I need a word in another language

O.

This is one of those times I wish I spoke another language besides pidgin French, because I need a word that means "the feeling in your chest where you want to cry, but don't know if it's because you're sad that the person you just spoke to for work at your prison-focused law firm murdered his mother, step-father and, after raping her, his sister, or if it's because you're weirdly awed that he was easy to talk to, that he found a way to survive, that he got married while in prison, where he's been since age 16 after getting a life sentence without the possibility of parole, that he overcame an addiction to heroin, meth and cocaine...or maybe only that he was just a person, like you." Maybe the word I need is something approaching "redemption," but not so trite, so freshman year Humanities paper, or so patronizing, and not in application to this fellow human being, but to me, because I feel that my association with the species we call humanity has suddenly improved in dignity, maybe lurched forward, by a microscopic unit of measurement.

The other night, I felt my boyfriend's breath on my face as he slept. I thought to myself, if I died, this is one of those things that would make me homesick for life.

Secret Resurrection

It's time to bring this thing back, but only if I can do it without anyone knowing (NB: the Fat David Gilmour gif, which I created myself, did not count as a full resurrection, despite the immeasurable joy it brought to this world). I think the reason the internet is littered with dead blogs is because of their constrictive public nature--after a couple posts written in a charming, carefree style about charming, carefree things, afforded by the assumption that no one's paying attention anyway, the author becomes aware of an audience and increasingly feels confined by (probably imagined) expectations of charming, carefree styles and things. Maybe this performance anxiety also stems from the self-branding that results from blogging after a while. I am a young, female adult, so what are my options? Shall I tell stories of how I'm an adorable disaster in my love life? Inventory to an almost pathological degree my findings in the realm of fashion on the internet? Document undertaking a quirky hobby I'll abandon once I reach the inevitable crossroads of "give up" or "get serious"? Even if I don't want to do any of these things, it's sometimes hard to avoid becoming a caricature of oneself (like this rule of three rhetorical question-asking; is it Aristotle or Sex and the City I'm channeling?). This is an expectation at the heart of the available template photos for Blogger, which seem to have pre-ordained that my blog, like all others in my demographic, be about either My Life: One Cupcake At A Time <3 or a self-actualizing journey through Italy, India and Indonesia.

Themes contribute to this kind of oppressive branding, and as you may gather from above, over-analyzing the mundane, as a raison d'etre, suits me just fine. After all, the only other unifying thing that could really occupy numerous entries for me is a phenomenon my boyfriend and I have observed here in Seattle: cars driving around with no headlights on after dark. Yes, that is truly a fixation of mine--why does no one else notice?!!--and the only other possible filler for this blog, besides a Kafka-esque serial novel examining the dark heart of man and set at a store near my apartment called Cartridge World that I don't feel like getting into right now. Until I overcome the physical limitations of documenting the mystery of the former or get a job at Cartridge World to research the latter, I will recount other developments in my world in which I live in:

- A lot of important people in my life died over the past two years, including my dad, which was sudden and awful. It has been horrible, horrible--things like months of waking up from naps, having forgotten that the world is now one with no Dad in it, and then having to re-remember as my sleepy disorientation wears off. I hope that this partly explains why I have consistently been in a bad mood for the majority of the past year. You should have seen me as a barista last summer, holy hell. But finally things are starting to even out for me, I think. Another day, maybe, I will talk about how the grief process made me surprisingly uncommunicative, not only in blogland but with many of my friends, including some from a while back who still don't know what happened. Some uninspired journalist looking for an angle on the tired story of the decline of newspapers should write about the almost comical misfortune of having to verbally compose your father's obituary to friends and acquaintances instead of making the paper do the dirty work for you.

- In better news: I moved to Seattle! A good amount of people here are from the '90s, it really is true. In some ways, these vestiges of our shared common history--men with earnest long hair, women in clunky Mary Janes--is comforting, especially for someone to whom the pleasure of subjecting her 24 year-old boyfriend to the video for "Runaway Train'' is not unknown. On the other hand, your goatee is gross. On the third and final hand, though, I admire your determination to assume the costume and, by extension, the less downtrodden attitude of a pre-9/11 world. Perhaps as a result of this, I have found myself saying "hella" unironically from time to time.

- I started law school at picturesque University of Washington. Some of my classmates' ability to bullshit is so outstanding that knowing that they don't know what they're talking about makes me admire them all the more. As someone for whom life decisions are excruciating (see: lack of ability to decide on a blog theme, above), I have been pleasantly surprised at the outcome of this one, despite concerns that developed the first day of orientation when one of the alums on the introductory panel recommended, as if he were imparting a great truth, that the UW Law School Class of 2013 see "Dead Poets Society." Many of the hangers-on in the legal profession like to speak as though they are imparting great truths, and that's a great truth you can take to the bank.

That's all! No theme = no need for conclusions, hooray!

Car without headlights?!

Fat David Gilmour

He used to be a male model. But he's still a really nice guy!

The Day I Knew I Was Old

Setting: the Chicago neighborhood Rogers Park, outside the Morse Red Line stop. It's like the nicest day of the year so far. Shouldn't I be hanging out in a graveyard?

Three youths are strolling toward me. Thug life, etc. They survey the landscape with a satisfied air of ownership; it seems the lovely weather is their personal doing.

