Archive for May, 2008

Is your mama a lama?

May 31, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

I think I may have finally mastered the art of mother appeasement, at least in “bonding day” form.

 

One parts each of outing (especially the beach), shopping, snacking (preferably guacamole and some sort of alcohol) and lots of reassuring shoulder pats- that’s PATS, not PADS.

 

This seems to please, and even lets you get away with the possibility of a night to yourself, since you can always pull the old “peopled out” defense by the time you get home.

 

Tonight, after such a mother-daughter day out, we had dinner with my mom’s friend Mary, who I dare say is more spry than my mother, although 20 years older. Mary absolutely adores me for some odd reason, something about my ‘energy’, but not in the cloying way that some new agers say that everyone has ‘special lights’ about them.

 

Mary is fantastic and at times I enjoy her company so much that I start to think of her as normal, until she starts in about extraterrestrials or some such thing. She likes me, even though I do not necessarily agree, I’m not sure why, except that maybe she appreciates a skeptic.

 

Unlike my mother, Mary appreciates my sideline stance on aliens, among other things: sure, it’s all possible. Doesn’t mean it’s likely, or that the proof, as yet, is strong enough to support all the claims. My mother, on the other hand, will believe anything she reads as long as it is sufficiently bizarre enough to make most people balk.

 

I don’t care what ‘most people’ think, but I also don’t think everyone who’s ever claimed to have touched god or space or truth has actually done so. And I think you have to filter things through your own system of refection before deciding one way or the other (or neither, as I prefer to do more often than not).

 

But what the fuck do I know?

 

Mary hugs the trees in her backyard to make them better when they are dragging ass. My mother is all about the new age manifesto but I guarantee she has never embraced a maple. She doesn’t live it, like Mary, or her friend Victoria, who gives a back massage to you before she even knows your name. And you can tell this about my mom, because when other drivers cut her off, she still calls them assholes.

 

I don’t call bad drivers ‘assholes’, partly because I am one myself (an asshole, and a bad driver). But I do criticize my mother to no useful end, and therefore, despite my pleasing ‘energy’, my new age status is in serious question.

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Get off this glaven’s back

May 26, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,

It’s funny when my sister’s friends try to give me a makeover.

 

It’s not just that I am a goth to their jock, a greaser to their soc.

 

I don’t appear to register with them; they are SoCal queens, and I am just a nerd (which I am), but not an annoying hipster (which I don’t think I am, but which might be an easy assumption, at least for an East Coaster assessing the situation).

 

The point is, they don’t process my “look” as any sort of style at all, except none, even though frankly I think I’ve got them all beat.

 

They seem to be especially hung up on the glasses, which are dubbed either too big/geeky/manly/crooked (this last one is definitely true, and so are the other ones, but I think in a good way).

 

Okay, so even my own friends have their doubts, croc sandals being the example that most comes to mind (but they’re so comfy and supportive!). Still, they never treat me like some charity case that needs donated lessons on how to pluck my eyebrows (no, they are not too bushy; I don’t want to look like RuPaul, thank you).

 

My sister has given up on the clothes (though she is bitter about their quantity versus hers), and focuses on the bigger picture, my personality. Frankly, I wish she’d stuck with sartorial scorn.

 

Today, she corrected me: “interweb” is not the correct term; it’s “internet.” Apparently, irony is in short supply on the sunnier coast. Don’t they get the Colbert Report?

 

She thinks I am attacking her when I call Sex and the City heteronormative and point out that all the women are rich and white and straight, both because she likes the show and because she did not think to criticize it herself. The problem is, I still like the damned show. Examining it with a more critical lens when I’ve got my anthropologist’s cap on doesn’t stop me from enjoying it on a baser level. The sex! The shoes! The revelatory puns! Yet I do think it is extremely important to reflect on the content and messages of those media that surround us. Can’t one have it both ways? Fine, enjoy your cake, but be aware of the nutrition facts all the same.

 

I guess the problem is, my sister thinks I’m a pseudo-intellectual party pooper; in truth, I’m just a nerd with too much time on her hands, and a crooked pair of glasses.

