"Most Hated" questionnaire

A day later, I’m still reeling from that goddamn Six Feet Under finale. I cried off and on throughout the evening, including during my shower, and this morning when I was driving to work, I decided to be a masochist and blast Sia’s song “Breathe Me,” which is what played during the wrenching final scene of SFU. I’ve liked this song ever since I first heard it on a mix made for me by my friend David, but it now has a new, and somewhat devastating, meaning. A meaning that made me bawl during the first half of my commute. (I finally forced myself to focus on other things and listen to different music so my eyes would have a chance to dry out before I lurched into my office.)

It got under my skin so badly. It’s a suit of barbed fishhooks lodged into every pore. I still have knots clenching and unclenching in my stomach. In the past, whenever I thought about my loved ones dying, I thought of it in terms of isolated incidents. One person dying in a few years’ time, another person following suit a few years after that, and so on. I never thought of the whole cohesive picture: the fact that someday, everyone I love will be dead, and I could very well be the last person standing. I just can’t imagine outliving everyone. And my family is tiny to begin with. What if, god/dess forbid, I outlive them and have no family left whom I’m close to? (That’s assuming I never marry someone with a big family and/or have kids of my own.) Who will be with me when I finally die? I’m not a person who hates and/or fears aloneness—I absolutely relish it—but I want it to be my choice. I don’t want to be abandoned by everybody through death. What if I outlive all my friends like my grandfather has done? How would I survive going through loss after loss after loss? The mere thought of it horrifies me. I don’t want to live to be 102 and have no one left when I’m at my most helpless and vulnerable point. I don’t want to be the last person left to keep everyone’s memories alive.

I know that, barring any major terrorist attacks or bird flu outbreaks, all of this is so far away, but life speeds by so quickly—we all know that.

I suspect that all of this would be easier to digest if I were religious and had some clear idea of what exists after death. My rational mind says that nothing exists, and you just enter nothingness. But part of me wants to cling to the idea of reincarnation or a heaven like that seen in The Lovely Bones. If I had absolute faith that this is what I’d find, maybe I’d be better equipped to handle the thought of losing everyone bit by bit.

Anyway.

To distract myself, I filled out one of those questionnaire thingies circulating across the net. Here goes:


MOST HATED...

FRUIT: coconut (yeah, it’s considered a fruit)

CANDY: dark chocolate

BEVERAGE: A tie between iced tea and lemonade.

COLOR: teal

TOWN/CITY: Probably Newark and Elizabeth, and that whole bleak industrial area in New Jersey that’s just over the river from Manhattan.

TV SHOW: Nothing in particular...I guess any one of the sleazier-than-thou reality shows currently populating the airwaves.

MOVIE: There are some movies I didn’t like that everyone else seems to think are da bomb: Slingblade, Moulin Rouge, American Beauty...and probably more that I’m just not thinking of right now.

ASPECT OF MYSPACE: I don’t use MySpace.

ASPECT OF INSTANT MESSENGER: I never IM anymore. I used AIM on occasion in the past, to chat with friends, but I haven’t done that in at least a year, if not longer.

ANIMAL: I don’t hate any animals!

INSECT: The mosquitoes in St. Petersburg. The mosquitoes around here are bad enough, but I’ve built up a resistance to them, so I recover from their bites within, like, a half hour. But the mosquitoes in St. Petersburg left welts that took weeks to fade.

BIRD: I don’t hate any birds, but I do hate their shit that is splattered all over my birdfeeder.

SEASON: Summer. Well, the extreme heat and humidity. The other aspects of it are fine.

AGE OF KIDS: I don’t have any kids, so I’m not sure which age is my least favorite. The teen years, maybe?

...WHAT ANNOYS YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING WHEN...

DRIVING?: Tailgaters, people who don’t use their turn signals, rubberneckers, people who leave their blinkers on even when they don’t plan to turn/switch lanes, people who drive too fast, people who drive too slow, people who drive in two lanes.

TALKING ON THE PHONE: In general, I’m not a big fan of talking on the phone. I try to avoid it as much as I can. Worst part? When people call during one of my can’t-miss TV shows. I don’t answer!

WATCHING TV OR MOVIES: Watching TV: too many commercials, and those semi-transparent logos that now stay on the screen all the time (and sometimes even make sounds, too!). Watching movies: at the cinema, I hate noisy people—especially teenagers! Also, chair-kickers and people who noisily chew their popcorn and candy and noisily slurp their sodas.

EATING IN RESTAURANTS: Kids running wild, and a lack of vegetarian dishes. Also, now that all the restaurants in my county are smoke-free, I can no longer stand dining in restaurants where people smoke.

GOING THROUGH DRIVE-THRUS: Intercoms that are crackly and make the employee’s voice difficult to hear. Also, there seems to be an increased risk that they will screw up your order.

YOU’RE AT THE MALL: Loud teenagers (I know; I sound like I’m 80 years old), people who leave no room for me to walk around them, people who stand two astride on the escalator, rather than keeping open a passing lane. That said, I rarely go to malls anymore.

SLEEPING (OR TRYING TO SLEEP): On weekend mornings, when my upstairs neighbors wake me up with their screamed prayers, hymn dirges, and clomping footfalls. And, as much as I love my cats, I hate when Plath screams and screams on weekend mornings (he wants breakfast), and when both cats paw at my pillow for some reason which remains unknown to me.

SHOWERING: The size of my shower. It’s so damn small.

YOU’RE AT THE BEACH: Kids running pell-mell across the beach, kicking sand onto my blanket and disrupting the tranquility of the setting.

YOU’RE AT THE GROCERY STORE: People who leave their carts blocking an aisle, people who pay with checks (it’s so sloooow!)

WHAT HOUSEHOLD CHORE DO YOU HATE THE MOST?: God, all of it. I hate cleaning, hate taking out the garbage, hate paying bills.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WOULD BE THE ABSOLUTE WORST WAY TO DIE?: In pain and/or in terror, like in a plane crash, or being burned alive. Where you know it’s happening and know you can’t do anything but suffer and wallow in terror and let it happen. Dying alone and having nobody discover the body for yonks.

WHAT’S THE MOST ANNOYING HABIT IN OTHERS?: Too many to choose! Excessive talking, invading my personal space, cell phone dependency...

WHAT IS YOUR WORST HABIT?: procrastination and laziness

WHAT FASHION TREND (PAST OR PRESENT) HAVE YOU HATED THE MOST?: I really don’t like trends in general. Just because some nameless, faceless person in NYC or Milan says that flares are out and gauchos are in, you have to obey them? Bollocks! I say: wear what you like, when you like. Don’t feel obliged to change your whole damn wardrobe every season just to be trendy! But, that said, I think that most—if not all—of the fashion trends of the early ’90s were particularly disastrous. And I’m ashamed to say that I used to peg my jeans all the time back then.

WHAT POPULAR SONG (PAST OR PRESENT) HAVE YOU HATED THE MOST?: Oh god, there are so many songs that fill me with rage. Two Dave Matthews songs in particular fill me with rage (“Ants Marching” and that “What Would You Say” song), “Lovesexy” from The Cardigans, that “every time I look at you I go blind” song from Hootie and the Blowfish, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” super-repetitive dance/techno songs, most country songs, most rap and hip hop songs.

WORST OR MOST HATED PICKUP LINE: Nobody ever uses pickup lines on me! *sniffs*

TO BE COMPLETELY STEREOTYPICAL, WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST ANNOYING THING ABOUT GIRLS/WOMEN?: Too much of that “Oh, I’m nothing without a man!” nonsense.

TO BE COMPLETELY STEREOTYPICAL, WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST ANNOYING THING ABOUT GUYS?: Not enough sensitivity.


song heard most recently before posting: Szombateste Búcsúztató—Muzsikás

swollen eyes

Happy 1st Birthday, Peyton Avery Carron!!!

Oh, the brutzing! The brutzing! Over the course of this weekend, amidst my standard load of freelancing, I worked my way through the final episodes of Six Feet Under. I was fully prepared to bawl when Nate died and during the series finale; I was equipped with a massive wad of toilet paper tucked into the sofa the whole time (I’m running low on tissues!). Oh, god, did I cry when Nate died. And afterwards. But the dam really burst during the final episode, as Claire drove off into the sunset, and I saw all those snippets of the main characters’ futures, including their eventual deaths. It just tore out my fucking heart and I had the gasping sobs to prove it. (Although I didn’t cry until I vomited, like Missy did when she watched the episode.)

This was such a tremendously brilliant show—albeit teeth-gnashingly frustrating at times—and seeing it end was difficult. But that wasn’t the overwhelming reason for the tears. As is usually the case when I cry when watching a movie/TV show or reading a book, the luminously sad event unfurling onscreen (or on the page) acts as a catalyst, giving me the good, therapeutic cry I need but can’t initiate at will. It’s a catalyst that triggers all the pent-up gloom I have no reason to acknowledge on any given day: an amalgam of it’s so easy for things to go horrifically wrong and this could be the last day everything is okay and everyone I love is going to die. Maybe not for 80 years, but it will happen. As the tagline to Six Feet Under says: Everything, everyone, everywhere ends.

I’m not professing ignorance about this. I know death is the only thing on earth that is inevitable. But I try not to walk around each day thinking about it. I try not to think about the fact that any given day could be the future anniversary of my death or the future anniversary of a loved one’s death. I’m not denying death—I just don’t want it swim in it. I accept that death is natural and inevitable, and, to a certain extent, I’m not even afraid of it. But I am afraid of losing everyone I love over time, having them chipped away from me piecemeal. And really, at the end of the day, that is one of my most all-encompassing fears: I don’t want to outlive everyone I love.