I'm headed the other way, looking for the house of woman I've never met but already gave money to for a piece of African fabric with Barack Obama on it. When I find it, I will ring the buzzer, next to which will be written the woman's name, followed by "Anthropological Consultant." I will wonder sadly if this is the fate of all bozos who graduate from Peace Corps University. I will notice that she pronounces "Kenya" "Keenya," and grant that this is probably because she's actually been there. I will meet her other middle-aged friends, one of whom will remind me of Jean Stapleton but with none of Edith Bunker's sweetness. I will ask the woman, since she says "Keenya" so authoritatively, if she knows what the Kiswahili under Obama's smiling face means. "Something about peace, maybe. Are you staying for potato soup?" This invitation will be extended in an oddly accusatory manner. I will say something stupid about needing to get back to my cat, because the three of them look like witches.

Right now, though, I'm on Morse, and the vainglorious youths have me in their sights.

"Damnnn!"

"Heyyyy...."

"Hey, pretty girl...."

We pass. I can tell by the pause that they're checking out my ass.*

One more try:

"I'm over 21!"

*unintentional vulgar couplets: another reason I appeal to horny young men.

Andy Ponders the Months

Last night I was at the Y, running on one of those treadmills with a TV attached to it, which isn't normally my thing but was the closest one on which I could get in an impulsive and fairly illogical seven-minute run before the Y closed and threw me out onto the street like so many indigent Village People. Even less my thing was the realization that by choosing a machine that uses the same principle as the rabbit at the greyhound track to spur couch potatoes to physical exertion, and by then changing the TV to the 60 Minutes profile of Bobby Jindal, it was as if I were unsuccessfully chasing the person on whom the GOP, so the captions told me, is pinning all its hopes and dreams. The alternative, that I was breathlessly pursuing Morley Safer, was not much better, although it is a little-known fact that one of his hobbies is painting depressing pictures of motel rooms, which I find to be endearing proof that Morley Safer, under his cheap sportcoat and soothing yet gravely voice, has the soul of an angsty college kid who feels he is misunderstood. Regardless, since it was the end of the hour, both of these objects in my not-very-good metaphor for unattainable desire were supplanted by an even weirder one: Andy Rooney.

Dear Andy: what sort of meta-risks would I run by offering an ironic commentary on you, O Most Ironic Commentator? What kind of hypocritical new heights would I scale by curmudgeonishly pointing out your foibles, O Most Curmudgeonly Foible Pointer-Outer? Could I ever come close to the acrobatic exasperation and surprising earnestness with which you recite your frustrations with this world in which we live in, hunched over your desk, your hands, powerless to tear down the insipid culture around you, deciding to instead remain clasped and your eyebrows continuing their march, like Sherman to the sea, south into your eyes--representing the only truly interesting development, week in and week out, of your otherwise unchanging act at the end of every show? And could I, in good conscience, mock the man who may not possess the cynical artistry of an H.L. Mencken but nonetheless has more intelligence and heart than your average "Hey you kids get off my lawn" misanthrope, combining the two somewhere in the middle to become the embodiment of what we may most accurately refer to as "a prickly pear"?

I can't. I was going to go for the cheap shot by explaining what it was like to read Andy's grousings in closed caption there on the treadmill rather than hear them delivered in his trademark deadpan, peppered with abrupt pauses to signal an end to the Quixotic attempt to understand aspects of our society that simply cannot be understood, and interspersed with footage and ambient noise to back up his point and, more importantly, to save us from the discomfort of a neverending shot of Andy, staring at us from behind his desk as if we've been called into the principal's office and our punishment is a rambling catalogue of everything that's wrong with kids like us. I was going to talk about how, even with my intermittent-at-best viewing of 60 Minutes in my wastrel young adulthood and, even then, seeing Andy Rooney tempered with the above embellishments, I had already noticed a marked decline in the quality, humor and even logic of his meditations from the levels he showed every Sunday night when I was growing up, and how this was finally confirmed by reading rather than hearing his words as they fled me at approximately 5.8 miles an hour.

Then I pulled up the text of his segment and everything I had thought as I was running last night was still there--but it mostly just made me feel sorry for Andy who, hilarious eyebrows-as-symbol-of-his-unchecked-grouchiness-about-everything notwithstanding, has the melancholy air of someone left behind by the Pied Piper of the Reagan years. However, if he ever decides to quit the world of disgruntled journalism, I think Andy could really have a future in poetry. So that's what I offer you instead. Enjoy!

"Andy Ponders the Months"

I.

When I write the name of a month in a script,

I'm always surprised

How some months are spelled. August is easy

But February is strange.

"Febuary" is spelled "FebRuary" and not "FebUary"

The way we all pronounce it.

II.

Today is March 1st, of course. Most of us

Like March but I think either May or June

Would win any vote we took to pick our

Favorite month.

January and February are

Too cold and

July and August are

Too hot.

Some people would probably pick September

But I don't like endings

And I think of September as an ending.

III.

The thing you have to remember is,

Most people don't wear clothes

To keep warm.

For instance, "warm" is not the issue

When women get dressed.

I wear the same suit

All year long.

