a bit of culture

On Friday night I met up with a big group of coworkers at Sabang, a brilliant Indonesian restaurant with a massive vegetarian menu that includes an array of vegetarian seafood. It was fun and the dinner lasted until 10pm, which is positively scandalous for a hermit like me.

I had an embarrassing incident when I first arrived. I walked in and I heard someone say, “Oh, here’s another one!” and she motioned for me to come over to her table. I didn’t recognize the three people at the table, but since I’d never met one of the coworkers who was going to be at the dinner, and since I didn’t know most of the spouses who were going to be there, either, I just assumed that these people were either spouses or last-minute-addition coworkers who I hadn’t met yet.

They introduced themselves and started gabbing about how one of them had gotten arrested for passing out Impeach Bush buttons somewhere. That definitely made them seem like people from my office. (What can I say? We’re a liberal bunch.) But slowly I began thinking, “Wait a minute...am I at the wrong table? Something doesn’t feel right.” So I mumbled something about needing to run outside to check my voicemail, and I hid in the lobby, waiting to see if any coworkers showed up. They did, and when we walked into the restaurant together, they didn’t go to the table where I’d just been. So I had been at the wrong table after all! D’oh! I tried to shrink down into my seat so my original dining companions wouldn’t see me and wonder what the hell I was doing sitting with an entirely different group. But even if they didn’t see me, they still must’ve been wondering what was up with that weird girl who sat down with them, introduced herself, and then disappeared into the night.

On Saturday I worked on freelancing for a few hours and then hit a Capital Fringe Festival play, The Lesbian and the Flying Pig. It was about the US under Christian fundamentalist rule, and it was funny, moving, and scary. (Scary mainly because a Christian fundamentalist is currently in charge of the US; he may not be of Handmaid’s Tale proportions, but still!) As the play was only a block away from the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, and there was an hour between when the play ended and the museum closed, I decided to browse through their modern art wing. I was quite entranced with one Andrew Wyeth painting I saw, but finding a copy for my apartment is proving to be very difficult.

On Sunday morning I went to a coworker’s son’s bris and naming ceremony at her house. It was my first bris and I loved every minute of it. The rabbi was hilarious and the whole ceremony was just so moving, lovely, and meaningful. They had quite the lunch spread, so two other coworkers and I settled down after the ceremony with plates of food and spent a good hour or so eating and chatting. We really hit it off with one guy at our table—a Manchester, England, native.

In a different vein, this is an avatar I created on Yahoo a few weeks ago. It’s as close as I could come to making an avatar who looks like me. I gave her my brown hair, blue eyes, black-framed glasses, and square face, and put her in an outfit that looks like my clothing. I made her look pissed off, too. Fitting!



song heard most recently before posting:
Shady River—The Chapin Sisters

an interlude of miscellany

My hair. I’m chomping at the bit to hack it off. For the past few years I’ve gone through these cycles wherein I grow my hair long, cut it all off, donate it to charity, and then grow it long again. The last two times I did this, the hair went to Locks of Love (the picture to the left was taken after my last big cut, in December 2005). During this round I decided I wanted to do something different; namely, donate it to Pantene Beautiful Lengths so it would go to a woman with cancer. They only require an eight-inch ponytail, and since mine is now clocking in at nine inches, I knew I was finally free to chop it. Only…no. Turns out they don’t accept dyed hair, and I finally had to resort to dyeing mine a few months ago, since it’s turning white at warp speed. And even though I didn’t dye my hair at all between the ages of 17 and 32, it’s still exempt from donation. I’m disappointed! I guess I’ll just have to give it to Locks of Love again, as they take dyed hair. However, their minimum requirement is a 10-inch ponytail, so I’ll have to wait another month or two before it’s long enough to donate. Gah!

Plath. I was so pissed at him earlier this week, because he killed a poor little bird when I took him and Freyja in the yard to get some fresh air. When we’re outside I watch them carefully to make sure they don’t attempt to leave the yard, but I guess no amount of careful watching can stop a cat from spontaneously ripping a bird from the sky. Here’s what I don’t get: Plath is overweight, 10 years old, on Prozac, and has been a housecat his entire life. Yet somehow he’s able to leap into the air with the speed and acumen of a cheetah to suddenly pluck a bird out of mid-flight. How does he do it?? He killed one other bird in the past, as well as a mouse. Obviously I need to keep this cat away from the great outdoors! My backyard is turning into a graveyard. If I were a rapper I’d have to go by the name Gravedigga, especially since I had to dig a mouse grave at my mom’s house the other week, too, after her boyfriend killed the poor little fellow.

I’m partially to blame for the bird’s demise, but that didn’t stop me from being a passive-aggressive bitch who refused to talk to Plath for a few days, aside from saying things like, “I’m going to the courthouse tomorrow to get your name legally changed to Plath Wayne Gacy” and “Oh, you want some of this pizza, eh? Well, I bet the bird you killed would like some of it, too. Only HE’LL NEVER EAT AGAIN.”

Lindsay Lohan. She should go to jail. Yes, addiction is a terrible disease, and I do think it would be a shame if she didn’t get the medical help she needs for her addictions, but the bottom line is that she broke the law. Several laws, actually. Having an addiction shouldn’t give you a Get Out of Jail Free card. If Joe Schmo got busted twice for DUI, and both times he had cocaine on him, and he had been drinking underage during the first DUI charge, his ass would be in serious trouble. It wouldn’t simply be a matter of sending him to rehab to wipe the slate clean. Why should Lindsay Lohan be any different? People can break many laws in the name of addiction, and I don’t see the justice in letting them escape punishment for it—especially when those broken laws could cost other people their lives. Should a sex addict avoid jail time if his addiction causes him to start raping women? Should a gambling addict avoid jail time if his addiction causes him to start robbing banks? I personally think Lohan should go to rehab and do some jail time. Hey, at least it will keep her out of the clubs for a while.

Michael Vick. The other day I got into an online debate regarding Vick and the charges against him. I said that I wanted nothing to do with Nike until they drop their sponsorship of them. They have put aside their plan to endorse his shoes, but they haven’t dropped him from their roster completely.

Someone retorted:

Um, let me double check on something. Yep, there it is presumption of innocence. Or, as we laymen like to say: “innocent until proven guilty”.

What if (and yes, I read the whole indictment, honest, you can read it on line) he really had nothing to do with it? Or he isn’t convicted of any wrong doing? And you’re Nike, and you dropped an innocent man from your payroll? Then what?

Well?

I responded:

As for Michael Vick, yes, he could be innocent. That’s for a jury to decide, not me. Personally—and I know my opinion doesn’t mean anything in the end—I think he’s probably guilty. A very intensive long-term investigation found, on his property, 52 pit bulls and dogfighting equipment such as forced breeding stand, treadmills, performance-enhancing drugs, and a bloodstained fighting pit. Is it possible all that stuff was on his property and he knew nothing about it? If he doesn’t actually live there—if he bought the house for his cousins, as he claims—he might not know about it, but then again, doesn’t he have a single staffer who could report to him what’s going on? Doesn’t he ever visit this property? If he visited it even shortly he would’ve seen the bloodstained pit at the very least.

But still, he could be innocent and losing his endorsement over nothing. And you know what? I don’t even care. Call me callous or bitchy or heartless or whatever, but honestly, I could care less if he loses his endorsement deal while he’s innocent. I never want to see an innocent man go to jail, but losing an endorsement deal when he’s already a millionaire? I ain’t shedding any tears over that. Countless innocent people have been falsely accused of crimes in this country, and that’s a damn shame—that’s a major flaw in the system—but it happens, and most people don’t have millions of dollars to fall back on when it happens. If Vick is innocent and lost his endorsement deal or his job with the Falcons unfairly, his career isn’t over. Celebrities always get second and third and fourth chances. Normal people rarely do. Some other team will hire him, and somebody else will give him an endorsement deal, and he’ll make millions more selling his story to the tabloids.

He replied:

I know this is a tough case to put your personal feelings away, but it’s entirely possible that he’s totally innocent. And that he feels just as badly about this as you do. His peeps never told him about it becasue they knew he wouldn’t approve. And yes, isn’t it possible that he never stays at the house, he just bought it for his friends and cousins to live in.

