Appropriate Appropriation

Unpacking my library

2011-04-29T02:33:00.010-05:00

Not everyone seems to have the same relationship with books that I do. After unpacking my library, which has been in storage for four months, I sat in a meditative state surrounded by stacks of my books, my gaze lovingly caressing the exposed spines. There you are, beat up copy of White Oleander from late high school; I haven't even flipped through your pages, Portable Dorothy Parker (I only bought you because I love Penguin Classic Deluxe Editions) but I love you just the same. My body floods with relaxed excitement, potential for both curling up and expanding at the same time, overwhelming and comforting.

I approach the idea of not being able to read every fascinating, well-crafted exploration of the human experience, every clever turn of phrase or twist or piece of witty dialogue, every in-depth analysis of our world, as an anxiety-inducing tragedy. I look up from my trance, panicked, and say to Greg, "What if I don't even finish all of these books?"

This is why I keep neglecting to get a job, lurking LibraryThing instead of LinkedIn. Funny how leaving an institution of higher learning awakens real desire to learn. Four years and thousands of dollars later, where has college left me?

I could have had four years of job experience and 200+ books behind me. Instead, I stare at my library like a lover who's slipped through my fingers, imagining what could have been, what late night conversations and deep connections and afternoons sitting silently in the sun enjoying each other's mere presence we could have had, if only I hadn't spent those four years with a moron who only cared about basketball.

I wish to be left alone with my happiness

2011-03-29T23:31:00.003-05:00

I wish to be left alone with my happiness. I feel like this is a small request to make, but in the face of a world that trades in breaking people's willpower and telling everyone how they've failed, even if all they've ever done in life is worked and attempted to succeed, asking to be left alone with one's happiness is really the greatest request of all.

I may not have work nearly as hard as some people in certain fields, but in the field of my own, simple happiness, I think I'm reaching mastery. I enjoy reading, cooking and eating delicious things, talking to friends about their lives, speaking precisely, taking notes and making lists, smiling at people walking tiny dogs, and trying not to make the world a worse place for anyone. Simple things.

But nothing is simple, and the world is not concerned with my or anyone's simple happiness. No one looks anyone in the eyes anymore and says "your intentions are earnest and good." When I wake up in the morning I'm most proud of the fact that I took the time the last couple of weeks to make sure that I learned how to treat myself and others with more respect.

But there's no where on a resume to put that, and therefore it is useless.
This is the best way I can think of to describe my unhappiness. Like a calm pond that no one can resist throwing a rock into, I feel their disruption ripple on and on and on.

Knowledge is poptarts

2011-03-21T16:17:00.004-05:00

Sometime in the last decade, having three weeks with a library book went from ludicrously long to just enough time. When I was thirteen, I was making weekly trips to the library to check out foot-tall stacks of books. Scratch that first part, actually - when I was thirteen, I was volunteering for the library on a bi-weekly basis helping run their summer reading program. For my girl scout silver award, I spent forty hours scrubbing the sticky residue from years of old due date stickers off the front covers of reinforced hardback children's books. Just me, the Berenstain Bears. and all the tikes at the tiny kids table huffing paint thinner fumes for hours.

The library near where we're living frustrates me with its glamourous high ceilings and self-checkout lanes. The libraries I grew up with in Dallas - underfunded, musty, squat brown buildings from the late sixties, closed Thursdays (the day that every kid is banging out that end-of-week assignment) - were bastions of safety and security for all things old. Old books that no one would ever see stocked on the shelves of the bright, shiny Borders down the street (itself now an antiquated entity on its slow way out, thanks to the even brighter, shinier internet) and old souls. There was a camaraderie amongst the library-dwellers, slow movers in an accelerated world, disinterested in newfangled forms of entertainment and knowledge acquisition, leaving the tiny island of tan, half-decade old computers untouched in favor of getting a sweet spot next to the windows to examine crisp, yellowing pages closer.

The Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library is internet in solid form. At its core are table after table after table of flat screens. Beeps and clicks are more prevalent than the crackle of plastic-encased dust jackets. Bright florescent light bounce off the perfect white walls, creating a mood more like a supermarket than a cavern of centuries of knowledge. Everything is new, fast, instant, all inclusive - everything a book isn't. A monument to modern age intellect and desire - we invented knowledge, you know.

The most telling part is that the old people don't come there. It's all travel coffee muggers in the armchairs. As I confidently navigate the stacks, people are drawn to me to teach them the archaic skill of finding information by hand. I love the internet - I hang out on fucking Reddit and have a unmanageable blog roll - but I respect books. Reading Jezebel might give you a taste of what it's like for victims of sexual assault - it provides the latest talking points, keeps you abreast of legislative developments - but rereading Alice Sebold's Lucky hit me like an earthquake. Food bloggers are hip in their exploration of forgotten foods, but no one tells you the history of your dinner the way M.F.K. Fisher does, beautifully intertwining history and culinary artistry. Books separate the wheat from the chaff, they work harder, they're more passionate, more complete. They've been tested, seen more eyes and more red pen rewrites. The don't win the race, but when has speed ever been the basis of understanding?

There's a scene from The L Word that's always stuck with me, and not because it's the prelude to one of the hottest trysts in the series. Bette, director of a prestigious visual arts center, hires carpenter Candace (who is the first and only person to make overalls sexy) to complete some renovations on the building. They have this exchange about quality right before Candace is hired:

Candace: Have you ever seen this?

[She hands the notebook back to Bette. On a page, she's drawn a triangle. On each side of the triangle, she's written a word: Fast, Good and Cheap.]

Candace: There are three sides to the triangle, see?

[Candace sits down in a chair in front of Bette's desk.]

Bette: Fast, good, cheap.

Candace: Yeah. You can have any two of the three in combination, but you can never have all three together.

Bette: Of course you can. I mean, if you have enough money - (looks at triangle) Oh. Right, then it wouldn't be cheap. Okay.

Candace: You can have fast and good. But that takes a big crew of skilled, highly-paid workers.

Bette: And I can have fast and cheap, but then the end product would probably look like shit.

Candace: You can have cheap and good.

Bette: (smiling) That's the one I want.

Perhaps the top .00001% of written knowledge has been created via the fast, good, expensive route - but this route also requires something even rarer that brings together the primary three qualities: luck. As the media continues to face financial crisis, and as huge hunks of the population (myself included) fancies themselves deserving of being published, having their voice and analysis heard, the world teems with the ability to create fast and cheap. But fast and cheap is only good for profiters - not those who want to consume knowledge. We deserve better than new, fast, cheap. Fast and cheap is pop tarts. You might feel full, but you're really starving.

Dots

2011-03-14T02:15:00.004-05:00

I guess I should keep blogging since someone still has my blog at the top of a very short list on the side bar of her's. And I keep reminding myself that I used to be a writer and that Ira Glass said you just have to power through the drudgery of creating a body of work and so it follows that I should just ignore how shitty my writing has gotten lately, maybe.

I guess I'm still an okay writer since I edited that last sentence to have more effective adjectives and nouns, and I've got a twitch in the corners of my mouth about using blog three times in the first sentence.

Blog, blog, blog.

Life's gotten weird the last few months and I've stopped most things I enjoy doing for so long that I've kind of forgotten what those things are, and subsequently who the person was that enjoyed doing those things. According to my new life as a squatter in Alexandria, Virginia, I enjoy playing turn-based strategy games, cooking (the bastion of sanity and identity grounding pre-move me and post-move me), and neurotically documenting hygiene and mood control efforts on a tiny calendar with a code of colored dots.

Did you brush your teeth twice? Dot.
Did you start your period? Dot.
Did you take your (possibly fake helpful, possibly placebo-helpful) homeopathic drugs to keep you (at least thinking you're) sane(ish)? Dot.
Did you take a bath (also mood-altering)? Double dot. (Single dot for shower, less helpful in terms of keeping my muscles from controlling my ability to take criticism).

Things that I supposedly do not like anymore: sunlight, telephonic contact with friends, achievement.

The dots are the only thing telling me anything about myself anymore that I trust. Indisputable, factual records. How can I trust anything else, when I constantly hear conflicting reports about my level of skill, who I truly am, what I can achieve and what I'm worth. My liberal arts degrees have granted me skills and intellectual prowess that are competitive with educations from fancier colleges that cost far more, says my state school, but why do I feel like my brain is at least three years spoiled? What am I really good at? What can I securely put a dot next to to remind myself of what I am and what I've achieved?

The Wire

2010-08-31T03:05:00.004-05:00

For a party recently, I shoved my digital recorder into my bra and recorded 3 hours of audio.

I always thought my deliberate, slow speech was full of impact; actually, what it is is that
I sound like Drunky McDrunkerson.

But, I'm very polite.

More than one way to skin a cat

2010-08-11T02:09:00.017-05:00

So I made an impromptu visit to my parents this weekend strictly because I felt like I shouldn't stay home alone while my boyfriend went to visit friends in Boston. Reasons for this feeling include: still being afraid of being raped in my own bedroom, thanks to an irresponsible jewish landlady; various unfounded anxieties that my boyfriend will die the moment he leaves my sight, be it from an incredibly premature heart attack or a commercial jet crash; and just generally knowing I'd probably just sit at home alone and watch episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix streaming all weekend and wait for Greg to get back so I can switch back to watching episodes of Sailor Moon and 12 oz. Mouse.

All visits to see my parents make me nervous because relations with my mother have been elevated to threat level red ever since she told me she'd not acknowledge any romantic partner of mine who couldn't put a baby in me (eventually).

This was the nine-eleven of our relationship; I will never forget. As such, much like the U.S., I will leave no opportunity to call her out unturned, completely unrelated or not. If she screws up once, I am there with my verbal artillery at the ready. Or, in this case, a pair of wire-cutting scissors.

Over the past year, my mom has been busy working on the house she and my dad are building a lot down from where they are now. To put this in perspective, my mom has made a jump from a lifestyle of jeopardy watching, solitaire playing, and pork chop microwaving to a full time, year-long, heavily-detailed project. She flips through catalogues of door-hinges, for god's sake. For someone who barely seemed to have a hold on the basic functions of family life, this seems pretty ambitious. Unsurprisingly, certain things have fallen into neglect.

So I get home, put my stuff down, and immediately go upstairs to visit my cats, who hang out in an empty bedroom with wood floors so that Alzheimers doesn't strike and they forget that my dad's shirt isn't the catbox and they saturate the whole house with cat pee, I don't know. And I'm petting K.C., my superfriendly maine-coon barn cat, and it feels like his body is riddled with tumors. And I think, well, it took them a long time to tell me that Felicia, my other cat, had a stroke, so I figure they either haven't noticed or just didn't bring it up.

Except, it's not tumors. It's just huge mats of hair all over his body so tightly wound and close to the skin that it just feels like tumors.

Not a relief, though. Tumors on a 15-year-old cat, you can't blame anybody. A cat covered in mats of hair, however, means he hasn't been brushed in weeks, and someone is at fault. I grit my teeth in silent glee as I tally up more grudge points against my mom. But, I stay silent, mostly because I can hear the arguments about being busy already.

The next day, I decide to take things into my own hands and do something I've done several times before: give K.C. a haircut. Snip off a few clumps of hair, brush out the rest, fix him up. I ask my mom where the scissors are and, in usual my mom form, this launches her into a fifteen minute search for the right pair of scissors,
the pair she bought specifically for this occasion,
so as not to have to use the other pairs of scissors she has
in order to keep them in pristine condition
so as to avoid that dreaded occasion where someone comes over to borrow her scissors
and they're dull or dirty
and she tell everyone in the community, "don't borrow that (mom)'s scisssors, she keeps hers in dreadful order."

I get exasperated incredibly quickly because, of course, it's not about the scissors, it's about
me being queer and the cat being covered in mats of hair and that one time where she dropped me off to get my hair cut and then didn't pick me up for an hour and wouldn't answer her phone because she was deeply in discussion about door hinges and that she hates my best friend for also being sexually incomprehensible and afraid of insects.

So finally I have scissors and I go upstairs and get K.C. and, as usual, K.C. is just happy he has something to rub against that isn't stroked-out Felicia or his own loneliness, so he's purring and squinting his eyes and lolling his head around and I'm holding him still pretty well and snipping off clumps of hair. And these clumps are thick, and so I'm separating them out and clipping them up and everyone's having a great time, and then K.C. turns, and I sort of ruffle his hair, and the kinda pull it back,

And there is a gigantic hole in K.C.'s fur.