(This final one is not by Andy but by the lone commenter to his segment posted online. I didn't alter the capitalization):

Ode to 60 Minutes

the Bible I choose to live by

is 60 Minutes,

and 60 Minutes keeps me feeling

alive.

thank You

Graceland

Facebook's so-called news feed mostly consists of "top stories" like "That Girl From High School You Were Never Really Friends With, Who, In a Weak Moment, You Friended ("friend" is a verb and this is our culture) Just So You Could See What Her Wedding Dress Looks Like is now friends with Some Other Girl That Who Cares." But the other day it served me well by alerting me that my friend Dustin had removed "the macabre" from his interests, which reminded me that the macabre is, contrary to Dustin apparently, one of my interests. I was obsessed with and terrified by ghost stories as a kid and most infamously once made my parents throw away one such book that had scared me so deeply I didn't want it in the house. They had bought the book for me when we were on vacation in Scotland, a place that does the macabre with such verve that the bookstore we got it at was called The Witchery. In yet another example of that not serious but not insignificant lack of parental foresight that I love about them, they let their overimaginative, bookworm seven year-old daughter delve into the book unsupervised, probably enjoying the silence in backseat of the rented Rover rather than the surely irritating but popular is-it-a-fight-or-is-it-a-game? my brother liked to start by stealing my blanket and then informing me that, to get her back, I would have to orally fill out an "application" of his own improvised devising (somehow at age ten he had a cutting wit when it came to bureaucratic formalities. Another in his repertoire involved claiming that, any time I won a staring contest, it didn't count because he was "the proctor" and had the final say...an early lesson in why fascism is so annoying and maybe, combined with the threat of filling out imaginary forms in triplicate, why I dislike rules I don't see the point of). The book's purchase unfortunately coincided with our staying at Borthwick Castle, a hangout of Mary Queen of Scots allegedly haunted by not one ghost but multiple ones, including one of a man who had been burned alive. No doubt my parents told me this story, myopically encouraged by my budding interest in the macabre and unaware that I had just read a story in my evil new book about a disembodied ghost head floating through a wall. And so I spent the whole night at Borthwick Castle awake and terrified to the core, when probably the only scary thing that was going on was a wide-eyed child staring for hours into the darkness. After we got back, I was still so afraid of the book that I finally made them throw it in the trash--a child's pared-down version of an exorcism.

Most of my relationship with the macabre, however, is more manageable and basically means that I love 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' and Vincent Price (although even his appearance [and Nietszche quoting! WTF?!] in the Elvis movie "The Trouble With Girls" can't save that piece of shit) and believe that a perfect October date is walking around Wicker Park and determining which houses are the spookiest-looking. The latest manifestation has been a longing to spend an afternoon in Graceland Cemetery here in Chicago. I go past it every morning on the train and always imagine it being spring and me being down on the paths I see from above, alone among the beautiful, strange, silent monuments. And today it was finally nice enough to go! It was also an appropriately sobering and reflective activity after a night of debauchery on the sad and cringe-inducing, rather than toasting to freedom and throwing your glass over your shoulder, end of the spectrum. Plus there's something about being in a cemetery on a day that feels like the first of spring, not only because a lot of the smaller graves are unexpectedly standing in water but because of the more obvious life and death paradox that this blog seems to be focused on lately.

One of the things I was thinking about while I was there was the different physical representations of mortality and how the graves and monuments reveal what someone thinks or once thought about death. Of course, there are the normal "Rest in the Lord" inscriptions (weirdly, I didn't see one "Rest in Peace" in the two hours I spent there), which are so common that we don't stop to consider what that actually means. But when you add the fact that not a few graves look sort of like beds, it starts to beg the question of what death is supposed to be. Like, death is sleep? And life is toil? In my unscientific observation, I noticed that the small, presumably working class graves seemed to like this theme a lot, which I guess makes sense--if your life is all hard work, then death's reward is rest, although that seems to imply that life is more tragic or at least harder than death. I guess this can be either depressing or not, depending on what you want to believe about life or about death.

Then there are the bigger, fancier monuments. Even the mid-sized ones didn't seem to need much in the way of comforting Bible(ish), Gothic script verse, let alone the "he's not dead, he's just sleeping" idea. Instead, it was as if the owner of this, shall we say, Mercedes E-Class of grave had been successful (er, rich?) enough that there was no need to describe his death as an escape from the difficulties of life. And, in the case of the grave of Allen Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton detectives and enemy to all us IWW fans out there who learned at a young age how cruelty is perpetrated by the mighty, whether they be robber baron hired guns or self-appointed proctors of staring contests, not only is there not a word of King James English to be found but instead there's a huge plaque detailing the man's accomplishments, including founding "a noble profession in the hour of the nation's peril." Now, should we blame Pinkerton for being proud in death? Unless he dictated what his epitaph would say, I don't know if we can. So should we judge his grieving survivors for making a laundry list of why he was great and tacking it up on his grave? Again, probably not.