Possible, yes?

So, it seems to me, your arguement boils down to the fact that he’s rich, and likely to get richer no matter what happens. So to hell with him, and the system.

OK. that’s fine. I feel your pain. Be pissed at M Vick.

I’m not sure what Nike’s guilty of here.

Someone else wrote:

This sounds like the same thing - is it a boycott if you don’t already use their product/service? How much business had you done previously with Nike?

The other part of your argument is just emotionally flammable. I understand that this is a news topic, but people (not just you) really are starting to sound like a torch-carrying angry mob. How many folks had those Duke lacrosse players convicted of rape the minute the story broke? If that isn’t all the proof anyone will ever need to make sure we let the whole story play out before we ruin someone’s good name, then I don’t know what would do.

Does my gut say that he is guilty of something? Yup. Do I think his career is over? Yes, again. He may have millions now - but his earning power is severely damaged simply based on the outstanding accusation. Nike, the NFL and anyone else who does business with Michael Vick all need to reassess their business relationship. Right now, he is a cancer - and this is not something that will go away. This is the biggest sports story of this decade - as big as Pete Rose in the 80’s and OJ in the 90’s.

My understanding, by the way, is that the NFL and Nike have both removed all Michael Vick merchandise from their respective web sites. Nike has (at least for the moment) delayed a Michael Vick-related product launch (shoes?). So, if there are still fringe groups (PETA isn’t the most reliable unbiased source, in my own opinion) that are calling for a Nike boycott, it is possible that they have an agenda outside of this incident.

I replied:

QUOTE
is it a boycott if you don’t already use their product/service? How much business had you done previously with Nike?

Like Carrot Cake Man said earlier:

QUOTE
Yes, if I talk about it, and convince others not to [go] there who did before.

I’m desperately unathletic, so aside from buying a single pair of Nikes two years ago (and that was only so my feet wouldn’t be destroyed during a walking-intensive vacation), I don’t use Nike products. There has just never been a need for them for my torpid life. But I know people who do use Nike products quite a lot, and that’s where my boycott comes in. Will they listen to me? Who knows. Probably not. But I tried.

QUOTE
NFL and Nike have both removed all Michael Vick merchandise from their respective web sites. Nike has (at least for the moment) delayed a Michael Vick-related product launch (shoes?)

Yeah, and it’s my understanding that this was driven in part by the outrage of people appalled by the dogfighting charges—people who were boycotting Nike and the NFL and phoning them with their complaints. The media focus also had a lot to do with it. If none of this had happened, would Nike and the NFL be pulling that merchandise? Maybe. I don’t know. This is why I was doing the boycott—to get the merchandise and the endorsement pulled. If Vick is proven innocent, then, as far as I’m concerned, they can sell all the Vick products they want and endorse him all they want.

I agree that people are starting to sound like a torch-carrying angry mob, and it’s not my intention to join them. Mass hysteria and witch hunts don’t appeal to me at all. I’m not baying for blood—I’ve just been telling people how I feel about the issue and then letting the justice system do its job.

QUOTE
I know this is a tough case to put your personal feelings away, but it’s entirely possible that he’s totally innocent. And that he feels just as badly about this as you do. His peeps never told him about it becasue they knew he wouldn’t approve. And yes, isn’t it possible that he never stays at the house, he just bought it for his friends and cousins to live in.

Possible, yes?

It’s absolutely possible. Still, I have to wonder how much responsibility property owners should have for property they don’t live in. If you own a house and give it to your friends and they use it for sexual slavery, should you be held partly responsible for this, even though you didn’t know what was going on? I honestly don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair. Yet how fair was it for the people forced to be sexual slaves? Who was looking out for them? Maybe the one thing that could’ve saved them was a landlord/property owner taking some time to periodically check on his/her property to make sure everything was okay.

It’s kind of a murky, gray area, and if anything good comes out of this Vick case (aside from those dogs being rescued), maybe it can be a clarification of the extent of responsiblity a property owner carries when s/he doesn’t live in the property.

QUOTE
So, it seems to me, your arguement boils down to the fact that he’s rich, and likely to get richer no matter what happens. So to hell with him, and the system.

Well...yeah, basically. Not the part about the system, though. I think the judicial system needs an overhaul because it’s deeply flawed, and the fact that very little is being done about it is a tragedy.

Look, I’m not professing to be unbiased here. I’m totally biased. I’ll readily admit that I’m not a big fan of rich celebrities and athletes who usually think they’re above the law. And I’ll readily admit that when it comes to animal cruelty cases, my first line of defense is for the animals who suffered, perpetrators—guilty or not—be damned. I always take the animals’ side first. No, it’s not fair for me to give a toss about the people accused of animal cruelty. It’s not fair for me to be biased. But I work in the animal protection field and every single day I hear news about horrific acts of cruelty against animals. Today, for example, I got to work and the first thing I saw on email was a press release about two girls who held down a kitten in California and set him on fire. This is what I see every day. After five years it’s getting hard to set aside compassion for the dogfight ring leader or the puppy mill owner or the cat decapitator who might be innocent, especially when investigative facts point to the contrary. It’s hard for me to give those people the benefit of the doubt, because all I see are the mutilated and abused animals. This is my personal bias.

Why not leave my job? Because, daily horror aside, I love my job. I love that I’m doing my part to make a difference in animals’ lives. It’s the same reason my boss’s wife loves being a chemo nurse, even though it means seeing death and despair on a daily basis.

The debate dwindled down after that. Vick’s trial is slated to start in November. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out...



song heard most recently before posting:
Good Times Gonna Come—Aqualung

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from ’80s Song Lyrics

Forget about kindergarten. The only thing I learned in kindergarten is that it’s a mistake for a five-year-old child to wear a one-piece Halloween costume to class, because when she needs to pee she’s not going to be able to get the costume off in time, and after she pisses her pants her mother will have to come to the school with a clean pair of plaid bellbottoms for the poor child to change into.

No, kindergarten didn’t tell me everything I need to know about life—all my important life lessons came from the sage wisdom of 1980s song lyrics. Below are a few of them, all of which would probably be right at home inside a fortune cookie. If you can name all the song titles from whence these lyrics came, I’ll toss you some cookies (or some biscuits, for you Brits). Please feel free to add your own lyric life lessons to the comments section, if you’re feeling philosophical and wise.


Sometimes love can be mistaken for a crime.

Hollywood ain’t paved with gold—it’s just a trick of light.

Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.

Everybody’s looking for something.

We all have wings but some of us don’t know why.

Different people have different needs.

Life is cruel—life is never kind.

A man can tell a thousand lies.

Ain’t no use in complaining when you got a job to do.

Love is a battlefield.

Sometimes love don’t feel like it should.

To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind; there’s no comfort in the truth—pain is all you’ll find.

We’re fools to the rules of a government plan.

Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.

If the wind is right you can find the joy of innocence again.

When you go you’re gone forever.

You don’t know what you got until you lose it all again.

It can cut you like a knife if the gift becomes a fire.

When you’re born to run it’s so hard to just slow down.

You’ve got to roll with the punches to get to what’s real.

You live for the fight when that’s all that you got.

Summer’s like a merry-go-round.

If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change.

We are stronger when we are giving love.

Everything is nothing if you got no one.

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.

No one can take away your right to fight and to never surrender.

Some things in life you cannot measure by degrees.

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble.

There ain’t no perfect world.

There’ll be rumors floating around on Judgment Day.

You can’t fight passion when passion’s hot.

When you hear temptation call, it’s your heart that takes the fall.

We don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time.

The sun always shines on TV.

Even doves have pride.

There’s nothing fair in this world, there’s nothing safe in this world, there’s nothing sure in this world, there’s nothing pure in this world.

Playing games is part of human nature.

Everybody’s going off the deep end.

There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime.

Sometimes there’s nothing to feel, sometimes there’s nothing to hold, sometimes there’s no time to run away, sometimes you just feel so old.

Some things will never change.

Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past; you must fight just to keep them alive.

In violent times you shouldn’t have to sell your soul.

Some will win, some will lose, some were born to sing the blues.