And my first thought is - oh my god: fuck you, mom, what is this.

It kinda looked like those craters old people get in their skin from like, i don't know, scratching holes into their skin I guess, or not being able to scab anymore and just falling apart like wet tissue paper. It also looked a lot like the cat I dissected senior year of high school. The dead, skinned cat.

I sat there for a second as my stomach turned over, and then started shouting for help.

K.C. is still purring and lolling his head around, and even though purring is a trauma reaction in cats, it seems like he's still having a pretty good time, even if his shoulder looks more like a saran-wrapped chicken leg than a cat's.

And I'm all wide-eyed and keep saying "why didn't he say anything, why didn't he react" as I hold a clump of hair with a tiny little bit of skin and a few dark red capillaries that look like they've been traced on with the point of a needle. My dad takes a look and tells me I've cut through the subcutaneous level, which is his doctorly way of trying to calm me down, but it doesn't help at all because subcutaneous could mean anything as far as I know. I keep picturing K.C. having a gigantic bald spot for the rest of his life that I have to stare at every Christmas and cry onto, and him not understanding my pain or any pain at all, apparently.

This is, of course, when I decide to start flipping out about the real cause of this: my mother.

My dad drives me and K.C. to the pet emergency room and the whole way there I will not shut up about every single bad thing my mom has done in the past decade which has all led up to there being clumps of hair on my cat and how everything, everything, is always all my fault, especially now, now because I accidentally hurt something trying to help, and how this is always what happens. I am crying in the back seat while trying to comfort my cat as best as a person can limited by a plastic cat carrier with barely finger-sized holes. I am oscillating between explosive hysterics and calm, cold, collected criticisms with sharp, cutting accuracy. At this most opportune moment, I announce that, as long as Greg isn't allergic to him, we will be taking K.C. back with us at fall break. Even though I've just sliced my cat open, I decide that the clumps of hair definitively decides the argument I've had with my parents for four years over whether I can care for my cat at college.

The animal emergency room takes K.C. back and we fill out some forms. I have to tell my dad how old he is and what kind of food he eats, even though I haven't fed him since I left for college. While talking to the doctor, he confuses his pronouns, and the conversation carries on with K.C. as a she, even though I keep correcting both of them. My dad is standing and I'm sitting, so the vet only makes eye contact with him. She jokes and says it's an easy thing to do, slice your cat like a deli meat. "I just did it to my dog recently," she says with the pleasant nonchalance usually reserved for switching to a new shampoo or treating yourself to a manicure. I am thin lipped as they joke, even though she started the conversation telling us that they're kinda backed up and it'll be a few hours until K.C. can be stitched up.

She says 8:30. My dad says we'll be around by 9. He's concerned we'll not have enough time to go out to dinner in the interim. This puts me off food entirely, and we end up having takeout personal pizzas from the grill around the corner.

I am silent all evening, until my dad delivers K.C. into my arms while I'm sitting in bed talking to Greg on the phone about the whole ordeal. K.C.'s shoulder is shaved, with purple stitches criss-crossing a two-inch long cut. Where they gave him an IV at his ankle is also shaved, so he has a little poodle-like puff for a left foot. My dad tells me that while he was sedated they combed out the rest of the knots of hair. K.C. snuggles up against me and rubs his head under my chin, and everything seems okay
until my mom swoops in, scoops him up, and tells me he's not allowed to move around much. I'm left alone in bed with just a tiny fuzzy cat hair tumbleweed.

And for me coming to North Carolina, everyone is worse for wear.

True Love

2010-06-28T15:23:00.002-05:00

After two weeks of living in Lawrence, Kansas, my boyfriend still does not know what the KU mascot is called.

Greg Patton is the best story of my life.

Oh, I'll show you "fresh"

2010-05-05T11:59:00.006-05:00

Not to do a complete 180 on my audience - wait, yes, because that's exactly how my blogs always go - and go all vagina monologues on your ass, but when the fuck did "fresh" mean code for "YOUR VAGINA SMELLS, HERE LET ME FIX THAT."

I'm fucking serious though. Maybe it's because I'm reading a little book called Cunt and am currently doing my full-on "let's synch with the moon, my body is one with the universe" type bullshit but I am fucking raging over the fact that every single time I buy "sanitary" items I fucking have to learn a new language that involves stylized flowers and ambiguous adjectives written in pink cursive. Why not just explicitly say "perfumed" or "goddamn vaginas are so fucking gross, I wish women looked like Barbies down there."

I take offense that I have to search out the word "unscented" as if I'm some sort of deviant dirty hippie for wanting to stray from the norm of making my vagina smell like fucking grain alcohol, which is exactly what fresh smells like to Always.

Just a question: since my vagina is basically likened to a bloody, festering gash, where's the butterfly-print, perfumed for my pleasure surgical gauze for when I actually have a bloody, festering gash? Oh wait, no, those are fine and permissible. Injuries are accidents, unforeseeable, not my fault. Being a woman is an egregious offense.

In related news, the Women's Studies department thinks I need to have a more communal experience - because all my friends aren't WS majors and I'm not in a goddamn queer campus group - and because of this I probably won't be able to get a little validating piece of paper that says "Cara did far more credits than she even fucking needed to, here's a degree for that."

A Blog of Repeats

2010-05-04T13:20:00.005-05:00

I came to Kansas to forget. I walked away from my parents’ car and into my dorm room with its sticky-clean linoleum floors, sat down with Jamie’s friends, and started a new life, a life that I thought would be better than the one I left in a place I never chose for myself. In Kansas, I would make all the choices. I would choose all new friends, people I’d tried to imagine for weeks before school started, blurry faces with cool haircuts, glasses, awkward, gawky, sassy, mixed nuts. I would not make the same mistakes with guys as I did in high school - eventually, I would get rid of them all together. I would pick new places to live, I would decide what’s for dinner, I would set the limits on when my parents saw and heard from me, and not vice versa.

I made all the choices. I alienated myself from my real friends, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I drank and smoked to put a smile on my face the way life never seemed to be able to. My diet’s been inconsistent – I eat chips and salsa for dinner as often as I eat some semblance of a normal meal. I sleep odd hours in places infested with mice, with leaky roofs and doors that don’t shut and lock. I’ve almost ruined my relationship with my parents.

I have a way of throwing away all convention. I want to build everything myself. The way other people have lived their lives is of no matter to me – I will selfishly create my life on my own, my own meanings and understandings, I will forge in the smithy of my soul something something something, yada yada yada.

For the life that I create alone, I will be alone.

For my masterpiece, I will choose the best things with the worst intentions. I will plunge myself into the most challenging situations in life despite not weathering the simplest trials well. I will create a magnum opus of complications so I can say to those around me, look at what a crazy life I live! Think of all the strange tales I will have to tell! This is all fodder for my book. “You live a very Sedaris-y life,” Cay said. It’s a sick pleasure, like taking sugary butterscotch schnapps shots, licking your lips after you gag.

I will paint over the mistakes. I will forgive the people who have hurt me and then not learn from the pain. Instead, I will become them.
I will paint and paint and paint, layer and complicate so much that the past will be unrecoverable and inaccessible. It will be lost in the business of what’s in front of me now. I will repeat. No,

Alone, I will repeat.

Happy Birthday, Antidepressants

2010-04-15T02:07:00.006-05:00

I'm so depressed I can't even finish writing a journal entry to myself about my depression, let alone compile the evidence that I will present to whoever I can threaten into seeing me ASAP in order to convince them that I need to be on pills. When it's bad enough that I can put aside my consuming paranoia that antidepressants are just one small step away from sci-fi style social control, it's really bad. When you have a post-it note that lists the things you must focus on in order of importance, and the top two things have to be "eat" and "sleep" because you keep forgetting to do both and really have no desire to even fix those things, maybe it's time to recognize that you are sick in the head.

I literally care about nothing.

The best part is, going to therapy has actually made things worse, since my therapist is under the impression that I have some sort of self-awareness problem, as if years of journaling and writing and blogging have not made me obnoxiously absorbed with my own head. I go in and sit down, and she stares at me until I start talking, and for 50 minutes I just fill the air with concerns that I didn't even know existed, that I might just be making up to make sure I get my $15's worth. I leave empty handed. The one time she gave me something constructive and concrete to do - exercise and change my sleep schedule - I almost jumped up and down with glee. The whole point was to go and figure out how to fix things, to get help. But then at the end of our session this week when I asked her what I could do to make things better, she plainly explained to me that I knew how to fix things, I just needed to do it. "I'm not here to tell you what to do, that won't help you. I'm here to listen and try to understand."

To Lena, later that afternoon: "As a patient and an essayist, ideally, she should be paying me to entertain her, if that's what this is going to be."

It doesn't help that my in-training therapist just seems so goddamn therapisty. She wears turtlenecks, glasses, and solid fabric circle headbands that hold back her perfectly rounded mass of short kinky hair. Her voice is smooth. She is generic in a soothing and reassuring way. When she fails to help, I look at myself and say, she's the sane one, she probably knows what she's doing. Way to fail at therapy again, Cara.

My head is sick, it's that simple. At the slightest trigger it vomits up the most insane, anxious, insecure bullshit it can manage. Tonight I went from being playfully made fun of for my Harry Potter love to questioning my intelligence and self worth, my ability to remember "important things" (including late 18th century painters) or even anything, my skills as a conversationalist, as an intellectual, as a decent girlfriend - all of this in a matter of mere handful of minutes. Everything and anything becomes blown epically out of proportion until something like not cleaning my room becomes the lynchpin in my academic success this semester, in college, success in my work life, in the rest of my life - the fear and panic sweeps in so rapidly. It's a rough time for everyone, being so close to graduation and the uncertain future, but while everyone's house occasionally has a small kitchen fire, I'm like a housing development full of cookie cutter homes with faulty wiring, soaked in gasoline. Every day I trigger in a flash and destroy myself and then wake up and do it again.

Besides, I always wanted some Zoloft to match the pharmaceutical swag post-it notes my first therapist gave me.
It's finally time for the real deal.

Fragment

2010-04-04T02:17:00.001-05:00

...it is a delicate balance, a hundred spinning plates atop wobbly dowels, and I haven’t been a circus performer for very long, just street shows for passersby, I haven’t tried to impressed crowds or met the demands of loyal fans. I don’t know what it’s like to have a long-term gig, it’s only my first night and my adrenaline’s pumping, my hands are shaking, I’m running back and forth trying to make sure everything whirls and dances beautifully, that nothing wobbles off while my back is turned, while I overconfidently conduct more plates onto their perches. Keep them all afloat, keep the crowds oooing and ahhing rather than gasping and sighing, collecting their coats and bags and leaving me to sit in the solitude of the harsh spotlight with my plates all crashed on the floor.

Melinda Remora

2010-03-23T18:17:00.010-05:00

Once you start living, everyone else want to latch onto you, commensally. Remora, sucker-fish, along for the ride but not steering the ship. Eating whatever scraps they can get from the actors, the king pins, the sharks of the sea - whatever they can get as long as they don’t take (a) life themselves.

Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!

She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.

Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.

She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.

She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.

I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.

(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)

That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.

Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.

Don't Call It a Comeback

2010-03-17T16:52:00.003-05:00

Placing a mirror behind a desk is not conducive to working, Charleston Place Hotel, unless my thesis, or rather, this thesis-distraction blog post were on what types of lighting suit the contours of my face, how to tilt my head just right so that my eyes don't look so deep-seated and tired. Cigarettes and and hitting the sheets at seven a.m. are not treating me nicely. I should stop both, but really I'll just cut back - 3 am a night, 2 cigarettes a day. It's settled.