I’m not eager to rush to the grave just yet—I’d like to live a satisfactorily long life, thank you very much—but I still want to die before my family and friends. I suppose that makes me selfish, but I don’t care. I flinch at the thought of going through the rigors of sorrow over and over. Finally coming to terms with one loss, only to be sideswiped by another. Watching the layers of my tribe peel away, one after another. That ongoing litany of grief every time I’m forced to let another person go.

I have the utmost admiration for people who end up in the position of outliving all the people they truly love, be it through the ordinary passage of time or through a cataclysmic event such as genocide, plague, famine, war. How do they do it? How do they keep going forward without ramming a white flag into the ground to announce their surrender?


song heard most recently before posting: Suite No. 6 in D Major, Courante—JS Bach

Joyeux Anniversaire!

Happy 29th Birthday, Scott Peyton!!!

song heard most recently before posting: The Gunner’s Dream—Pink Floyd

burn baby burn

I just got a pension fund update and it says that my “Normal Retirement Date” is July 1, 2039. Oh lord. Do I really have to wait 33 years before I can retire? It doesn’t come as a surprise or anything, but it’s still depressing to know that I’ll have to wait that long. Then again, the world will surely end long before my working life does. HAW HAW HAW!

I played hooky on Friday and went to the biyotch (Delaware Beaches State Park, more specifically). There were some traveling…uh…snafus, mainly because my experiences with driving to Delaware always involved going to Missy’s house in Milton, and this time I wanted to head straight to Rt. 1, rather than detouring through Milton. You wouldn’t think that simply following 404 to Rt. 1 would be an issue, but apparently it is. The roads aren’t always marked clearly and all roads in southern Delaware look identical: flat and surrounded by cornfields. So I hit some snags during both journeys, but ultimately I was able to enjoy 6 ½ hours on the beach. Although it was a bit more crowded than I expected, it was still light years better than what I would’ve found in Rehoboth, Dewey, or Bethany, I’m sure.

The weather was pitch-perfect: sunny and warm (around 80º), with a stiff sea breeze. I had my boss’s beach umbrella and SPF 50 sunblock to keep me safe, but still managed to get a patchy and painful burn on my lower back, the back of my shoulders, and the back of my legs. Freckles sprang out everywhere and my hair became a rat’s nest…but ahhh…the joy of frolicking in the ocean! Does anything compare? Still, the undertow was quite fierce and I repeatedly found myself like a quarter of a mile down-beach from where I started. And the waves were a bit violent; I was spun in circles and knocked flat more times than I can count, which means that I swallowed an unfortunate amount of salt water and ended up retching a few times. Periodically I stumbled from the ocean back to my encampment and collapsed onto the ground, vertigo having its merry way with me. When the spinning stopped, I pulled out one of the three books I’m currently reading and spent some time relaxing, drying out, reading, and people-watching. I gathered some mini shells and made a big ol’ spiral in the sand. Buried my legs in the sand to warm them up (the breeze made things surprisingly chilly!). Snapped Fisheye and digital photos. Ate my packed lunch from Subway.

Later, as I sped toward Rt. 50, the sun began to set in a modestly gorgeous way. The sunset lingered, too, so it was still around when I hit the Bay Bridge. What a nifty little thrill: arcing across the bridge and straight into the colors that were stretching and sinking before me—colors that turned the Chesapeake a marvelous shade of pale Caribbean blue.

looking over at the eastbound side of the
bridge (the pic seems faded because my
flash accidentally went off)

hurtling westward across the bridge

The rest of my weekend was pretty much spent working, although I did take some time out on Saturday to check out the Jim Henson exhibit at the National Museum of American History. What a disappointment! There were only like three tiny displays containing a minimum of detail about his life and a handful of the original Muppets. On a different floor I stumbled across two more displays containing items from Dark Crystal and the Jug Otter Christmas special. The exhibit was miniscule and scattered. WTF! A topic like this has enormous potential, and the NMAH really squandered a golden opportunity. However, the exhibit did contain the original Rowlf, so that made it all worthwhile! Because, as everyone who knows me knows, Rowlf’s my man!

Rowlf was behind glass, so I couldn’t use my flash,
which is why this photo is dark

The day was beautiful and I was in no rush to return home and resume working. So, I decided to stroll through the sculpture gardens at the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn. I’ve been to both gardens a few times, but I’ve never taken digital pictures nor Fisheye pictures in either garden. So that’s what I did.














xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
Then I strolled up to the Washington Monument to take some photos from its base—another thing I’ve never done.

My my...this flagpole is as big
as the Washington Monument!

Then it was back to reality…



song heard most recently before posting: Boys of Summer—Don Henley

terrorism begins at home

So how about that foiled terrorist plot in England, huh? This one in particular reeled me in because of that short vacation to London I’m thinking about taking this fall. Will this cause me to change my mind? Hell to the no! If I ultimately decide to make the trip, then I will make the trip. If I decide to postpone it until the spring, then I will be doing so because of financial and/or time issues—not because of a fear of terrorists.

Look, I’m the same as anybody else: I don’t want to die in a terrorist attack. I don’t want to become a casualty of extreme, mindless violence. I don’t want to become a statistic in this so-called “war on terror,” a notch in some jihad-happy terrorist’s bedpost. But I don’t want to cripple my life, either. I don’t want to surrender my vacation, or avoid riding the tube or busses when I’m in London. I live a mere 10 miles from the White House, but I don’t want to avoid going into DC and riding the Metro. This weekend, if I can squeeze out the time amidst my freelancing schedule, I’d like to hit the Jim Henson exhibit at the National Museum of American History, and because parking near the Mall can be a bitch on weekends—especially during high tourist season—I will take the Metro. I don’t live in Tel Aviv or Beirut or Baghdad, but the threat of terrorism is always real. It could happen. But I don’t want to put my puny social activities on hold just because of what could happen.

If I do go to London this fall and terrorists knock my plane out of the sky or my tube out of the ground, well, it’d be a damn shame, but at least I’d have my affairs in order. I have a will, I have assigned guardians for my cats, I have two life insurance policies. I can’t do much more than catch that plane and hope for the best.

On a completely unrelated note—and one that is highly frivolous, all things considered—I’m planning to take off work tomorrow and go to the beach for the day. I haven’t gone swimming in the ocean since 2002, so lately I’ve been thinking about how lovely it would be to spend a day alternately bobbing around in the waves and lolling on the sand, reading a book and napping. I’ve got my SPF 50 sunblock, I borrowed a beach umbrella from my boss and a cooler from my sister, and I’m planning to buy a large beach towel tonight. I’ll hit Subway at some point and buy myself a tasty lunch for the cooler. I’ll head out by 7:30am tomorrow, hopefully getting to Delaware Beaches State Park by 11am. Mmm-mm!



song heard most recently before posting: Woman Like a Man—Damien Rice

The light was so strange when I woke up this morning—a kind of yellowish gray that was both lovely and alarming. Ever since my tornado, oddly-colored skies make me a bit nervous, even while they enthrall me.

I ended up taking bereavement leave yesterday to go to my great-aunt Mag’s funeral. But here’s the thing: we missed the freaking funeral. Initially my sister and I were making great time, and we even stopped at a Giant en route to Lebanon to pick up flowers for Mag’s coffin. But on the Turnpike, halfway between Harrisburg and Lebanon, we saw a sign saying that there was an accident ahead and we had to prepare to stop. We ground to a halt at 8:50am, and we initially thought we’d still have time to make it to the funeral, which was scheduled to begin at 10am.

However, the accident involved a gigantic truck that hit the concrete median and burst into flames. In other words, this was no tiny thing. Around 9:15, after being unable to find any sort of traffic report on the radio, Kristen called Mom and had her hop on the Turnpike’s website. It revealed that there was a truck fire and the Turnpike wasn’t expected to reopen until 11am. Oy. So Kristen called Dad and Jill’s cell phones and left messages for both of them, as well as calling her husband to give him the scoop, in case Dad didn’t check his cell phone and instead called Kristen’s house to see where we were.

The Turnpike reopened around 11:10am, meaning that we’d been sitting there, with the car idling to keep the a/c running, for two hours and twenty minutes. Meanwhile, poor Kristen desperately had to pee during our wait, so she finally had to resort to peeing in her McDonald’s orange juice cup. Desperate times call for desperate measures!

After the Turnpike reopened, we hit construction, which closed one lane of traffic for several miles, leaving us to shuffle along at 5 mph. When we passed the scene of the wreck, Kristen said that the smell was awful and it was one of those rare times when I was actually glad to be an anosmic. The road was charred and the truck was a vast, burnt-out shell, with burned debris scattered everywhere. I don’t know how anybody could have survived the crash, or if anybody did.

So we missed the funeral altogether, but we still got to catch up with a small contingent of relatives at my uncle’s house in Lebanon, where we arrived at noon. That was cool, especially since I haven’t seen my cousins in years. We just missed seeing my cousin Suzanne’s 20-year-old son, Ian, which is unfortunate, because he recently did some Marine training in the highlands of Scotland, including Glen Coe, which was my favorite place during my ’03 trip; I would’ve loved to have discussed it with him! As it was, we spent a lot of time talking about how much we used to hate getting dragged to CCD and mass, and how brain tumors and other head disorders run rampant in our family. Hot.

We stayed for two hours and then Kristen and I stopped for lunch at Friendly’s (where, shocker!, I ate until I was borderline-sick). Afterwards we headed back to her place, which gave me a chance to spend some more time with Olivia before I hit the road.

