From Apotheosis to Apostasy

There's something about belief that isn't quite properly summed up for me in the actual word. I have believed a great many things. I have believed in a great many things. I have believed in a great many people. I have believed those people. And I have had my beliefs betray me.

Pain and disappointment do leave scar tissue. They leave behind a tougher substrate that is less penetrable, less flexible. I catch myself wanting to undo or not acknowledge these things. I want to pretend that I'm still a wide-eyed child without all of those cautionary impulses overriding my more naïve instincts. I vacillate on which of these is my better self.

My work life has begun to present certain repetitions. I'm at a rehearsal right now that makes me feel as if I'm sitting in the theater of the Guggenheim two months ago. It's the same voices and the same work. I was looking forward to different things back then. I was operating under different rules. Snow has been replaced with jacket weather. But today, the feel of it approximates the other.

I wish it wasn't necessary to feel badly about having believed. But being wrong is so distasteful, I have to think of it as my having been right about how wrong I was.

Something gets lost in the translation from pure truth to the code language of my online self-expression. Everything I'm saying is obscured by everything I'm not saying.

In a vast field of order, anomalies are the only thing you see.

"Waiter, three whiskeys."

The very first night I slept in my house, I had been moving all day, and I was thrilled to be able to take my first shower, and before actually climbing into bed, I went downstairs in search of a pair of slippers, because the floors were kind of gritty from the move. But before I could make my way to my slippers, I found that the downstairs shower had overflowed and the bathroom, the hallway, and two of the bedrooms had an inch of water on the floor. Well, that was an adventurous first night.

I've spent the past few days in an especially gorgeous San Francisco. Anxious to get back home, realizing that I was only able to half deal with the second downstairs flood I discovered in my house just before I left. I'd left area rugs drying outside. Perhaps someone stole them. Perhaps a family of raccoons spent the weekend shitting on them. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

There's something familiar about this brand of uncertainty. A return to a once nearly constant state of not knowing what new frustration was going to reveal itself, what new discovery was going to emerge to ruin my day. So recently I've been walking around with a kind of blinders on. If I'm going to be destroyed, I'd rather not see it coming.

But I'm home now. And the rugs are still here. And my DVR successfully captured the shows I couldn't watch while I was away. So whatever other disasters may befall me, for tonight, I'm just fine. Wanting things to be fair and lovely is just the curse I was born to.

"One whiskey. One wine. You are with the tourists."

The secret to running is to just keep going

These are not new realizations. I've been learning the same lessons over and over for as long as I can remember, sad as that sounds. But these days, it feels more like a veneer. I'm not feeling the actual pain of remembering when I heard that song playing, while I was trying to get it together in the bathroom of a speakeasy and all I could feel was dread and hurt and anger and sorrow. I'm not feeling that pain. I'm just remembering feeling that pain because that song is now playing on a commercial. I remember how provocative that song was, but I no longer feel the actual provocation.

I woke up on a Monday morning a few weeks ago -- it was the day after St. Patrick's Day, if you must know -- and I told my little sister that it was as if a weight had been lifted. I was suddenly -- at last -- convinced that things were going to be better. And I felt good that day. And things were better. For a little while. But then they got unpleasant again. And it felt as if everything had melted down to a murky liquid that was draining away, and my hope that things might not be unbearable circled the drain with it.

I woke up today -- a Monday -- and it was like it was that other Monday. Like a weight had been lifted. Like I was waking up for the first time in the absence of crippling dread. I could suddenly appreciate the gloomy weather and get some work done and tidy up my office and maybe even see myself, at some future date, no longer really feeling those tender remnants of bruises past.

Then I was at my computer, and I saw that bombs had gone off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and it made me feel all the things that tragic things do. I think it was best summed up by Alex Blagg in this tweet, which I saw this evening and recognized to be spot on. These things steal focus, as they should. But no one knows how long we're supposed to engage these coping mechanisms or when we're supposed to leave it to the people who handle these things for a living and just hope it all pans out.

My little sister and I talked about an article she shared with me from the Chicago Tribune. We mourned runners who literally lost their legs, knowing that some of them had probably waited their whole lives to cross that finish line. It seemed so cruel. It's hard not to let one's imagination spiral out of control in the face of these morbid descriptors. There was a point, during the Sandy Hook nightmare, when I had to just stop listening, because I wouldn't be able to get those thoughts out of my head, and those thoughts were so awful.

We keep experiencing these horrible assaults on our humanity, and most of us survive them. And in my moviegoer's mind, I imagine that a runner who lost a leg today will end up recovering and taking on the Boston Marathon again, and it will be a triumph of the spirit and a symbol that we can't be snuffed out like some single-wick candle. People survive. Amazingly, sometimes. People survive things I feel quite certain I could never survive myself. I always say I'll be one of the first to go in any kind of apocalypse. Zombies. Pandemic. Asteroid. You name it. I'm not the surviving type. Especially if you give me half a minute to think about what the world will be like without plumbing and refrigeration. So I have plenty of room in my heart to hold admiration for others who can hack it. I have sometimes wondered if I could get through tribulations so trivial I'm embarrassed to describe them. Of course, at the time, it was everything. And anyone who told me otherwise was my sworn enemy.

Anyway, I guess my point is time passes, and things get better. Even if you try to keep them from doing so.

Lies

I've saved a lot up. And I'm so much out of the habit of writing that the easiest way to poke a hole in the inspiration sac and encourage something to leak out is to go back through the various half-written bits and the jotted-down notes and the song lyrics I must have found very meaningful at the time and hope something is still relevant or that I remember what I was originally trying to say. It hasn't been a terribly fruitful pursuit so far.