Against Miley Cyrus's incredibly astute advice for America's youth, I'm documenting the shit out of my life lately, and in turn I'm living it more, not less - although I guess playing sports "or something" might do me some good. I'm going out and seeing more of the people that will soon be out of my grasp; I'm getting on planes and crossing the country on a monthly basis; I'm putting miles on my car and I'm never home on the weekends. I've filled paperback moleskin notebooks with musings and scenes, fleeting thoughts and undeveloped projects. Scraps that I'll never do anything with: "luxury is hiring a cab just to sleep in the backseat," "at half-squint, my eyes look like pheasants," "all the women in this paragard brochure are wearing wedding rings - intentional?" I've written reviews of contributors to NPR's voices, talking about Maureen Corrigan's crisp, appley c's; I'm cataloguing podcasts, treating them like advice from well-respected mentors. I'm going out, noticing more, caring less; I'm reevaluating the standards I've evaluated my life by these past, oh, 17 years, and I think(?) that's okay.

But as much as I'm writing, or taking notes, or rambling, or really whatever you call all this incessant journaling, margin-scribbling, and post-it note sticking, nothing beats having something polished and public. Which is why I want to come back to this, even if it's slowly and scarily becoming more public with every person who mentions they've seen it. Even if almost all I can write are transcripts of therapy sessions and barely inconspicuous love letters. Even if I can't seem to ever make this thing cohesive. As good as raw is, complete and concise are nice, too. More polish, more editing, more.

English 334: Kerouac & Ginsberg

2010-02-16T16:23:00.005-06:00

Class notes:
Mills. Channels. Whistler. Lowell. Betty Davis. Kerouac memorial. Textile history museum. Palpable locations.
Oral biography. A shower of roses. Rose. When the flood comes. Canonization. Sprawling. Gary Snyder. Schneider? Snyder. Theater. Oscar Wilde. Lecture tour. April 1882. Liberty Hall. Parochial school. Children's books. Dead at the time. Maggie Cassidy. Inch along the ground. Wrinkly tar. Ulysses's soap. Drizzly November day. The Shadow. Silver Tin Can. Self polishing wax. Hypnotic power. Margot Lane. Didn't bother to put in a plot. Balzacian. Rosebud palace. Like asking water to be wet. 12 people. Haunted. Murmur, mummy, elements, moment.

Memories and thoughts and dreams - go back and forth, seamlessly, same place. Like shrooms.

Mesh of memories. Baby in the river bed. Visions. Mythologized. Color.

Parallel Notes:
Hookah. Spelling. Palpable? Sailor Moon. Canadian kids TV. Eighties hair. Redhead, boots. Kevin. Greg. Day desk calendar. Hershey's Hugs. Belgium shells. Au Marche. Downtown. Dad's desk. Dad's library. Red leather desk chair. Creaking. Creak. Summer. High ceilings. Writing. Notebook. The flood. Vagina Monologues. Lauren. Short hair. dream. Helvetica. Paris walk to class. Lower school. Tears. Tears? 2008. 2000 and late. Jane. Lacy. Septum. Essays. Spaghetti. Linguine. Birthdays. The Chateau. Fondant cigarettes. Cigarette cigarettes. Kiss the insides of your thighs. Death, Knowledge, Sex. Chuckle. Bubbly. Evervescent? Effervescent. Spelling, again. Caricature. Stale. Blue and gold checked coat. Ponies. Sleeping in the Parthenon. Kegels. Shell snap necklaces. The cabinet under the phone, under the remotes. Mom - ponytails, bar chair. Nose piercing. Matthew. Marwa. Mesh of memories. Bags in the back seat. Not shutting the car door. Foreheads. Drunk. Paces. Our steps lining up perfectly.

Death

2010-01-30T14:07:00.004-06:00

I finally feel alive, which is why all I can think about anymore is dying. I almost didn't leave the house because my postcard of that eerie self-portrait of Edvard Munch fell off the wall and was sitting on my bed, staring at me. I don't want to drive because of that dream one of my exes had about me dying in a horrible car crash, my bracelets melting into my skin, my body twisted and crumpled. I'm beginning to realize how easily a bullet passes through a skull, cracking like an eggshell, gliding through the brain like the electrical jelly that it is. I've finally got so many things to live for: writing and reading and eating banana crepes with my roommates with the sun streaming in through all the windows of our fucking beautiful house, falling asleep to your voice and having it sink into my psyche. Everything's so amazing, why do I have to feel like death is all around me now?

The Fog

2010-01-16T12:23:00.004-06:00

When we got out of the concert, the fog had descended over Kansas City. The parking lot lamps were well-defined, sharp-edged spotlights and we were the stars of running across the black ice and hopping into my freezing cold car. I had been yawning all night, and when the last band came on and the whole building started shuttering with their alt. rock mediocrity, we both understood it was time to go. Even if you did have to write a review for the newspaper.

At first everything was purpley-red - or maybe red purple, I could never tell the difference between those two crayons. “Maybe the whole planet was swallowed by something while we were in the concert. It feels like we’re in the bowels of the beast.” Very Jonah and the Whale, very Pinocchio, but let’s not mix metaphors, although they all seem a little appropriate; I’ve been feeling pretty lost lately, although things are beginning to get a little clear. Write a creative thesis, get an MFA, become a bestselling author and live in a well-maintained turn of the century house.

The fog comes in waves wisping over the windshield. We discuss the merits of the almost forgettable final scene in Men In Black where the galaxy is part of a game of marbles. We feel small – we are small. And then we’re alone on the road and the fog is swallowing us up completely. The red has turned into smoky grey, and I can only see two dashes ahead on the road. All the cars disappear for a while.

It feels like we’re on a bridge! I feel like I might fall off! It’s just like Banshee Boardwalk. Except the giant fishes arching overhead are the eerie floating lights of cars unsupported by bridges, even unsupported by cars.

I begin to freak out, but you’re in love with it all, and if I weren’t too busy being responsible, maybe I could see all the beauty, too. Which I guess is sort of our story, which I guess is why we couldn’t live with each other for a while. And then once you were gone, it was just me in the house alone with my bitterness, and that’s when I knew it was always my fault.

We reached the toll plaza, which floated out of fog in mere seconds – nothing, and then something, with chips and cracks and grooves and dents. Beyond, a curtain of satin gold cast down from the yellowed highway lights. And beyond that ...? I roll down the window for the toll, and then keep it down with my arm out and drive through the low-lying clouds. It feels like the perfect cold, velvety with wetness. And we smile and laugh with our arms out, and for a second it’s clear - there’s still hope for all of it yet.

Flying's a miracle; try not to crash

2010-01-08T21:21:00.004-06:00

I’m a terrible writer. The more I read about the processes of other essayists the more I realize I’m not cut out for it: I don’t have the memory and I don’t like to lie. I can’t remember the details well enough to tell even the stories that mean the most to me.

What was it that you said when we were sitting in front of Luncheon of the Boating Party? And I said “Who would go to Georgetown?” and you said “Touché,” which is one of the best-suited words for you. I can’t remember what you said, and I hate it when people forget the joke and remember the punch line. And we laughed because you hate Georgetown and I hate the dog woman, and neither of us really wants to believe that beautiful things are so rotten inside.

There’s not enough time, for Man Ray and African art, for you to be sullen or me to be withholding and not sit back down on the couch. There’s not enough time to wait another 3 years or another decade, but there’s not enough time to worry about it, either. The future is so bright! We could die tomorrow! We’re so free!

On the plane I’m sitting here trying not to crash, but all I can think about is how you said flying’s a miracle. I didn’t expect you to believe in miracles; I don’t, but when the plane shakes, I close my eyes like I do when you kiss me, and I’m not afraid.

Coup de Grâce

2009-12-24T09:41:00.002-06:00

There is a god, and he's been laying in waiting for me in Independence.

It would have been too easy to kill me on the flight to Kansas City, but that didn't stop him from at least letting the plane unexpectedly drop for three seconds, some of the longest three seconds of my life, time enough for me to have full view from my aisle seat of one of the flight attendants drop down into a crouch reminiscent of a "duck and cover" video. My copy of The Economist slide off of my tray table and on to the floor, but I was too busy clutching the edge of my seat, bracing myself in a maneuver that could be the basis for an existentialist joke: you can cling all you want to your seat and your life, but it's not going to stop that metal coffin from dropping. Even after the plane balanced out, I kept my hands in the same place, not picking up my magazine, not moving a single tensed muscle for 20 minutes, only listening to the too-loud, tinny laughter of the passengers who cope through sublimating their fears. When I removed them - once we were safely braced against the ground - the leather was shiny black from sweat.

No, it's always the slow route with me, the Catherine wheel and not the guillotine. Which is why I here, going through the motions of a religion that has mostly done me irreperable harm, clamping my mouth shut when my grandmother repeatedly asks about the effeminate guy on Glee if "we're sure he's a boy" or when she calls Obama a "dumb man from Illinois who has half the country looking for work," and diverting my eyes around a callendar that praises women for being the great self-sacrificers behind all good men. Tonight I get to answer the same prying questions about my love life, which finally exists again but which I get to mask with my usual dry spell responses: "i'm just so busy with school," "I've got a lot of great friends but no one special," and, new for 2009, "well, I didn't want to get into something before I left for Europe." And everyone will look at me disdainfully when I feign almost bashful repentence for my lack of interest in KU sports. I'll hold my breath all Christmas, but no one will rush me a stay of execution, and no one, not even I, will be brave enough, or know enough, to bestow a coup de grâce.

Tiger

2009-12-12T17:34:00.004-06:00

Consider this: what if Tiger Woods was in an open relationship with his wife, and now she's taking the financial opportunity the media has now created for her (and somewhat insists that she takes)?

We're doing two things wrong here: assuming we understand the inner workings of someone's personal life, and expecting celebrities, who are in a unique difficulties - they're under unusual pressure and offered unusual opportunities - to be role models. Even if this is legit infidelity, being able to hit a ball in a hole never qualified Tiger Woods to be an amazing person; we should never have expected him to be, even without the unusual complications of super-celebrity.

(sorry this is old news, but after being bombarded with tiger "news" since I got here...)

Addendum: Okay, just kidding. Further information leads to the conclusion that he's a sleazy dirtbag.

Fourth Thanksgiving

2009-12-12T15:18:00.003-06:00

Tomorrow my parents and I are making up for me skipping thanksgiving by basically cooking all the carb-centered dishes, since those are all really all that matter/don't involve hours of dismembering/basting/tryptophan-induced sleeping. Things I am currently thankful for:
- A bed that does not screech when I get in it, comforters, comfort in general
- Umbilical cord -free internet.
- A sex-sized shower, primary (only) used for its secondary function of leg-shaving accommodation. Also one that doesn't run out of hot water in 4-6 minutes.
- Netflix! Hulu! NBC.COM! Basically, videos being licensed for the country I'm in.
- Margaritas. My parents willingness to make me cocktails.
- Time to read books, write in them, actually enjoy them (maybe after I've recovered from compact western civ trauma, I might go back and read some philosophy)

Things I could really see more of:
- Well-dressed men, additionally with a facial piercing, particularly nose studs.
- Really, well-dressed everyone, including me.
- Paris-style temperatures.
- Publictransportation/art&architecture/fastyetqualityfood etc.

Things I could probably see less of:
- Sports, constantly on our TV.
- Cute viral videos catered to the daytime talkshow watching demographic.
- Mail, on every surface in my parents house, that proves the law of superposition via checking magazine dates.
- Movies censored for language.
(Side rant: I would argue that turning the Penis Game in "500 Days of Summer" into the "Pandas" Game is significantly more offensive - also, I'm sorry, but does artistic license and maintaining the integrity of characters not matter at all? If you're going to be offended by 20/30-somethings talking about blowjobs & "other jobs" shouldn't you be watching a Reese Witherspoon movie? That's not Cruel Intentions?)

In summary: good to be home, wish home was europe.

Storytelling

2009-12-08T16:43:00.001-06:00

Finals now; blogging commitment resumes when crazy subsides.

15

2009-12-04T07:40:00.004-06:00

Remember three months ago when I thought it was a great idea to pack 15 pieces of clothing?

Everything smells like dust and sweat, covered in the same grey lint from my cardigan sweater, half stretched and worn out of recognition. My two white shirts are casualties of the wonders of italian washing machines. I've almost completely worn through my black flats, and the heels on my brown ones are splintering. My tights all have tracks.

I miss reality.