This past weekend was my first weekend of not working in months. How refreshing! I slept, read, watched DVDs (more Six Feet Under episodes, and East/West, one of my all-time favorite movies), and dawdled as a lady of leisure. It was superb. I also made long-overdue updates to my website.

On Saturday evening, I went to these...uh...ruins...in DC that I spotted a few weeks ago while driving to the Fringe Festival. I don’t know what they were, but I suspect, based on the fact that they’re across the street from a water treatment plant, that they are part of an older, abandoned water treatment plant—one that was used before the city upgraded. The ruins are a series of crumbling, vine-covered towers and doorways that lead underground. I have a real explorer streak when it comes to shit like this, so I was itching to investigate the ruins up close, but their perimeter was completely surrounded by a tall chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. Yeah, I can take a hint. So, I just poked my camera through the fence and took lots of pictures, some of which are now on Flickr.

This weekend also brought a delightfully unexpected surprise: I received a phone call from my old friend Laura, who I haven’t spoken to since early 1998! I was really excited to hear from her again. I filled her in various friends’ lives and we reminisced about all the wonderfully ridiculous experiences we once shared. As I will be in Lancaster during Labor Day weekend, visiting David and Angela, who will be in town for a wedding, I decided to visit Laura as well. She knew David and Angela during the year they studied in Germany, so she’ll probably join all of us for dinner.

Tonight I will swing by Ritz to pick up the humongous order I placed on Friday. My order is honestly going to cost over $200—a fact which sickens and horrifies me. See, this is what you get when you’re too lazy to develop your digital photos on a regular basis. I haven’t developed any photos since last November...and on top of that, I need to re-develop like 80% of the zillion photos I took in Europe last year (since their original developer, Ofoto, did a shitty job), as well as a few rolls of my Lomo film. Why go to Ritz, then, instead of a cheaper venue? Well, because I know Ritz will do a great job with the digital shots (unlike Ofoto, who I no longer trust), and they won’t (*knock on wood*) mess up my Lomo photos (unlike Wal-Mart, who destroyed several rolls of them a few months ago). I’m just too exhausted to deal with taking all these photos somewhere else and risking subpar quality. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m working 900 hours a week: so I can afford to splurge on top-of-the-line photo development.

But still...$200+? Again: oy.


song heard most recently before posting: Jamaica Inn—Tori Amos

Rest in Peace, Mag

Magdalene Rose Reilly
June 7, 1923 - August 2, 2006

For what is it to die,
But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
–Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. –Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. –Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. –Socrates

It’s the thought of death that is horrifying; the phenomenon itself always comes as naturally as a sunset. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn. –Chuang Tzu

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils… –Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali



song heard most recently before posting: Family Snapshot—Peter Gabriel

August and everything after

Here’s a shocker: I don’t think I’ll have to work this weekend. Unfathomable! Even on weekends when I’m away from home, I still have work that I should be doing. But the last time there was a weekend when I literally had no work to do? I can’t even remember. I think it was in February or March. My knees are knocking together with excitement, yo!

Yesterday was a pagan holiday of sorts: Lughnasadh, the autumn quarter that runs from August 1st to October 31st. Sayeth my Celtic Devotional:

“The autumn quarter of Lughnasadh brings the gift of maturity and is a time of physical harvest and spiritual garnering. It sees the greatest change in weather from broiling heat to dark and chilly nights. It is the time for celebrating the harvest and sees the busy preparations for winter. … It is a good time to celebrate the lives of all who have helped stabilize and uphold the noble values of life, of all who have exercised good judgment and steered the doubtful into the harbor of certainty, of all holy ones whose guardianship has saved us from life-disabling mistakes.”

The Devotional also includes this little poem:

The Song of Lughnasadh

I am the sovereign splendor of creation,
I am the fountain in the courts of bliss,
I am the bright surrender of the willpower,
I am the watchful guardian and the kiss.
I am the many-colored landscape,
I am the transmigration of the geese,
I am the burnished glory of the breastplate,
I am the harbor where all strivings cease.

Well, even though August is a wretched month, weather-wise, I’m not sad to see July go, since the fruits of its labor included a terrorist attack in India, a tsunami in Indonesia, and, of course, the current nightmare in Lebanon and Israel.

On a considerably shallower note, yesterday was also MTV’s 25th anniversary. Oh, remember those glory days when MTV actually played videos? When they were known for music? It was such an integral part of my ’80s experience, even though my family didn’t get cable until 1987. My grandparents had cable, and my sister and I always watched MTV when we visited them. I remember the delicious thrill of World Premiere videos, and how great it felt when one of my favorite videos aired. I remember when the Raspberry Beret video premiered; for some reason, MTV played it every hour on the hour. Maybe because it was considered a breakthrough video? My cousins were in town and we were at our grandparents’ house; one of us would turn on MTV at the start of every hour and scream, “It’s on!” so none of us would miss it. We watched that damn video every. single. hour. When my family finally possessed both a VCR and MTV, I would tape my favorite videos and re-watch them over and over. Ah, what a shame those days are long over. Do they even make music videos anymore?

I can thank MTV for inadvertently turning me into an Anglophile. In junior high I heard rumblings about a nutty British show, The Young Ones, and because the buzz was so strong, I wanted to see it. But it only aired after my bedtime and it didn’t occur to me to tape it. Finally, on Memorial Day weekend, 1988, I was able to watch it. Oh my gawd, was I hooked. Instantly. Not only on The Young Ones, but Britain in general. I began devouring every episode of The Young Ones, Monty Python, and British Comic Strip Presents (all of which ran in a block on MTV), and began checking out books about Britain from the library. The rest is history.



song heard most recently before posting: Beautifully Undone—Lindy

Social? Me?

This weekend I did something unthinkable: I socialized. Yes, it’s true!

I cut out of work early on Friday and headed to PA, where I met up with Danielle, Shawn, Missy, and Missy’s girlfriend Kat. We met up with a gaggle o’ lesbians we know for a birthday dinner at a Dave & Buster’s-style restaurant, ate our hearts out, played some games, and then headed to a small regional playhouse to see our pal C. make his dramatic debut in a musical. I am being deliberately vague here.

C. was totally wrong about how long it takes to get to his playhouse from the restaurant where we had eaten, so we were late for the show, which was already a few minutes into its first scene when we arrived. Apparently some of the actors bitched about it to C. later. Ah, screw ’em. It wasn’t our fault. The show itself was decent, but learning about the backstage intrigue from our darling gay C. was even better (which is why I’m being vague with names and places). Turns out the male romantic lead is banging the show’s director, who is the real-life father of the leading lady. No wonder she always looked really uncomfortable when she had to kiss the man who was supposedly the love of her life—she was kissing the mouth that been with her father! And the male lead is also having an affair with the male musical director too. There were a number of other gay dudes in the show as well.

The lead female had a good voice, but rumor has it that she only got the lead because her dad is the director. And the poor girl was forced to wear a garishly-colored leotard during most of the show. Whoever made the decision to put a 200+ pound girl in a tight leotard on stage should be shot.

Some of C.’s costumes were so awesome. They looked like a cross between S&M gear and a 1983 Michael Jackson video. I had to muffle my laughter on more than one occasion.

Even though we were late, we somehow netted seats in the first two rows, with Danielle and me being dead center in the first row. My flash accidentally went off like twice and some old woman kept glaring at me. Also, the actors bitched about it to C. And even when the flash wasn't used, the actors were bothered by the small light that goes on when a picture is about to be taken. This happened a lot, since Danielle and I were like the paparazzi, taking one digital picture after another every time C. appeared on stage. Danielle shot video footage on her camera, too. The other actors huffily snipped to C., “All we see is orange-green-orange-green!” We later told him that he should’ve told them we were reviewers from the NY Times, which is why we showed up late and took so many pictures.

Afterwards we went back to Missy’s place and looked at Danielle’s and my pictures on Kat’s laptop. We also watched Danielle’s video footage and, nearly wetting ourselves with immature laughter, repeatedly watched a scene where the one actor’s voice did this weird cracking, swooning thing while singing. We were going to post all the C. video footage on YouTube, tagging it in really inappropriate ways so anybody who searches for anything finds this damn footage. We were going to tag the footage with “pussy boobs tits Christmas kittens anal.” So this got Missy and Danielle obsessed with singing “pussy boobs tits” to the tune of “La Vie Boheme” from Rent. Since they both have OCD parroting issues, this consumed them for a while.

What I love about my friends: an inappropriate sense of humor, a certain level of craziness, and being totally unruffled by the strangest things. Our conversations were a flurry of details of various OCD ticks; our crude, appalling, mean-spirited, and very funny fantasy version of The Amazing Race; etc. Nobody batted an eyelash when someone would say, “Remember when so-and-so used to hoard his own pee?”, “His brother once attacked him while wearing a Captain Stubing mask,” “I was such a hermit that year—I never wanted to leave my dorm room except for classes, so I peed in a bucket every night to avoid leaving my room,” “That was the summer I stayed up every single night until dawn, clutching a butcher knife,” “So-and-so once had this thing where he would only get out of bed when the numbers on his clock equaled seven,” “We should stop by so-and-so’s mom’s house and tell her about how her son has a dungeon in his basement and likes to wrap up his slaves with saran wrap and shoot electricity through their penises.” It was all in a typical day’s conversation for us, really.

I stayed at my mom’s house on Friday night and at noon on Saturday I headed to Antoinette’s house in Virginia and spent the afternoon with her and her sweet 2-week-old baby Luca. Sunday was spent freelancing until 5:30pm, at which point I pounded through more episodes of Six Feet Under (I’ve been Netflixing the entire series). I want to finish Season 3 tonight while doing more freelancing...



song heard most recently before posting: Ripachka—Karelian Folk Music Ensemble

Joyeux Anniversaire!