But it is also a sort of emotional archaeology. Which maybe has some kind of value, I guess. I hope.

You can go back through old photos -- it's even easier now that you can just keep scrolling downward, as opposed to having to open a shoebox or scour an old hard drive -- and the same kind of thing happens. Well, it happens to me anyway. Photos in my various online albums are like the rings of a tree. Little clusters of the time when my hair was that color or when I was on that beach or with that guy. I can look back to a specific date with surgical precision and rocket speed just by looking for a specific outfit. Because I always remember what I was wearing.

I got a stone where my heart should be
And nothing I do will make you love me

It ends with a reference to Memento.

I dreamed that I was out on an expedition, exploring the ocean with my friend Kim. We were swimming amongst mostly undersea mountains -- literally MOUNTAINS -- of guano, and I couldn't believe how deep we swam or how long I could hold my breath. At one point, it felt as if I had fallen asleep while diving ever downward. And when I came awake (in my dream), I had a sudden concern that I wouldn't get back to the surface in time to breathe, and I might end up drowning in water that was clearly at least partially made up of dissolved bat shit.

But my lungs held, and the resurfacing was like something out of a movie. Just a lot of glorious sunlight reflecting on rippling sea and that feeling in the legs that I suspect mermaids get. But not in the legs, obviously.

When we were back on dry land, we went back to our hotel, which was apparently in Japan. And Kim knew instinctively to light a pilot in every single plumbing fixture and appliance, while I mused about whether this was efficient.

I've learned and unlearned and relearned and re-unlearned the same lessons so many times over that I'm thinking of tattooing instructions on my body so I won't forget. Sometimes it helps to write things down.

You see one crowded, polluted, stinking town...

There's something about Comic-Con. Something that populism does. A kind of infiltration of cleverness and irony into what would otherwise be sincere and earnest. It's as if regular folks -- you know, the kind that tease the truly nerdy and ostracize them from their cliques -- can't allow themselves to unironically attach their passions to something fantastical. They can't BELIEVE in superheroes or apocalyptic mega-monster threats. But if you mash up something they can't believe in with something that a jock or a prom queen can relate to, all of a sudden, those jocks and prom queens are Comic-Con fans, and they're putting vinyl character decals on the rear windscreens of their SUVs. And they're standing behind me snarkily commenting on everything with haughty scholarliness and a certain air of entitlement and understanding. As if steampunk came to us by way of the New York Yankees and a Sergio Mendes song. And frankly maybe it did. What do I know. I almost never wear brown.

I guess I'm talking about the t-shirts with a hipster mustachioed Captain America or Hello Kitty as Cthulhu. You know: the shirts your mom would wear. And wearing them would make her feel like she relates to you*.

I love cute. I love super. I love sci-fi. I love robots. I love anime. I love cartoons. I love video games. But I think I prefer them in their separate rooms. And maybe part of it is that when my tastes in entertainment might have caused me to be an outsider, I chose that path brazenly. I watched Star Trek in high school. I read science fiction with a vengeance. I never ever had a poster of a TV actor in my locker. I never wrote popular guys' last names after my first name on my Pee-Chee folders. I owned my otherness. And maybe on some level, I felt superior because I had chosen something different and unexpected.

But now that it is all broad and mainstream and populist, where is the hard-won badge of geek honor? Everyone goes to Comic-Con now. And everyone watches superhero movies. And everyone dresses their toddlers up as Wolverine.

The true test of course is how a Comic-Con attendee reacts to die-hard expressions of true genre fandom even when it's empirically distasteful. It's one thing to take a picture of the mercenary booth babe dressed as Catwoman who probably has no idea whether she is modeling Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar. But what do you mutter under your breath when you see an extremely large sweaty man dressed as Ultra Magnus and you can't help but note that through the damp white spandex you can see more ingrown hairs than you knew a human chest could host? Do you applaud his commitment? Or do you wince and wonder aloud about his Type II diabetes? [Side note: I saw the guy in this not-at-all hypothetical costume every year for a long time. And I have long suspected that the curtailment of that faithful yearly sighting can only have been brought about by death itself. Or the inability to afford a Hoveround.] Anyway, the point is, popularity has an uncanny habit of ruining things, and it sometimes saddens me.

We all get this. We all have a little over-precious possessiveness about a band only we know or a show only we watch. Or a convention only we -- among our friends -- ever used to attend. There's badge value in "first." Especially when the thing becomes extremely popular and mainstream, and suddenly no one remembers that you were on board in early days. No one rewards you for liking that song before it ended up in a Target commercial. Once it's in everyone's playlists, it doesn'y belong to you anymore. Once it's in everyone's playlists, frankly, it's probably not going to be in yours for much longer. Right?

Anyway, I'm grateful for Comic-Con. I truly am. But I miss the days when it was an exclusive-if-somewhat-foot-smelling club that I could attend without ever feeling unwelcome or ineffectual. I miss the days when I didn't feel the need to take umbrage when overhearing someone who is not a Comic-Con familiar explaining what Comic-Con is but clearly does not get it at all.

It's strange to feel superior to people because you have what you perceive to be a more authentic connection to geeky stuff. Ironic, even. There was a time when one might not volunteer the admission that one had played role-playing games. Or that one had been vexed on account of not knowing HOW Psylocke got Jean Grey's telekinetic powers. One might have kept such things under wraps. But today, when virtually everyone flies their geek flag proudly -- ersatz though it may be -- it's hard not to be iconoclastic about it all. I mean, how will children of the future know the character-building pain of being an outsider if everything geeky is cool? Well, I guess there will always be acne.