 

 

 

 

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This is the End, Beautiful Friends, the End

May 19, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

Tonight, Sami and I made a list of things we might need to change about ourselves.

 

Graduation brings about these sorts of things, I guess.

 

It’s surreal, the end. Not an anti-climax, just a soft float away from the way things were for a while.

 

It is only appropriate that we should have a frantic party replete with parents more intoxicated than friends and excessive food that we foolishly, though successfully, insisted on making ourselves, and cap it off with Iron Or’s first and only performance (sadly sans Melon Man).

 

These are the things that make us fantastic, and borderline annoying, especially if you don’t know or like us.

 

I now have to change my cover letters from “This spring I will graduate…” to “I graduated this spring…” Will this make me more or less desirable? One hopes the former. But maybe it only makes me appear more desperate, and appropriately so.

 

Cleaning out my room to move out has made me think of a few things. For one, I never need to buy a single piece of clothing EVER again, at least until my very last pair of jeans wears out, which will very likely be a while.

 

My bare walls- now, and all year- also remind me that I’m not a nester. I don’t like to bring furniture, or put holes in walls, or things in drawers.

 

I guess I want to know that I will be able to get out of someplace easy. Nothing is forever, so why get too comfy. I have an adorable and overpriced duvet cover that I bought last August, still sitting unopened in my closet. What am I saving this bedspread for, exactly?

 

When I began my life, I barely left my house. Buddy ran her daycare from there, so friends and affection came to me. Once, we almost moved to Hong Kong when I was three. We even gave our little white dog Boomer away, and he tried to run away from his new home and got run over. I’m just glad it wasn’t Beowulf, though in the end she lived too long, and we had to put her to sleep after she starting shitting everywhere and eating air conditioning wires. I captured it all in my first ever picture book, very much inspired by All Dogs Go to Heaven. This was followed a few years later by my eulogic tale of Hamlet the Hamster in The One That Stayed. Someday, I am going to make a killing off my series on dead pets.

 

I always thought we must have stayed in the US because of Tiananmen Square riots, and it was only recently that my dad corrected me. It turns out it was my parents’ riots instead.

 

After that no one ever let me stay very long in one place and now all I ever want to do is leave on my own accord, before someone else pushes me out.

 

At my next abode, I am determined to bring more than just dirt and clothes, both of which I have a plenty. I will hang things and settle in. That’s it; I just want to enjoy my bedspread. And be a better person, too.

 

 

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Memory Box

May 12, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

Today, one of the daycare kids had “the runs.”

 

I think this is one of the biggest things I dislike about the idea of being a parent. I cannot, or do not want to, imagine myself discussing things like my child’s bowel movements with the air of casualty that most parents do – and rightly should. After all, everybody poops, and kid-poop is the least offensive of any kind. I don’t mind changing diapers, just as I don’t mind picking up doggie doo. I just don’t want to talk about doing it.

 

Our poos were all we could talk about in Asia, since it really was a central concern: Where will I be able go to next? Will there be toilet paper? Why haven’t I gone in a week? Why have I gone every hour on the hour? What is going ON in my intestines? But generally speaking, this is not my favorite topic of discussion, and I was excited to get back to the prude US where we keep that kind of thing to ourselves.

 

I guess this is really it then. Being a parent reminds us that we are “merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other.”

 

I do not want to be reminded of this. I want to pretend, as often as I can, which still isn’t very often, that humans have something more to live for than just tube supplication/replication. One simply cannot do this when potty training is on the agenda.

 

Something I would, however, like about parenthood, if god forbid it were somehow thrust upon me, would be all the picture-taking.

 

If I ever had an addiction (besides food), it would probably be nostalgia- mostly self-indulgent, rather than the more generic historical kind, although that plays a part, too. (My previous post on smell attests to this).

 

Last night I pored over a box of my dad’s old photos, ones I’d seen at least a few times before. I am always struck by the same things: how similar I look to my dad when he was younger and doughier, how awesome the 60s/70s were, how adorable my first dog (Beowulf, a fattie German shepherd with droopy ears) was.