But it is interesting to see how one's social position influences the physical commemoration of their life forever. Obviously this also extends to the really big monuments, most notably Potter and Bertha Palmer's Greek temple/grave that looks over the pond on the northern side of the cemetery. Not only are there no Victorian God references--not only is there not even the brash self-made man's list of reasons why he, too, gets to have a biggish monument--there is nothing except impressive and truly beautiful Classical columns, two sarcophagi and a few torches for good measure, creating an effect of spare grandeur that seems to say more about these people's impact on the world of their lives and even ours than the "RIP" sentiments of the tiny graves in its shadow. Meanwhile, the latter are plain for a different reason, with only "Mother" or "Father," the person's name, dates, and maybe something about never being forgotten, the price of which probably having gone up for every extra "eth" and "thee." There are also those older graves you occasionally pass that have become so smoothed with time that the name is lost and the grave is really just a stone. Does this happen to the big ones, too, eventually? I hope so. Then, despite the barriers created by wealth, race, gender, and class, in the end everyone would just be an anonymous, fragile and perfect human being, having briefly appeared and now gone. Although it would take a glacier to smooth the Palmers' "grave" down.

Still. One mustn't take life or even death too seriously, so after all these, er, monumental reflections today, I ended up at a party where the hosts' cat chased a laser pointer beam around the room until it puked. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

The Century Plant

Yesterday, once I got over the daily adrenaline rush of whether I could traverse the entire north side of Chicago to get to Evanston for work on time (really more of a self-imposed challenge; the idea of it mattering whether I'm there at 9:00 am sharp is laughable), after I got my daily arrival reward coffee from the office not-exactly-maker, but rather a machine whose screen promises to "inspire" me (thus we should refer to it as a "coffee experience," maybe? And here I am writing about it, so I guess it is inspirational. Sigh.), and after I had finally settled in to my cube to check Facebook, I realized that I was sick. Sick enough that even the satisfaction of knowing and taking advantage of where the office stash of Tylenol is kept was not enough to make me feel completely better, nor was combatting the chills by wrapping myself in a scarf that made me look, especially coupled with the Sensibly Scandinavian (TM?) turtleneck I was wearing and especially when it came undone and just hung around my neck, like a Lutheran pastor. My brother would be so proud. Nevertheless, since I was already there and fearful of what the Purple Line would hold for me during non-express hours, I stayed, battled through my under-the-weatherness and took today off instead. I slept until noon, getting up only to email my boss and tell her I wasn't coming in, to which she responded with some adorably motherly advice to drink lots of fluids. Coffee is a fluid, right?

And after sleeping off exhaustion probably due in no small part to staying up late watching as much 'Felicity' as my eyeballs (and, sigh, heart!) can handle, I was feeling well enough that I decided I should do something more interesting with my day than laying in bed, drinking coffee and watching shit online. Plus 'Felicity' wasn't coming in the mail until later. Why not the Garfield Park Conservatory, perfect not only because it's free and only five minutes from my apartment but also because I could argue (again, a self-imposed challenge; see above) that this was a perfectly reasonable sick day activity--all that humidity and carbon dioxide would surely improve the health of an invalid like myself, as anyone who uses 19th century logic to justify their actions knows.

I wasn't really expecting to be inspired by the place, though...getting enough inspiration from my daily coffee experience at work, I was more interested in pretty flowers and becoming as warm as possible through no physical effort of my own. But even as I was pulling up to the huge glass building in the otherwise rundown neighborhood of Garfield Park, I saw the tops of the trees looming inside, contrasted against the barren landscape outdoors, and was caught off-guard by the beauty of it. Inside the place, you are enveloped by greenness; drawn into the funny names of the plants--the Boojum tree, for example, named from a Lewis Carroll poem--the weird shapes of the cacti, the horticultural information you never knew and will forget as soon as you've moved on (although you'll appreciate, man, you'll appreciate), the flowers, the cute couples on dates, the ponds where you can make a wish, and, oh yes, the chocolate tree.

I had been to the Conservatory once before, almost four years ago, and I remembered the basic layout of the place and most of what I've already described. I didn't recall, however, the Century Plant. "So named because it is said to bloom once a century," the plaque reads, "the Century Plant in fact blooms after a decade or two of growth. When it is ready, it sends up a single thirty foot stalk which produces an impressive blossom. So much energy is spent growing this flower that the plant dies shortly after. Side shoots growing around the base ensure a new generation of plants." Seriously? There is a plant that embodies major themes of everything from 'Charlotte's Web' to 'The Brothers Karamozov' to, well, Easter?! The English major in me is reeling--why didn't they bring this up in otherwise uninteresting bio classes?!--but I'll leave you to dissect its many meanings in the comments section. For now, it's enough to know that there is a tiny rainforest in the middle of this city, in the middle of this endless winter, where those of us for who are sick of the cold, seemingly dead world outside (if not actually made sick by it) can be reminded that even after the most beautiful and rare things have passed away, spring will come again...even if it feels like a century from now.

The Last Days of Jughead

I'm breaking my laziness-imposed silence to discuss--what else?--a pop culture icon from my childhood whose recent profit-motivated desecration I'm upset about, and which discontent I will use as a launchpad to meditate further on the subject and what it reveals about myself. Yes, strangers trawling the internet for this rarest of finds, look no further.

Appropriately, this navel-gazing began tonight while I was taking a bath. While most 28-year-old single women may coyly deny it, it is nonetheless a fact of our hidden inner lives that we spend those few nights off from what a never-young ghoul once branded the lifestyle of "sex and the single girl" in the tub, reading Archie comics digests we selected from much more ghoul-approved impulse buys in line at the grocery store. (I don't know who decided to put Archie comics in the checkout at the Dominick's at Chicago and Damen, but God bless him or, as we just learned, more likely her, because it's the only worthwhile thing in that otherwise godforsaken hellhole of too-narrow aisles, douchebags both shopping and [probably] for purchase, and automatic doors that don't open.)