I began writing this a short time after Comic-Con 2012. And if I even go this year -- which depends mostly on whether I can get a hotel room for the love of Pete -- I'm sure I will have even more of these thoughts crystallized. The noteworthy thing is that I'm still planning to go. I invite you to wish me luck, snob that I clearly am.



*It should be noted that the "you" in this scenario is actually me. And my mom would never wear a t-shirt of any kind and has no desire to relate to me. She is perfectly comfortable giving me advice from Judge Judy and second-guessing my menu choices.

Your Cake and Eat It, Too

Your Cake and Eat It, Too

"Your cake and eat it, too." I had cause to use this phrase to describe something recently, and it occurred to me what an inane idiom it is. If I'm going to have cake, of course I'd like to eat it, too. And yet whenever someone accuses you of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too, the implication is that you breached a covenant of the social compact. You're greedy. You decided you're entitled to a different set of circumstances than everyone else. And what's more, you are an anomaly. NO ONE ELSE wants to have their cake and also eat it. We're ALL perfectly comfortable with one thing or the other. I will have my cake, or I will eat my cake. But as God is my witness, I WILL NOT DO BOTH.

You'll pardon me while I sway a little further in the literal direction, but I don't actually like cake much. So I'm neither inclined to have it nor eat it particularly often. And if this is a metaphor, I guess that says something about whether I take more than what's coming to me or believe I deserve special accommodation, and I would say that metaphor has some truth to it. I am so tightly wound around the pillar of fairness it's crippling at times. I expect it, strive for it, and believe in its possibility, despite the countless times so far I've been served a slice of cake that had the words "Life Isn't Fair" scripted on its icing in a bright sugary extrusion of curly cursive.

Things are not generally fair. Fairness is not the stuff of storytelling. Or when it is, the stories are decidedly jejune. And we don't generally root just for what's fair. We root for what's heroic. Who even gets out of bed in the morning for fair. Well, me, I guess. And even so, I seldom get it. But it's possible my insistence on wanting what's fair originates somewhere in this murky soup of cinematic upbringing that has been my second life. A black hat/white hat world where we see both sides. We see what happens in secret. We know when someone is lying And we all know exactly the same things.

My parents loved Taken. It's actually hilarious to watch them eat it up, because in that film -- spoiler alert -- everybody gets what's coming to them. To an absurd degree. To a laughable, comical, absurd degree. And they loved it. Watching Taken was not especially my favorite thing. But watching my parents watch Taken -- that was the stuff of dreams.

The trick with movies is that we all generally root for the same person. We root for the figure we're supposed to root for. It's disruptive when a filmmaker tells us a story where the good guy doesn't prevail. It's a breach of trust. Or it's a tragedy. Or it's German. It's part of what sucked about the Prequels. It's why it's no fun to watch Law and Order episodes where Jack McCoy learns that the system isn't perfect or where juries decide it's acceptable for someone to get away with murder. That's called jury nullification, by the way. Even unsatisfying moments in procedural television can be comfortingly educational.

But the point is life isn't like that. The point is you don't get the admiration of the audience for being forgiving or for being heroic or for letting people get away with murder. The point is that metaphoric cake I'm having but not eating, or eating but not having, or neither having nor eating should actually say, "Life Is Not the Movies." The endings are not always happy. The good guy does not always win. You don't get to see what people say about you at your funeral. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones and later Devo: Satisfaction is a Western construct. Would anyone care for cake?

The Beginnings of the Ends of Things

The Beginnings of the Ends of Things

I don't know how I got so rusty, but the habit of writing things I think in anything but the briefest of bursts has fallen away from me with disturbing completeness. And here I am, ineptly marshalling all those unexcised words -- the things I'm always thinking, the conversations I'm always having, like a practice game of chess where you play both sides of the board and can only ever win and lose at the same time.

It's September. It used to be November for me. November was the month of melancholy. All my memories of loss and disappointment seemed to crowd around the eleventh month on calendar pages of the past. But today, it's September. And today, I'm realizing that if you live long enough, and ill-advisedly allow yourself to get your hopes up enough, you'll be disappointed plenty in all of the various months, and disaffectedness will not be necessarily seasonal. It's a law of averages thing.

It's September. But the melancholy mood lacks the clear causality of melancholy moods past. It isn't just one thing anymore. In a way, I covet those days when things were so seemingly clear and dire. Maybe clarity is a luxury of the naïve. Things are not clear. They are infinitely cloudy. Infinitely complex. The solutions are infinite. And possibly unknowable.

When we write, we either want to be saying something very timely or something timeless. When we publish our thoughts, we want to be the first to have the idea in a moment of great meaning, or we want to coin the idioms that will pepper the English of others long into the future. Well, some of us want these things. There are also plenty of people publishing today who are content to string a few words together. There are people today who are content to seek the attention of strangers just to say they're going to bed now. I hope it's fair to say that we are in danger of evolving past artistry altogether. But then, the value of a moment or a thought or a poignant turn of phrase is not uniform. And the only hope of not flailing to death in frustration is to try and regularly talk to at least one or two other people who see the same value that you do, however high or low it is. A shared sense of what is and isn't good, what is and isn't important. It's the only thing that matters.

There are a slew of draft posts pending in my blog account. They date back years. But the new thing that makes them update to today's date each time you open them makes me fear I'll destroy my own history just by trying to consider it. Sometimes I need to know when I felt that way as much as I need to know what I felt. It's a context thing. And another argument in favor of just writing shit down in a notebook like I used to.

What is funny? or Please be advised, this is not going to be.