Happy Birthday, Deborah Stultz!!!

on getting older

A coworker of mine will be turning 50 in a few months’ time, and she has been feeling a bit blue about this. It has me thinking about aging and why it’s such a big issue for so many people.

I’m guilty of it—most of us are guilty of it—but I hate when people try minimize other folks’ age-related freakouts. When I turned 30 it hit me a little hard, and I had so many older people roll their eyes and snip, “You think you’re old? Wait until you get to be my age! You’re just a baby!” Well, yes, it’s true that 30 isn’t old, but jeez, aren’t I entitled to feel a bit elderly and freak out for a little while? That said, I do feel a yearning to say the same thing to people who are younger than me and fretting about feeling old, like a coworker who recently felt badly about turning 26. It’d be easy for me tsk-tsk and sigh heavily at what she’s going through, but didn’t I feel the same thing when I hit my mid-twenties? Sure. It’s called a quarterlife crisis, and it’s a known phenomenon.

However, all that “You think you’re old?” crap can actually be advantageous. Whenever I start to feel old, I think about people who are older. And I don’t do it in a mean-spirited way (“Well, at least I’m not a dinosaur like her!”), but in a thoughtful way. I think about how people turning 60, 70, whatever, would probably love the chance to be my age again. Being old is relative, and unless you’re, like, 110 years old, there’s always somebody who is older than you to remind you that you’re lucky. Even a griping 90-year-old can have a 100-year-old say to him, “Oh, I’d give my eyeteeth to be your age again!”

I think what bothers a lot of people about getting older—and this certainly applies to me—is that each age serves as a yardstick for what we think we should have accomplished by that point in time, and it’s hard to avoid holding that yardstick up to our lives. I’m 32, and by now I feel like I should have a house and a spouse, or, if not a spouse, then at least a potential spouse. And a beefier retirement fund than what I’ve currently got.

You know how in high school, most kids fret about what other people think of them? They feel like they’ve got this spotlight piercing down straight upon them. Everybody can see their flaws and mistakes. What they don’t realize is that everybody else—no matter how “perfect” or popular they are—is feeling the same way. And Jane Cheerleader is too busy worrying about what her friends think about her to notice you in the corner, worrying about what she thinks of you. It’s the same thing with this yardstick mentality. I think, “By the time she was my age, so-and-so had a husband, a big house, a successful career, and she was on the road to getting pregnant. I’ve done none of those things.” But who notices that except for me? Who is keeping score? Everybody else is too busy thinking the same thing (“Oh, damn, I should’ve done this and that by now!”) to notice me and what I have failed to do. And for every area in which someone else has bested me by this age, there is an area in which I have bested them. The aforementioned so-and-so does have a great life, but unlike me, she has never once lived on her own. She always had roommates up until the point she got married. She has never had to survive on her own. She has never been to Europe. She has never marched on Washington. Those are all things I have accomplished.

And really, regarding the yardstick mentality, I don’t think that abstract milestones should be universal. They shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. It’s not written anywhere that all people who go to college must graduate by age 23. Some people graduate when they’re 63. It’s not written anywhere that a woman must be dating/married by age 30, and must have at least one child by age 35. Some people never date or marry, and some people never have kids. Some people only have kids at age 45. Some people only get married at 55. We all follow our own path at our own pace. So turning 40 or 50 or 60 shouldn’t be a death knell for all the things we supposedly should have accomplished by that point. There’s still time to do some of those things! And if they don’t get done, oh well.

Youth doesn’t have to get buried when you turn 50. My mom’s life really only began when she turned 50. After her divorce she went from frumpy and harried to fabulous. She made new friends and got into a new relationship. She started a brand-new hobby (ballroom dancing) and now even dances in competitions. Life begins and ends when you let it begin and end—not when the calendar dictates it.

Also, there’s the whole mortality issue. Every birthday makes us think about the passage of time and the looming prospect of death. What we also need to remember is that every day could conceivably serve as a mortality reminder, because every day brings us closer to death. That’s just a fact of life. You don’t need to wait for your birthday to realize, “Wow, I could die at any second.”

Most important of all is this: whenever you feel badly about entering a new decade of your life, remember all the people who never got to live that long. When I turned 30 and pissed and moaned about having to leave my 20s behind (even though they were, for the most part, a crappy decade for me), I thought about all the folks who never lived to see the age of 30. People who died in childhood, or as teenagers, or in their twenties. What would they have given for the opportunity to live long enough to celebrate turning 30, 40, 50, and beyond? So for my coworker who is bothered about turning 50, I have to say to her: Think about it like this: it’s not so much that 50 years have slipped away from you and are lost forever—it’s more that you were lucky enough to experience 50 birthdays, 50 summers, 50 autumns full of vibrant, changing leaves, and so on. Think about how lucky you are to have had that.

My great-aunt, who is in her mid-80s, is dying of cancer. When she was finally diagnosed in the spring, it had spread considerably, and a round of chemo made no difference whatsoever. Her doctor told her that he expected her to die within two months. This woman, who has always been robustly healthy, will not live to see the end of summer. She will never again see another Christmas or birthday or snowfall or flaming red leaf. This summer is the last summer she’s got. Given the choice, of course she’d rather live for another 20 years, but since she doesn’t have that choice, she has made peace with what is happening. No matter how hot it is, she goes outside every day to sit and look at the flowers in the yard. She spends every day with loved ones. She savors every minute.

If I found out that I were dying, and I only had two months to live, I’d think about all the things I wanted to do and never got a chance to do, like go to Antarctica and publish a book. If I only had two months to live, I really wouldn’t have enough time to do those things. But if I lived to age 50, maybe I could. And as she turns 50, my coworker could say the same thing: I haven’t done all the stuff I’ve wanted to do, but presumably—assuming I don’t die, like, tomorrow, I still have time to maybe make some those things happen. People who died at age 18 didn’t have that luxury.

The biggest components of aging that bother many people are the two Ws: wrinkles and white (or gray) hair. Yeah, it sucks, dude—I’m not going to deny that. I don’t know why it sucks (when did it become a badge of shame to show your age?), but it does. I pluck out my white hairs every week, and will most likely start dyeing my hair within the next year or two. I don’t have wrinkles, but I still started using wrinkle cream and anti-ageing moisturizer a few months ago. I used to avoid the sun because I liked having pale skin; these days, it’s because I don’t want age spots and sun-induced wrinkles. Still, I don’t ever want to get cosmetic surgery to stem the tide of time (especially Botox, which is evil because of its horrible impact on animals). I don’t want to look like I’m 30 when I’m 60—I think that’s creepy and unnerving. I want to grow old gracefully, but that might be easier said than done...




song heard most recently before posting: Punky’s Dilemma—Simon & Garfunkel

guilt

Happy Birthday, Julie Falconer!!!

And curses to you, Bethesda Barnes & Noble! Last night I went there in search of the latest issue of heat (a guilty pleasure; see below) and they didn’t have any! This is the only store I’ve found in the metro DC area that sells this magazine, and they’ve never not had any copies in stock. I’m paranoid that they stopped selling it because no one else in or around Bethesda (aside from me) is ridiculous enough to spend $6 on a British celebrity gossip magazine. I ended up buying issues of British Cosmo and OK! as consolation prizes, but they are poor substitutes for the real thing. I also scored a huge and lovely pictorial Anne Frank book for only $14.95. It contains photos of every room of the Secret Annex (as it looked in the 1940s and as it looks now) and Frank family photos, as well as excerpts from her diaries. So yeah…Cosmo, OK!, Anne Frank. A hot trinity of reading material.

Well, this got me thinking about my guilty pleasures. And there are a lot of ’em, trust me, so let’s begin!

Celebrity gossip magazines and tabloids (both British and American). Oh, I love this shit. Truly. The Sun, Star, heat, Reveal, People, you name it. This genre is so shallow and salacious, but I heart it.

Trashy women’s interest magazines from Britain. God almighty, do I love these things. Their sweetly abrasive klaxon call never ceases to lure me to their forbidden shores. Last time I was in Britain (in Scotland in 2003), I bought so many of them that I embarrassed even myself. But Missy, who shares this passion of mine, outdid me when she went to Ireland last November. She bought so many of these trashy magazines, their publisher should’ve given her a medal.

Richard informs me that my two favorite cheesy mags, Chat and Pick Me Up, are aimed at chavs, which I guess makes me a chav in spirit? (I do own a trench coat with Burberry lining, purchased a few years ago at a secondhand shop. Hmmmm.) Tortured and killed BY MY SON! screeches Chat. I turned to CRIME to pay for IVF! blares Pick Me Up. And I am hopelessly smitten. Yes, I do want to hear about your family being slaughtered on Christmas Eve! I really do! Chat and Pick Me Up, you had me at “hello.” Or “love rat’s sickening deception,” if you will.

Even if America got its own version of, say, Chat, it just wouldn’t be the same. Because in America, an article about a cold-blooded killer wouldn’t include the line “Would you like a cup of tea, love?” And it wouldn’t include such quaint words as “settee.” In Chat, someone is always getting stabbed to death or raped on a settee. As I once pointed out to Richard, if I knew nothing about Britain except what I read in these magazines, I’d be under the impression that:

1) 90% of the men in Britain are monsters
2) the other 10% are too good to be true
3) everyone starts pumping out babies when they’re like 20 years old
4) hardly anybody is married
5) even the ugliest people have no problem snagging an endless stream of significant others

Footballers’ Wives. Glorious trash TV. Utterly glorious. This show was what single-handedly made me surrender my huffy boycott of BBC America. (I started boycotting them when they yanked EastEnders off the air a few years ago; I still watch EastEnders on PBS, but it’s not the same, because A) those episodes are five years old, as compared to BBC America’s current episodes, and B) BBC America used to air five episodes in a row each week, whereas PBS only airs two episodes a week.) Although Footballers’ Wives has been somewhat sedate lately, in the past it made me yell “Oh no they di’int!” at the TV screen more times than I can count.