 

Aside from the usual parade of glossy moments, I found a new prize: a bag full of old papers. This was it, the proverbial bundle of letters from a parent’s past! I would open new windows into the shadowy psyche of DStein, or at least get a back-story on one of the girls he poses oh-so-debonairly with in many of the sepia shots from his doughier days, (especially the now semi-famous artist whom he wanted to marry but who refused him).

 

But as I delved into the bag, I recognized the writing immediately; they were all from Deborah. I knew this hand well, and wondered whether this was not unlike my own little stash of Deborah notes, mostly threats and angry outbursts about a small pile of clothing left on a closet floor or an insufficiently scrubbed tupperware. I wondered why anyone, besides myself, would have that sick, nostalgic desire to save angry notes like those. But I also figured that if it would be anyone, it would be my dad.

 

Turns out, though, they were love letters. Awful, tacky, can’t-live-without-you love letters that were more embarrassing to read than anything more pornographic would have been.

 

The thing that struck me the most about these, and I know this may be shocking for those of you who know a thing or two about DStein & Deborah (but not as much as me), is not “my how things have changed!” but, “yea, that makes sense.” To this day, Deborah makes no secret of her bizarrely enduring love for DStein (bizarre not because he is unlovable, but because of the trenchant bitterness that so often seems to characterize their everyday interaction). And it seems indeed that this must be the reason for their staying together, at least on her side of things. After all, she has been divorced three times before.  There is no reason shame, or anything else, should keep her from making it four.

 

Yes, strange as it may be, I think they actually love each other. Well, I know she does. I know part of the reason he stays with her is his fear of being alone. Part of it is also that he likes the way he takes care of her, cooking, cleaning, unconditionally loving (in a way that my mother never did). But I think maybe he also has strains of that same can’t-live-without-you love. He kept the letters, didn’t he?

 

There’s something unsettlingly eerie about watching someone’s life progress through pictures, and this sense is only heightened by the narration of notes.

 

One of the “charitable deceptions” of nostalgia for many people is the romanticization of what once was; “the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and…thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” But this has never been its primary appeal for me. Maybe it’s still escapism from the present, but not from the realities of life. No, I swallow memories whole because I want to remember, I want to feel every crushing moment, every uplift, every downbeat, just like the first time. I don’t know why- I guess I’m just a thrill seeker of the most pedestrian kind.

 

Of course, it’s never the same. The framing effects of memory, the passing of time and inevitable reflection mean that no single moment can ever be recalled the same way as it was, or even remembered the same way twice. No reconstruction of time and place is without the marring effects of time, just as no current time and place is without the marring effects of the present. This drives some people crazy, so that they either never think about the past, or only think about it to repaint it with a brighter palate than its true colors. And this is all the more true when trying to relive the past of someone else.

 

Looking back on my dad’s box of memories, the most poignant message was how complicated his life came to be. This is true for most people. But when, exactly, does this happen? When do we go from carefree youths to burdened old souls? Surely it is no moment, no single day. For most of us, it is probably a process that begins from birth. We don’t necessarily think life will be easy, yet we cannot fathom all of the bullshit it will throw at us. Delight, too- but mostly bullshit.

 

From proudly holding a string full of hooked fish to proudly patting the belly of a pregnant wife to proudly snapping photographs of your own children, before and after everything’s been torn apart.

 

I simultaneously lamented the fact that one day the terrain of my life might look this jagged, and yearned for the time when the complications can be all my own, rather than absorbed through the lives of others, as they mostly have thus far. Maybe this is the real reason I don’t want kids: can I stand to be a living repository for the memories of yet another soul? No, I think I want the picture box all to myself.

 

 

 

 

 

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Greyhound blues

May 7, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

My bus ride up from Charlottesville on Monday confirmed a number of things:

 

1)    Baltimore is weird.  This was NOT in fact confirmed by a John Waters film shown during the ride, but rather by the bizarre man-child (or should I say, child-man) sitting behind me.