A long time ago, I took a class at San Diego Mesa College called "A Literary Approach to Film," taught by Andrew Makarushka. He was a really entertaining teacher. I remember him reminding me of George Carlin, and I remember him telling us he used to have a radio show (with Gabriel Wisdom, if you're from San Diego or interested in finance). We watched and discussed a lot of great films. And he gave me passes to see Joe Versus the Volcano. And I never forgot his name nor how to spell it.

That is not the purpose of this post.

Earlier today, I followed a link from a tweet by Paul Sabourin of @paulandstorm and read Robert Mankoff's New Yorker article about the #kanyenewyorkertweets meme, of which Paul Sabourin is the originator. Wow. Complicated sentence.

Anyway. Every now and then, I'll be talking to someone who shares my interest in and -- gross and unironic as it sounds to say -- passion for comedy, and I'll mention this class I took and one session when we discussed comedy. I'll cite the discussion of the levels of laughter, but I'll usually forget all but the first and the last. I'll mention that we watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Prizzi's Honor and Modern Romance, and then I'm off to Tangent Town.

Fortunately, I took notes in my tiny handwriting in my somewhat tiny Japanese looseleaf notebook, which you can see above. And this afternoon, I took the notebook out of a filing cabinet, and typed the notes in a Tumblr, and here they are for you and everyone, so we need never speak again.

Comedy

In 1896, the Lumière brothers made a film of a man watering a lawn. In 1911, Mack Sennett wandered onto the set of a D.W. Griffith picture and ended up studying under the tutelage of Griffith himself, the inventor of film language. Sennett then decided to use the techniques he learned to create a world that was zany and skewed instead of realistic. That was the birth of the Keystone Cops and a world in which all social problems could be solved with "a kick in the rump."

Comedy vs. Humor

Comedy is based on human foibles. Humor is based on content and is therefore timely, e.g., Mort Sahl's Kennedy jokes. Comedy, by comparison, is timeless, e.g., Aristophanes' The Hypocrite. Molière's comedy The Misanthrope is still successful and funny. Whereas Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland's satire is lost, but the comedy remains. Humor changes quickly with the times and can become dated (political cartoons).

What is funny?

This is a difficult problem because laughter resides in the viewer rather than in the event. Laughter is unique to a given event, and its perception in the moment by the viewer. Laughter is evoked by situations having both comedy and tragedy. Aristotle said that the comic element is something ugly or distorted but not painful. Humans are the only animal to have this ability/propensity (i.e., laughter). There is a sadistic element to it, but a person amused by an accident is one who is afraid of it. He experiences satisfaction and glee in seeing humiliating misfortune happen to a proxy victim. Laughter's friend is cruelty, and its enemy is compassion.

The 3 Comic Elements

1. the ludicrous (out of proportion/exaggerated)
2. the incongruous (depends on discovery of mismatched characters in a normal setting or vice versa)
3. the unexpected ([a] unforeseen by viewer or [b] unforeseen by proxy victim)

The 6 Levels of Laughter

1. obscenity and/or vulgarity (basest level)
2. physical mishap
3. plot device (e.g., Cyrano de Bergerac's nose -- denotes expectation of humor)
4. verbal wit (sophisticated level -- "De rien. Il n'y a pas de quoi.")
5. situation or high comedy (depends on incongruity of characters)
6. satire (incongruity of ideas, audacious, most intellectually demanding, most risky)

So those are my notes. You already saw a picture of them. Can you believe my tiny handwriting? It's pretty unbelievable.

I don't know if this directly addresses the Kanye/New Yorker discussion, but inspiration is its own excuse. And that even sounds a little like an iterative expansion of Paul Sabourin's thesis: The context is the joke. Which maybe belongs in these notes somewhere.

This might not last forever.

I recently rediscovered Lisa Germano's Excerpts From a Love Circus while making a mixtape. There were songs of hers I wanted to include. I included them. But not until I was on a revision of so high a number that you might wonder if I'm expecting to be paid for my product. I'm not.

I used to listen to the album end to end, over and over, all the time, during my first year in Los Angeles. I found meaning in nearly every song. Personal personal things. It was both comforting to hear someone else sing them and also sort of deflating being reminded that nothing I felt was really mine. Disappointment is so tragically ordinary. Everyone feels sad. Everyone gets hurt. Everyone feels cheated, let down, dashed. At one time or another, everyone feels like the world is sitting on their chest and they can neither breathe nor cry out. A night terror.

If you listen to an album enough and then don't listen to it for a long time and then listen to it a lot again, it's likely that it will change. It's likely that you will have changed. You might have changed so much that you don't even hear music in the same way.

That's how it is for me with this album. It's like I've taped over the previous feelings. Drawn over the previous faces. Only hints of the former remain. And even that is more a product of my propensity to remember who I was at the time than what any of it felt like. I remember what was happening around the music. I remember what I was wearing. But I don't completely remember the scorn that I was responding to. That has faded to nothing. It has lost its potency. It's a bottle of soda left open. The peppery sting of the fizz is all gone.

Oh, it's possible that you in your lifetime have never made an actual mixtape. I mean with magnetic tape on a deck that records analog sound. But I made many of those tapes. And if you did, you may recall that sometimes -- when you recorded over a tape more than once -- there would be ghosts. Faraway remnants of songs you meant to erase. This happened to me a lot, because I would work very hard to never have a tape cut off in the middle of a song, but I also didn't want there to be an excess of blank space at the end of a side. So, in some cases after finding that a track didn't quite fit, I would find another song that did. Maybe some short instrumental piece. Or If You Were Here by Thompson Twins. (Two minutes and fifty-six seconds was just right more often than you'd think.) And there might be only a second or two of empty space before the tape ran clear. And in those seconds, you might hear one of these ghosts. Maybe Depeche Mode. Something from Black Celebration. But it would sound like they were playing in an empty pool in the empty gymnasium of an empty school hundreds of miles away.