Days of Our Lives. What a ridiculous show. Nonetheless, I have been watching it every day since 1993 (and I used to watch it sporadically during summer breaks as a teen, too). The DOOL board on Television Without Pity is downright splendid; we love nothing better than to viciously and snarkily fillet this show that we just can’t seem to quit.

Easy listening. A glimpse at a dark corner of my iPod: Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, Air Supply, Bread, Styx, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers (not the country stuff, but the Lady/Through the Years stuff), Christopher Cross, Linda Ronstadt, Peter Cetera, Phil Collins. My hollers of glee ring from the rooftops when I hear Endless Love!

Little House on the Prairie. There are gonna be people who don’t think this is a guilty pleasure because it’s okay to like LHotP in a sarcastic hipster kitsch kind of way. But, uh, that’s not how I like the show. I like it in a genuinely corny, heart-warming kind of way. And because of that, there are going to be people who don’t think it’s a guilty pleasure because it’s okay to like wholesome TV fare that warms the cockles of the heart. But the thing is, I’m kind of ashamed to like wholesome TV fare. I do think it qualifies as a guilty pleasure, because I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve got a reservoir of wholesomeness inside of me—one that induces a love of Little House on the Prairie, Doc, and Touched By an Angel.

I’ve seen every episode of LHotP like 30 times, and it was the only show I watched religiously during my year abroad. It meant having to wake up early on Sunday morning and stake out a seat in one of my dorm’s two TV lounges, which were constantly hijacked by a cluster of geeks who did nothing but sit and watch TV in silence for hours on end, so I could have control of the TV when LHotP finally came on the air at 11:20am. But waking up early on a Sunday and sitting through two hours of Rawhide reruns was oh so worth it just to experience the medicinal salve known as LHotP.

Again, the fine folks on the LHotP board over at Television Without Pity are gorgeously merciless with eviscerating the show’s corniness (especially the baby battering ram episode and the raped-by-a-mime episode), but all the same, we love it. We love every blasted episode. And I still tear up when Jack the dog dies of old age and Bunny the horse has to be euthanized with Grandpa Ingalls’s gun after she falls and breaks her leg. Oh god, and when those anonymous backwoods brutes threw a sealed bag of puppies into a pond so they’d drown? Can’t even watch it. I know that Laura and Mary rescue them and the dogs all end up in good homes, but still.

Degrassi. My pleasure is guilty because this is a show about teens, for teens. And I’m 32. When I first started watching it, I was a teen. In fact, I was only a year younger than the main characters. So liking the show was cool and acceptable. But now that I’m 32 and still freak out at the thought of missing a single episode, and I even own a book about Degrassi? Not so cool and acceptable.

True crime books. I was never a big fan, but Missy and Antoinette are both hooked on the true crime genre, and its greasy veneer eventually wore off on me. The other day I pumped my fist in the air and growled “YES!” in a gutteral baritone when I found a copy of a true crime book called BERSERK! for only a buck at a used bookstore. I generally don’t buy true crime books (instead, I borrow them from Missy), but when I’ve got one in my possession, it’s hard not to get sucked into the filth.

Disaster books and films. This is a trait I inherited: both my mom and grandfather are fans of movies like Earthquake in New York, The Day After Tomorrow, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, etc. I’m particularly fond of the end-of-the-world subgenre (with nuclear disaster at the forefront).

Bad reality TV. Honestly, I’m not a huge reality TV buff. I stick mainly to American Idol, The Amazing Race, and my latest acquisition, Project Runway. But sometimes I do like to indulge in the seedier aspects of the genre; namely, Trading Spouses. And when Amish in the City was on the air, you can be damn sure I caught every. single. episode. The same goes for America’s Got Talent, which, thanks to my coworker Susan, has snagged me in its corrosive net of addictive awfulness.

So there you have it. My guilty pleasures. And, you know, we’ve all got them. We all like at least one movie/book/hobby/song/collectible that induces cringing in other people. It doesn’t make you less of a person if you were once so addicted to Melrose Place, it affected your ability to function in daily life. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Seabsy.) Frankly, I think guilty pleasures are a big part of what makes people interesting. It’s always fun to meet a tightly laced academic with a secret love of 90210 (which is a former guilty pleasure of mine, along with Saved by the Bell). Or a feminist hippie who secretly loves Snoop Dogg. And that’s not just me rationalizing!



song heard most recently before posting: Vissi d’arte—Giacomo Puccini

I like my shoes, too!

I ended up going to a single Fringe event this weekend; my workload was so extensive, I just couldn’t carve out any additional time for other events. I’m such an old lady. The play (4:48 Psychosis) only began at 9:30pm, and I was like, “That’s so late! Why would anybody start an event that late?!” Even on weekends, I’m in my pajamas by 9:30pm. As they say in the junior high vernacular, I’m so gay.

I was going to take my camera, but then I decided against it, because it began pouring when I left the house. Also, I knew it’d be pushing nightfall by the time I arrived at the theater downtown, and my hands are too shaky to allow me to take good pictures in the dark. Well, I regretted my decision almost immediately, because a huge-ass rainbow appeared in the sky as I drove away from my apartment. And I couldn’t photograph it! I’ve always been a shutterbug, since the time I got my first camera (a Kodak Disc camera) in 6th grade, but lately it’s been more of a compulsion. I almost feel tense and anxious when I see beautiful and/or interesting things and can’t photograph them. I need to just fucking relax and savor life without hiding behind a camera.

I stopped for gas and as I filled my tank, the light—on the opposite end of the sky from the rainbow—was so lovely…a kind of luminous buttery gray. One of my favorite things in this world is walking or driving into a dark, menacing, storm-heavy horizon while the sun burns behind me and ignites the landscape. The contrast of an illuminated landscape beneath a dark, roiling sky is so gorgeous. And that’s kind of what I was seeing on Saturday, when I cursed myself for not having my camera.

The sky thrilled me again later, in DC, because it was a fragile shade of pink glowing behind a series of cranes (this was in a section of the city undergoing intense revitalization; luxury condos are springing up right and left—hence the cranes). What a great shot that would’ve been—those black cranes against that glowing sky. Ah, but what can you do?

So I went to the theater, drove around for a bit in search of parking, and ended up snagging a space like three blocks away from the theater. As I walked along, buried beneath my umbrella, some dude lounging against a wall hollered, “Hey, I like your shoes!” Huh? Well, obviously the guy has good taste, because I was wearing my awesome black platform sandals—the kind that could do some serious damage to someone’s bare foot or balls. And yes, after thanking him for his compliment, I did point out to him that the shoes could do some painful damage, with my unspoken meaning being, Dude, you’ll be spitting yo’ nuts through yo’ grill if you try anything. He agreed and said something like, “But the shoes are really you.” Uh…thanks? What an odd thing to say to a stranger passing by you on a dark street. How does he know what’s me and what’s not? Still, the whole thing made me smile.

The play was great—delightfully in-your-face experimental. I kept casting sly looks at some of the other audience members, because they looked very… yuppyish. They looked like McMansion-dwelling, SUV-driving denizens who were fidgeting uncomfortably in their Prada loafers. I just wondered how they really felt about this strange, chaotic, profanity-laden, borderline-incoherent play about mental illness. Not that McMansion dwellers can’t appreciate avant garde theater, mind you! Really, I’m just glad that people were willing to come out and support this show—and all the Fringe shows—rather than snubbing it as being too unconventional. Let’s hope the Capital Fringe lives to see another year.


song heard most recently before posting: Exposed to Love—Exposé

all aboard the Gotthard!

I kick-started my Friday by plucking 23 white hairs from my head. A few more remained, but I was getting dizzy from keeping my eyes rolled upward for several minutes as I hunted for the offending hairs, and so I stopped plucking. My first white hair appeared at age 23, and nine years later…uh, it’s getting to be problematic. Dyeing lurks on the horizon, but I’m trying to ignore it, thanks to inertia.

Meanwhile, the Capitol Fringe has begun, and there are so many shows that interest me. But time constraints (ie, having to do a million hours of freelancing) have forced me to drastically reduce how many shows I attend. I’m trying to decide if I should squeeze in two shows on Saturday (Desire Caught by the Tail: a play by Pablo Picasso, and a play about depression called 4.48 Psychosis), or if I should just attend one of those shows. I’ve been quite indecisive about the whole thing. If only all decisions were this carefree! I mean, jeez, it’s not like I’m living in a Darfur refugee camp and I’m trying to decide if I should walk 10 miles to gather firewood (thus risking rape, mutilation, and/or murder) or stay in my tent and let me children go without eating cooked food.

Some weirdness: this morning I was driving to work on 270 North and I saw a cop parked on the shoulder. It’s a common sight—cops are always parked on the shoulder of 270, waiting to bust speeders and HOV offenders. But this time it was different, because a cop got out of his cruiser, walked right into a lane of traffic, put out his hand in a “stop” gesture, and ushered an SUV to pull onto the shoulder, which it promptly did. What was that?! Is this how cops are going to start pulling over people now? They’re going to walk into traffic—on a busy highway—and use hand signals to catch drivers’ attention? Um, okay.