Love’s a game of easy come and easy go.

Love is like a bomb.

It's so much easier to push instead of pull.

If you know what you want, just go on out and get it.

Fact is fiction and TV reality.

Every night has its dawn.

Everybody’s got a reason to live. Everybody’s got a dream and a hunger inside.

Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

So many times it happens too fast—you trade your passion for glory.

There is freedom within, there is freedom without.

It’s no better to be safe than sorry.

The more you live, the faster you will die.

There is good and bad in everyone.

Memories will burn you.

The passing of time leaves empty lives waiting to be filled.

Love is a dangerous drug. You have to receive it and you still can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s savage and it’s cruel and it shines like destruction; comes in like the flood and it seems like religion. It’s noble and it’s brutal, it distorts and deranges, and it wrenches you up and you’re left like a zombie.

Everyone needs a place and home’s the most excellent place of all.

We all need control.



song heard most recently before posting:
The Prayer—Bloc Party

dust to dust

“When a plant or animal dies it will eventually be eaten by the decomposing microbes. They will decay or disassemble it and put it back into the soil. This life-death-decay-life cycle has built the thin layer of fertile soil that covers our land. It nourishes and grows our plants, which are the bridge of life between the soil and man. The laws of Nature demands that all expired life be recycled back to the soil to serve as food and energy to support future life. Nature did not exempt the human body from this cycle. Should not it too be recycled?” –Malcolm Beck, “Pushing Up Daisies”

Long before I read The American Way of Death and learned about the seamy underbelly of the American deathcare industry, I decided that I wanted to be cremated. It just seemed like more of a free-spirited thing to do, and as a gal with a rabid case of wanderlust, I liked the idea of merging with the wind and rain instead of being anchored to one spot for eternity.

As I got older I also recognized the value in staying away from modern burial techniques, since they’re so economically wasteful and bad for the environment. Consider this:

• Many coffins aren’t solid wood—they’re made of chipboard that contains formaldehyde—and their handles are made of plastic made to look like brass. When happens when that formaldehyde and plastic starts leaching into the soil? Toxic embalming fluids, along with the copper or lead in expensive caskets, can leak into the ground and water supply.
  

• When a corpse decomposes inside a coffin, there isn’t enough oxygen to create aerobic compost (a beneficial process). Instead, anaerobic decomposition takes place and produces methane, which is 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas such as CO2.

• Massive cemeteries take up land that could be used for food production, playgrounds, or nature preserves.
  

Those are some of the reasons why cemetery burial isn’t for me.

So why am I thinking about all of this right now, when I’m healthy and robust and only 33 years old? I’m not going to deny that I’m a morbid ghoul at heart, but really, that’s not the reason why I gave this subject so much thought. No, my intentions were far more straightforward and practical. Basically I just realized that, hey, I could die at any minute. Even as a teenager I had no illusions of immortality. And I knew that if I died without telling my family how I wanted them to dispose of my body, they’d probably end up taking the safe route and burying me in a cemetery, even if that’s not what I wanted. Yes, okay, it wouldn’t really matter if they did that, since I’d be dead and unable to see/experience what was going on. But, see, I just think it’s sad when a person’s deathcare clashes with his/her wishes or personality type, simply because the family had no idea—or didn’t care—what the person wanted. Like an earth-loving hippie who’s buried in a huge mausoleum or an expatriate who’s buried in his hometown, simply because that’s what their families want.

So at an early age I scripted a will stating my wishes: I want any viable organs and tissues to be donated; I want to be cremated, with half of my ashes spread in Greenwich and half spread in Lebanon County; and I want a memorial service that’s simple and nonreligious, with particular songs played and particular poems read. In lieu of flowers, donations should be made to my favorite charities or trees should be planted in my honor. If flowers are received, they should be donated to hospitals and hospices afterward. I specified that my dad is to take custody of my cats. I specified which charities/organizations should receive money from my estate. I said that my possessions and valuables should be distributed among my family and my very closest friends, as long as we’ve had contact within the six months prior to my death. Certain items go straight to my mom—my photos and journals, mainly—and my journals can be read by my loved ones after Heather has edited them to *ahem* remove any incriminating evidence.

In recent years, though, I’ve been pulling away from the cremation idea, mostly because it’s not an ecologically sound practice. I learned that the typical crematorium consumes around 285 kilowatt hours of gas and 15kWh of electricity during the three-five hours it takes to burn a body at 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s around the same amount of energy an average person uses at home in a month. Plus cremation releases into the air CO2, mercury vapor (from fillings), dioxins, and hydrocarbons (from crematory coffins). A 1990 study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that mercury vapor during cremation of a person with the average number of fillings was toxic enough to poison the fish in five 10-acre lakes. A 1999 report from San Francisco’s Public Works Department found that crematoria were the third-highest contributor of mercury in the region. Not only that, but are ashes really good for the environment?

In 2003 I read Mary Roach’s book Stiff, and it led me to consider human composting. This involves freezing a body; immersing it in liquid nitrogen; letting it disintegrate into an odorless, hygienic powder; and then burying it in a biodegradable coffin. Any toxic parts like mercury fillings can be separated out beforehand. The powder composts completely into a rich soil in just a few months. A freeze-dried body supposedly produces up to 65 pounds of pure organic matter that would enrich the soil. It does sound kind of grisly and weird at first blush, but the basic tenet of composting is pure: it’s simply a means of wholly returning to the earth and doing one’s part to nurture soil and trees.

However, I do have to wonder: How much energy does it take to make the liquid nitrogen? Will any traces of it remain in the powder and contaminate the earth? Wouldn’t it be better to just put my corpse on a traditional compost pile and let nature do its trick? Will such an option ever be made available to the general public? Probably not, because most people would be turned off by the idea—they wouldn’t want to think of their loved ones decaying under a pile of waste, coffee grounds, banana peels, etc. But it would be a practical solution for someone who wants to be composted without liquid nitrogen. Compost companies have found that large animals (even full-grown horses) disappear completely within two weeks when placed in an active compost pile. Nothing remains—no teeth, bones, or hair. Wouldn’t a human disappear almost as quickly? It’s not like my family would have to live with the thought of my body hanging out in a compost pile for a full year.

But anyway, the other day I read a great article (in, of all places, the June 25th issue of People magazine) about green burials. The article focused on the Ramsey Creek Preserve in South Carolina, a cemetery/nature preserve that’s exclusively reserved for green burials. The owners dig all graves by hand, and the cost of each plot is used to fund land restoration. Headstones are simple and made from local fieldstone. Coffins are simple pine boxes that are biodegradable. Bodies are unembalmed and wrapped in simple cotton shrouds. If you were a fan of Six Feet Under, you’ll remember when Nate was buried in a similar manner—wrapped in a shroud and buried under a tree in a nature preserve.

After People ran the article, letters began pouring in, some in support of green burials and others condemning it. One woman wrote, “I have seen the postmortem effect on a human body and cannot fathom the idea of allowing loved ones to decompose in a crude fashion.”

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what this woman does for a living? That’s right, she’s a funeral director. You mean a funeral director actually disapproves of burials that don’t require funeral homes? Shocking! Beyond that eye-rolling aspect, her letter cracked me up. “Decompose in a crude fashion”? As compared to the elegant decomposition you get in a casket? Come on, decomposition is decomposition. It’s ugly and it’s nasty and it’s natural no matter how you look at it. Granted, a top-of-the-line casket will keep the moisture and worms at bay for a long time, but the body, no matter how insulated and embalmed it is, is still going to decay. Decay is inevitable. So why not do it in a way that benefits the earth? It’s worth considering, anyway, although in the end, it’s a highly personal choice.

Personally I think that choosing to allow your body to return to the earth isn’t disrespectful or dishonorable. It’s not “crude.” It’s what our ancestors did, and if it was good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for us? It’s definitely something that captivates me the more I think about it, and I sincerely hope that the green burial movement gains some steam in the years ahead.