This Lisa Germano album has similar artifacts for me. Faint ghosts of what I used to feel when I heard those descending notes on what I think is a hammered dulcimer but could also be an auto-harp. Who I thought of as "hero" when she sang, "So what if your hero sells its soul." Who was doing the carrying in the lyric, "You can carry a lie till it makes you fall down." It's like a revival of a play with a mostly new cast. It's not an issue of which version you like better. But there's an argument to be made that a remake occasionally gets the casting more right than anyone expected. And sometimes it's not about which version was more apt. It's just an issue of running into it at a time when it means something to you. I guess that's the issue with most things.

The mistake is listening to anything alone and expecting that anyone is sharing it with you. Even if you put a song on a mixtape. Or a mix CD, as is now the way we do. We listen in different ways. Some people never give a song a chance. Some people don't care about lyrics. Some people don't like to listen to anything from beginning to end. I've spent my life so far gradually learning that what I call one thing is something else to everyone but me. And that there's no crime in that. Letting go the desire to control every aspect of the experience is a gift. But gifts are something I often have difficulty accepting. It takes a certain amount of back and forth.

The world revolves around you. But it revolves around me, too. So how could we see the same one?

A Headache Not Worth Having

I used to write more things down. I used to have dreams all the time and remember them. I used to stop mid-sentence and scramble to find a pen. Maybe it's something about all of this micro-blogging. I think of something and just spit it right out. There's never a chance to let the words linger a bit. See where they go. See if anything comes of them. There's no mellowing period. The immediacy overtakes the art. I've even learned to forgive myself if a tweet contains a typo. It's usually an iPhone typing gaff. And if I don't catch it before two other things have been posted, I commit it to history and accept that there will always be evidence that I might not know the difference between "if" and "of." That is an evolutionary shift.

Not so with this blog of mine. Even today, if I happen across a post from years ago where "going" is spelled "giong," I fix it and republish on the spot. Preserving quality for a posterity that is ironically bound to be less expansive and perhaps less attentive than the ones who read what I tweet. Although one could argue that having a great deal of attention for a second or two at a time does not constitute occupying a place of great meaning in people's lives. It's the ones who sit and listen for a while. The ones who wish there was more. Those are the ears worth whispering into. Those are the ones who will hear now and yesterday and sometime later today and be able to tie it all together, context being a precious, precious thing that nearly never accompanies a status update. Those are the ones who would notice if you were tweeting in a series. They wouldn't require the two of three.

But notebook time was a different time. The notebook was a staging area for something more complete. And I would review what I'd written without waiting so long that my handwriting became illegible to me. And I would fill the notebooks up before they began to disintegrate in my handbag. The notebook was a place I would remind myself to make more of things later. And, in general, I would follow through. That is becoming less the case.

These end up being ways for me to feel the vitality in me ebbing. If I sit with a pen poised over a blank notebook page, I might wait for hours and find that nothing seems worth saying. When I was in high school, and we were required to sit and write in a journal for a half-hour period every day for one semester, I often filled those pages up with song lyrics. Because I couldn't think of anything else to say. All my angsty teenage musings and I couldn't make sentences of them. But I could remember the lyrics to songs I liked. And I usually liked them either because they made me feel forlorn and romantic or because they said things that sounded dirty to me. So those are the words I wrote. No one was ever going to read them. It was more an exercise in penmanship than in anything else.

And in some ways, it's a kind of code. A way to say, "I'm feeling something," without having to say what it is. And if anyone gets wise, you can just point out that it's a song and that you didn't write it, and there ends accountability. Anyone who presses you further either doesn't understand social cues or really, really cares about you.

The notebook I carry still contains sporadic history. There's the bit I wrote when I was waiting for that guy, the first time we went out and he was a little late. There's the thing my friend said that made me want to launch a line of greeting cards. There's the mini-diary I kept the first time I flew to New York for my current job and everything seemed so pre-perfect.

I've managed to sunburn my front half pretty well. Tomorrow I will set out in search of balance. And the outcome will be damage in symmetry, but damage just the same.

The silence was mandatory. And, in retrospect, advisable.

Blogger's recent location-change requirement for FTP subscribers, despite the offering of some lickety-split-sounding migration tool, actually ended up preventing the use of my blog for all this time. And maybe that was for the best. I don't remember feeling as if I had so much to say, but who knows what I might have blurted out. Instead the past month has been somewhat like one of those dreams where the murderer is coming for you and you want to scream but you can't. In this case, the murderer was Blogger, and the silent scream was WordPress, because that fucker hasn't been any help either.

Anyway, cheers. I'm back on again. For whatever it's worth.

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Definity

Sometimes when I lie very still, I can't feel my arms or legs or any part of my body. I can't even feel my teeth. With my eyes closed, I'm floating in the vacuum of space, slightly surprised I'm able to breathe.

Upon waking this morning, after seeing Alice in Wonderland the night before, I realized I had been dreaming in that theme. I was trembling and you held me, but I was tall and you were small, and there was no magic cake in sight.

I also realized that there are birds that sound like rain. The dogs always sound like dogs, but the birds -- the birds can sing a variety of songs.