Let me back up a bit and briefly summarize a life spent with Archies. Although it had a rather definite beginning--namely the discovery, one bored childhood afternoon in Canada, of my older cousins' in retrospect modest but perfectly fascinating collection of early to mid-'80s Archie comics--it's hard to remember a time that I didn't have an Archie in my possession. I instantly loved everything about them: the five color palette, the ads disguised as stories in which Josie and friends extol the deliciousness of Twinkies while solving facile mysteries, and, of course, the never-ending cycle of 5-6 plotlines. I loved that "the gang" always met up on the sidewalks of Riverdale--even arranging to do so over the phone--and that they unironically referred to themselves as "the gang." I enjoyed laughing (to myself, natch) at the dated outfits and slang from different eras of hijinx--everything from the '50s' description of a "fresh" "fellow" as a "wolf" to the '60s' background characters sporting afros and greeting each other with peace signs. I secretly and egotistically identified with the eternally losing but virtuous Betty, rather than the selfish but, I now realize, fairly human Veronica. And naturally, I was consumed with the optimistic belief that only a child could have: that someday good-hearted, dull and shockingly low self-esteem-riddled Betty would finally win out over evil Veronica in the battle for undeserving and totally average Archie's love--not seeming to realize that not only did the writers have some measure of control over this situation, but that the romantic stalemate was Archie comics' entire bread and butter.

But I loved, and continue to love, Jughead the best.

Was it that his eyes were always closed and yet he never seemed to run into anything? Was it that he could eat all the hamburgers he wanted and never get fat, except after having like a million of them at the end of some particularly hilarious episodes? Was it that he often wore a sweatshirt that mysteriously just said "S," as well as an equally baffling and impossible-to-imagine-in-real-life gray crown?

While these were all intriguing aspects of Jughead--but then, Archie's criss-cross hair combing pattern/scapular genetic defect also didn't translate into reality--I think the thing I loved about him, as unoriginal as it may be, was that he was a non-conformist. Okay, so really what that means is that, in the hormonal primordial stew of Riverdale High and the extracurricular mating rituals going down at the Chocklit Shoppe, Jughead was not only oblivious, like myself, to the finer points of dating, but he actively rejected them, preferring instead the life of a hamburger-loving loner who applied himself with equal industry but much less recognition to noble activities like collecting change for a TV at the nursing home or, sometimes, moonlighting as a superhero named Captain Hero...all while his friends were busy hustling girls and fixing their jalopies. Sometimes it troubles me that Jughead prided himself on being a self-avowed "woman hater," but I guess most of the so-called "gals" of Archieland, like their complementary "pals," were vapid enough to be deserving of his disdain. I mean, the guy wore a crown! You think that was a coincidence?

Unfortunately or fortunately, as aging goes, so I find myself less able to brazenly reject societal norms such as wearing sweatshirts with letters that stand for something, walking around with my eyes open and not reading (or at least subscribing to) comic books for children...but Jughead is still my favorite. So you can imagine my horror when I, vulnerable in the tub, read in my newest Archie that they had changed the look of the characters to make them more "contemporary," apparently assuming that by doing so, they will find a foothold with a younger and larger audience than woman-hater-loving women who bitterly patronize Dominick's. I already knew this misguided marketing scheme was in the works after my dad had sent me an article that showed the proposed modernized Betty and Veronica. But, with whatever shred of foolish optimism left over from that younger version of myself who always believed that, maybe this time, Betty would finally get Archie, it didn't occur to me that they would ravage my Jughead, too.

But here it is. Oh, Jughead. Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

Crown Meditation, Part II

Since Kei, whose blog I've been secretly reading off and on for years, humbled me with a comment, I thought maybe I should increase my posting from roughly once a month to never to maybe twice a month to never. I'm fearful of this new goal, but let us soldier on.

Also, I realized that my so-called crown meditation was ambitiously divided into parts. I don't know if I need to point out the odd phenomenon of retaining often the most useless and even wrong information from one's otherwise pedagogically pointless junior high education--for example, while my extracurricular lessons in how to instinctively identify the one type of girl who always has Midol and a whole arsenal of menstrual accessories on her, always happy to dole out even if your asking represents the only time you speak to her (O, cruel food chain of junior high!) and how to smoke paid off, I don't recall learning anything in, say, Speech class, but somehow I do remember Mrs. Hatton's claim that her knowledge of public speaking was so vast that she could have even taught MLK a thing or two that would have improved his delivery of "I Have a Dream." Another of those things I recall from the glassy-eyed vegetable state of 8th (or was it 9th?) grade Language Arts was that if you're making an outline, you HAVE to have at least two parts--TWO PARTS! TWO! DO NOT LET THE PASSING OF THOSE NINE MONTHS HAVE BEEN FOR NAUGHT!!!1!1!--to whatever sub-division you're making or you shouldn't divide it at all. Which brings us to the slapdash second half of this entry, purely for the sake of the rules.