And last night there was more weirdness when I took Plath into the yard for a bit of fresh air (okay, fresh is a misnomer, because it’s downright tropical outside, but the air is fresh when compared to the circulated air-conditioned air of my apartment; and yes, as always, I had Plath on a harness and leash). Wait, let me backtrack for a second and mention that I recently encountered an odd bird when sitting in the yard with Plath and Freyja. This bird had a very abrasive and persistent squawk, and he hovered very closely to us—unusual for a bird. Even more unusual: the cats made no effort to try to attack him (rest assured, if they had, I would’ve stopped them). And it sounded like they were having a conversation of sorts with him. He squawked, they meowed, he squawked, they meowed, on and on. I began thinking, “Are they communicating?? And is he trying to get my attention to show me something?” A ridiculous idea, to be sure, but he just kept squawking and sitting very close to us, like he was trying to tell us something. It was both fascinating and unnerving.

So anyway, last night I was in the yard with Plath and the bird came back. Well, okay, it could’ve been a different bird, but if that’s the case, both birds looked and sounded identical. Again, this bird stayed close to us and squawked repeatedly. And again, Plath meowed in response and made no move to go after the bird. When Plath moved to a different section of the yard, the bird followed. When Plath came back, the bird followed. After a few minutes of this, I swear to god, the bird started repeatedly dive-bombing Plath. He didn’t actually touch Plath, but he flew only an inch or so above his fur when swooping over him. It was the strangest thing! I moved over to Plath’s side to protect him and the bird stopped dive-bombing him, but still sat nearby, squawking and watching us. Baffled, I began wondering if maybe the bird was out to get Plath because Plath killed one of his relatives. (There were two times when I wasn’t paying attention to what Plath was doing and he managed to kill a bird and a mouse. I buried both of them and felt horribly!) It was surreal.

Sunday marks 15 years since I took my first-ever plane ride. Why is this worth remembering? Because that plane ride inaugurated a fab two-week trip to Europe. It was a chaperoned student trip which allowed me to travel with three of my best friends (Gates, Foster, and Missy) and our favorite English teacher, along with others from our region and from other states. We started off in London/Windsor, took a ferry and bus to Paris/Versailles, took an overnight train to Berne/Lucerne, and then took a bus to Florence, Montecatini, and Rome. I can’t resist leaving a jaunty little salute to the trip on this blog, because it was…well, memorable, to say the least. I mean, when you take a cluster of 16- and 17-year-old Pennsylvania Dutch kids—none of who had ever left the country before (besides hitting Canada)—and you dump them in Europe, you get sparkling results.

I inadvertently burned off the front of Gates’s hair in London, which is probably the most memorable part of the trip. There were many other great memories, though, and here is slender sampling of them:

• I was denied entrance to the chapel at Assisi, getting screamed at in Italian by an angry monk who didn’t like my shorts

• playing “Shave and a Haircut” on the fusebox in our Montecatini hotel, causing people’s rooms to plunge into darkness at a jaunty tempo

• Foster fell asleep in the lobby of our Paris hotel and when she woke up she groggily roared “How long have I BIN here?”

• one of our fellow travelers (a guy from my high school who was a year ahead of me) had a drunken birthday party on the roof of our hotel in Rome, where he sobbed about his fear of me cutting my feet on the broken glass on our bathroom floor (it had broken glass because earlier in the evening I’d lost control of the shower hose while washing my hair and it caused the lights over the bathroom mirror to explode)

• On top of Mt. Pilatus, while I was, like, on my knees weeping from the sheer splendor of the Alps, Bill G. walked up to me, looked around at the staggeringly beautiful vista, said, “This is dope,” and then sauntered away

• on our tour bus, Missy was reading a tabloid ad for a love talisman and remarked that maybe she’d buy it; Bill G. overheard her and abruptly said, “Shit, I’ll slip you the hoagie,” before walking away

• on the Tube in London, a drunken Bill G. loudly slurred, “I really like it here in the BK,” because he was too stupid to realize that England is part of the United Kingdom, not the British Kingdom

• I crawled out onto our window ledge in Paris and shoved our contraband fast food garbage (fast food was banned from our hotel, which is why the garbage was contraband) into our neighbor’s open window

• after our tour of Westminster Abbey, Gates and I accidentally got onto a Japanese tour bus, thinking it was ours; we only realized our mistake when the seats around us were suddenly filled with dozens of Japanese tourists

• Gates and I also got trapped in a supermarket in Paris; we literally couldn’t find our way out of there

• I had to walk around Berne looking like I’d pissed myself, because my water bottle had burst a hole on the bus, soaking my shorts
  

• we found Gates passed out on the floor between the beds in our hotel room in Rome— and she wasn’t drunk
  

• Bill G. got cactus needles stuck in his back in Rome and Gates had to pick them out with Missy’s Swiss army knife

• when on the Dover-Calais ferry, Missy and I ducked down into a lower deck of the ferry and performed Mame dances (we’d been in our h.s. production of Mame three months previously), kick-ball-chaining and jazz handsing our way across the English Channel
  

• much snickering ensued when we realized that the dinner cruise we’d be taking on Lake Lucerne would be on a boat called the Gotthard

song heard most recently before posting: Maryland—Vonda Shepherd

the immorality of saving lives

Happy Birthday, Heather Love Hubbard!!!!

It’s a damn shame that Bush had to ruin your birthday by vetoing to lift the ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research. “It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it,” he said. Because doing research that could cure horrific diseases and save countless lives is immoral, don’t’cha know.

As I just said to Missy, it is fitting that last night I dreamt that Bush’s kid flung Chinese fighting stars right into Bush’s eyes. D’ohhh!



song heard most recently before posting: Seaside—Tori Amos

Welcome to the World!

I’m very happy to announce that my darling friend Antoinette—who has been in my life for nearly 20 years (we’ll celebrate our friendship anniversary this fall!)—has given birth to her first baby! Not-so-little Luca Antonio Rudolph was born at 1:30am on July 17, 2006, in Winchester, Virginia. He weighs 9 lbs and is 21" long.

He shares his birthday with John Jacob Astor, James Cagney, Art Linkletter, Phyllis Diller, Pink’s husband Carey Hart, Lucie Arnaz, horror movie queens PJ Soles and Heather Langenkamp, Diahann Carroll, Donald Sutherland, and...drum roll, s’il vous plaît...David Hasselhoff. Hot!!! He also shares a birthday with a host of Brits: Camilla Parker-Bowles, love rat Darren Day, Brooke Kinsella (from EastEnders), and Natasha Hamilton (from Atomic Kitten).

I also want to give a shout-out to my friends David and Mark, who are competing in the Gay Games this week. Chicago, like the rest of the US, is expecting blisteringly hot temperatures this week and is under a heat advisory, so I send them my best wishes to stay cool while they kick their competitors’ ass!

On a much more somber note, today is the 10th anniversary of the crash of TWA flight 800, which is most known for the conspiracies surrounding it (many believe that a US military missile shot it from the sky, causing a government cover-up). This crash in particular struck a chord with me—one that resonates to this day—because the flight carried 16 Paris-bound students (and five chaperones) belonging to a Pennsylvania high school French Club. Because I’m from Pennsylvania, and because I was in my high school’s French Club for four years, and because I too participated in a late-July student trip to Europe, the TWA tragedy really got under my skin. It’s hard to believe that a decade has passed.




song heard most recently before posting: Dancing Queen—ABBA

to medicate or not to medicate

Interesting. Twenty years after its premiere, I have learned about the existence of an opera version of Oliver Sacks’s wonderful neurology book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently it was transformed into a one-act chamber opera by Michael Nyman (who did the sumptuous soundtrack to The Piano). It was first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (coincidentally, that’s one of the places I want to hit next time I’m in London). This has me wanting to re-read the book!

Moving on...

I’ve been on antidepressants for nearly 11 years now, and periodically I idly mull over the idea of maybe stopping my meds. Because the thing is, I was never officially diagnosed as being clinically depressed. I just kind of assumed I was, since clinical depression runs on my dad’s side of the family, and after eight years of unrelenting, exhausting depression, I figured that it had to be more than just teen (and early twenties) angst. I said to myself, “If I’m clinically depressed, I should be on medication. There’s no shame in that. It’s no different from a diabetic taking insulin.” What really drove me to this wasn’t so much the years of depression I endured, but the situational depression I was facing at that particular time (it was situational depression on top of my regular depression, basically). It was this situational depression which finally made me say “Fucking hell, I’ve had enough!”

So I went to my GP and asked for meds and when he refused, I got a new GP who didn’t refuse. This was during fall break of my senior year of college, when I was 21 years old. First came Zoloft, which eventually helped, but because I didn’t like the side effects (short-term memory loss and reduced powers of concentration), I later switched to Serzone, which was worse. The spaciness was out of control. Then I tried Paxil, which was better, but still caused a bit too many memory and concentration problems for my taste. Nowadays I’m on Effexor. My short-term memory and ability to concentrate aren’t pitch-perfect (were they ever?), but they are vastly improved over what I experienced with the previous pills.

I can honestly say that I was never crippled with depression, and because of that, I’m sure there were people didn’t take it seriously. I was a functioning depressive. I was able to keep my head above the water, go to school, work at summer jobs, etc, but barely. And treading water like that took a lot of effort—it didn’t come easily. This is really the main thing that keeps me from stopping my meds now.

Like I already said, I do chew on this idea occasionally. Nobody really knows the long-term effects of antidepressant usage—or at least the effects of my particular antidepressant (it’s an SSNRI, not an SSRI, tricyclic, or MAOI)—and I worry that it could be doing lasting damage. And what if I don’t need it? What if life from ages 13 to 21 really was just an exercise in teen angst and nothing more? Why am I pumping chemicals into my body if I no longer need to do so?