The Disingenuousness of Polite Encouragement

Last summer, my neighbor told me she would be gone for a week. She was going camping with her daughter. I said, "Oh, that sounds fun!" But I didn't mean it. Not truthfully. To be terribly honest, it doesn't sound like anything but the opposite of fun to me. But it's not my job to burst my neighbor's bubble. She doesn't need to know that I'm afraid of possums and raccoons. She doesn't care that I don't know what poison ivy looks like. She was probably only telling me so she could blame me if her place got robbed. And I was just being polite in the way that we are polite to each other in our fraudulent little society of liars. And if you think I'm wrong, please cite the last time you said, "You look AMAZING!" to someone and meant it.

Maybe if a camping trip was planned by someone who really knows how to camp and is really good at it, I'd end up not loathing it. Maybe if the centerpiece of the camping trip was a two-night stay at a five star hotel.

But if you left it to me to plan a camping trip, I would just come up with ways to make it feel like it wasn't a camping trip at all. Because I can't think of anything less appealing than being outside all the time and learning why everything is all wet in the morning and not knowing who has recently peed on the spot where you are now about to pitch a tent.

I can make pancakes and steak on a Coleman stove. And I can remember to buy all the right booze. There is virtually no end to the number of travel size shampoo bottles I can offer you, and I buy only the most luxurious t.p. You want me as your supply officer. But you don't want me as your captain where camping is concerned. And you don't want me in your tent. Unless you like the delicate art of complaint. And let's face it, if you're inviting me somewhere, you probably do.

Year of the Eye of the Tiger

Today was my first visit to San Diego in 2010. A longer absence than usual. Truncated by the same reason as nearly always. In a recent email, my mother invited me to come to a Chinese New Year dinner with the family, and she adorably and somewhat passive-aggressively said: "We have not seen you for so long. Your dad and I like to have you here as long as we can. I hope we are also your Valentine. :)" This is the form of guilt I find most irresistible.

Usually, Chinese New Year's most noteworthy impact on my life is a slight urge to go to the post office and buy year-of-the-whatever stamps. Back in 2004, I was on this mail art kick, which I unashamedly attribute to watching How to Draw a Bunny and getting all caught up in the genius of Ray Johnson. In addition to buying a photocopier and a lifetime's worth of art supplies, I bought far too many year of the monkey stamps as a means of supporting my plans to send random letters and little arty things I made to various people I knew. I did it for a while. Sent letters around the world and across the country. Sent a bunch to my sister. It never really kicked off a movement, as I might have hoped. I think the only person in the lot who sent me something in the mail was my friend Geoffrey, love that he is. In the end, I was left with a lot of extra stamps. And I seem to have misplaced the little address book I was keeping. So the mailing of stuff won't reinstate itself without at least a little bit of leg work.

So this year, I don't really care that it's the year of the tiger especially, but I do care that it's something new. Time is linear, but the way we experience it is largely cyclical. And these occasional markers are as good an excuse as any to kick yourself in the pants and say, "Hey, how about doing things a little differently this time?" You don't get to unlive or undo. But you can certainly start over. As many times as you like, really. Maybe you can even get it perfect eventually. As long as part of what you change is the way you define perfect, and as long as you learn not to throw away too too much when you're doing your spring cleaning.

I'm not drinking glasses of whole eggs for breakfast. That would just be taking things too far.

Gong xi fa cai, people. Possibility is as much about what won't happen as it is about what will. But in either case, it all begins with the walnut shrimp.

Towards the Memory of a Better Prom

I did not have one of those longstanding boyfriend-girlfriend things in high school. A lot of people I knew did. And at the time, I probably envied them. But through the filter of my more experienced recollection, I look back on those scenes and assume that I wasn't feeling especially left out. Even though they were 15 maybe 16 years-old, my classmates in relationships became like old married couples. The girls became practical, dour. And they expected things. The boys had to think ahead to bring a second jacket, in case girlfriend required first jacket over the shoulders of her cheer sweater. The boys had to be careful not to talk to other girls. Not to look at other girls. The girls had to be careful not to tell their blabber-prone friend the details of their various dissatisfactions. I remember seeing them talking to each other at their lockers, these coupled up ones. It never looked fun. It often looked angst-ridden. And at the time -- as I was listening to The Smiths and The Cure and David Sylvian -- maybe it was the angst I envied. But I think about it now, and I have to wrinkle my nose. I had my crushes to depress over. But I didn't have this boyfriend-girlfriend thing. This "let's hold hands even though neither of us seems to like doing that" thing. This "I'll just wait in your car while you're at football practice" thing. At the time, having someone expect you to be waiting outside for them at the end of the day seemed like something I would have wanted. Looking back, though, I'm relieved I never narrowed the field in that way. (At least not until the absolutely very end of my senior year. And at that point, half the time we weren't in school anyway.) I compare it in my brain to going exploring and stopping at the first place you see that seems different and just staying there. You don't know you're just steps away from the unattended entrance of the world's coolest abandoned amusement park. You don't know that you could walk five minutes and see an original Van Gogh. You don't know there are restaurants that don't have microwaves in them. How could you know? You've settled in right here. In this little alcove that inadvertently provides shelter in the event of rain but doesn't appear to have been designed for that purpose.

In some ways, I think growing up is just the act of revising your wants. All those things you thought you needed. All those things you knew you had to have. Looking back at them from years away almost demands the making of excuses. I don't know that many people who can talk about those tender, temerity-filled teenage years and say, "This is who/what I loved," without having to immediately offer, "Let me explain..." Life mostly ends up being the many ways you push yourself towards the things you convince yourself must happen. You rewrite the musts over and over. But the pushing itself is written in indelible ink.