Practical/Prático/Pratique/Pratico Language

2009-11-28T11:25:00.007-06:00

When I was in third grade I got into an argument with my teacher about why we should learn French instead of Spanish. My position was simple and straightforward: I liked France. France, particularly its language, had been a large part of my upbringing: my mother, despite not being a native speaker, taught me the alphabet and numbers in both languages and lulled me to sleep with “Frere Jacques” as often as “Rock-a-bye Baby.” On the weekends she would brush up her French watching PBS’s “French in Action,” and I dreamt about one day going to the places shown in the show’s opening, especially the water garden outside of the Pompidou with “the lips.” To my nine-year-old self, learning Spanish merely meant being able to order at a Mexican restaurant in a different language, which I was too shy to do anyway. No one I was friends with spoke Spanish, and at the time product labels and billboards didn’t show up in both language; Spanish just didn’t play into my everyday life.

My teacher’s argument was pretty simple, too. She rolled down the world map, pointed to the two countries, Mexico and France, and then pointed to us. “Which country is closer?” she said testily. I scowled at Texas for betraying me, its borders cozied right up to millions of people who hablaron español. France was just too far away to be useful, end of discussion.

+++

Language is perhaps the one cultural marker that has to answer to practicality. Traditions like Fourth of July fireworks expend significant resources in a literal flash, food culture has just recently truly begun to have to answer to its environmental and health effects, and few people look at Michelangelo’s David and say, “Sure, that’s pretty, but think of all the kitchen countertops they could have made.” Language, however, is both inherently cultural and inherently practical. It expresses unique nuances about a culture and what it holds important, such as German’s schaudenfreude or the Inuit’s multiple words for snow. Language conducts culture as well, the means through which oral and written traditions of a people are passed on from generation to generation. It holds a people together and sets them apart – which, of course, is problematic when you want to unify people cross-culturally into a supranational organization. Europe’s 32 official languages express a unique cultural diversity, but presents difficult challenges when trying to communicate messages between nations. I have enough trouble each morning communicating to the cashier at the café which pastry I want, and that interaction only involves two languages and basic vocabulary – I can’t imagine trying to ratify a treaty in a council with ten or twenty languages represented. Clearly the proposed strategy of adopting one to three languages of “wider communication” is significantly more practical. But so are marble kitchen countertops.

+++

Years after I realized my dream of seeing the mechanical lips of the Pompidou water garden, I opted to study Italian to fulfill my foreign language requirement during college. While I was never the most talented or dedicated Italian student, I did take enough away from my two years of study to order a panino or ask the price of a pair of boots. While everyone around me on the transatlantic flight watched romantic comedies and slept, I stayed up cramming vocabulary and verb ending back into my brain. This was more important and more real than any exam.

Once we’d dropped our bags off at our new apartment, my fellow jetlagged expatriates and I wandered down to the corner café for some much needed coffee. How to order un caffé is the one of the first things KU's Italian program teaches you how to do, and thus I was more than ready, warming my tongue up for the rolled r’s of vorrei like a runner stretching her hamstrings before a 50-meter sprint. I wanted to start this trip off with a quick, easy boost to my Italian speaking confidence, but as each of my roommates ordered with not even an Italian “grazie,” I realized all my training was for naught. The barista took their requests in stride and stated how much money they owed in crisp, practiced English. I ordered my caffé in Italian nonetheless, but the luster of my unique knowledge had disappeared with each familiar English word.

The EU may not need to bother with selecting languages of “wider communication,” for the European people seem to have chosen them for themselves, although it’s clearly a coerced decision. English may be the language of 80% of data storage, but more importantly it is the language of popular media – just try to escape the dulcet tones of Lady Gaga, or flip through TV channels and see how few “foreign” films you catch. And within city centers and other popular travel destinations, English is the language of multitude of tourists. The English language is no longer merely a tool to cater to those from English-speaking countries – it is truly a language of wider communication between peoples from around the globe. One afternoon I caught two people with two different native tongues awkwardly discuss directions on a street corner, cobbling together an understanding from the English they both knew.

Despite my 3^rd grade teacher’s strong argument for learning Spanish, my argument against it was just as practical: no one I knew spoke it, so why should I? The same attitude represents the future of the “languages of intimacy,” the unfortunate tongues not chosen for wider communication: eventually everyone will speak the larger languages, and once everyone you know speaks one language, why even bother with a second language of limited use?

Right now, Europeans still generally hold firm to their mother tongues, be even so, it’s undeniable that English is creeping in. When my mother first visited Paris 25 years ago it was virtually impossible to get around without some proficiency in French; by the time I started making trips to Europe with my parents 15 years later, I could easily get by with some hand gestures and a smile, if not plain English. Perhaps linguistic diversity is just another thing of beauty that will disappear from our cultural landscape, hunted into extinction like giant kangaroos and wooly mammoths. But even as we hold language to a higher standard of practicality, maybe we will respect it in a way society has found easy to do with less practical cultural markers: as valuable in and of itself, and worth the trouble no matter the cost.

Bonne Nouvelle to Strasbourg - St. Denis

2009-11-14T15:35:00.005-06:00

A guy and a girl get on the train and sit directly across from each other. They enter with just enough distance between them and they're dressed so different - she in a bright red peacoat, large loose-knit black scarf that swallows her neck and shoulders, her hair pulled back in a bun with casual elegance so that just the right tendrils curl around her face; he in an oversized long grey coat, the kind that looks like and doubles as a sleeping bag if you're homeless, and gaunt cheeks to match - that they could be separate parties.

She gives him only a glancing look, one that you give any guy who stares are unwanted. It's only when he reaches his feet over and embraces one of hers that it's clear they're together. She doesn't look up from burrowing her face in her scarf, which is strange because even at night without huge crowds of people the metro is still warm. As we roll into the next stop she looks up quickly over her shoulder to the door, and her scarf misses catching one tear, which gleams in the light in an almost unreal, early hollywood black & white soft-around-the-edges close-up fashion.

The train stops and she swiftly runs off, the guy jumping up and quickly following her. They stop out of view, but as the train crawls out of the station I catch a glimpse of him holding her shoulders, crouching down to try to meet her gaze as she continues to hide in her scarf.

Artificial Stressors

2009-11-09T17:52:00.002-06:00

Let's just be real, for one second: when I strip away all of the artificial stressors of studying abroad (which, I'm convinced, are put there in order to insure only a rare few expatriate) - the ridiculous group socialization, the hectic, ever-changing schedule, the ridiculous living situations and lack of comfy places to sit - I absolutely love Europe, and see very few reasons not to live here.

The few, of course, are in major conflict with my life goals, but at least they're small in quantity.

Monthly Info

2009-11-09T15:42:00.003-06:00

Who says I need a security login screen on my laptop when I can just always leave up the browser window displaying my monthlyinfo.com home page? Assault them with more personal information than they could ever want and you'll never have to worry about prying eyes ever again.

Two Suggestions Regarding Absinthe

2009-11-08T08:14:00.002-06:00

Way to get back on the good side of your study abroad group: produce your gambler's delight sugar cubes almost instantaneously at the suggestion of absinthe shots, then bravely be the first to light your green-soaked club-shaped cube on fire and plunge it into your shot.

Way to confirm your status as fucking weirdo outcast amongst your trip-mates: while all eyes are on you, proceed to drool all over yourself because you can't get the half-melted sugar cube and its accompanying taste of drain cleaner out of your mouth fast enough.

Good times!

Tri-Color Rotini

2009-11-06T13:12:00.001-06:00

The plain colored ones taste plain! But the green ones really taste like spinach! And the orange ones taste like something veggie related as well! Ahh, France! Never full of fakers.

This Morning

2009-11-06T05:00:00.005-06:00

Oh look! The sun is out! The sky is blue! Everything is beautiful and gorgeous (but probably still cold) in Paris!

Cough-cough-hack-cough-hack-sneeze-groan.

I'm not even kidding. I woke up this morning and it was like my own body was strangling me. Like I had stuffed pillows of snot down my throat to suffocate myself. I can't believe the only thing that went awry last night was throwing Chocolat off the top bunk. I should be sudden-undergrad-death-syndromed. Except I think that means alcohol poisoning, right?

I dragged myself out of bed anyway because today is the only day the entire week that is not suppose to be completely miserable, and cheered myself up with some Rainy-Day Paris Gambler's Dream Chai:

Sugar cubes in the shape of card suit symbols! As if I needed reason to back the extreme amount of sugar I put in my chai. No suit left behind.

So, listening to some Simon & Garfunkel, drinking my chai, feeling pretty good about the day and then bam! - I cough up a fully-formed, solid booger. Out of my mouth. Which flies onto my computer screen and just plants itself there like a willful, petulant little tike refusing to put on its shoes.

I just gagged, on the ridiculousness of it all. And then my roommate came in and cheerfully suggested I get some allergy medicine, as if I knew more French than "les filles courent." Is that even right?

P.S. Do you like how I just escalated this story to completely disgusting? Because I'm so frustrated right now. Sidenote: remember when blogging use to get me laid? THOSE DAYS 'RE OVER, BITCH.

Jour... du Jour

2009-11-05T16:29:00.003-06:00

Oh, my favorite: being kinda sick but not really sick, but kinda having it around as a good excuse to stay in for the night and drink tea and listen to hours and hours of The Misfits and Of Montreal and Selda. Even if I'm in Europe, I still want a night completely to myself to do nothing but listen to music, which, for some reason, I've been fasting from for no logical reason other than to additionally starve myself of happiness. Yesterday on the Metro I gave up on talking to people and just listened to some Ratatat, and my life suddenly had a lovely glamour to it. Subways are such (somewhat unlikely) romanticized spaces, listening to awesome music and pretending you're shooting a music video is somehow so much better than sitting around spacing out and nodding and laughing at the appropriate parts of a discussion about beer/amsterdam/weirdos on the metro.

Also, my "sickness" is really just a perpetual need to clear my throat. Which is not helping me in the battle against coming off as a judgmental snob, because how can you not seem like a douchebag when you clear your throat before you, say, try to get the attention of someone working at the student center desk. "Ahem - oh, sorry, I didn't mean that 'ahem...' ...uhhh... those are my printouts." Seriously, I'm not trying to be a bitch, I'm trying to express myself in non-mangled sentences.

Other things not helping my war against judging others: listening to my trip mates make fun of disabled beggars, hippies on the metro with pet rats that live in their hoodies.

The latter was pretty hysterical though. Well, until some people continued to freak out about it, and then make fun of them directly behind their backs in the crowded train car. Did you know that if you can't understand anyone because you don't speak French, no one can understand you either? It's like a linguistic asshole cloaking device.

But I'm trying, or something. I'm trying to remove myself from bad situations, I'm trying to do more on my own rather than float along with the group until I start to crack. A couple of days ago we read Descartes, and I've been whispering his third maxim to myself like a mantra, or like a nutcase: Change my desires rather than the order of the world; There is nothing completely within my power except my thoughts.

But maybe it's my serotonin levels I really need to be controlling.

Jour Deux

2009-11-03T10:43:00.003-06:00

I feel like the schedule's going to vastly differ from Florence here in Paris. In Florence I spent a lot of time putting off work sleeping (the good ol' depression cure-all) or going out and wandering the city. Overcast Paris, however, screams, or rather dolefully moans "stay inside... especially until you can say at least one word of French." French people speak to you a lot more than Italians do. Especially if it's clear you don't speak French. I like it; it's not necessarily mean, it's resolute and every so slightly defiant. You come to France, you speak our language, which is the way it should be.

Except that I flat out can't speak French, no matter how many times I make Rosetta Stone repeat things slowly. "Une pomme" will never come out of my mouth to its, or any Frenchman/woman's, satisfaction. However, me repeating it, over and over and over, with different emphasis, in my best French impression, slowly, quickly, and finally with absolutely frustration, would probably greatly amuse them. Oh ho ho! Oui oui! Triumph! The silly American girl fails again.

I'm so afraid that I've reached that age where you lose the capacity to form non-native sounds, and just when I've become really interested in fluency in another language. Over the break I met so many people who knew at least one other language, if not several: my Japanese suitemate knew at least Japanese, English, and Italian, the Irish guy I got hot chocolate with studied Irish throughout school and then a foreign language on top of that, and the Croatians were serious polyglots (Ivan knew Croatian, English, French, Italian, and German, and was considering taking an intensive Russian program).