 Apparently, Child-man moved from Baltimore to “the country”, someplace in  Virginia I’d never heard of and hope never to accidentally come across from the sound of it. He is only 17, but gets his liquor from the store in town owned by the “China man” who never cards him.

 He moved there several years back, because “people” were trying to kill him. He does not go to school, actually has not since he was 12, when his mother took him out (not sure how she managed this, except that she was “fucking crazy”) and his house, apparently some sort of crack den, was “popped”, which I can only assume means “busted.”

He had a weird accent that sounded Southern and gay, but may just have been Baltimorean and bizarre. The strangest thing about all of this was that I learned it by overhearing his conversation with a UVA ROTC student, who quite earnestly encouraged Child-man to take the GEDs and go to community college in order to pursue his dream of being an architect or interior designer (GAY). Yet ROTC             man did not seem to notice, or at least mind, the GAYness. Not to assume that all army peeps are homophobes. Anyway, ROTC man did not ask, and Child-man did not tell. They probably fucked in a bathroom stall at Union Station once we got off the bus.

 

 2) Anthropology students make me sad. First, I ran into a “friend” from class. You know, the kind where you have a nice chat one day about your similarly hopeless futures before the professor comes, and you think “hey, maybe we’ll end up best buds” and so you go home all exited and facebook friend them. And then  you never talk to them again for the rest of the semester? She was nice enough, and actually surprisingly interesting without spilling her guts in that awful way that pseudo-interesting people do. But then we ran into her friend (“friend?”), another anthropology fourth year who apparently divides his time between UVA and his job working for “a presidential campaign” in DC. (As a side note, I REALLY hate when people are purposefully vague, in some sort of attempt to be either [pseudo]modest or [pseudo]interesting]. It’s not working, asshole).

Anyway this douchebag was bragging about how he never goes to class, only office hours, where he flatters the teacher (mostly just by being there, I’m sure),and gets all the important points of the reading (which, not surprisingly, he does not read on his own). He was, of course, writing a thesis, which from its topic sounded like it had potential, until he explained it and then it sounded lame. He also shared his recent interest in archetypes (not Jungian, just generic) not as an academic exercise or even as a way to understand specific cultural tropes - which I would have had no problem with – but rather as an enlightening way of understanding all of humankind. Anyone with any ounce of anthropological sense (especially the school of Anthropology generally taught at UVA), would reject this idea without hesitation. Even if this actually were an example of archetypes, which it is not, just because the Egyptians AND the Mayans both  built pyramids does not mean we are all hardwired the same. Maybe you should have gone to class more, IDIOT.

 

3) Neko Case & Cat Power are both very nice to sleep to. 

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Rosie the Riveter, BITCHES

May 7, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

Today, I built a grill!

Well, not from scratch, and not without the assistance of one and half other human beings. But still!

Actually, I not only put it together, I found it, requested assistance in its transport to the front of the store, and then accepted yet more assistance from an entirely different person putting in into a car! It was all very exciting- especially for an item that I myself did not pay for and will never use.

It’s things like this, along with more mundane tasks like grocery shopping and mailing a package at the post office, that make me feel like a real person, specifically, an adult. They make me think: I can handle this world!, an attitude which I maintain quite steadfastly, until I try to do important things, like get a job ‘n shit.

 

 

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Luckily, I’ve had the chickenpox

May 6, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

Everything is harder when you no longer have the car you totaled when you crashed into another car, twenty feet away from your driveway, for no reason, nine days after your twenty-second birthday.

I think my biggest fear in life is being a burden, and I’m pretty sure borrowing people’s cars, or worse, making them drive you places, counts. I don’t know what I will do if I ever get sick and need taking care of. Probably kill myself first.

This is most certainly a result of living with Deborah, who wouldn’t let you place a burden on her if you tried, although just having other living and breathing beings in the same room counts as a burden for her so I guess she lets us get away with a few things.