Some links I found on the subject:

http://greenburialcouncil.org/

http://www.greenburials.org/

http://www.forestofmemories.org/

http://www.memorialecosystems.com/


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

fields of plenty

Yesterday I headed out to Berryville, Virginia, for Antoinette’s son Luca’s first birthday party. It was 95 degrees and the party was outside (normally a recipe for disaster in my heat-hating world), but I still had a really good time, especially since I hadn’t seen Luca since his christening in November. He banged his face on someone’s sunglasses at the party and ended up with a bloody nose—his very first. The poor boy!

The birthday boy and me

One thing I dreaded about the party was seeing Antoinette’s dad, because every time he sees me he asks, “Why you not-a married yet? Eh? Why you still-a single?” etc, etc. And he always expresses shock and horror over the fact that my parents are divorced, even though they’ve been divorced now for 17 years. This time I think he stayed away from those lines of conversation, but I can’t be sure, because I couldn’t understand a single word he was saying. It’s weird...sometimes I can hack my way through his accent and other times I’m lost. Yesterday was one of the times when I couldn’t understand him. So I just nodded and smiled and said “Yeah!” a lot. For all I know, the conversation could’ve gone like this:

Mario: “Are your parents dead?”
Me: “Yeah!”
Mario: “Did you kill them?”
Me: “Yeah!”
Mario: “Did you kill them because you’re a gross, crazy, useless little bitch?”
Me: “Yeah!”
Mario: “By the way, I hate the fact that you and my daughter have been friends for 21 years. You’re a bad influence and the whole family hates you.”
Me: “Yeah!”

On my way to Luca’s party I passed some fields full of hay bales, and because I’ve always wanted to photograph hay bales (yeah...don’t ask), I made a mental note to stop at the field on the eastbound side of Rt. 7 on my way home, especially since there was a country road running beside it (which would make for easier parking—I didn’t want to park along busy Rt. 7). So when I was heading home, I pulled onto the country road and parked my car on the shoulder, and to my sheer delight, I saw that the hay bale field had a huge rainbow arching over it. Plus the light was stunning because the hay was illuminated from the sun behind me, yet the sky over the hay remained dark and roiling. I scrambled out of my car and ran across the road, dropping my camera along the way (it’s banged up but still working just fine, thank god). I nearly fell a few times, too, because apparently platform sandals weren’t meant for running through rutted, hilly earth and knee-high grass. (Who knew?) I frantically snapped away for several minutes, raindrops and lightning bolts be damned, getting some strange stares from passers-by in the process. It was totally worth it. I’m always happy when pictures turn out like I planned!

These wildflowers were in a field across the
street from the hay field.

song heard most recently before posting:
Man in Motion—John Parr

worth more dead than alive

$6025.00

Hot damn, y’all! Being born with a life-threatening condition pays off. My craniosynostosis will help me net over $6000! Too bad I won’t be around to enjoy that sweet, sweet booty.


song heard most recently before posting:
Money for Nothing—Dire Straits

education

I nearly squealed with delight when I read this in Heather Armstrong’s latest blog posting:

“No, all my nightmares are now about college, all about not knowing the answers to a test, or not knowing that I’ve been enrolled in a class the entire semester until the week of finals, or waking up late and missing the final entirely. It’s never about sharks or getting hit by a bus or having the house crushed by a dragon, at least not anymore.”

This was so cool to read because, like her, I have frequent college nightmares, even though I’ve been out of college for over a decade. It’s weird…these dreams began not long after I graduated from college—I never actually had them when I was in college. They’ve been increasing in frequency as the years have passed, too.

The most common variation of the dreams is this: the end of the semester has arrived and I realize I haven’t attended class for most—or all—of the semester, so I have no idea how I’m going to pass my finals. A less frequent variation involves me arriving on campus at the beginning of the semester and not knowing what my mailbox code is, and/or what my class schedule involves. In the latter, I need to go to some office on campus to find out my schedule, but I can’t find the office and nobody can tell me where it’s located, so I just wander and wander, becoming more panicked with every step. In the dreams where I missed class all semester, the classes I missed are always the same: English and gym. Always English and gym.

So, okay, in a typical dream, finals are upon us and I break into a sweat of panic as I realize, “Holy shit, I haven’t been to English or gym class since, like, the first day of the semester. How am I going to pass these exams? How am I going to explain to my professors why I was missing all semester long?” Then I start coming up with myriad excuses to tell my professors. Like, I got really sick and couldn’t attend class for months, or I had personal troubles that kept me away from school. In these dreams I’m always on the cusp of graduating and I always realize that my failure to show up in class is most likely going to cost me my diploma. Sometimes in these dreams I’m running back and forth between my real-life job in Maryland and my college in Scranton, and I know that if I miss my chance to graduate, I’ll either lose my job because I won’t have a diploma or I’ll lose my job because they generously allowed me to take time off work to go to school, but that generosity is going to stop if I go over my allotted four years of schooling.

I’m quite curious as to what these dreams mean and how many other people out there have variations of them!

Speaking of college, I saw the greatest bumper sticker recently: “Education is everywhere.” And it’s true. So very true. I love the idea that education isn’t confined to a classroom or a textbook. That it’s out there in the world, in our experiences, in our daily lives. That just by observing something, paying attention, picking up a book, or watching a documentary, you are educating yourself and expanding your world.

But it also made me think about the paradoxical nature of the education section of my quotes collection. On one hand, there are quotes touting the virtue of being educated. I really do support this notion: the idea that education is exquisitely important, that it can change the world. I think it’s a tragedy when kids drop out of school prematurely and never go back for a GED. I think it’s a tragedy when kids in other countries are forced out of school at a painfully young age because they must pay to attend upper grades and they have no money to do so. I think it’s a tragedy that universities aren’t free or at least reasonably-priced, and that so many universities rely heavily on SAT scores for admitting students. (I test rather poorly, especially when it comes to math, so my SAT scores make me look like I’ve got about three brain cells in my head. Thankfully the four schools to which I applied looked beyond my low scores and were willing to take a chance on me.)

But on the other hand, I’ve got quotes in my collection that are heavily critical of education. I think it’s because I’m dismayed by the state of the educational system in the US—its increasing dependence on standardized tests, its emphasis on rote memorization, its focus on textbook learning.

And administrators are cracking the whip, forcing teachers to follow strict guidelines in order to ensure that students can pass specific standardized tests, which means teachers are losing the freedom to stray from textbooks and inject unconventional methods into their teaching techniques and lesson plans. Often they’re not even allowed to choose their own textbooks; instead, they have to buy specific texts chosen by administrators. So certain textbooks become orthodoxy and thus a certain set of prejudices is passed down year after year. With such a strict adherence to textbooks and rigid tests, the classroom becomes a grim and joyless place offering a narrow window on the world.

Although there are niches for kids who are learning disabled and kids who are gifted, there’s not much space for kids like me (I excelled at Honors English, AP History, and French, but at the same time I could barely pass the lowest levels of math and science; also, I hated speaking up in class—hated it with a passion—and even when I was doing great academically in class, my grades would suffer because I didn’t speak enough). All kids learn differently, but these differences are set aside in favor of a limited amount of boxes in which they’re expected to squeeze themselves. They must think this way and learn at this pace and their abilities should be somewhat uniform across the board, so if they’re in the “smart” English class they must also be in the “smart” math class. But what about people like me? Or kids who are geniuses with algebra but fail geometry? Or kids who ace history but can barely spell?

What bugs me most of all is how the educational system so ham-fistedly promotes conformity and groupthink. This obviously isn’t a new ideology; it’s been going on for as long as schools have existed. Remember that famous scene in Pink Floyd’s The Wall when the schoolchildren—who are all wearing deformed masks that make them look identical—have to march in step and uncomplainingly ride a conveyor belt that drops them into a grinder, where they’re all turned into one steaming lump of meat? The idea is that schools are grinding kids down to their basest nature, taking away what makes them unique and creative, pulverizing them into a single entity. How very true that often turns out to be. And I’m not even talking about school uniforms and clothing restrictions that keep kids from dressing as they want to dress.** I’m talking about the push to get kids to not think outside the box or color outside the lines. (Sheesh, how many clichés can I squeeze into one sentence?) Said Henry David Thoreau, quite beautifully, in his journal in November 1850:

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.”