Being monolingual in Europe embarrasses me to no end, even if being bilingual has little more use than as a cool party trick in the U.S. In general I just feel less intelligent in Europe, or that I know less and less valuable things. My Irish friend, Michael, did not mince words at all when he proclaimed the superiority of the European education system. He claimed that a study had shown that a large chunk of American schoolchildren couldn't even point out the U.S. on the map - "They'd point out China, or somewhere else way off." I told him that one time I was asked if the U.S. was in North American or South - and I picked South. "It's still a mortifying memory, but I was really, really young." Michael's face told me I probably should have kept my mouth shut.

Lena tried to argue with me that it's just a difference in culture - being bi- or tri-lingual is just more important in an area of the globe with so much linguistic diversity, but I still can't really buy it. I wasted two years of Italian education to come out of it with barely the ability to converse with a preschooler, when a huge chunk of the global population can speak completely non-native tongues. The first day at the hostel in Dublin I expressed my embarrassment at not being better at Italian to the two Italian girls in our room. One of the girls looked up and said, "It doesn't matter really, you know the most important language," and then went right back to folding clothes. It was just so matter-of-fact, and so shitty.

I don't want to just ride the wave of colonialism and English-dominance. Being born into English shouldn't alleviate my or anyone's responsibility to study languages, especially when traveling in another country. There's nothing that makes English inherently better than any other language, or any decent reason that English should swallow up other language and thus swallow up some of the culture and specific cultural meanings with it. Languages aren't just interchangeable - they express unique nuances about their home culture that go further than just different names for the same objects or actions or feelings. On the street in Dublin I overheard these this American guy talking about his friend who spoke Irish. He explained that his friend thought English was great for discussing everyday things, news, business, etc., but when he wanted to express his feelings or emotion, he always preferred to use Irish. I thought it sounded fabulous and romantic - and like something I'd never experience.

And so, I'll keep at butchering French pronunciation, and brushing up on Italian, if only to prove to myself that I'm not letting English win.

Jour Un

2009-11-02T15:16:00.002-06:00

Florence was too small, not necessarily urban enough, and smelled like sulfur. Paris is too big, uninviting, and cold. Dublin was like a warm hug - which I received several of from the million fantastic people I met. Someday I will write more than half an unpublished entry about it.

Our Florence apartment didn't exactly set an amazingly high bar, with its washing machine that trapped a load in, micro-showers, and complete lack of heat during the last week, but compared to the Paris dorms it was like a palace. My roommate and I share a stoic dorm room that came outfitted with exactly three spoons, two of which are gigantic, no bowls, no towels, and not nearly enough bedding for how cold it is. Currently I am considering sleeping in layers and using my towel as a blanket. Also, drinking heavily.

In other news, it's raining, I've got a cold again, the internet sucks, and I wish I were having a more romanticized first full day in Paris, but mostly I just want to get hooked up with a proper comforter, or just blow everything off and go back to Dublin for keeps.

Feet

2009-11-01T16:18:00.003-06:00

My feet have never been so dirty, constantly and consistently, as they have been in Europe. I feel like a hobbit.

Yes

2009-10-29T12:26:00.006-05:00

Dublin, Dublin, Dublin, I had no idea.

There is no place to start writing from because everything is worth remembering. There is no time to stop and take photos, to pocket lens caps, to not use flash photography, to slow down the shutter speed or even stand still. I am vibrating with excitement and all my photos turn out blurry, and I love them, because that's what it's like, a blur.

After spending so much time in the last month and a half feeling guilty and self conscious for not tuning into the same frequency as the other people I'm traveling with it feels so overwhelmingly satisfying to be able to do exactly what I want completely for myself. Everywhere I go, I can't help but smile. It's so great not to have to practice looking naturally happy for photos. Even I know how little I smile lately.

But everything's so great. I'm constantly surprised how much I love everything, or maybe I've just forgotten what it's like to be completely happy all the time. I can be friendly, I can be outgoing, I can not be a bitch as long as I don't feel like a cornered animal, as long as I don't feel bad for wanting to be alone and be independent and learn and live.

More specifics later. Art! Glorified hitchhiking! Joyce! Dublin! Dublin! My heart is going like mad and yes I say yes I will yes.

Sunglasses

2009-10-21T06:29:00.004-05:00

Right now, everything is stress.

I came back from Venice this weekend and everyone was huddled up in blankets and multiple socks. The cold that I didn't pack for had officially hit Florence, and apparently it's illegal in Tuscany to turn on your heat before November 1st. I crawled up into the loft, found the mildewiest comforter, and spent the first part of the week snuggled up to sickness.

This was, of course, on top of midterms. Three days, three tests, one paper. Galileo and Luther. Shivering, sniveling studiousness.

Because internet was 8 euro at the hotel in Venice, and permanently shut off at our apartment (or so we thought), I only really planned out my eleven-day break, which starts tomorrow, at the beginning of this week. When the internet wasn't shut off, my credit card was. I'm sure at some point later in this trip losing 6 euro will really bother me, but I wish my bank would stop protecting me from putting a deposit down for my hostel friday night. Keep me in the sheets, not on the streets, Commerce.

All of my clothes drying out on the on our patio were surprisingly not dry, considering the 100% humidity this morning, and both of my white v-necks had mysterious grey blotches over their lower halves. I'm down literally one half of the shirts I brought. I feel like I'm on the Oregon Trail.

All I can do is wander around the house wearing gigantic turquoise and orange sunglasses to keep myself mildly sane.

Octo-Italia

2009-10-12T07:44:00.004-05:00

Long story short: I'm really busy with school and writing an essay about the octopus, which I probably wont even post on here because I'm gonna get that sucker* published. However, expect this post to turn into a photo-essay-but-really-just-photos in a couple of days when I upload my photos and swipe most of Claire's.

*See what I did there?

But really, when I was chopping the legs off the body suctioned itself to the cutting board. WHAT A CREEPER.

WC&H: A Thinly Veiled Intro to Christianity

2009-10-05T21:40:00.005-05:00

"Nevertheless, Augustine firmly believes in the humility of his religion, a religion that asks not what we can humble deduce from scientific observation and analysis but rather proudly explores where the limits of blind faith can reach, a religion which has 'tamed him' and 'bridged every valley, leveled every mountain and hill of [his] thoughts' and 'cut straight their windings, paved their rough paths,' or, as I prefer to read it, leveled the topography of what was probably the beautiful landscape of a brilliant mind."

I am so over Western Civ.

Sardinia

2009-10-04T16:56:00.003-05:00

Just like girl scout camp, but with

less s'mores

and more tables full of open beers ready to be topped off with rohypnol and handed out,

less truth or dare

and more never have I ever (never have I ever lost never have I ever so quickly),

less singing songs in rounds,

and more going around the corner of the dodgiest bar in Europe and banging in the bleachers.

But just as always, waking up in a room full of girls, passed out in my clothes with dirt in my hair, ready to go home and be alone.

Quick Trip to the Grocery Store, Vegetable Risotto

2009-09-30T15:04:00.006-05:00

1. Find a simple italian recipe, keeping in mind you have no food processor/blender, forgetting that you have no chopping knife.

2. Make a grocery list.

3. Translate entire grocery list into Italian, even if you plan on letting your language skills deteriorate into blubbering the moment anyone tries to converse with you

beyond one word sentences.

4. Walk to the open-air market. On the way, make sure to not take 40-year-old portly truck driver on getting into his truck. Consider that the reason you wear eye-catching jewelry in the U.S. is the exact same reason you don't want to wear it in Italy.

5. Wander around aimlessly in awe of how many types of mushrooms there are.

6. Get increasingly more and more flustered with every interaction, and end up running off in the direction of the supermarket. Fondly remember the days where you enjoyed grocery shopping and a wider vocabulary than "mi dispiace!"

7. Stare at the bouillon powders for 15 minutes and realize that even with all of your translations you still have no idea which one to buy because you have not been raise to know what "traditional" broth means.

8. Be genuinely shocked when the cashier does not pitch a fit when you pay with a $50.

9. After an hour of shopping, come home and translate recipe from tablespoons and cups into grams and milliliters, only to then guess at all the quantities anyway because there are no measuring utensils in the house, not even a scale. Follow that by spending an hour and a half "chopping" vegetables with a paring knife.

10. Drink as much wine directly from the bottle as you pour into the pot, so that once you're done with this whole mess you won't even care what it tastes like.

It looks less appetizing than it actually was. Thanks for washing out my photo, blahgger!

11. Feel 100% entitled when your roommates are impressed. Realize that there probably would have been nothing wrong with just having brioche alla Nutella for dinner. Again.

Valuable Extracurricular Vocabulary

2009-09-28T05:29:00.004-05:00

- Every flavor of gelato (here)

- Skim milk, whole milk, heavy cream, coffee cream, sour cream (which is what my professor almost accidentally put in our coffee)

- "Will you make change for a twenty?" "I'm serious, I don't have any coins." "I'm sorry I gave you 5 cents, I thought it was clear that I didn't have 5 euro so I assumed that you couldn't be asking that." "Isn't it your job as a cashier to give me change?" "Il Centro Supermercato will make change, and they have Tabasco." Punctuate the end of the discussion with "vafancullo," which roughly translates to the name of any opposing soccer club.

- "What is this hash laced with?"

Alternatively, when not spending a night drinking on the steps of a church, discoteca vocabulary: "You have a bit of coke on your nose." "Did he really say he had a knife?" "Excuse me, there's a flaming champagne bucket coming through." "There are three guys already grinding on my pelvis, but I'm sure I could squeeze you in, too."

Sant'Ambrogio Market

2009-09-26T08:22:00.009-05:00

I messed up and almost stopped blogging again, although I'm not sure anyone noticed. But it's not like I wasn't thinking about blogging, because I have been - I have a slew of open blogger windows with halves of stories about Europe and no motivation to finish any of them. I think what makes it so difficult to really maintain a blog while studying abroad - which is seems like everyone does nowadays - is that it's a complete story that you're in the midst of. Trying to write a post about any one thing I do in Florence is like trying to tell a story by giving you one sentence in the middle. I keep resorting to lists.

And postcards! It's so ridiculous, I feel like I can only say one thing completely on them, and I really just want to write huge letters to everyone. Maybe I should just do that, and then send a blank postcard with them. With a list, like "strange gelato names" or "how many people called me 'little hat' today and who."

Or "what strange things I saw at the market today":

- A lamb's head (and what I can safely assume were a collection of its comrades' brains next to it)

- Green pomegranates

- Sting rays

- Four people in the same conversation discussing honey in four languages:

Italian/German (apiarist) , Italian/French (bystander), French/English (my professor), Italian/English (me!)

- More male dogs, and thus more prominent dog testicles. No females dogs anywhere in Florence, it seems. I like to think that there's a sister city in Italy with only female dogs, but I have a feeling that Europe may be the canine China.

It's just so hard to write here, it seems. I need quiet and calm to gather my thoughts and living with four girls, one of which had to be treated for anxiety before she even came on the trip, means those moments are about as rare as electric dryers or Florentines who are willing to break a twenty.

Things I Have Learned in Europe, by Cara

2009-09-14T07:43:00.005-05:00

1: I am an elitist bitch who does not know how to get along.

1a. I have been reported as saying "I didn't cross the Atlantic to vomit in foreign gutters."

1b. But really, is classy too much to ask? And by class I mean not pouring olive oil onto your paper placemat and then dipping your bread in it. I don't know where you're from, but this is Europe, and we have plates and words to ask for them. "Vorrei un piatto, per favore," to be exact.

2: I like gin and tonics. But preferably not at 5 euro a pop. And that's during happy hour.

3: Octopuses have beaks. Also are probably scary. But I will dive in, with a butchering knife! With courage! And with a repressed gag reflex.

I Polpi

2009-09-11T17:45:00.002-05:00

After our first trip to il supermercato in Florence, I announced to my four roommates that I plan to cook a real homecooked italian meal some time in the next week: octopus stew.

So those relationships are off to a great start.

In Which I Almost Leave for Europe

2009-09-08T23:14:00.008-05:00

Oh my god I am leaving in 14 hours for my semester abroad. I am about to vomit with a mixture of excitement and fear that I will turn up and my credit cards will all be shut off or something. Lena has helped by putting the image in my mind of me dying on a plane from eating peanuts, which helps a ton when I think of all the other dying-on-a-plane fears I have.