Keeping Things Whole

A while back, I watched Waking the Baby Mammoth, in which paleontologists study the remains of the most perfectly preserved woolly mammoth ever found. And as I watched them take her apart, I realized that I hated watching them do it. It might be the same thing that makes it hard for me to cut up a book for a collage if the book is perfect or part of a set. I treasure the completeness and know that once you've started cutting, the wholeness can never be restored. "Whole" is an absolute. Once it is diminished, it is no longer. Once you've taken something away, "whole" requires an adverb.

I've spent a lot of/too much time in my life thinking about the irretrievable messing up of a perfect thing. Things that go on your permanent record. Things you do that make it so you can never say "never have I ever" anymore. (Drink.) It's misplaced concern, I'll grant you. But it is a thing I think. Sometimes it works better for me when something brand new or perfect gets marred in some way very soon after it comes to me. It takes the pressure off. Next time I buy a new car, I should nick the bumper on something right away. That way I can loathe its imperfection but no longer feel a prisoner of my desperate desire to prevent it.

Maybe second chances are folly. We like to pretend we can put things behind us or unfeel things we've felt. Maybe after a severe brain injury. But in the absence of that...I guess I don't know.

I forget very little. And frankly it's only a strength when it's valuable to remember something. But in a way, it's like paying for storage month after month for a thing that you'll only take out once or twice ever again. Just to look at it. Never to use it. Never to put it to work earning back all that rent you paid. I would forget many things, if I could. I would put a lot of things out of my mind and never give them an opportunity to transport me anywhere. Especially not back to a place of insecurity or hurt. I'd like it to be more like in Dickens. Where, having been transported, you can just stand off to the side and watch yourself objectively and maybe not actually BE in the moment all over again. Where's the fun in that. Those ghosts never take you back to any places you want to go. Scrooge doesn't proudly survey his favorite orgasm in any of the versions I've seen. And I feel like I've seen all of them.

The sun's back out. The sky is a solid crayon color of blue. Sometimes it feels like the world joins me in my desire to have something to look forward to.

Inert(ia)

I was looking back at the earliest of my blog entries. They go back to September of 2001, right before I got a new job and moved from San Diego to Los Angeles and told myself I was starting over, when really I was just starting.

From my corner office on the 6th floor of the City National Bank building on Wilshire and Fairfax, I had a pretty enviable view of Century City in one direction and the Hollywood Hills in the other. And whenever I thought, "I should write something," I'd usually just have to look through the glass to find something to say. Homeless guy this. The clouds that. A doubledecker bus filled with Austin Powers lookalikes. It wrote itself. I guess having an office with a window that looks out on the rest of the office instead of a bustling, piss-soaked sidewalk is as viable an excuse as any to explain away the dearth of inspiration I have been feeling.

I've had phases. Sometimes I would write about what I was doing and say nothing about how I felt. Then I would write about what I felt and say nothing about what I was doing. Maybe this is the phase where I'm doing nothing and feeling nothing and the obvious result is a reduced urgency to tip tap type it out. In the marketing and public relations world, there are various positions taken on what constitutes an announceable event. You don't want to overreport. You don't want to be one of those companies that issues a press release to say how much you love summer or to remind people that "lunch" is a fun word. But you also don't want to keep too quiet. Lest people forget you. Or assume you're working on something you're ashamed to talk about. It's hard to imagine what that could be in these modern times. Porn is utterly mainstream. Dropping out for a year to live on your disability settlement is like a generational rite of passage. Even prison has become commonplace and banal enough to not keep you from getting to second base with a lady if you meet her at a bar in Silverlake. It might even be a selling point. The shame of just not having anything interesting to say is on a separate scale. A more shameful scale. And a far less rebloggable one.

These days, I have my best ideas on the treadmill or in a movie theater or while driving. And I command myself to remember and write them down. At which time I often find I'm lacking a pen. That can be as literal or as figurative as you like. It's true in both directions.

It comes in waves.

I saw three white balloons drifting up into the nighttime. Past the moon. In front of the stars. I don't know who let them go, but I felt sorry for their goodbye.

She said "yes."

I had a dream the other night, but enough nights ago that we can accurately say "the other year." I was in Culver City. I kept having the answers to geeky questions, and I kept not getting credit for it. And there was this pall of injustice and urgency hanging over it all. Everyone was getting something they wanted. I was just watching it happen. And despite my frustration and an overwhelming feeling of being left behind, I kept it all to myself and offered my congratulations. A bystander, making notes in a journal, saving the commentary for later, when -- after rigorous editing -- it might be palatable to judging eyes without revealing the subdermal layer of "it's not fair."

Say what you will about Jung and Freud, but some dreams are so easy to interpret, you might as well have read their transcript in a fortune cookie. And if anyone ends up turning two-line dream synopses into a fortune cookie's insides, I expect a healthy share of the profits.

Kisslock

The moon came down to meet me. Like the inside of a cooked egg. The part of the yolk, both yellow and grey. You have to be careful not to overcook eggs, you know. But I won't decline a cooked egg, under any circumstances. I'm very forgiving that way.

I looked at the moon the way I always look at the moon, when I see it. Expectantly. Hopefully. Once a great source of inspiration. It's so easy to write lyrical little turns of phrase about things that are persistently, prettily present. That's why thousands of years of writers have written about the moon. Many of them calling it "she." And why they write about stars and the sun and mountains that haven't yet come down. It's easy to treat them like gods. They're always there. But me? I wrinkle my nose at things that promise permanence. Even pens.

But I keep seeing the moon from the same angle, from the same point of the compass, from the same street. With the same dog leash in hand. Passing the same neighbors. The ones who always seem to be frying onions. The ones who have everything but curtains covering their windows. The ones who turned that little shoebox of a house into such an adorable little opposite-of-an-eyesore.