First, Kei reminded me of an interesting thing I've encountered in the latter half of my tooth odyssey: being the dental office VIP. I'm not sure if this is her experience as the daughter of a dental assistant, but as a patient who began her expensive mouth renovation right before the U.S. economy's nosedive gave us the ambience, but not the inspiring moxie, of "The Journey of Natty Gann," I can't say I know of any place where my soft as butter, brittle as ice teeth and I are as popular as the dentist's. Also, because all the other bindle bums apparently have bread lines to stand in, I seem to be one of their only patients, meaning I have finally succeeded in achieving celebrity solely through sheer lack of other people. Anyway, what this all translates to is a strange tendency on the part of the dental assistants to want to talk to me when my mouth has either become a diorama-like display of dental instruments or is so numbed with Novocain that trying to apply Chapstick to my lips holds the same infuriating sensory disconnect as trying to grab toys in one of those godforsaken arcade drop-claw games.

On a recent visit, my usual assistant, who I like very much, was wondering what she should be for Halloween. Having heard her predicament in wanting to be some variety of adorable but not slutty mummy when the vast majority of pre-made female costumes are slutty but not adorable, I tried to come up with a certain kind of gurgle that would sound non-committal, reassuring and not tied to recognizable words that would only create more confusion if she felt she had to determine what exactly I was trying to say--a balancing act further complicated by having to hold back a more honest knee-jerk gurgle/snort of criticism at the very idea of a mummy being anything but a mish-mash of crusty bandages, fugitive eyeballs, flaking-off bits of dried-up mummyface, and, for the more pseudo-historically minded, something to do with sinister ancient Egyptian curses. This back and forth of the pros and cons of adult costume wear and my accompanying vague murmurings of agreement, mutual disapproval or, secretly, germane soliloquies on the difficulties we women face in purchasing an easy yet undemeaning costume in this consumeristic patriarchy of ours (which sort of sounded like "nnnhguaaahrl") went on for several minutes, leading me to later wonder a) why I felt I needed to reassure anyone who was about to poke the holy hell out of me* brand new Joe Biden teeth and b) how many perfectly acceptable conversations you could have like this and what it says about the art of small talk. I guess they already covered this on the Simpsons where Homer gets his mouth wired shut, but it's an interesting and sort of unpalatable experience to have all your perceived conversational skill, allusion-making ability and pop cultural acumen removed and to find yourself an even more desirable listener. Which is probably yet another reason I'm so popular over there! Love you guys!

Anyway, the teeth and I are all set for a new round of wacky adventures as we get set to move to Chicago tomorrow. Will we be the original odd couple? I don't even know what that means, but I sure hope not!

* the only possessive pronoun I feel has any place preceding mention of me* new teeth, as opposed to my old ones, is "me," rather than "my," because that's how I'm certain they managed the distinction in pirate times.

Crown Meditation, Part I

I am in the process of getting nearly all of my teeth crowned, due to an unfortunate medical condition that has been wearing them down for years (I'm trying to make this tastefully vague but fear I'm instead coming off as a reverse superhero whose exceptional disability is explained in a way that not only fails to pull off any sort of acceptably "sciencey-sounding" believability but suggests about as much imaginative rigor as that of the writers of "Turok: Son of Stone," my father's comic of choice for poorly executed backstories ["OK, so there's this Indian...and he lives among dinosaurs...." "Good, good!" "A-a-nd...each week he has to fight a different dinosaur." "Wait, why does he live among dinosaurs?" "Oh...I dunno. Because he's an Indian?"]). The bright side of this pretty unpleasant business is that soon I'll have a mouthful of new chompers to flash to the world, hopefully inviting speculation that once I got done with the whole martyrdom stint in Africa, rather than the pedestrian boob job or a snoresville recessionista shopping spree at Marshall's, I decided to treat myself to a new set of teeth, much like my favorite "love to hate him" senator, Norm Coleman, did not long after he managed to beat a dead guy and Walter Mondale to win Minnesota's Senate seat back in '02.

Anyway, this process is pretty time-consuming, and if you make the fatal mistake of not bringing along your much-maligned but still beloved Sport Discman (TM)--your goal being to be the last member of your generation with neither a tattoo nor an iPod--you have a lot of time to think, especially after somehow getting so used to the noise of the drill that you wonder if you could sneak in a nap while leaving your mouth hanging open.

I started, as I always do, by wondering where I should be looking. Does anyone else worry about this at the dentist's? When I was a even more self-conscious and neurotic youth, I used to think I should try to make eye contact with the dentist himself (I have no idea why), until I realized, to my embarrassment, what an unsettling thing it must be to have some spotty kid glaring at you while you're trying to fill her Big League Chew-related cavities. Thankfully, that was a long time ago. Today I decided to alternate between a charcoal sketch of Mickey Mouse golfing and the blue sky of the window opposite me, still half-thinking that if either the dentist or the hygienist confirmed my bizarre adolescent theory and happened to wonder why I wasn't making eye contact with them, they would immediately understand through the understated longing in my eyes that I was imagining freedom just beyond that window--freedom from drills, lite FM background music, post-Novocain conversations in which I look like the Elephant Man and sound like Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein, admonishments not to look in the mirror "because your teeth are essentially pegs now," and all the other things that will always make me hate Plymouth, Minnesota.