I was pretty relieved to find out that I'm hooking up with the other people in my group (hah!) in Frankfurt to catch the flight to Florence, because that means I can split a cab to wherever once we get there. Not very reassuring that I don't know where I'm going once I hit the Florence airport. However, reassured that I don't have to take a cab by myself, as cabs are my second least favorite mode of transportation (guess what is first? hint: planes.)

So, I thought paring down my book collection to come to North Carolina was bad, choosing the clothes to bring to Europe is significantly worse - although once I finish that, it will surely quickly lose its title to "paring down the North Carolina Book Collection (currently at 33 unread books) to 9 Novels to Entertain Me as I Come Down from My Internet Addiction in Florence." Over the past couple of days I have been throwing clothes on top of my suitcase, but today was the first time I actually packed them. With about 1/4 of my suitcase left free, without having thrown in toiletries or all of my textbooks/papers, I decided I might be overpacking. That is, if I want to bring back more than a pair of Eiffel Tower earrings.

So now I'm down to fifteen pieces of clothing: 3 skirts, 5 shirts, 2 cardigans, 1 trench coat, 2 pairs of shoes, a pair of jeans, and my black dress. Considering how ridiculous, sometimes flashy, other times childish, I look most of the time, I'm hoping taking so few clothes, all mix-matchable, will teach me how to dress well without having to be constantly over the top. Understated but fashionable.

This baby will be getting a lot of play.

Also if I run out of things to wear/decide that miniskirts in december are dumb, it's not like Paris and Florence are the worst places to pick up some threads.

All and all, I think I'm excited? Mostly I'm just nervous. I've never traveled by myself, at least to the point of ending up somewhere unfamiliar and having to figure everything out on my own. The good news is that large chunks of my Italian are coming back, although they're mostly strange grammatical things and napolitano curse words.

Anyway (look at how all of the last few paragraphs start with "a" words), I am going to keep this blog as non-"study abroad experience"-y as possible. It might become a fashion blog - the many ways you can remix gap and american apparel basics. Or a food blog. Or a blog about how disenchanted I am with everything. Oh wait, that's what it already is.

Later that evening...

Have moved on to book selection, thrown out three books of the initial elite eight for having too few words-per-page. Damn you, Sarah Vowell! I need less than a pica between lines, man. I'm now reconsidering my relationship with books like Middlemarch and The Feminine Mystique, both which pack a considerable number of pages and words for their book volume.

Nah.

In the end, I will end up switching out Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper for Botany of Desire, despite its words-to-volume ratio, end up committing to Take the Cannoli and Chocolat anyway, reneging over the same w2v concern as Botany, and pick up The Handmaid's Tale along the way. The final list will look like this, which is to say that with ten minutes left before I leave for the airport, I will take out one, even two, in the interest of bringing back another pair of shoes:

+ Chocolat, Joanne Harris

+ Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell

+ The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

+ The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

+ Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

+ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

+ Skinny Legs and All, Tom Robbins

+ The Best American NonRequired Reading 2008

+ Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

The next morning...

Pollan's down! Chocolat? Handmaid's Tale? You're next.

Jus de Pamplemousse

2009-09-08T02:01:00.005-05:00

Today I got the last of my Europe supplies:

- One trench coat, black, awesome

- Two pairs of shoes, black and brown flats

- Converters, adaptors

- Books

+ Valley of the Dolls

+ Self-Made Man (hardback, for $3 on clearance! wow and sad, all at once.)

+ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

+ Take the Cannoli

+ Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

I feel sort of ungrateful taking a book about Chinese food culture to Italy and France. Maybe I'll take The Botany of Desire instead. Gotta cover all my favorite genre bases.

The last thing I got was the French edition of Rosetta Stone. I got the Italian one the summer before I came to college, but I didn't really stick with it like I'd planned so the most I got out of it was being able to count before everyone else. Considering how incredibly nervous I am about my Italian proficiency (not looking too good after I scrambled it with Spanish working at IHOP) I'm hoping I'll keep at it out of pure fear of being trapped in some dark alleyway surrounded by french hoodlums and dominatrixes (as I remember from previous Europe trips - or maybe just my dreams - those are the two categories french men and women fall into, respectively) with my only two french phrases to defend myself: "merde" and "jus de pamplemousse, s'il vous plait."

Desperately Seeking Straight Daughter

2009-09-06T14:02:00.003-05:00

Cara:

Man, I love Dexter.

Dad, from a room away:

What? Who's Dexter? You haven't mentioned Dexter.

Mom:

No, she loves a TV show. About sociopathic serial killers.

Peer Pressure

2009-09-03T19:48:00.003-05:00

Every night I say to myself, Cara, don't drink two glasses of wine with your parents.

And every night I end up dizzily drunk watching the Golden Girls.

Aim Low

2009-09-02T16:20:00.003-05:00

Thank you, Slate, for introducing me to Heather Armstrong, author of dooce.com and at least two books (too discouraged to look any further into it). According to Slate she has over a million followers on twitter and enough blog readers to be able to support her family off the income she gets from the ads on her website.

Meanwhile, I got two anonymous comments on my last post which I'd like to pretend were just random people discovering my post, but were probably really two people who saw me pimping this on Facebook. Did I mention that Armstrong has been a blogger for a single year longer than I have? This is clearly a lesson in stick-with-it-ness and not changing your domain name ten times. Then again, with a handle like lawlessgoddess, your audience is limited to fellow angsty teenagers and wiccans.

Armstrong's bio is molto encouraging, though. As anyone not looking for competition should, she encourages people to aim low and save themselves some time working hard. On that note, I've revised my goal of becoming a prolific writer and making it onto wikipedia's shortlist of prominent essayists

to selling enough ads on my blog to feed and inebriate myself.

Well, either that or adapt Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into a modern coming-of-age teen comedy.

Arcadian’s Got Talent

2009-09-02T01:14:00.009-05:00

As a result of my continued seclusion in NC and my mom’s vicious addiction to TV, I’ve become a weekly viewer of America’s Got Talent. While it’s pretty entertaining as is, nothing beats the little unscripted moments from contestants not properly conditioned in celebrity behavior. TV, but particularly reality TV, is much like a magician’s illusion: the viewer only sees what the magician wants you to see, and a good magician never reveals his tricks.

Unfortunately for NBC, 13-year-old Arcadian Broad, however graceful and well-groomed, is not a magician’s assistant. He is a dancer.

And he is not a stooge.

My mom and I have always had theories about AGT: it’s clear that certain acts make it through for variety, certain people make it through solely on kitsch value, and certain performers are made to jump through unnecessary hoops by the producers so that other “chosen” acts will make it through to the next round or to amp up the show as the weeks go on at the performer’s expense. Simple acts have random break dancers thrown in the background or are surrounded by fancy sets and pyrotechnics to distract from whether or not they’re actually talented.

Arcadian Broad managed to make it through the competition without all of that. In his first three performances, he stuck to what makes him special: he is an incredibly talented solo dancer. He leaps and bounds across the stage with intense energy, style, flexibility, grace, and enthusiasm. His most impressive performance came during the Quarter Finals, when he (unnecessarily, as the judges pointed out) whipped out his piano-playing talent, and then knocked out an awesome performance to Footloose. The judges loved him, everyone freaking loved him, and he made it through to tonight’s the semi-finals.

Sources say gravity was asleep on the job while Arcadian was performing.

Everything about Arcadian was wrong tonight, though. In his pre-performance video he revealed that he’d be doing some paired dancing with a new girl dancer, even though he is clearly a one-boy show. And then he came on to a stage full of backup dancers in a basketball jersey and, like a little marionette, performed the dance moves to High School Musical’s “We’re All in This Together.” He hoisted his very young partner awkwardly above his head, moved in sync with his other puppet dancers, and, with the exception of a few pirouettes, exhibited none of the wild, bold dancing of his previous performances.

Heteronormitivity: we're all in this together.

So it was no surprise when the judges’ reactions were rather tepid, with the sort of coddling they reserve for only the very young, very old, or very military. However, Arcadian was not walking off the stage without exhibiting his flair somehow. In the middle of one of the judge’s criticisms, he turned to Nick Cannon and asked if he could say something, and then let loose a big one: he had something else planned for the semi-finals, but the show’s producers instead made him perform what would clearly be a family-friendly crowd-pleaser.

Oops.

Sharon Osborne immediately jumped in, saying that he didn’t need to give excuses and that he was clearly a talented boy and a great dancer, etc. etc., but the damage was done. Arcadian had had his say: he was no puppet.

But America’s Got Talent’s puppetry of Arcadian goes beyond trying to reel in viewers with a shoutout to a successful franchise: it shows the dirty way producers shape people into products, and the deeper messages at work.

And this is where I have to throw in the usual disclosure: yes, I know I’m highly trained by other mainstream-media-hating, ultra-skeptical, loudmouthed obnoxious feminist queerz, but I feel like I’m not reading super hard into this one (just like I believe with all my heart that the panty liner magician is gay as blazes).

In the quarterfinals, Arcadian was branded as America’s real-life Billy Elliott – a somewhat soft-spoken boy with a natural passion for dancing, overcoming adversity from his ignorant classmates. “At school the kids would always tease me about being a dancer,” said Arcadian in his quarter-finals video, “but when I’m dancing I feel like I’m in a whole different world. I feel invincible.”

Sure, you can’t trust the obviously staged shots and polished dialogue of the videos, meant to give viewers a true glimpse into the lives of these every-day celebrities, but the story seems pretty believable and Arcadian quite sincere. Nobody that talented at dancing and playing the piano can be that cool. Both take a large commitment of time practicing in private - but more importantly, they are both pretty “gay” hobbies for a thirteen-year-old boy. No one makes fun of male dancers without playing the gay card – Dane Cook, who’s social commentary isn’t exactly known for being groundbreaking, exhibits this perfectly in his bit about dance clubs: “You will never, ever hear a guy say to one of his buddies, 'Mike -- Mike, Mike, listen, buddy. Tonight, bro, I gotta dance, dude. Screw chicks tonight, bro -- I gotta dance!” A straight guy, that is. You just know the teasing has a hint of the gay when the bullies are 13-year-olds, who have just been passed the uber-masculinity torch and probably aren’t exactly known for their creative insults.

So as a counterpoint, this weeks video featured a different side of Arcadian – not the shy, dedicated boy who’s only passion is for dancing, but of the up and coming suave, popular kid, who’s lady is back home acting as his PR director. Okay, maybe that’s taking it a bit far. But so is the line something along the lines of “It’s nice to have her back there supporting me” - god I know that’s not the phrasing but something along the lines of “thank god my beard’s printing out flyers for me and acting like a good little housewife.” There were then a ton of shots of Arcadian with a nice young girl his own age, and thank god for that. Behind every successful man is a woman… who wishes she were a man - both for rights and so that her husband will look at her the way he looks at the milkman.

Whether Arcadian is gay or straight is not the point – Arcadian could already be getting a head start on a long career of fucking dancerladies for all I know or care. The point is just how far mainstream media will go to uphold the standard of heteronormativity. Producers see a vibrant male dancer, code for gay, and then make sure that he’s seen with ladies all over him from then on. Back during the aftermath of last season of American Idol I didn’t buy people’s arguments that Adam Lambert lost the competition because he was gay, but I definitely thought it was fishy that he seemingly had to go back in the closet in order to be a part of Idol. Just like Ethan from Queer as Folk, producers want their young talent hot and straight so they can make the big bucks off of fangirls, or at least not lose money because of politics.

Arcadian probably won’t win the competition, though, especially after tonight's little encore. But for the sake of the American family and their viewership, NBC has made it clear there will be no roll models for young gay boys, or young dancer boys, or young boys anywhere that don’t fit in. After all, they’re not in the business of making role models, they’re in the business of making stars.

5 Years

2009-09-01T03:09:00.001-05:00

It’s pretty painfully obvious that I’m freaking out about writing/careers/my future/my identity right now. I’m currently contemplating and planning my future as a super-senior and what I’m going to get out of the extra time I’m buying myself before I have to blindly commit to go down some uncertain path. As relationship freakouts were to xanga, career freakouts are to blogger.