**Honestly, I think school uniforms can be a good idea. Although I would’ve hated them in high school, as an adult I can appreciate the purpose they serve. They level the playing field so kids aren’t viciously ostracized or ridiculed for dressing differently or for wearing, say, discount or secondhand clothes. Many folks say that uniforms promote conformity and encourage everyone to be clones. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Conformity is more than just how you dress—it’s how you think. How you act. What you believe. Clothing does make a personal statement, and I’m happy to work in an office whose business-casual dress policy isn’t rigid. So on the days when I feel like doing so, I can show up at work in funky platform shoes instead of sensible pumps, wearing a psychedelic ’70s dress instead of a gray suit. It’s a nice perk. A very nice perk. But at the end of the day, clothing doesn’t define who I am. It doesn’t make me less of an individual if I’m at work in a bland suit or a uniform, just like it doesn’t make a quirky, creative kid less of an individual if she’s wearing a uniform at school.



song heard most recently before posting:
In the Sun—Joseph Arthur

Concert for Diana

This weekend was a godsend because for the first time in months, I didn’t have to work. That buoyant feeling of release was incredible. So I spent a lot of time reading (I finished two books) and watching Netflix DVDs (Midnight Express and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu). On Saturday I finally went to the Corcoran Gallery in DC to see their modernism exhibit, and aside from inwardly bitching about their high entrance fee (when half the museums in DC are free, you do tend to get spoiled), I really enjoyed myself. And I managed to snag a parking space right outside the museum. No small feat!

I was rooted to the sofa on Sunday as I watched the full six-hour Concert for Diana. It seemed to be a smashing success, and I’m very sorry I couldn’t be there. I tried—really, I did. I was fully prepared to fly to London solely for that concert. But every time a fresh batch of tickets was released to the public, they sold out before I could snag one.

Disappointments:

• Fergie didn’t piss herself while performing. I’ve seen shots of her with a wet crotch on stage, and I was hoping that she’d follow suit yesterday, because I don’t know if there’d be anything hotter on earth than seeing someone pissing herself while performing in front of the future king of England. Sadly, Fergie let me down. And she lip-synched, too, which I thought was disgraceful. Her performance slot should’ve gone to a performer who is actually capable of singing live.

• That trainwreck Amy Winehouse didn’t perform. I wanted to see her slurring and staggering her way across the stage, and maybe even rip off her shirt to carve “Diana” into her stomach with a piece of glass.

• Robbie Williams didn’t join Take That for a surprise reunion. What, he had something better to do than to sing in front of a billion people worldwide?

• Kanye West didn’t scream “PRINCESS DIANA DIDN’T CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE!” while on stage. (Of course she cared about black people; I just wanted him to re-enact his awesome “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” tirade from way-back-when.)

• Most shocking of all: Elton John didn’t perform “Candle in the Wind ’97.” I was all set to brutz my way through it but never got a chance. I know he swore he’d never do it again after Diana’s funeral, but rumor has it that William and Harry asked him to perform it at the concert, and what better reason does he have to break his vow than a request from Diana’s sons? It’s not like he was asked to perform it on freaking American Idol. Wills and Harry should arrest him for treason and throw him in the Tower of London.

Aside from those issues, I thought the concert was superb. I loved the “Diana & Me” clips played between performances, as well as the childhood home movies shown at the end. The performers were great and it was a lot of fun to see William and Harry grooving to the music. The entire occasion was a marvelous, unique memorial to their beloved mother.

Yes, I’ll admit it: I liked Princess Diana. Well, obviously I did, or I wouldn’t have sat through a six-hour TV concert on a gorgeous, pristine summer day. Okay, no, Diana wasn’t the brightest bulb in Britain. And some of the stories of her being hysterical and manipulative—and perhaps a tad unstable—probably carried some degree of truth. But at her core she had a genuinely good heart. She cared about people and their problems and wanted to do something to brighten their lives. She took a bad situation (a loveless marriage; cold, distant in-laws; constant, crushing hounding by the press) and turned it into something positive (raising awareness of important issues, such as AIDS, homelessness, and land mines). She dragged the issues of eating disorders and self-injury out of the shadows by publicly sharing her personal experiences with them. She gave the royals a softer, more modern face by dancing at rock concerts and taking her kids to amusement parks and McDonald’s. She exposed her kids to life beyond their “ivory tower” (as she called it) by taking them to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, AIDS wards, and streets with heavy homeless populations. Above all, she truly loved her kids—she didn’t keep them at a polite distance as so many of the other royals do with their children. She loved them and treated them like…well, royalty. Diana may’ve been flighty, neurotic, and lovelorn, but she was still a good person and a phenomenal humanitarian, and she died far too young.

To celebrate the concert I drank English cider in the Diana memorial mug I bought during my second-to-last London trip. I would’ve eaten British food, too, if I’d had any on hand!

This has nothing to do with Princess Diana, but I saw a very cool blurb in the most recent issue of GDUSA magazine:

Revenge of the Nerds

Avant-nerdism is gaining steam and will hit the mainstream in 2009. “Avantnerdiwhat?” you ask. Zandl Group researchers, the ultimate trendspotters, define avant-nerd as a stylish, cool, or social person who engages in nerd culture with a full awareness of the irony of his or her behavior. Irma Zandl says that avant-nerds are the new creative class and that they possess a “compact, eco-friendly, quirky, and smart” aesthetic. Avant-nerds tap into retro styles and reflect a European sensibility. They ironically re-appropriate nerd culture, transforming the formerly nerdy into something cool. The aesthetic is influencing fashion, industrial design, and interior design, Zandl adds.

Lord almighty, those are my people! I hope this trend takes off!!!


song heard most recently before posting:
Vedete? Lo son fedele—Giacomo Puccini

queen of useless knowledge

Victory in da house!!!!!! My department had a baby shower at work today and one person arranged a party game: a quiz involving the identification of celebrity baby names. HEL-LO! Everyone was grumbling, “Aw, Jen shouldn’t be allowed to play!” because they knew right off the bat that I was going to slaughter them. And I did! It took me like five seconds to do the quiz and I got 19 out of 20 questions right. Boo yeah!!! That $65,000 Jesuit education is paying off, y’all!

It was jokingly said that the winner gets to pick the baby’s name. Plus, some quizzes were on pink paper and some were on blue paper, so it was decided that the winner’s colored sheet would determine the baby’s sex. My sheet was pink, so we were like, “You’re having a girl!” Then I said to the mother-to-be, “I hope you like the name Freyja, because that’s what I’m naming your kid!”


song heard most recently before posting:
Disconnected—Veruca Salt

15 years

Antoinette is planning her son’s first birthday party; she told me that in lieu of gifts, she wants guests to bring items for a time capsule that she’ll give to Luca on his 16th birthday. It’s a brilliant idea and I’m not surprised by it, because that girl tends to be disgustingly creative!

Her focus is on items that will be useful to Luca when he’s 16. Well, aside from condoms (which were suggested by another one of her friends), I don’t know what he’ll define as useful in 15 years’ time because I’m not sure how his personality will evolve. Will he be an athlete? An artist? A budding journalist? A wannabe architect? Will he have a passion for old cars? For dinosaurs? For playing the violin?

Because I don’t know what items will be useful to him, I think I’ll focus instead on “this is what life was like in 2007” items. Copies of Time and Entertainment Weekly, a newspaper, a compilation CD of today’s most popular songs, a New York Times bestseller. Things that serve as a snapshot of modern life. And I’ll write him a letter describing what the world is like at this moment in time. I can’t say what it’s like for someone who’s 16, because I’m not 16 and I don’t even know any 16 year olds. I suppose I can hazard a guess, though, based on technology and trends. What I do know is blazingly obvious: life for today’s 16 year old is wildly different than it was for me when I was 16 in 1990. I may as well try to compare a teenager’s life in 1957 to a teenager’s life in 2007.