But that got boring fast, so then I began pondering Hermie the Elf from the TV Christmas classic, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Remember him? He was the blonde, inverted triangle-faced elf who was willing to brave certain death at the hands of a comically unfrightening yeti or just Kelvin-scale temperatures to follow his dream of being, yes, a dentist. Doesn't that seem weird to you? Does anyone want to be a dentist that bad? Dentists are commonly believed to have the highest suicide rate among professions (the link says it's not true, but it also says that even dentists believe that it is). Dentists also make a nice chunk of change. That sums up all I know about them, and I was trying to figure out what it reflected about this elf's character. Granted, he was probably right to not want to toil without pay in the particularly grim, colorless and conformist North Pole presented in "Rudolph," but for some reason I concluded this line of thought with a markedly diminished respect for Hermie. Which is really saying something since he already mostly lost me with that piece of shit song, "We're a Couple of Misfits." Maybe it gets to what always irked me about "Rudolph"--its attempt at the standard "You can do anything you put your mind to/being different is okay" message, while perhaps inspiring to young, possibly gay reindeer just a few years before the Summer of Love, was also embodied by a character who represents a threat the Establishment because he wants to pursue dentistry. Rebellion that ain't! No wonder Burl Ives signed on to it.

Anyway, I was there for four hours, which left much more time for thoughts in this Millenium Generation-type vein, but I won't bore you with them or what I subsequently learned about Neanderthals in the National Geographic they gave me while they forged my temporary crowns or the heartbreak of later going to IKEA and not being able to even consider eating any of the Swedish hospital food they make look so good, because even overcooked pasta earlier in the day was too painful for me to chew. In fact, I don't even really know what the point of this post was, but I'll leave you with a nifty picture that is regrettably more pertinent to this election season than any such thing should be in an educated society. Maybe Palin just read a few too many Turoks?

Apartment Investigation

I'm really trying to make this not be a blog about nothing that I eventually stop updating altogether...hence this post where I apologize for not updating (which is actually the first sign of trouble in most soon-to-be abandoned blogs, I think). But my excuse is that I'm in the process of moving to Chicago, first to my generous friend's apartment while she's on her honeymoon and then at the end of October to my new "two bedroom" apartment on the street that I loathed most in Chicago when I lived adjacent to it two years ago.

But when I brought Jaime over as an objective observer who would check my possibly too low apartment-choosing standards (so what if the doors don't match? So what if the designation "bedroom," used in this context, only indicates that the room is neither a bathroom, a kitchen nor a living room? So what if it's on Western, the most heinous street of the Ukrainian Village after Ashland, a.k.a. "Trashland"? So what if my landlord and I joked about signing the lease on the hood of his car, but instead did it inside of his car, while it was running, after he referred to the place as "four walls and a roof"?), not only did she think the place looked all right, but we discovered a discarded banjo on the floor, a sure sign of...something. Something about how this must be the place for me since its current inhabitant, like myself, appears to like the idea of playing the banjo but probably doesn't put in the effort to make that a reality and instead keeps it kicking around on the floor of his "bedroom." However, that's where the similarities end, since two times poking through this guy's personal space without him present revealed:

a) a large assortment of drums stashed around the place, which can only be explained as the result of a horrible breakup with a drummer (let's say the drummer of the dog-fronted deathgrind band, Caninus) who left his/her drums at the apartment, probably after an abortive attempt at a lovers' animal band side project (Felinus? Bovinus? Porcinus? The difficulty of employing any of these vocalistic choices, particularly in the shadow of the commercial and societal impact of Caninus, would strain even the most committed of collaborations), which initiated first artistic and then romantic differences, the ups and downs of which are at the heart of all notoriously explosive vegan temperaments. This no doubt ended with the drummer abandoning the instruments that only seemed to mock his/her vision of a world in which pigs and kitties have as much claim to deathgrind culture as dogs do, and dudeman not being quite able to bring himself to throw them away. Or else he just got a lot of drums.

b) a bunch of robot action figures. I may be still reading Archie comics to such an extent that when my aunt and uncle came to stay and were going to be using my bathroom, I had to do a little shameful item-stashing of my own, but I certainly do not have a collection of robot action figures atop my "closet" in my "bedroom."

Anyway, if the landlady hadn't been standing there, you can be sure that I would have done some more digging around to get to the bottom of this drum mystery and any others that are none of my business. As it is, I'll be moving in before Halloween and less than a year from then some snoopy bastard like myself will no doubt be noting my floor banjo and bizarre collection of Archie comics. Until then, visitors, in very small simultaneous amounts, are welcome!

Email from Jim

Jim writes:

"...also, clement claims he couldn't find a cheaper place to live so he is staying in the place he was last year. it's possible that this is true since it turns out that laura's ONG's main activity is providing free rent and tuition to like 400 kids, so I can imagine everything is taken up. on the other hand, clement has been rocking some awesome red women's jeans recently and i can't imagine that they came cheap."

