprising how many women buy into this. Case in point is the way, as soon as a girl gets engaged, they’re all scrambling to get a glimpse of the ring, often an unsightly, sweater-snagging lump of rock that overpowers her hand.
But that’s no excuse, gentlemen. You know better. Ironically, it’s the same guys who feel affronted by the emotional manipulation of the Valentine’s Day racket who are getting duped by it, cornered either into empty mercantilism or inaction. That’s a damn cop-out. This year I challenge you to protest Valentine’s Day by doing something authentic, creative and personal. Oh and by the way you aren’t nearly as inept at this as you think you are.
Maybe this all seems picky, but come on, I’d rather have nothing than get a gift that says “I know I’m supposed to give you something but don’t really want to take the time to think about you as an individual.” Having said that, gee whiz flowers sure are purty. Flowers are great, actually, as long as they’re not yellow and purple. Too pep rally. Dark chocolate is never a poor choice although I’ll thank you to stay away from anything nougat-related. A guiding rule should be that less is always more. Instead of blowing 20 bucks on roses and baby’s breath, go for a single, potted orchid. It’s sexier and more exotic and will still be blooming months from now, as long as I remember to water it, which is, frankly, doubtful. Rather than a dozen grocery store bon-bons, spring for one truffle hand-made by your neighborhood chocolatier with some weird-ass ingredient like lavender or chili powder. Then feed it to me. Naked.
All I ask is that you remember that, while I haven’t mysteriously morphed into one of those mall girls overnight, I’d still love to be acknowledged on the one day of the year you can be as smarmy as you want and people have to suppress their gag reflex. And get ready because I’ll probably do the same to you.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
snow day
Mert calls and tells me school's been canceled because there's a wind chill of thirty below, so I roll over and go back to sleep right after sending the neighbs a text message reading "I have a snow day neener neener neener". Three hours and forty-five minutes later I'm awakened by a knock at the door and there he is, standing there in a very classy new overcoat. He looks extremely handsome, in a cousin sort of way that fails to attract me. He doesn't want to come in, he just says, I'm not doing so well, it's been a long time I know, but right now I'm not doing so well, so here, I'm going to move on all the stuff I said I was going to move on and I'll cut you a check by mid-February, and he hands me a stapled packet of papers and says, see ya, and he's gone. I look at the papers and across the top they say
which really only means that it's official now but it's like someone just punched me in the stomach, punched a hole in my "new life" or whatever the hell that means. I feel suddenly vile and like the trashiest person ever to have existed and I need to talk to someone, anybody, right now. So I go to call my mom and then I remember she's holding my grandmother's hand in some hospital in St. Augustine Florida, if I still have a grandmother, and I can't do that to her. I'm about to call the neighbs when I get this overwhelming urge never to call him ever again, never return another one of his calls, I don't deserve him, I don't deserve happiness, I should have to suffer more first after all I did wrong, I can't make this man a solution to all my problems but I'm dialing him already more out of momentum and muscle memory than conviction at this point and then I hear his voice mail message and it says
and it's always sounded kind of grouchy before but today I hear it totally differently. Even the recorded sound of his voice starts reminding me that I've got things I want in this world and that I'm not done yet and that damn it, I've reached his voice mail, I've made it this far, so the only thing now is to keep going, leave a message for Pete's sake, and then let myself be called back, let myself be loved, try to be worthy of it today and from now on.
I call Mert back and tell her I'm divorced. She goes, whoo-HOO! and I laugh. We make a date to walk in the snow for as long as we can stand it and when I hang up I reach for my laptop. My dog groans under the covers as I reach across him to accommodate the power cord. I write some stuff down and hit
JUDGMENT OF DIVORCE
which really only means that it's official now but it's like someone just punched me in the stomach, punched a hole in my "new life" or whatever the hell that means. I feel suddenly vile and like the trashiest person ever to have existed and I need to talk to someone, anybody, right now. So I go to call my mom and then I remember she's holding my grandmother's hand in some hospital in St. Augustine Florida, if I still have a grandmother, and I can't do that to her. I'm about to call the neighbs when I get this overwhelming urge never to call him ever again, never return another one of his calls, I don't deserve him, I don't deserve happiness, I should have to suffer more first after all I did wrong, I can't make this man a solution to all my problems but I'm dialing him already more out of momentum and muscle memory than conviction at this point and then I hear his voice mail message and it says
hi, this is (and there's this tiny pause before he says his own name, almost as if he's forgotten it or is considering whether it's safe to reveal his identity or something), you've reached my voicemail, so uh, leave a message
and it's always sounded kind of grouchy before but today I hear it totally differently. Even the recorded sound of his voice starts reminding me that I've got things I want in this world and that I'm not done yet and that damn it, I've reached his voice mail, I've made it this far, so the only thing now is to keep going, leave a message for Pete's sake, and then let myself be called back, let myself be loved, try to be worthy of it today and from now on.