This explains my aversion to borrowing money, being late, and choosing restaurants. I’m not sure which I’m more scared of incurring: outright scolding, or silent resentment. The latter seems more likely, since decorum generally limits the former. Unless, of course, you are Deborah, whose obsession with manners somehow fails to translate in the instances most convenient to her, i.e. giving Anna sneers when she asks to use the bathroom, or scolding her visiting sister-in-law for “dancing too loudly.”

My boss, Edie, has the shingles. I wonder if it’s from the stress of writing her new book, another treatise on communitas, the same topic she has been pondering for forty years. Luckily its Edie so she can laugh her way through it, like the ancient, leathery Inupiat women she has a photo of on her mantle from her fieldwork in Alaska. Their hysterical expressions radiate joy, and Edie captures as much in that moment about the singular experience of human togetherness than any of her well-written but unremarkable books. Best of all, the photo is not exploitative. Despite the Westerner at the lens and the Other at the other end, it is taken in a way that merely says: here is humanity, would you like to join us? And I like it so much that I’ve contemplated stealing it, making a copy and seeing if I can return it over the fireplace, unnoticed.

Edie is darling, and tells me I’m fabulous, even though I merely do what she says and nod along to her sometimes insightful, sometimes outlandish commentaries, letting out nary an intelligent peep, just dopey laughter, since I never know quite how to respond to her musings and oddly timed cackles. I wish she were my grandma, especially since both mine are dead, but she already has an anthropologically-inclined granddaughter, one who lives with her no less, and never says hi to me when I pass her in the hallways. Anyway, Edie always gives me a hug before I leave, and today she even told me she loved me, since an embrace was out of the question, on account of the shingles.

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Wenus on fire (better throw her in the water!)

May 1, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Today, outside my window smelled like burning things that are not meant for burning, so not wood or anything else organic. Probably just the exhaust burp of some gross giant truck, since it’s too warm to be having a fire for fun, but if so it lingered for a suspiciously long time.

They say that smell has the most power to evoke memories (m-prizzle had it right with his madelines, as most of what we think of as taste is actually smell), and I think they are right because I was brought right back to stinky Southeast Asia and the smell of burning trash (mostly rubber) that was especially prevalent in depressing Cambodia, along with unattributable fish smells, and dust.

Another of my most evocative scents is the one that reminds me of preschool, which was actually held in Fairfax High School, across from the PJ Skidoos, which had a lot of ugly stained glass and where my mom would go to eat linguine and clams in white sauce with my teacher, Ms. Nancy Payne, and probably discuss how weird I was. Once, there was an actual fire in the ceramics building, and it made every fire drill for the next 12 years anticlimactic, especially the one that occurred in the middle of my IB English oral exam about Elizabeth Bishop’s fish.

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Hello world! (wordpress chose this title, and I feel bad deleting it, since they gave me a blog and everything)

May 1, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

I’m not sure why I hate the saying “[insert triumphant statement about lame accomplishment here], bitches!” so much, but I really do.

Maybe it’s because no matter who is saying it, I just picture a huge asshole with a shaved chest spouting it with a giant grin after winning at something stupid like guitar hero.

It is now officially May, the month when I graduate and My Life is supposed to start. Only I’m thinking these days that It might be a bit delayed, and I can’t say I’m too upset about that, except for the fact that this makes me certifiably imperfect in the practical part of my life, the only part I’ve ever been even marginally good at.

Sami and I reflected yesterday on the obvious but annoying fact that we have not had boyfriends in all four years of college. Or ever. Everyone always told me that boys get better in college, but they only get more obnoxious and slightly more body hair.

Sometimes I think that I have only fleeting moments of desire to write a blog in order to be “creative” (rather than frequent, intense pangs of self-indulgent impulse) because I have Sami, who serves as a spring board for all ideas, thoughts, reflections, complaints, jokes, and absurd dances. This is extremely helpful (especially since my previous blogs have never fully appreciated my dance moves), but it is also limiting, because we generally agree on most things, and no one needs to hear their ideas reflected back to them with such startling reassurance, as this only makes us more convinced that we are right about almost everything, when in fact this is probably very rarely the case.

 

 

 

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