I guess the sensible thing to do would be to stop the meds and see what happens. If I subsequently get smashed across the head with a 2x4 plank of depression, then I can always resume the meds, right? Well, yes, but what worries me is that I don’t really have the luxury of doing this. Because, after all, if the depression is indeed clinical and it returns (since it is no longer fettered by chemical chains), there are two likely scenarios I could face:

1) The depression is stronger than ever and effectively paralyzes me.
2) The depression exists as it existed before and I resume life as a functioning depressive.

And again, I don’t know if I have the luxury of facing either scenario. I face a lot more responsibility as a 32-year-old than I faced as a 16-year-old or a 20-year-old. Back then, being a functioning depressive wasn’t unreasonably difficult, because I didn’t have to function at a very high level. Minus 10th grade, when I juggled both school and minimum wage slavery in the hellish fast food industry, I kept my schooling and working segregated. During the school year I only focused on school, and during the summer I only focused on working at a crappy summer job. So my stress levels were a lot lower than those found in kids who had to work and go to school at the same time. I had very minimal responsibilities around the house, and aside from being involved in some school activities, I really didn’t do much. All I really had to do was put one foot in front of the other and, day by day, survive the smoggy torpor of life. I don’t want to minimize my academic experiences in college, because I worked hard, always carried a full course load, and prided myself on getting good grades and a high GPA—it wasn’t like I was a slacker. But there’s really no comparison between being a student, when I wasn’t responsible for much more than academics and doing my own laundry, and being an adult living on my own.

I have fewer responsibilities than many people. I’m not a CEO or even a manager, I don’t own my own house (through no fault of my own; I want to own a house, but can’t afford one in the current housing market), and I don’t have a spouse and/or kids. But that’s not to say that I don’t have any responsibilities. I have my main job and six freelancing jobs to do, bills to pay, a car to upkeep, cats to care for, and an apartment to run. I live alone, so I’m the one who is responsible for all the little things: making sure the garbage and recyclables get taken to the curb every Wednesday; doing the dishes and laundry; keeping the fridge stocked; ensuring that I’ve got backups of shampoo, light bulbs, toilet paper, etc; and so on. These responsibilities will only increase when I finally manage to snag a house. At that point there will be a new host of drudgeries to consider.

As I said, all of those responsibilities are little things, but you have to understand that when I’m depressed, it doesn’t take much to overwhelm me. I may be functioning okay, and successfully going through the motions of surviving, but in that state of mind, molehills easily become mountains. And trying to remember everything when depressed—remember to run this errand, remember to return that library book on time, remember to buy extra cat litter because the litter box is running low, remember to pay those bills before they’re due, remember to stop for gas before my car dies—is damn near impossible. It’s like asking me to remember the entire numeric sequence of pi.

So if I do stop the meds and I do resume life as a functioning depressive, I don’t see how I could swing it as an adult—especially where work is concerned. Juggle seven jobs when barely holding my head above the water? Umm, no. And that, I guess, answers the question. Stopping the medicine isn’t wise because I just can’t take the chance that I’ll slip under the waves. There’s just too much at stake, especially right now, when I’ve got a towering stack of freelancing facing me. So why do I sometimes still ponder the issue? Why do I sometimes still think Should I...?



song heard most recently before posting: Bachelorette—Björk

on the fringe

Excellent!

I just learned that DC is just about to launch its very own fringe festival! In 2003 I attended an event at the granddaddy of all fringe festivals, the Edinburgh Fringe. I would’ve loved to have attended more Fringe events, but time was limited, and I already had tickets for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an Edinburgh International Festival play, and an Edinburgh Book Festival poetry reading (I was also hot to trot for a French film playing at the Edinburgh Film Festival, but I couldn’t make it to either showing; I was fortunately able to score the film on DVD at a later date). I’m so excited that DC is throwing its hat into the fringe fray. I’ve got my must-see selections narrowed down to five events, and will try to whittle them even further, simply because of a lack of time. But it’s going to be hard!

This week I’ve gotten sucked into watching VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture (which I’d love to boycott, since they rejected my friends and me when we auditioned for the show in April), as well as the latest entry in their I Love the… series, I Love the ’70s, Part II. I’ve got so much freelancing to do this week, but I just can’t resist spending at least one hour each night with my holy trinity of TV boyfriends—those purveyors of gorgeous, buttery snark: Michael Ian Black, Hal Sparks, and Mo Rocca. Please, guys, won’t one of you marry me? Or at least be my friend?




song heard most recently before posting: Your Ex-Lover is Dead—Stars

London calling

I’m starting to give some serious thought about darkening London’s doorstep this fall. This is a city I love to a tingling degree, yet I haven’t been there since 1999. Part of me wants to take a break from working 800 jobs and do something fun, frivolous, and relaxing with some of the freelance money I’m pulling in. That money is meant to fund a future house and travels, but I’m starting to get antsy for a quick wallop of immediate gratification—something that will allow me to say, “Ah, yes, this is why I work seven days a week and constantly risk burning out—so I can be irresponsible every once in a while.”

You know how some people go on monastery retreats to get in touch with their spiritual sides? My trip to London would be like that. Not that I’d fall on my knees in Trafalgar Square and begin praying to the god of London; I just mean that a trip back there would be very…mmm…restorative. Calming. I’ve always thought of London as my spiritual home (I mean that in a non-religious way), and it’s time for me flutter my fingers once again in that glorious church o’ mine.

It would have to be a budget trip—as budget as possible, anyway. Sadly, the halcyon days of $300-and-under plane fares to London are long gone, especially with fuel prices being the way they are. But I’d still aim for as cheap a flight and hostel as possible. I’d eat cheaply, too.

My tentative plan at this point would be to fly out on a Thursday night in September and return home the following Monday afternoon. That would give me three full days to wander the streets, snap a ridiculous amount of photos (I’ve never been in London with a digital camera!), and do whatever I want to do. My goals would be to hit my old stomping grounds in Deptford, New Cross, and Greenwich; check out things that have only come into existence since the last time I was in London, like the Tate Modern; do a ghost walk tour (I did ghost walks in Edinburgh and San Antonio and loved both of them) or a gory history tour (a bit like the Jack the Ripper walking tour I once took in London); and maybe see some things I’ve never seen before, like the Design Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I’ll keep y’all posted.

Last night I browsed through the Time Out student guide I got for free when I started at Goldsmiths, because I thought they might provide tips on cheap accommodation in London. The guide is 12 years old, so it’s horribly outdated in a lot of respects, but my rationale was that the cheap lodging suggestions would probably still be valid. What’s funny is that at one point they made a comment about geeks and the internet, basically saying that only geeks use the internet. It made me smile because it was so outdated—like reading something from the dark ages. But it was true! The Internet and Web were so new at that point, and they seemed so unnecessary to anybody who wasn’t a geek. There weren’t many websites in existence, and I don’t even know if graphic browsers existed. After a while the relevance of email seemed obvious, but hardly anybody had accounts, so email was kind of purposeless because there was nobody to email. Heather had to drag me kicking and screaming into the world of email and ISCA during the spring of ’94—both of which I reluctantly accessed on a text-only browser. During the fall of ’95 I finally had someone teach me how to get onto the Web. But it took until late spring before I worked up the nerve to tackle a graphic browser (I was a bit of a technophobe back then); up until that point, I only looked at websites on a text-only terminal! Now I can’t imagine being without the Web or even knowing anybody without an email address (apart from my grandfather, of course). Even my hermit-like mountain-dwelling dad has got email and a cable internet connection.

Meanwhile, I was sniffing around the Internet Archive, and I found a five-year-old incarnation of my website, which was created seven years ago. It’s fun to see how simple it was in the beginning. Not that it’s elaborate now, mind you, because my skills are still rather limited, but compared to how it used to be, it’s downright futuristic nowadays. I also snickered at earlier bare-bones versions of my employer’s website and my alma mater’s website. How far we’ve all come!



song heard most recently before posting: Fade to Black—Apocalyptica

one year later

Today marks one year since the terrorist bombings in London.

What I wrote to my friend Richard in England last year on July 7:

Such awful news to wake up to. It’s certainly not the first time London has been bombed by terrorists, but this time in particular broke my heart, because it happened in so many different areas at once, in places that are so common: Tube stations and double decker buses. How sad that it always takes something like this to make me and others appreciate how fucking delicate we are, how delicate the balance between comfort and catastrophe.

You know I’m not religious in the least, but I recognize that everything in the world is a miracle in its own way. The fact that the universe and human beings manage to exist at all—and not only exist but thrive—is miraculous in the purest sense of the world. Earth floats in a sea of cosmic debris and chaos, and yet it stays alive. One extra degree of tilt on our axis and everything could end. We are perched on that ledge of annihilation and yet we don’t drop over the edge. We continue our languid twirl. All those chattering cells, spinning in their proper orbits in the groundwater of blood, doing what they need to do to keep the human body working. All those neurons firing at proper intervals. The growth of trees, the bloom of flowers, the way the sun and rain may bring ruin through drought and flood and yet, in the end, they manage to trade places and restore balance. There is wonder everywhere, for those who bother to look.

But the thing is...we don’t look. Or else we only look occasionally, and then turn away, bored. And amidst all the wonder, such waste...such dreadful, sickening waste. The things people are capable of doing to each other! Mother Nature isn’t perfect; the Boxing Day tsunami proved that better than anything. So you’d think that in the face of that, humans could maybe work together and be good to each other so at least they’d have something beneficent and sustaining to carry them through Mother Nature’s psychotic episodes. And there is goodness among mankind: I see it, I know of it. But there’s so much horror there, too. The gamut runs from genocide to pickpockets. So much barbarism from such flawed little creatures.