This is probably only entertaining for like three people in the world, none of whom are reading this, but the Beninese tendency to push the envelope when it comes to what gender or even part of the body clothing was originally designed for is endlessly hilarious. Besides the ubiquitous scowling taxi drivers wearing whimsical 'World's Best Grandma' appliquéd and lace-trimmed denim shirts or forlorn, straight-from-a-Save-the-Children-commercial children wearing as their only dress/tunic a t-shirt that proclaims, 'Talk to the Hand!', you occasionally happen across something really special. In two years, I think this was the best I ever saw:

The title of this photo, for those who aren't sure what they're looking at, is 'turtleneckpantz.'

The Silent Treatment

I realized recently that the only form of punishment I know how to inflict on people who deeply hurt or insult me is to just stop speaking to them. I'm not saying I do this often or that, really, there's anything wrong with refusing to waste your time on people who are, well, a waste of time (I'm writing this as my cat, Mr. Sanchez, unleashes his wrath on my only stuffed animal, Lyle the Crocodile, who seems innocent enough to me but also earned similar animosity from my dog in Benin. I guess some, when provoked, prefer the more direct biting approach, while others stick with the subtlety of the silent treatment). But when it unfortunately does happen, I always think, self-righteously, that cutting off communication altogether or curtly announcing that I "need a break" from the evil Lyle to my victimized Sanchez will be a huge sacrifice, directly in proportion to the wrong committed in the first place. And then they'll pay! Oh, how they'll pay!

Aside from the conceited notion at the root of this--that depriving someone of my presence in his or her life is the cruelest form of revenge imaginable--the problem with the silent treatment is that it really isn't hard for me at all. Beyond a week or two of (maybe) wistfully reorganizing my interpersonal communication habits, including subjecting my still-talked-to friends to a detailed analysis of the deceptively lovable stuffed animal's catalogue of outrageous crimes, I'm more or less smoothly off on a different track, perhaps informally holding interviews for the next offender or interviewing for someone else's version of that position myself. What's worse is that this out-of-sight, out-of-mind wiring is so entrenched in my brain that not only is it easy to drop people who I feel deserve it, but even those who I love, revere and admire--the ones who are the ingredients of all the good in me--sometimes end up on the receiving end of an accidental form of the silent treatment just because I'm bad at keeping in touch. Like the archetypal deadbeat dad, I'll try to make up for this by sending an inevitable apologetic email that in turn makes grandiose promises of letters or packages or even mythical phone calls that never materialize, which then embarrasses me so much that another season of silence commences. Luckily I've managed to make some friends who are similarly challenged in this respect, or who at least don't take it personally when I don't return calls or emails--who somehow don't view it as anything worth dropping me for. Thank goodness.

Which brings me to Benin. When I finished my service at the end of June, I was trying to figure out how I would go about counteracting this inherent inability to pick up the phone and say hello (there's gotta be a disorder I can blame this on! Can't we make one up like all the others that medically excuse human emotion these days?) so that I would remain in touch not only with people--the usual deal-breaker--but, worse, ones who don't have email access, who only speak my ever-atrophying French and the metaphorical common ground with whom I share is still, for the most part, back across the Atlantic. I knew that this would be entirely my responsibility and, after years of hearing about the wunderkind Cobly volunteers who did call and write once they got back to the US, I was also aware that I would not be able to easily fade into the mist with the other ingrate gorillas who had already set a precedent for leaving and never being heard from again. So when I actually did force myself to sit down and call (I admit, partly hoping the phones would be down), I was almost shocked by how great it was hearing my best friend Zita's voice again, hearing my own slipping oddly and effortlessly back into villageois French, and just laughing with her about how neither of us had found a husband yet. I didn't realize until that moment that I wasn't calling just for her sake, but for my own as well.

Maybe an experience like this doesn't merit a novel-length essay, but it is quite a feat for anyone suffering from what I may more accurately describe as the unique cowardice of people who have no trouble nonchalantly yelling "Smell ya later!" as we turn to go but can't bear to say the word "Goodbye." Being able to talk to my friend for the unspecified amount of time during which my calling card went from having 25 minutes to having seven was worth even the painful recognition--the fear of which is at the heart of all the unintentional silent treatments throughout my adult life--that there are people and places I am no longer a part of that I miss terribly. I hope it won't be long before I do it again.

In Which I Play WIth the Format

Still trying to figure out what I like on here--this subdued Valentine's Day theme is appealing to me today, and I swear it's unrelated to what you see below.

However, while this maelstrom of political mudslinging continues to swirl, let's take a moment to set aside our party affiliations and focus on something positive we can all appreciate.

Yes, I'm talking about David Gregory's boyishly adorable haircut. Love that thing!

First Post, or Behold, World, My Important Observations

Yes, I finally have a blog. You may ask why I, unlike almost everyone in my training class and certainly the one after it, waited until after an as-advertised life-changing experience in Peace Corps to add my own reedy voice to the self-referential navel-gazing of my generation. Am I suggesting, your eyebrows may as well be saying, that I, too, deserve to be listened to only because I have a camera in my fake iPhone, a laptop, a belief in my own "wit," and nothing better to do? Wasn't it you (meaning me), you (meaning you) who know me (sigh) may be adding in smug recollection, who once claimed that bloggers don't do anything more than post in painstaking detail how they turned their old-school NES controller into an iPod case, following that with an ambient synth melody-rich playlist to accompany said activity?

To distract you from these imagined accusations for which I have no defense, I offer the below picture. I like the steps up to the door best of all. Welcome to this world in which we live in.