In some ways modern teens have it better than my peers did, because cyberspace and mobile communications have made the world much smaller, and this can be a great comfort to kids who feel restricted by the confines of their immediate surroundings. I was a raging Anglophile at age 16 and would’ve given anything to obtain easy access to British newspapers, magazines, products, and TV shows. That access didn’t exist back then, but nowadays it does in the form of the internet. In other ways I think my classmates and I were better off than today’s teens. At the very least, we didn’t have to worry about cyber-bullying, text bullying, and getting embarrassing videos of us posted on YouTube by vicious classmates. There was a kind of purity nestled in the note-passing we did in school, in the old-fashioned letters we had to write in order to keep in touch with penpals or friends who lived far away. Sure, we could’ve phoned them, but with no free nighttime minutes, not everyone had the money to make a ton of calls to someone in a different state or country. Patience was taught to us in the form of waiting until the family phone was free before we could make a call (no cell phones, after all), and having to try again and again to reach someone when his or her line was busy (nobody I knew had call waiting at that time).

So I try to imagine the impossible and think ahead to Luca as a 16-year-old boy in 2022. God, we’ll be speaking a whole other language by then, just like the language we speak now is different from that which was spoken 15 years ago. I mean, think about it. Suppose a guy walked up to you in 1992 and started talking about digital camera megapixels, satellite radio, WiFi, SUVs, blogging, GPS, emailing friends on Blackberries and Treos, IMing people in chat rooms, surfing the Web on a laptop, Netflixing a DVD to search for Easter eggs, Mapquesting directions, eBaying, Googling himself, texting on his Razr, TiVoing American Idol on his plasma HDTV, friending people on MySpace, playing with a Wii, shooting a video of Brangelina on his cameraphone and uploading it to YouTube, playing MP3s on his iPod Nano, looking for a BFF to LOL with on match.com…would you even realize that he’s speaking English? Would you believe him if he told you that the human genome has been mapped, a rover has photographed the surface of Mars, a cancer vaccine (Gardasil, for HPV) is now available, space tourists exist, and we’re all the verge of figuring out how to manufacture stem cells? Although we’re all still eating and shitting and walking around like we did in 1992, I think 2007 would sound like a foreign country to your average 1992 resident.

I can’t imagine what we’ll be saying and doing in 15 years. I can’t imagine what advances will be made in science, what technology will be enhanced and perfected by then, or made obsolete. I’d like to think that 15 years from now, society will have made some progress in the right direction. I’d like to think we’ll have slowed down or halted global warming, eradicated our need for oil, figured out how to dissolve terrorism at its root (or, at the very least, know how to protect ourselves from it without sacrificing civil liberties in the process). I’d like to think healthcare will be universal and poverty will be alleviated; gay people will have the right to marry; we’ll finally have a cure for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc. I’d like to think we’ll know how to respect each other and create a better world. Wishful thinking, huh?

We could take a turn in the wrong direction: dystopian novels and movies come to mind. V for Vendetta. Children of Men. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984. Sometimes it feels like we’re headed there, that the next 15 years will bring us under the heel of a totalitarian regime or crush us with a worldwide superplague or some other disaster plucked from our most paranoid fears. Other times I have hope that we’ll manage to get our shit together and figure out what we most need to learn: the idea that the planet isn’t disposable, that underneath skin and faith and genitals and sexual desire we’re all the same. We’re all the same. We’re all a bunch of vulnerable, lost creatures living on the membrane of a lonely rock bobbing in space, and we’re all we’ve got. We’re the only ones who can look out for, and protect, each other. We’re our only line of defense. Tearing each other and the planet apart won’t solve any problems.

For now, though, I’ll tell Luca about where the world currently stands—not where I hope it goes. It’s a messy, silly, absurd, complicated, divine world. Humanity is the same as ever: we stretch toward evolution and advancement and sometimes we make it, while other times we fall into the same old ruts, digging the same old destructive graves. There’s still racism, sexism, and war. Pedophiles, criminals, and suicide bombers still shadow the streets. There’s still pollution and poverty. Tensions still run high between certain countries. People are more fixated on Paris Hilton’s release from jail than they are on the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. More people vote for American Idol contestants than they do for politicians. A shocking amount of people have no access to education or healthcare or even clean water. Obesity is skyrocketing and yet people are dying every day from starvation, either because they can’t afford food or because Hollywood has set this ridiculous standard wherein being a size zero means being beautiful.

But, you know, there’s still plenty of loveliness out there amidst all the terror and atrocities and apathy. There’s still art, music, beauty. People still create. They still help one another, give to charities, volunteer their time and services. This 2007 world of ours still holds compassion. Sometimes wallets get returned unopened. Sometimes someone will offer his or her seat on a crowded train to a pregnant woman, or will offer to mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn, or will step forward to help a person who’s being attacked. Sometimes friendships last and nations align and families are functional. Sometimes it seems like we’re going to be okay in the end. And as long as we have that we at least have something.


song heard most recently before posting:
Farewell—Yo-Yo Ma

two more questionnaires

Courtesy of Mr. Seabold.

70 Confessions

1. The phone rings. Who do you want it to be?
-- I don’t care, as long as it’s not a telemarketer, a wrong phone number, or this one person (or maybe it’s a telemarketer; I don’t know) who has been calling me 2-3 times a day lately and hasn’t been leaving a message.

2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
-- Yeah, either to the store or the cart corral. It’s rude not to do so.

3. If you had to kiss the last person you kissed, would you?
-- Dude, I couldn’t even tell you the last person I kissed. Oh…wait…it was probably my niece Olivia, so sure!

4. Do you take compliments well?
-- Not really. Compliments about my clothing, shoes, photos, website: yes, absolutely. Compliments about me physically: not so much.

5. Do you play Sudoku?
-- Hell no. I hate numbers.

6. If abandoned alone in the wilderness would you survive?
-- Probably not!

7. Do you like your home as it is?
-- Not in my current hellhole apartment situation.

8. Do you enjoy driving?
-- I used to love driving until I moved to Gridlock Central. Now the only thing I like about it is having an excuse to blast my CDs/iPod and sing loudly.

9. What is your favorite roller coaster?
-- They’re all great in my eyes. I haven’t ridden one in nine years, but I still love them.

10. City, suburbs, or country?
-- Suburbs. Part of me really hates the bloated, bland sprawl of them, but they do offer a nice mix of city and country advantages: shops, restaurants, grass, silence.

11. Do you have a favorite restaurant?
-- Not particularly. The Dixie in Lebanon was always my favorite, but now it’s gone. I’ve eaten in many fabulous places over the years, and it’s impossible for me to choose one restaurant over another.

12. Who was your first celebrity crush?
-- Shaun Cassidy.

13. When someone tells a story, do you feel the need to top it?
-- Nope. But if I had a similar experience I might share it.

14. Do you clean your home on a regular schedule?
-- Pthhhhh. Not anymore—not my current place. I’m just too apathetic to care. Once I buy a place, I’ll be back to caring and cleaning fairly regularly.

15. Are you a pack rat?
-- Hoarder, hoarder, hoarder. I’m a sentimental hoarder, though—I keep letters, cards, mementos, etc. I still have every note passed to me by friends in high school. And I can’t let go of any of my books. Although I have trouble getting rid of clothes and CDs, I occasionally manage to do so. Other than that, I’m not so bad. It’s not like I hold on to stacks of newspapers and gum wrappers or anything.

16. Do you own, rent, or live with family?
-- Rent, with the intention of buying before 2007 is through.

17. What’s your next car going to be?
-- Whatever I can afford.

18. If your house was on fire, what would be the first thing you would do?
-- Make sure my cats are safe.

19. Who was the last person you shared beds with?
-- Besides my cats? My coworker Susan, when we shared a budget hotel room in NYC in early June.

20. Who do you text the most?
-- Nobody—it irks me for some reason. As do cell phones. I’ve got an ancient, bricklike ghetto TracFone for emergencies and that’s it.

21. Favorite children’s book?
-- I don’t remember much about my favorite books from childhood, other than this one personalized Sesame Street book I got when I was quite young. I read a lot and loved many of the books I read, but I’m drawing a blank as to which were my favorites. When it came to pre-teen books, though, faves include the first two Little House books; The Girl Who Owned a City; Run, Run As Fast As You Can; Mirror of Danger; Emily; A Gift of Magic; After the Bomb; books from the Twilight series; Chain Letter; and more that I’m not remembering right now!