I call Mert back and tell her I'm divorced. She goes, whoo-HOO! and I laugh. We make a date to walk in the snow for as long as we can stand it and when I hang up I reach for my laptop. My dog groans under the covers as I reach across him to accommodate the power cord. I write some stuff down and hit
PUBLISH
Sunday, February 4, 2007
the fine line
Over the past several years I've seen or experienced a few things that seemed to transgress the fine line between truth and fiction. Watching Garden State again reassures me I'm not the only one out there disconcerted by this stuff.
For instance. The character in that movie who speaks Klingon. This is a language, folks, made up for a wonky sci-fi franchise, yet there are people out there who take the time to learn it. It has rules governing its phonetics and grammar. You can use it to say stuff. This is straight out of Jorge Luis Borges, ladies and gents. Welcome to Uqbar. (NB: Uqbar is a made-up place that appears, in a Borges story, in an apocryphal edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). But here's the thing: there's no such thing as Klingons. But the fact that there's a Klingon language, people can speak, read, write it, makes it so. To put a finer point on it, someone like me is out here going, that's a ridiculous waste of time, how can you take something like that seriously, grow up and drop in on reality now and again, and yet you know somebody's making bazillions of dollars off Star Trek merchandising and conventions. You know, dollars, redeemable for any number of (more or less) meaningful real-world goods and services. If money talks, it has at least a Berlitz knowledge of Klingon.
I remember the first time the fine line was really crossed for me. It was at the Detroit International Auto Show, 2002. The U.S. Armed Services had a stall in the basement of Cobo Arena where they were showing a film people packed their fat asses into the folding chairs to see, called "Supertruck". At the beginning of the movie a flock of angry, vaguely Eastern-European-looking citizens lobbed Molotov cocktails at the American Embassy, until Supertruck crashed out through the wrought-iron gates and plowed through the unruly crowds. At an estimated 8 miles per gallon, the truck spent the next ten minutes terminating the irate masses with extreme prejudice and locking down the city (Prague?), all the while undergoing a series of Inspector-Gadget-like permutations.
And here's what scares me: I was the only one laughing.
What was I missing? I still don't know. I had lost all hold on reality vs. unreality. I've never known the American military to poke fun at itself. On the other hand it unflinchingly advertises itself to 18-25-year-old males disguised as a video game. Other Supertruck audience members turned around, deadly serious, to shush me. I struggled then, and struggle now, to understand what reaction the makers of "Supertruck" were trying to provoke at the auto show.
Would I understand this stuff better if I had a TV? Do I want to, or would I rather continue to be a crusty, befuddled academic?
Five years later, examples abound. We seem to crave it. Hollywood seems to be searching for the tipping point at which viewers finally decide women are too non-biodegradable to be beautiful. We don't even expect the stories we see on the news to be true. In general, we're much more sanguine and jaded than we used to be, and the question "Is this for real?" has been rendered largely irrelevant. Confronted with a reality in which it can be tricky to tell real from fake, is retreating into perpetual irony just our coping strategy? If I can't tell if something's authentic, isn't it safer to have an inauthentic response to it?
I guess I'm old-fashioned. I at least like to know the answer to the question: is this some kind of sick joke? Magical realism is wonderful but there's nothing magical about Supertruck. I like my reality only medium-rare, served up with a healthy side of certainties. Like how I know for sure that, last night just before I fell asleep, Zach Braff stumbled onto my blog, read it, saw my picture and realized that, even though he didn't know it at the time, I was the girl he wrote Garden State about and he's currently winging through the air over the midwest on his way to my doorstep to tell me he wants to make legions of babies with me.
And that's the god's-honest truth of the matter, that is.
For instance. The character in that movie who speaks Klingon. This is a language, folks, made up for a wonky sci-fi franchise, yet there are people out there who take the time to learn it. It has rules governing its phonetics and grammar. You can use it to say stuff. This is straight out of Jorge Luis Borges, ladies and gents. Welcome to Uqbar. (NB: Uqbar is a made-up place that appears, in a Borges story, in an apocryphal edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). But here's the thing: there's no such thing as Klingons. But the fact that there's a Klingon language, people can speak, read, write it, makes it so. To put a finer point on it, someone like me is out here going, that's a ridiculous waste of time, how can you take something like that seriously, grow up and drop in on reality now and again, and yet you know somebody's making bazillions of dollars off Star Trek merchandising and conventions. You know, dollars, redeemable for any number of (more or less) meaningful real-world goods and services. If money talks, it has at least a Berlitz knowledge of Klingon.