I don’t know why, but the other day Missy and I were talking about the massacres in Algeria in the mid-’90s. Entire villages slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated, hacked to death with machetes, knives, and saws. People burned alive. Pregnant women disemboweled. Children raped and killed. If only we could say that this had been an isolated chapter in history! Ah, I don’t know...terrorist attacks always make me introspective. I just don’t understand how mankind can be so sick when there is so much simple joy to be had in the treasures of daily life.

Today’s bombings in general remind me of a poem I wrote on the one-year anniversary of 9/11:

September 10, 2001

and tomorrow there will be smoke
and tomorrow there will be wailing
and tomorrow there will be bodies
still holy from their last commute, last cup of coffee,
but this morning a tree just east of the river

cocks its branches and waits, knowing,
and it doesn’t speak,
recognizing the ridiculous inadequacy of words,
well-meaning though they may be,
and it feels in its roots the filament of despair
that flies the planes and pitches the bodies
and on the 11th day god said let there be a conflagration
and light filters green through the branches
one last time before air becomes ash
one last time in praise of this plague
this blueness
this song

song heard most recently before posting: Adagio, Moderato (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor, op 85)—Sir Edward Elgar

herbivorial whines

I’ve been a vegetarian for 14 years (not a vegan, although I think I’ll gravitate to that point eventually), and I have dealings with an animal protection organization that is a level-headed group working to bring about lasting change through legislation and awareness. I emphase level-headed because being on the fringe scares people away, and makes the fringe-dweller less likely to be taken seriously on Capitol Hill. And I truly believe that at the end of the day, the most efficient, lasting way to protect animals is through legislation and education. How many animals can you truly protect if everyone is writing you off as an irrational, dangerous nutcase? Besides, this group is not trying to militantly convert anybody to a life of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s just trying to protect as many animals as it can, minimize and eradicate their suffering whenever possible, and raise awareness of animal issues, so that people can make informed choices.

I’d love to see more people become vegetarians, or to reduce their meat intake, and I always encourage people to eat as humanely as possible (cage-free eggs, non-factory farmed meat/dairy, etc), but when all is said and done, I think that food choices are an intensely personal matter, and I am not about to lecture people about why they should give up meat. After all, I don’t want people lecturing me about why I should eat meat.

Although everyone is ultimately free to eat what they want to eat, I can’t stand when meat consumers vocally try to minimize the inherent cruelty of the factory farming and foie gras industries and the suffering of those animals. Don’t try to argue that those force-fed ducks, those clubbed seals, those intensively confined farm animals, those farmed fish, and those skinned animals didn’t suffer. They have nervous systems, and they’re not brain-dead, so yes, they suffer. They have the same capacity to feel terror and pain as dogs, cats, and other pets. Don’t try to minimize their suffering in a bid to rationalize that big-ass steak you’re about to eat. Eat it if you want, but don’t try to argue that the cow who supplied that steak was incapable of feeling pain and fear. Or, at the very least, don’t do it in front of me.

There is such a dichotomy among many carnivores who eat cows, pigs, chickens, and fish but flinch when they hear about foreigners eating dogs, cats, and horses. How is it any different? Meat is meat. Acknowledge that. Just because chickens don’t curl up on the end of your bed each night doesn’t meant that they’re not capable of being as smart and loving as your pet dog. Again, eat those chickens if you want, but don’t flinch in exaggerated horror when you hear about someone else eating a dog. The same goes for fur. If you’re going to wear a fur coat made out of, say, leopard, don’t cringe when you hear about coats being made out of household cats in Asia.

At a minimum, acknowledge the dichotomy. Many people are paradoxical to one degree or another, and that’s okay—it’s what helps to make the world a flavorful place. I myself have lots of paradoxes flitting around my head. But I hate when people refuse to acknowledge their paradoxes and instead try to deny their existence or rationalize them away. For instance, instead of saying, “I know it’s strange for me to love hunting and eating meat while at the same time thinking of my pets as being like my children,” a person might say, “Well, it’s two completely different things. The animals being hunted and eaten don’t feel pain/don’t know what’s going on/have no sentient consciousness.”

The other day I watched a special on taboo foods on the National Geographic Channel. They covered the consumption of animal fetuses among a narrow population of folks in India. The narrator of the special asked why it isn’t okay among most folks to eat animal fetuses, but it is okay to eat baby animals (lamb and veal), adult animals, and animal organs. That’s what I’d like to know! How is eating a lamb fetus more inhumane than eating a lamb?

One thing that bugs me is how some people paint all animal protectionists with the same brush, writing all of us off as lunatics, misanthropes, and terrorists. The animal welfare workers who I know are very cool, intelligent, thoughtful, committed, compassionate, open-minded people. They are scientists, doctors, lawyers, parents. They’re not a bunch of ignorant, people-hating zealots.

But sure, I have my misanthropic moments. Absolutely. And I’m sure many of fellow animal welfare volunteers have their fair share of misanthropic moments, too, because of all the horror stories we hear at work. When you’re always hearing about animal cruelty cases—cats being burned alive and whatnot—it does tend to make you spit in anger at mankind. Really, though, my misanthropic moments have nothing to do with the fact that I love animals. It is possible to love animals without hating people, just like it’s possible to love people without hating animals. When I feel flares of misanthropy, it’s because of what people do—not because of the fact that I love animals. Turn on the news on any given day and you will be bombarded with instances of questionable human behavior. Genocide. Kidnappings. Murders. The mess in Iraq. Terrorism. Drunk drivers. Rape. Child abuse. Pedophiles. That’s why I have my misanthropic moments—because Nietszche wasn’t kidding when he said that man is the cruelest animal. (Side note: there are a lot of wonderful, positive people out there, too, and they are what keep me from being 100% misanthropic.)

Regarding the questionable misanthropy of animal protectionists, I will add something that is integral to the mindset of many of them; namely, that what’s best for animal health is often best for human health. The stress of prolonged confinement compromises the immune systems of factory farmed animals, making them more susceptible to pathogens that can be transferred to consumers. Because of their crappy living conditions, these animals are routinely fed antibiotics, which helps to create antibiotic resistance among human germs. That’s one of the reasons why an effective bird flu vaccine hasn’t been developed yet—because factory farmed chickens keep getting pumped full of different antibiotics, and the flu is mutating to keep one step ahead of those antibiotics. Not to mention factory farms’ environmental impact. You don’t have to be an environmentalist to be dismayed at the pollution stemming from factory farms.

Also, I want to know why so many people sneer, roll their eyes at, and ridicule animal protectionists and our desire to improve animal welfare. Why is it so awful to feel compassion for animals? Why is that such a terrible trait to have? When did kindness become a dirty word? Would the world really be a better place if nobody gave a shit about animals? Would that truly make things better for us humans?



song heard most recently before posting: Exhausted—Joseph Arthur

partying like it’s 1776

It’s Independence Day, and I’m celebrating my independence from work by lolling on the sofa in old, comfy clothes; idly watching DVDs; reading; updating my website; and writing this entry. Because I work 800 jobs, free days are few and far between, and I am relishing it. But there will be no veggie burgers on the grill and no fireworks for me this year; it’s too hot to schlep anywhere for fireworks (not to mention the fact that thunderstorms are expected), and…well, I don’t have a grill. So my all-American 4th of July feast will most likely consist of vegetarian salmon smothered in Swedish salmon sauce. Rock on!

When I was a kid the 4th of July was always a lot more traditional. With the exception of a few out-of-state jaunts to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins, the holiday was generally spent in our backyard, with my grandparents as visitors, making hamburgers, hot dogs, and corn on the cob on our little coal hibachi (followed by gooey marshmallows later in the day, as the coals burned down into delicate gray pillows). Sometimes we set up the badminton kit and played a few rounds. Mostly we just hung out and relaxed until it was time to watch fireworks from the grassy slope across the street from Hills department store. The slope abutted the county prison, which was a nice touch of irony, considering the prisoners were far from being independent and free.

When I was an Anglophiliac teenager, the 4th of July was an occasion to lament the Redcoats’ loss of the war. While I do admit that there would’ve been some perks to the Brits winning (namely, no Dubya as president, and I wouldn’t have to pay ridiculous import prices for my Yorkie bars and issues of Heat magazine), at the end of the day, I recognize how lucky I am to live in a country that—while quite flawed, as most countries are—is nonetheless independent and allows me to be fairly free. I honor every soldier who died for this freedom.

I couldn’t tell you which July 4th was my favorite, but I do clearly remember which one was the worst. It was in 2000, when I was 26. I was on my way to Virginia to meet up with my friend Gates; we were going to try to catch either DC’s or Alexandria’s fireworks display from the roof of her office building in Falls Church. When I stopped for gas near my apartment, my car—my dear, beloved, not-so-trusty Dymphna—died. Because of the holiday, AAA didn’t have a lot of staff working, and I ended up having to wait pretty much the entire day for a tow. That wasn’t even the worst part of the day, though.

The worst part was when a couple stopped for gas and decided to give their orange tabby Ozzy an opportunity to stretch his legs (they were from out of state and were presumably in the midst of a long journey). Before the woman could get a good grip on his leash, he slipped away and immediately bolted toward the busy road running alongside the gas station. As she screamed and chased him, he successfully made it across the first two lanes. A grassy bulge separated these lanes from the other side of the road, and after he disappeared across the bulge, I heard a terrible thump that will always be tattooed in my memory. The woman and I raced over to him and pulled him onto the grassy strip. He died in her arms and we both bawled while she cradled him. Being an animal lover who owns two cats, it was a wrenching accident to witness—one that I will never forget.



song heard most recently before posting: The Land Between Solar Systems—Múm