22. What color are your eyes?
-- Blue.

23. How tall are you?
-- 5’8”

24. Are you happy with your waist size?
-- My waist is fine—it’s my stomach, thighs, and ass that are the problem!

25. If you could do it over again, start from scratch, would you?
-- I wouldn’t mind going back and reliving a week here, a day there. But reliving my entire life again from scratch sounds horrific to me.

26. Any secret admirers?
-- I highly doubt it! Except for maybe a lunatic or two.

27. Any secret crushes?
-- Maybe a mild one.

28. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?
-- Years ago. That restaurant sucks. And they’re owned by the same people who own Red Lobster, which imports an inordinate amount of seafood out of Canada, and we shouldn’t support the Canadian seafood industry because… Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? They kill baby seals.

29. Favorite ex?
-- That’s kind of a weird question, innit?

30. Where was the furthest place you traveled?
-- St. Petersburg, Russia.

31. Do you use light mayonnaise?
-- Such a thing shouldn’t even exist. If you’re that weight- or health-conscious, you shouldn’t be eating mayo at all.

32. Do you like mustard?
-- I’m not crazy about yellow mustard, but other mustards are fine in moderation.

33. Do you prefer to sleep or eat?
-- That’s a tough one. I feel like I love both of them equally, but I suppose I love sleeping a tiny bit more.

34. Do you look like your mom or dad?
-- I look like some old pictures of my mom but I don’t resemble how they look now. However, I inherited blue eyes from both of them; I inherited my dad’s height, dark hair, curved toes, and freckles; and I inherited my mom’s big bones. (sigh)

35. How long does it take you in the shower?
-- If I’m not washing my hair or shaving I’m usually in and out in like five minutes. If I’m washing my hair and shaving it takes longer, ’cuz I gots a lot of hair, yo.

36. Can you do splits?
-- Not even close! I don’t even think I could do them when I was a kid.

37. What movie do you want to see right now?
-- 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, The Lives of Others, This is England, Wristcutters: A Love Story (When the hell is it ever going to get released?)

38. Do you keep a tea kettle on your range?
-- Yup!

39. What did you do for New Year’s Eve?
-- Watched TV, drank a glass of Vana Tallinn, worked on a big art project.

40. Do you think The Grudge was crappy?
-- I didn’t see the remake, but I can tell you that the original Japanese version made very little sense. I was disappointed with it.

41. Do you scrapbook?
-- I make travel scrapbooks after I visit other countries, but they’re not elaborate. It’s not like I’m using all the fancy paper and 3D stickers you see at Michael’s. I really just arrange ticket stubs, postcards, receipts, food wrappers, and other travel ephemera in a big blank book.

42. Do you own a camera phone?
-- See my answer to #20. I do use my digital camera quite a lot, though.

43. Was your mom a cheerleader?
-- No, thank god.

44. Was your dad a football player?
-- Again: no, thank god. He was a shiftless ruffian, bless his heart.

45. What’s the last letter of your middle name?
-- E. What a strange question.

46. What are you thinking right now?
-- That I really need to get around to applying for a mortgage pre-approval.

47. How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
-- Around seven on weekdays; up to 12 on weekends.

48. Do you like Care Bears?
-- I did in 5th/6th grade. I owned a Cheer Bear. If I liked Care Bears now, at age 33, there’d be a problem.

49. What do you buy at the movies?
-- Popcorn, if anything. I’m usually too cheap to buy concession food because it’s so overpriced.

50. Do you know how to play poker?
-- No. And I have no desire to learn—I’m lousy at card games!

51. Do you wear your seatbelt?
-- Always—it’s just a habit. But I do leave my belt off when I’m zipping from my office to the UPS box down the street.

52. What do you wear to sleep?
-- Either a t-shirt or a big old nightgown. Nothing when it’s warm.

53. Anything big ever happen in your town?
-- Well, these are the DC ’burbs—there’s always a shooting or a hit and run taking place somewhere.

54. Is your hair straight or curly?
-- Curly in some parts, wavy in some parts, straight in some parts. A rat’s nest, basically.

55. Is your tongue pierced?
-- I have no desire to pierce it.

56. Do you like liver and onions?
-- Ew! My dad loves them, so I sometimes had to eat them as a kid. It was foul. I think meat itself is nasty; you can imagine how I feel about eating organs.

57. Do you like sarcasm?
-- Yes, but not when people are sarcastic all the time. It gets abrasive and old when it’s constant.

58. Do you like funny or serious people better?
-- I like a perfect mixture of both.

59. Ever been to LA?
-- No. I wouldn’t mind going someday, but it’s not at the top of my list.

60. Who is on your mind right now?
-- Olivia, because it’s her birthday.

61. Any plans for tonight?
-- Working, as usual. Packing for my upcoming weekend at home. Wrapping Olivia’s birthday present.

62. What’s your favorite song at the moment?
-- I’d say that it’s a multi-tie between “Swans,” “Kreuzberg,” and “Who Would You Have Me Love.”

63. Do you hate chocolate?
-- I hate dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is superb.

64. What do you and your parents fight about the most?
-- We usually don’t fight about anything.

65. Are you a gullible person?
-- It’s weird…I have my moments of being naïve and gullible, but I’m also super-suspicious of everyone, so I’m surprised I ever fall for anything.

66. Do you need a boyfriend/girlfriend to be happy?
-- Fish without a bicycle, baby!

67. If you could have any job what would it be?
-- Writing/editing for a sleazy/lowbrow British magazine/tabloid.

68. Are you easy to get along with?
-- More so now that I’m medicated.

69. What is your favorite time of day?
-- Evening, although it’s usually spent working.

70. Are you a generally happy person?
-- Happy-ish, let’s say.


Love survey

[1] Two names you go by:
Jen, Jennifer

[2] Two things you are wearing right now:
Vintage 1940s dress and strappy silver sandals.

[3] Do you still have feelings for your ex?
Ditto Shawn’s answer: “I have no feelings, my heart is a blackened shell.”

[4] Have you ever been given roses?
Yes, but I’m a sucker for wildflowers.

[5] What is your all time favorite love movie?
Probably Love Story. Yeah, it may be corny, but I still think it’s fundamentally sweet and wonderful. And it always makes me cry. I don’t believe that love means never having to say you’re sorry, though! If that ass screws up, he better apologize!

[6] How many times have you honestly been in love?
With a guy? Just once. But with pets and countries and ideals and songs and poems and activities and art: more times than I can count.

[7] Do you believe that everyone has a soul-mate?
I’d like to think that everyone potentially has more than one soul mate.

[8] Have you ever had your heart broken?
A few times.

[9] Your thoughts on online relationships?
Relationships that start online are fine—I know lots of people who’ve had great success with it. But a relationship that only exists online isn’t going to work. Well, a friendship would be fine, but an actual love match? You need to be in the same room with the person for that to work!

[10] Have you ever seen a friend as more than a friend?
Unfortunately. Effing unrequited love!

[11] Do you believe the statement, “Once a cheater always a cheater?”
Not necessarily, but I’d really have trouble trusting someone after he cheated on me.

[12] How many kids do you want to have?
The jury’s still out on that one—if I want them at all.

[13] What is your favorite color(s)?
Plum.

[14] Do you believe you truly only love once?
Some people (like my grandparents) do, but other people find true love more than once.

[15] Imagine you’re 79 & your spouse just died, would you re-marry?
Hell no. Why bother at that age? Just enjoy being alone and finally having the freedom to do what you want to do and go where you want to go during the last years of your life.

[16] At what age did you start noticing the opposite/same sex?
I had crushes when I was a kid—both celeb crushes (starting around age four) and crushes on classmates (starting in first grade). Does that count?

[17] What song do you want to hear at your wedding?
Well, I’ve got a full line-up for Annida to sing, and I like the idea of having a wedding march that’s an orchestral or Celtic version of “our” song, whatever that may be.

[18] Do you like anyone?
I ain’t saying!

[19] Do you love anyone?
Just friends, family, and pets!



song heard most recently before posting:
Digital Ghost—Tori Amos

The Shuffler - vol. 1

The Onion’s AV Club has this regular feature called The Shuffler, wherein a celebrity of some degree sets his/her iPod to shuffle and describes the first five songs to play. No cheating (ie, no skipping ahead to a less embarrassing track) is allowed.