Obviously, writing has been a huge part of my identity for the majority of my life (or at least the years worth counting – I’d say before eight, kids are as interchangeable as Runts – they all look different but underneath they’re all the same flavor), and I think it’s no coincidence that letting it slide has coincided with some major identity crises in the last couple of years. It terrifies me that I can’t just do it. Even if I’m being good and tunnel visioning every other successful writer/blogger I’m personally acquainted with out of the picture, I’m still not where I wanted to be as a writer going into my senior year. Senior year of high school I was on top of my blogging game. I would have hoped I could be on top of my essay-writing game as my college counterpart.

I read the word of people 10-20 years older than me (at least), who have substantially more writing/career/life experience (and paid editors), and I can’t wrap my head around why I’m not at their level right now. I lost my patience for the slow maturation of my writing the moment my first essay got published and my professor pushed me towards professional writers workshops and a lifestyle of dedication and contemplation I am still in no place to sustain. Since then, I feel like I’ve always been trying to catch up to those expectations, to get serious about writing rather than just doing it, whether it’s good, whether anyone reads it, whether it’s even worth keeping more than a few minutes. I just want to pound out publishable piece after publishable piece, at whatever expense – and it’s that pressure that keeps me from writing anything at all.

Right now, I’m really into David Rakoff. I keep thinking about how next year I’m just going to reread books I love and analyze them, and I’m so eager (god how nerdy) that I keep thinking about Xeroxing copies of essays from Don’t Get Too Comfortable and scribbling all over them. A couple of days ago I came across this interview with him, and was more reassuring than anything anyone’s said to me lately – not my friends, not my professors, not my mother.

“Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.”

Okay, I knew the last part. No one makes it out of elementary school without having phrases like that scorched into your retinas via block letters on neon-colored laminated posters. But I really needed to hear straightforwardly what I can really easily be deduced from putting together the pieces of his, and every other writer’s, essays: all the good ones weren’t always writers. David Sedaris smoked way more pot than I ever have throughout college and he seems to have ended up a decent writer. I’ve got ten, fifteen, twenty years (although right now the voice of David Bowie is singing me “five years”) before I have to be a writer for the New Yorker or kill myself. What is there to worry about.

"Magic"

2009-09-01T01:02:00.023-05:00

Is it just me and my nonsense women's study degree or is there something about this commercial, besides its cute music and great art direction, that makes it really awesome?

It definitely starts with Ms. Magician looking quite good in that white suit, but then there's some hot gender play going on as she takes on her very masculine role, controlling her cute femme assistant as well as any Penn Gillette or David Copperfield. There's a total Tipping the Velvet vibe going here: soon our little swimmer will be hanging out with the big lesbo fishes.

Aren't girls dressed as men so funny! We're just close like sisters, right?

But it's not all about role-playing here: as in any good magician/assistant relationship, she clearly totally wants her swimcap-headed counterpart.

In my mind's magic eye i'm making more than that liquid disappear, sugarshack

A couple weeks ago I watched this video that highlights how certain companies opt to create gay-friendly versions of their commercials (clearly I've not been watching enough Logo - or TV, period). Obviously this is a little more subtle, and of course a little flirting between good-looking women is so hot right now, but I'm just glad that a gem like this has slipped into primetime viewing on major networks, if for no other reason than I get to see it more often without being a creepy chick who's into menstrual products. You can come break the fourth wall with me anytime, lady.

How's that for being self aware

2009-08-30T15:32:00.010-05:00

This post is a marker saying that I spent three hours sitting in front of my computer trying to write something, and then realizing that I am just an attention whore who wants to do this blog so that it will be easier to imagine that everyone thinks i'm funny and interesting and just an amazing person, without me having to put in any effort outside of pounding these keys and using a little artistic license to make it seem like i don't just sit in my house worrying about how i'm not a 40-year-old accomplished humorist tucked in a 21-year-old body and about the less-than-ten-greater-than-eight cavities just sitting around idly in between my molars.

Other realizations:
- I took a year off of writing to focus on reading, which then spanned into two years, not because i was actually focusing on reading to better my writing but because I am lazy and scared that I'm not funny anymore and that my moment as a published writer is now behind me.
- What's the worst that could happen if i just told the truth? Context: this blog would be significantly better if my mom didn't barrage me with articles about how you have to list every internet alias you've ever used if you ever want to get a job with the government or how if you do anything slightly adventurous or out of the norm with your life you will never be allowed around children again. The latter of which I'm sure isn't true, or is at least completely unwarranted, since i know a tattooed, pot-smoking daycare teacher who is incredibly invested in her job and the welfare of her charges, and godspeed to her. Would Hunter S. Thompson be able to find employment in today's workplace? Does everyone realize that it would be a crime if he didn't exist as a force within journalism?

Also I'm afraid of telling my family things, even though it might make things more interesting.

But it's not like they're your real family, Cara.

True and false. On paper they are. But I am living proof that genetic relation does matter - ex: I clearly missed out on the Catholic gene, which, much to my continued shock, everyone else in my family possesses.

So, you tell them the truth, thereby standing by your life choices and having integrity, and the number of interactions between your extended family and you falls from "incredibly rare" to "none." And there'd probably be a good story involved.

You're right. This is really a win-win.

- I think i've lost all my empathy and understanding of others' points of view and become a radical.
- The only thing i'm an expert on anymore is myself.

Simple Request

2009-08-30T12:44:00.003-05:00

I just want to die with a wikipedia article written about me, is that too much to ask?

21 and Overly-Emotional

2009-08-29T00:56:00.003-05:00

It's already two in the morning and all i have to say for myself is that i watched all six episodes of 16 and Pregnant + the reunion episode in the last twenty-four hours. Recommend not starting with the last episode, especially if you are an adoptee because you will spend your evening in your bedroom, by yourself, bawling your eyes out and wondering why this show couldn't be about dumb teenagers doing stupid shit. Thankfully, every other episode is.

Most of the girls on 16 and Pregnant have absolutely no concept of what it takes to raise a child, but assume that everything will magically fall into place as quickly and easily as it was to make their little bundle of runny feces. Not Catelynn and Tyler, though. It's obvious the facts that they look (and probably are) the youngest of the couples and that they have significantly less money and more familial problems play into their decision to give up their child, but it's no less shocking. As the youngest, they should lack the maturity to make such a decision, and as the least privileged, they should be the ones to repeat the cycle, but they're not - in fact, Catelynn and Tyler go out of their way to make it clear to their parents (which, p.s. her wastrel mother and his ex-con father got married after meeting through their children) that they're going to give their child what they never received from them.

Ironically, through the process of giving their daughter up for adoption, Catelynn and Tyler prove themselves to be the most responsible and ready to be parents of all of the couples. While Farrah is busy worrying about what type of car her parents are going to replace the vehicle she wrecked with, Catelynn is choosing what family will provide the best life for her daughter. And Tyler blows all of the other baby daddies out of the water by not only sticking with Catelynn throughout her pregnancy and afterwards, but fiercely defending their choices as a couple to their deadbeat parents, who fight Caitlynn and Tyler's decision tooth and nail. And you thought Gary returning his new Playstation 3 was good teen parenting.

Watching Catelynn and Tyler interact with their daughter's prospective adoptive family was completely heart-wrenching. I'd never seen that side of adoption before, the actual real process of handing your child over to another family. The adoptive mother's eagerness reminded me of Jennifer Garner's character in Juno - you could just tell how achingly desperate she was for a child. Even though she was clearly elated to have been chosen it was written all over her face how terrified she was that things weren't going to work out, and once you meet the adoptive couple, the tension of the episode builds as you worry that Catelynn might just keep the baby and crush these people's hearts. During every scene with the adoptive parents i could see my parents, twenty-one years younger, right in their places - explaining their lifestyle and hobbies, making their case for why they deserved to raise me, waiting in agonizing anticipation until i just showed up in their lives completely unannounced. It was absolutely excruciating. In the last few years i've experienced a great range of inner conflict about the idea of adoption and how it has shaped me, but rarely do i think about what it's like (and is still like) for the other two parties involved. At this point, i feel like it's old news to everyone but me - but if it's still an issue for me twenty-one years later, the one party who wasn't even really there for most of the actual process, why wouldn't everyone else still be thinking about it as well?

All in all, i'm rather floored at how much 16 and Pregnant really got to me, considering I was looking for more maury-esque escapades from it than anything else. Thank god for Maci and Farrah. Fuming over them totally helped bring me back to my usual schadenfreude-lovin' self.

(Also I can't stand how boring and dry I sound in this, but god, at least i wrote something. And I've written two abandoned half-essays. But mostly I'm blowing through backissues of The Believer. Why didn't i bring more than 7 issues with me? Oh that's right because i figured i wouldn't read them just like i haven't read through all of the other 30 that are sitting in my Lawrence storage unit. Wah wah wahhh. )

Mind Obesity

2009-08-25T17:43:00.001-05:00

(Can you just get through the plan without bogging it down with other little comments and criticisms to and of yourself?)

The Writerly Workout:
You, the participant in this program guaranteed to make you become a better writer in less than a lifetime, will spend at one hour a day focusing on writerly concerns. Just one hour a day has seen proven results in increased muscularity of your writing and will tone and define your reading and language skills. Participants have gained 4-5 new vocabulary words each week with just a bare minimum of one hour a day of concentrated, focused reading or organized, thoughtful writing. Our simple, easy-to-use equipment – the sharpened pencil with dual precise inscription and clean erase technology, stylish spiral notebook for both quick note taking or intense compositional sessions, and a great selection of intellectual, informative, and fun! reading materials – create a system that insure your desired writerly prowess.

But wait, there’s more! For those days when those synapses are just snapping with intellectual energy to burn, you can supplement your regiment with an extra hour of writerly workout. Choose from any one of our additional programs that will stimulate the mind and keep those compositional skill in perfect shape:
- Attend a reading!
- Have a literary discussion with friends, family, even your cat!
- Read news articles, book reviews, obituaries!
- And so much more!

Other plans are hard to follow with their stringent rules, complicated equipment, and overwhelming time commitment. With our easy to use system, you’ll be a real published writer at least by your 40s!

Christmas Elves

2009-08-22T00:39:00.002-05:00

Because I haven't learned well enough the lesson of not living with english department superstars, my future roommate, current friend, and now former essay writing peer has landed herself a reading at one of the bookstores in Lawrence, and my happiness for her is completely consumed by my overwhelming feelings of total failure as a writer and, as such, a human being.

I always felt like we had always started off from the same point - we lived next door to each other in the dorms, both honors students, took similar classes, and even worked at the paper the same semester - and she has blossomed throughout college into this incredibly put together, polished, highly esteemed member of the english department society, and i - i am signing on to take another year of college partially because I really genuinely want to get another degree, and partially because I still have no direction in life whatsoever.

But at least i made sure to quit IHOP in good standing, a feat rare amongst former wearers of the blue apron, so I always have that to fall back on. And if i keep repeating to myself that David Rakoff and David Sedaris both worked as christmas elves before they ever became writers, I can pretend like i still have some sort of a chance.

Driving to North Carolina, A.I.

2009-08-02T23:14:00.004-05:00

After an already emotionally trying day of driving 12 hours in the car with my mother (fights about: my car, how i drive my car, Sarah Palin, if you would save in a house fire a paraplegic or a box of fetuses - and you can't put the box of fetuses in the lap of the wheelchair bound person and also why is there a box of fetuses in a house anyway - and of course the obligatory "no i don't want to discuss your sexuality issues right now, i've instantly got a raging headache that will only get worse with increased awareness about your lady-dating") i get "home" to North Carolina to find my dad watching the end of Steven Spielberg's A.I., the movie that made me fall madly in love with Jude Law and also the most over the top depressing film that i've ever seen.

A summary of the end of A.I., also known as the four unnecessary levels of depression:

Level One: David and hotsexygoddamn Jude Law arrive in the dream land Man-Hattan to find that the whole place in underwater and basically completely destroyed. David then finds out that the one thing that he's had to hold on to his whole life, the idea that he's special and unique, is totally false, and there is a million other Davids in boxes just waiting to live out lives of soul-crushing sadness just like he has. His only freaking semi-human friend is sucked up into the air randomly, probably to be dismembered in front of David's eyes in a scene cut from the movie to save time for significantly more horrifically sad events. David then jumps in the neosubmarine, plunges himself into the ocean, an ocean of his tears, where he finally finds the blue fairy, and then prays to her until HE and the ENTIRE WORLD FREEZES TO DEATH IN SORROW.