I remember the first time the fine line was really crossed for me. It was at the Detroit International Auto Show, 2002. The U.S. Armed Services had a stall in the basement of Cobo Arena where they were showing a film people packed their fat asses into the folding chairs to see, called "Supertruck". At the beginning of the movie a flock of angry, vaguely Eastern-European-looking citizens lobbed Molotov cocktails at the American Embassy, until Supertruck crashed out through the wrought-iron gates and plowed through the unruly crowds. At an estimated 8 miles per gallon, the truck spent the next ten minutes terminating the irate masses with extreme prejudice and locking down the city (Prague?), all the while undergoing a series of Inspector-Gadget-like permutations.
And here's what scares me: I was the only one laughing.
What was I missing? I still don't know. I had lost all hold on reality vs. unreality. I've never known the American military to poke fun at itself. On the other hand it unflinchingly advertises itself to 18-25-year-old males disguised as a video game. Other Supertruck audience members turned around, deadly serious, to shush me. I struggled then, and struggle now, to understand what reaction the makers of "Supertruck" were trying to provoke at the auto show.
Would I understand this stuff better if I had a TV? Do I want to, or would I rather continue to be a crusty, befuddled academic?
Five years later, examples abound. We seem to crave it. Hollywood seems to be searching for the tipping point at which viewers finally decide women are too non-biodegradable to be beautiful. We don't even expect the stories we see on the news to be true. In general, we're much more sanguine and jaded than we used to be, and the question "Is this for real?" has been rendered largely irrelevant. Confronted with a reality in which it can be tricky to tell real from fake, is retreating into perpetual irony just our coping strategy? If I can't tell if something's authentic, isn't it safer to have an inauthentic response to it?
I guess I'm old-fashioned. I at least like to know the answer to the question: is this some kind of sick joke? Magical realism is wonderful but there's nothing magical about Supertruck. I like my reality only medium-rare, served up with a healthy side of certainties. Like how I know for sure that, last night just before I fell asleep, Zach Braff stumbled onto my blog, read it, saw my picture and realized that, even though he didn't know it at the time, I was the girl he wrote Garden State about and he's currently winging through the air over the midwest on his way to my doorstep to tell me he wants to make legions of babies with me.
And that's the god's-honest truth of the matter, that is.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
a penny? for these thoughts???!!!
How it works is, is you go into this little room on the fourth floor, the one with all the windows along one wall so people can watch you suffer, and on the first and second Tuesdays you have as much time as you want to write answers to two out of three of that day's questions. On the third consecutive Tuesday you defend what you wrote and talk about the four-page reading list with the three professors on your committee. After two hours of that, they send you out and deliberate, which by the clock takes about fifteen minutes, but by your calculations is something more like eleven years.
Next they come and get you and tell you you are officially a.b.d. (all but dissertation), congratulations. Then you hug your graduate advisor and inexplicably start sobbing into his tweedy shoulder.
But what then? You take your dog for a walk in the woods, and this time you don't even pretend to bring a book with you to read while he runs out ahead. Then you come home and take a scalding hot shower and go out to dinner with a friend who's in town for the weekend.
Next, of course, you go bowling, and stay up obscenely late even though you feel as though you have just fought a war or given birth, or given birth while fighting a war. The next day you still aren't quite tuned into the fact that your time is really yours to do with as you see fit, at least until they come and find you and remind you you have to start your thesis.
You have time to take a tango lesson and your boyfriend's mom made cake, and you hear him tell her the story almost in exactly the words you used to tell him and you're airborne, giddy. You even go salsa dancing the next night, make peace with an old nemesis, get a pro bono strip tease (ever notice how when someone says "no pun intended," they always mean "pun intended") and stand by while these guys from Pakistan pick up your girlfriends and try to steal your glasses.
The next logical step is naturally to get sick, since Demon Hyena Cough is going around. Your body's like, oh great, exams are over, time tobleaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhh. So you give Garden State another chance to much more favorable results this time and float on a sea of TheraFlu for the next two days and pending, finally get around to reading the Time Traveler's Wife which you find to be charming but still hit-or-miss somehow. When you are back from being a walking talking virus to being merely a sick human you make a ginormous pot of chicken soup with Amish egg noodles and your friend brings you this humidifier she swears was buy-one-get-one-free but you think maybe she thinks you wouldn't have taken it otherwise.
And you call your folks and tell them you just found out you're a.b.d. and there's a pregnant pause while they process this information and then you laugh and say, no, it's nothing to worry about, I swear. And what comes next? You update your sorely neglected blog and probably go sew corduroy patches on the elbows of all your sweaters and jackets. You smartypants, you.
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