So, I decided to do my own version of The Shuffler. Throughout my two commutes yesterday and my morning commute today I kept my iPod on shuffle and jotted down the songs it regurgitated. Here are the results:

Angel of Harlem – U2
Rattle and Hum came out in 1988, and although I really didn’t start listening to it until 1990 or so, Angel of Harlem was a big radio and MTV hit and I loved it.

Running to Stand Still – U2
Two U2 songs in a row! Fancy that! This is my favorite song from the Joshua Tree album. My angst-ridden teen heart was all over the lyrics “You’ve got to cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice.”

Someone Else’s Life – Joshua Radin
Haven’t we all, at one point or another, even if only for a split-second, wondered if we were living someone else’s life?

What Doesn’t Belong to Me – Sinead O’Connor
This is such a great break-up song. “I miss you, but I’m glad you’re gone / I want you but I’m not alone / I’m haunted by you / But I’ll get you gone if it takes me all my life long / Take back the pain you gave me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me / Take back the shame you gave me /…/ Take back the rage you gave me / Take back the hatred you gave me for me / Take back the anger that nearly killed me / Take back what doesn’t belong to me.”

Marys of the Sea – Tori Amos
I’ve been a massive Tori Amos fan since 1992, but this album, sadly, doesn’t do much for me. Still, I felt obliged to put it on my iPod, because, dude, it’s Tori! And really, this song isn’t a bad song—it’s just not as spectacular and some of her other songs.

When Doves Cry – Prince
Lord, when was this, 1982? ’83? I think I was around nine years old when this came out. I loved it even though I didn’t have a clue what it was about. Even today, when I see Plath sprawled on his back, legs in the air, I sometimes sing “Animals strike curious poses!” to him.

Mad World – Gary Jules
You know, the original Tears for Fears version of this song kind of sucks. It’s very jaunty and carnival-sounding, and considering the bleakness of the lyrics, this juxtaposition is disconcerting and downright inappropriate. Gary Jules’s version is gorgeously, gloriously wrenching. If this had been around before I was medicated, it probably would’ve been the straw that broke the suicidal camel’s back.

Sky Blue – Peter Gabriel
So Missy once told me that every time she hears this song, it reminds her of all the people trying to escape from the World Trade Center on 9/11. And ever since then, I’ve had that image burned in my head every time I hear this song. Thanks, Miss. By the way, the extended reworking of this song that appeared in Rabbit-Proof Fence is just as brilliant as the original Sky Blue.

Den Bla Slatten/Ormsla – Den Fule
Nordic folk kicks ass, and this is one of the songs that really makes me feel like grooving (albeit spastically, as I am wont to do).

Lonelilly – Damien Rice
Damien Rice rocks my world. What else can I say? He sets my cold, dead heart aflame.

Bad – U2
Another U2 song! I love U2, but apparently not as much as my iPod does! There was a period—’round about 2001, I think—when I was obsessed with this song and another U2 song, The Unforgettable Fire, and I listened to them on a continuous loop when driving back and forth to my weekend petsitting job in Alexandria. So that’s what they bring to mind.

I Want Candy – Bow Wow Wow
So dirty, but I had no clue what it meant when I was a kid. When it came to sex, I was about as naïve as you could get (and this carried on well into my teens).

Dirty Diana – Michael Jackson
I got my first stereo, a portable boom box, for Christmas 1987 when I was 13 years old. I got a handful of cassettes with it, including Michael Jackson’s album Bad. I loved that album—especially Dirty Diana. That bitch does sound dirty!

Spice Up Your Life – Spice Girls
Okay, listen, in my defense, when I’ve just had a long day at work, and I’m stuck in Beltway gridlock, and stretching ahead of me is an evening or weekend of grueling freelancing and being forced to listen to my neighbors bellow and pray and stomp, sometimes it’s nice to hear a fun, frothy, silly song that puts a smile on my face and rhythm in my weary ass. So yes, I’ve got three Spice Girls tracks on my iPod. Bite me.

Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad
I have this in my ’90s folder. I think it was out when I was in 10th or 11th grade. Not one of my favorite songs, but it still makes my tired old foot tap a bit.

Goodnight and Thank You – Evita
Heh. I had a thing for a few musicals in high school, especially around 9th grade, and this was one of them. It’s weird to hear it out of context like this, without the rest of the musical framing it. When it ended my brain automatically jumped ahead to The Art of the Possible, but instead I heard:

Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone – Glass Tiger
A prom/graduation anthem of the late ’80s! This came out in 1986, so I always think of big hair, shaker knit sweaters, and big ugly brooches when I hear it. Maybe I’ll request that Annida sing an operatic version of this at my funeral someday. (*smiles and waves at poor beleagured Annida*)

Have I Told You Lately – Van Morrison
Awww, such a nice love song. Conventional and hardly groundbreaking…but still lovely. I have a few of his songs on my iPod.

Waiting for That Day – George Michael
I was obsessed with the Listen without Prejudice album in 11th grade. This song features the line “Well, everybody’s talking about this new decade / like you say the magic number and then say goodbye to the stupid mistakes you made.” He was talking about the dawn of the 1990s, which seems like a lifetime ago. It’s so depressing to realize kids born at that time—at the turn of the decade—are now almost old enough to vote. And some of them have kids of their own. Jesus Christ.

Don’t Drink the Water – Dave Matthews Band
I really can’t stand the Dave Matthews Band. They earned my undying loathing for churning out two of the most awful songs of the mid-’90s: songs that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns and won’t even mention by name. Adding insult to injury, those songs got played several times on a day on the radio station I was forced to listen to during my two summers as a temp at a warehouse during college. So if I even hear, like, three notes of those songs I automatically think of being on my feet for eight hours, wearing a hairnet, and boxing up bars of chocolate with the dregs of Lebanon. Needless to say, no one was more shocked than I was when Don’t Drink the Water was released and I actually liked it. I think I like it because it’s so dark—the singing is a kind of feral growl, and then Dave Matthews repeatedly sings “Don’t drink the water—there’s blood in the water!” Blood in the water? Awesome!

Strangers in the Night – Frank Sinatra
A crooner classic. Part of me always wondered if I, too, would someday be enchanted by a stranger in the night. In reality, I’m more likely to be attacked and murdered by a stranger in the night.


song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Paul Potts

how the other half lives

This weekend I got to briefly experience what it must be like to be rich. Angela was in DC all week for business, and because there was a recurring issue with her room, the hotel upgraded her to a presidential suite, free of charge, for her final two nights. As she was planning to stay at my apartment on Friday night anyway, we decided to turn things around and have me stay with her in the mega-suite instead.

Good lord. Never have I seen anything like it. For one thing, she even had her own doorbell. Such a simple little thing, and yet it left my plebian self agog. The first thing I said to her when she opened the door was, “Ohmigod, you have your own doorbell!” I sure done felt fancy. Here’s the rest of the suite:

the foyer:

the living room:

another view of the living room:

the TV room:

the kitchen:

the dining room:

the bedroom:

the bathroom, with its shower stall that was bigger than my whole bathroom at home:

Angela and me in the back gardens:

As posh as the suite was, the rich aren’t given any swag in it. The snacks in the living room weren’t free—they cost a lot of money ($6 for a bottle of water!). And the movie-on-demand feature cost a whopping $9.99 per film. Breakfast would’ve cost a fortune for very little food. I shudder to think of what the minibar cost.

Anyway, on Friday evening we hopped on the Metro and went to Friendship Heights to browse through the stores and pick up a bottle of wine in World Market. Then we returned to Woodley Park and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant. After that we headed back to the hotel, showered, and hunkered down with the wine and a movie-on-demand (The Queen), since her office gave her permission to buy up to two movies.

On Saturday, after we checked out, I drove us down to Arlington so we could eat brunch at the Silver Diner and poke around the shops in Clarendon (the Mac store was our first destination). We didn’t have a lot of time before I had to drop her off at the airport.

The rest of Saturday and all of Sunday were spent working on freelancing, naturally. zzzzzzzzz



song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Paul Potts