This is where a normal movie might end, But Steven Speilburg, that gosh-darn sadist, does not want to leave any cringe-worthy weeping-willow-type leaf left unturned.

Level Two: After being frozen for 2000 fucking years in an ice cube meant to represent the coldness of a mother's heart, a mother who is willing to leave her robot son out in the cold to be raped and robot-murdered by dirty carnies of the future, David is rescued by beautiful aliens that only a 15 year old nerd could imagine, aliens made of computers with the bodies of anorexic models. Oh but first, David's new god, the blue fairy statue, CRUMBLES IN FRONT OF HIS FREAKING TEAR-ICICLED EYES. David is not programed for this level of sadness and has a freaking mini-seizure.

But wait, there's more.

Level Three: The aliens, who have magic greater than the coolest wizards, tell David that they can totally bring his mom back, who, even though she's a syphilis-ridden soulless whore who doesn't deserve any love, even the love of a machine wearing a cute little boy suit, is all that David ever really wants in his sad, wretched nightmare of a thing he calls a life. David cries such wonderful tears that they turn into diamonds, which the aliens collect in a secret side plan where they want to enslave him to bring them riches. They'll just bring him to the cusp of finally having one good thing happen to him in life, and then steal the diamonds and lock him in a box for later. As such, after he's cried his beautiful diamond tears, they throw him back in his empty house, where some sucker alien who clearly drew the shortest straw (or maybe the longest, those sick fucks) mimics his mother's voice to lure David in, and then tells him his mother is DEAD FOREVER. EXCEPT MAYBE FOR ONE DAY. BUT REALLY FOREVER.

Then Teddy, in his one minute of glory, whips out a wad of mom-hair that he'd been holding onto for "special keeping" and David finally wins something, a few beautiful hours with his mom, who is suddenly an angel and not one step above Andrea Yates. Make that one step below.

Level Four: We get to watch David live out the one happy day in his entire freaking life, the highlights of which include making coffee like a good little slave and hiding in the closet, which i guess is slightly better than coming out to a world where everyone likes to kill children. Then, much like Our Town, the audience must be put back in their place and reminded the life can never be good, ever, not even for sweet little traumatized half-children, not even for cherubs like Haley Joel Osment. At the end of the day, his mother, just like him, is not special, and she dies, and then HE dies, and then, once you think it's all over and the sad music is about to play for, i shit you not, ten minutes just to make sure you dehydrate your whole body, right down to your toenails, you see that TEDDY IS STILL ALIVE, and EVEN THOUGH HE SAVED THE FREAKING DAY, HE IS NOW STUCK ALONE IN THE HOUSE WITH TWO DEAD DEPRESSASAURUSES FOR THE REST. OF. TIME.

And then i got up and found out that toilet bowl cleaner had spilled all over the stuff packed in my car.
What a day.

Streaking

2009-05-29T00:16:00.002-05:00

I can't seem to find the right balance between spending a significant amount of time by myself and spending enough time with friends to develop a close enough camaraderie to go streaking. I have all this pent up energy from not being crazy in love with the wrong people and from the homemade margaritas that make up the top part of my food pyramid, and i just need to do something with it.

Books i've read this summer thus far: 2
What the hell do non-recluses do for fun anyway?

Cats

2009-05-23T13:52:00.002-05:00

I'm ready to admit that if I had a cat, i'd be significantly more satisfied with my life. I tend to think that "cat lady" is a rung above "hermit girl" on the social stigma ladder because at least you're socializing with something.

Things i did while not starting my 1500 word english paper:

2008-10-08T00:17:00.002-05:00

- Made a depressing trip to the grocery store; bought seven different kinds of ramen, other assorted fucked-up processed foods
- Watched 2.5 episodes of The L Word
- Tried to cook some potatoes, ended up filling the entire house with gas, spent a large amount of time trying to figure out how to resolve said gas problem, and wondered what exactly i'd do if my entire body was on fire
- Ate some Vanilla Honey Bee Haagen Dazs ice cream, twice (divine)
- Got yelled at by Rachel for not finding someone to housesit pet mouse while house is rid of guest mice
- Felt sick, probably from ice cream/salsa dinner
- Reread about four pages of one of the stories i'm suppose to write about
- Realized how lonely it is living in my house
- Played with blogger while pulled out stray leg hairs with tweezers

My Thursdays are packed, sorry.

2008-10-02T01:33:00.003-05:00

I'd love to go to your geology lecture, but, have you heard, it's at 9:30 am? I've got "be passed out hardcore in bed" for just about then.

Followed by "eat a free vegetarian lunch" and "play music for other slackers."

Gonzo

2008-07-30T00:52:00.001-05:00

Plans to lead adventuresome, Hunter S. Thompson inspired indulgent-yet-productive life:
1. Get a computer with a functioning “delete” key
2. Finish arting out the car
3. Go on roadtrips in said car
4. Equip oneself with proper protection – may have to train to use knives, since handheld tranquillizer idea failed to pan out
5. Have money, but not too much money
6. Take drugs, but not too many drugs
7. Read. Write. Take pictures. Pay attention.

David Sedaris

2008-06-17T15:02:00.000-05:00

Tonight I drove to Kansas City to meet David Sedaris and get my copy of his new book signed. After five hours of waiting, I was face to face with one of my major writing influences, one of my favorite writers. During the five hours prior to this moment, I envisioned what the encounter would be like. I knew he was spending a few minutes with each and every person who came to the book signing, which explains how I was still there past midnight. This amount of time with each reader left me with high expectations of the encounter. Two or three minutes was ample time to impress Mr. Sedaris. And a few extra minutes more, after I’d earned his special interest, would be all it’d take for me to get his address, and send him a manuscript. He’d ask me about the other books I had cradled in my arms, and I’d explain how I’m an avid reader, how I have to lie to my parents about where my money goes, often sarcastically claiming that I’m spending it on hard drugs. We’d laugh over my lies and his truths. Then I’d slip in how I’m also an aspiring author, an essayist in fact How I find him incredibly influential in my writing, and how I’m in debt to him for opening the door for essays into the minds of the common reader. “People now know about real essays because of you,” I’d say emphatically. He’d respond something like “You’re really passionate about this, my dear.” He’d ask me about my work, and I’d casually mention that I’m a published writer, not just some overexcited youngster. At this point the people left behind me in line would start to shift on their feet and grumble, but David (we’d already be on first name basis) wouldn’t mind. He’d be excited about discovering a diamond in the rough, his young female protégé. He’d understand that we are kindred spirits, we are both writers, we have a deeper understanding of each other than these other overgrown bookish fangirls. I’d give him my thoughts on his writing style, and he’d be impressed at my intuition. He’d offer to read my work, and I’d be coy, saying it’s nowhere near ready for his prestigious eyes. But he’d insist. He’d give me his home address, insisting I self-address the envelopes to be sure that he’d actually open them, rather than pass them off to Hugh to deal with. I’d walk off, books signed, with an even more important handwritten note than the rest of the wannabes lined up at Rainy Day Books. I would be the next best thing.
Instead I nervously approached the table, handed Mr. Sedaris my books, and waited for him to open up the cover of the first one and ask, “So you’re Cara, right?” He asked about the books I was cradling, and I gave a shitty description of Anne Fadiman’s Rereadings, not even mentioning that she was my other favorite essayist, or even that I am an essayist, until he got to Katie’s copy, and I explained how we are both writers. We talk about Miranda July, another one of the author’s I’m holding. “Did you get that book because of my recommendation?” he asked. “No?” I wow him with my knowledge of his every word. He explains that he’s been informally promoting the book. He tells me his favorite story, and I’m not even familiar with the book enough to remember what he said. I just nod my head, and say “yeah,” like the eloquent young intellectual I am. “Have you seen her movie?” Another yeah. “All other movies don’t get art right, but that one does,” he explains, talking about the choosing of the pictures of emails for the art gallery. I deeply wish I had bought a copy of the DVD this weekend at Hastings and prepared myself for this discussion. Unimpressed with my ability to discuss a. literature and b. movies by author/artist/actresses, David Sedaris smiles, tells me it was nice to meet me, and pushes the books back across the table.
I get in the car and look in the insides of the books. In Katie’s he wrote “I’ve heard such good things about you.” In mine, “I’m so happy you can walk.”

Slovenly Hovel

2008-03-24T18:45:00.004-05:00

There may end up being another video from spring break (the dallas half) but, i wouldn't count on it. However, the video-ish blog lives on, never fear. I'm not going to start another blog, write in it for a week, and then abandon it again, like almost every other one outside of the infamous xanga.

However, i do kinda want to keep up doing videos about my mundane everyday life, for several reasons.
- i want more than just one real person (thanks, greg) to subscribe to my videos on youtube.
- making videos will help me improve my speech patterns so i sound less like a valley girl and more like a refined intellectual
- i want to love all sense of privacy in favor of regaining internet popularity
- i want to develop a speaking voice that suits my writing voice, the sort of thing David Sedaris or Ira Glass has mastered. I want to be able to speak in an eloquent, writerly way (even if that does mean scripting)

So, first video of the non-travel diary era - about break aftermath.

Book Reviews

2008-03-20T15:12:00.004-05:00

Okay, i'm going to lay off the videos for a while. I tried to do a few today in Dallas except that all i've done is sit in bed in two different sets of pajamas reading and eating waffles. Plus, i'm much more comfortable writing, mostly because i sound less like an airhead and more like someone amusing and worth knowing. And most of all, i really don't feel as though i can top "I've been transported straight to Copenhagen."

Since i've done so much reading lately (re: i've managed to finish two books that i've been reading since January), i thought i'd review what i've finished and put it out on the internet for the good of all mankind.

Haunted by Chuck Palaniuk

So many people have raved about good ol' Chuck to me that when i found a signed copy of his latest novel lying around Borders last summer i picked it up, thinking that i'd found something of immense value. However, upon finishing the book, i'm of the opinion that Haunted isn't even worth the paper it's printed on, with or without author's signature. I was a little bit wary of the idea to begin with, a writing a collection of short stories authored by a collection of fictional writers, because it presents the pretty daunting task of not only developing 20 or so characters but developing corresponding writing styles for each of them. Not only does Palaniuk completely disregard the latter issue, but he doesn't even manage to create memorable characters. Part of this may be because i read the novel over two months, but by the end of the book not only did i have no connection to any of the survivors of the writers retreat gone awry,i didn't even remember most of them, and was just hoping that Palaniuk would finish meaninglessly killing off his underdeveloped characters and get the book over with. To add to this mess, Palaniuk includes formulaic and just flat out awful poems about each of his characters, proving that he has no hidden writing talent in other genres. Once the catastrophe of a novel is over, good ol' Chuck leaves you with an afterward that should be called "Chuck Palaniuk on the best horror novelist ever, Chuck Palaniuk." I loved the movie Fight Club, but i almost feel dirty and disgusted now that i know that its success helps Palaniuk masturbate his ego.

Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit by Charles Bukowski

I know just about as much about Bukowski as i know about poetry in general - basically nothing - but, from what i've read (this book) he sound's like a pretty cool guy to hang out with, although i've heard he's an asshole (thanks, Modest Mouse). I kind of like assholes though. But I digress. I know nothing about poetry, except for a few casual run ins with things that were a. Shel Silverstein, b. way over my head, or c. just really boring, so i'm not exactly in a place to review it. Bukowski has made me feel immensely better about poetry, though. His poetry sounds like something a real person might write, not some ethereal being. I really enjoyed reading this, a few pages every few hours or days.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

And to think i called myself an essay-enthusiast without ever reading any Sedaris. I liked Me Talk Pretty One Day, but there's something about the way the stories are written that makes them feel like spoken word transcribed, and to be honest, i rather hear David Sedaris read them than read them silently myself. I had heard "Picka Pocketoni" on This American Life a while ago, and i think that's part of what made the story one of my favorites from the volume - something about Sedaris' voice, the way he pauses for effect, the intonation of his voice just adds to his writing so much that it seems weaker on the page once you've heard him. Luckily, Sedaris is going to be in Kansas City this summer, and if i can do anything about it, i'm going to be there.