And now I look at the moon and it's all so very the same. A postulate. How I long to see something new. Even when I am looking at something that can't possibly be. It's all so very the same that I find I often don't even look anymore. I feel my poetic leanings crusting over, as if I'm one of those storybook work-a-days who tunes out the world and never realizes they're riding on a subway train made of gold. Oh, there's a fable to be written about me and my kind. Tin joints covered with that reddish, brittle coating that comes from the rain and the salt air and a terrific flood of weeping. Oil can. Oil can.

I lay my fingers across the keyboard, and there's this paralysis. Do I not know what to say? Do I not want to say what I'm thinking? Am I actually thinking anything? Maybe that's the primal arrogance of me. Believing I should have something to say, whether I seem to or not. And that was just the primal self-deprecation of me, in case you didn't notice. I'm very good at making sure no one thinks I really believe I'm worth listening to. Just in case.

I may actually be making a formal sport of saying nothing in five hundred words or less.

Snip

I got a haircut a short while ago. I've got bangs and a blunt little bob.



As any woman will tell you, bangs are a big commitment. And I've never actually had them in my adult life. I guess it could have gone either way, but I'm reasonably happy with the outcome. But I've noticed that -- while I do get many compliments from friends and even strangers on the cut -- the bangs might be a complication. It might be one of those situations where there's something so ugly you can't help commenting on it, and the only way to be polite is to say you love it. Like a terrible sweater or a startling elective surgical procedure. I get a lot of "I could NEVER wear that look, but it looks good on YOU." My little sister said, "My face would look like a garlic with those bangs, but you're working it." My mom congratulated me on finding a way to cover up that unfortunate little bump on my forehead. A guy last night said, "I love your hair." And a few seconds later added, "Unless it's a wig."

Anyway, these aren't actually raves is my point. I'm fine with it. But I think it bears pointing out.

A Belt of Stars

The day never really began. It just lurched into a going state, and I went along.

The cold sneaks up on you. Next thing you know, you're sitting in a t-shirt, shivering, and you don't even have the good sense to reach for a sweater. You can be comfortably eased into discomfort. Like boiling a frog. And once you're there, there is always the risk that apathy will guide you to your own lazy end. You just sit still and wait for it, and eventually it comes. It's the most effortless thing in the world.

I began writing this entry almost a year ago. Jotted down a line from a song, because it meant something to me. Today it means something completely different, but it means something just the same. I take notes for a reason. Even if the reason doesn't reveal itself until you've long since given up. I tell myself I pay such close attention. I get lost in the details. And there is no honor in that.

You are my sweetest downfall.

Thankspassing

For the past few years, owing to the unromantic reality of a crotchety and spam-suspicious mail server, I've not been able to send out what had become my customary Thanksgiving email. Well, I COULD have, but I've generally waited until there was too little time to properly create a mailing list or to figure out a back-up network solution or to come up with something to say, for that matter.

It gives the appearance of growing apart, but the appearance is unintended.

I took my younger sister to New York for four or five days just before the holiday. We did many things I've always intended to do when visiting there but haven't managed to do so far. It gave the month a different flavor. And a different perfume. Beulah, unfortunately, does not cherish the scent of chestnuts roasting on an open fire. She did however immensely enjoy the shop windows at Lord & Taylor. As did I. They were spectacular.

I'm in a familiar place in an unfamiliar time. I've been here before, but it was a younger me. A different me. And all the things I worried over were only the things that mattered then. And the things I worry over now seem trite. Even as they are paramount. Even as I know one day they will be as useless an investment as any financial choice I've made so far. It seems I need to worry. Without vexation, I have no idea what to do with my hands.

I'm sorry I missed the window, although I don't know that you should be. My Thanksgiving email would probably have been defiantly cheery and obsequiously glib. You didn't really miss anything. But I would have closed it with a slightly jarring moment of sincerity, I assume. I would have told you how thankful I am to share a bit of anything with you and that you have made my life richer in ways that only you could. If I had your correct email address.

Chasing a Spurious Starlight

Everything is far too familiar. Perhaps if I remember less, I wouldn't greet every experience with a sense of wry knowing. I've put away the childish inclination to hope things turn out better this time. I just conveniently expect them to disappoint, and they reliably do. And someone out there reads that and thinks, "Maybe she's read The Secret." P.S. I haven't.

This all sounds very cold. There is a plainspoken practicality in it. A less feeling take on a more feeling memory.

I don't forget the lessons of history, but I seem doomed to repeat it just the same. It's a pattern. Irrevocable. It's in the script.

This isn't a nostalgic interlude you can share with me. Even if you were there. Even if you are here. My throat is beginning to close around it. This cooling trend promises diminished resistance.

Today reminds me of a different you. And a me that worried what you saw when you looked at me. The puffy eyes of an allergic fall. The desire for a sleek comfort that proved persistently elusive. The space is the same, but the time is different. Less light used to come through the windows. Mornings felt more private. More precious. For all my rearranging, I fish a black blouse out of a drawer and it smells like me. Like anything else I've worn. Even if the last time I wore it was seven years ago. There are certain kinds of chemistry you can't change.

The Opposite of a Secret

There was an old lady crossing the street in front of me on my way in to work today. She was wearing a crazy denim get-up, with crocheted pieces added to it. I'm assuming she made them herself. And a big floppy knit hat that looked like a modern re-envisioning of Whistler's mother's kerchief. And she was pumping one arm vigorously as she strode across the street. Her slouch implied a certain hippie joie de vivre. She had a water bottle holster slung over her shoulder and a big handbag syncopating bounces on her hip as she walked. I'm assuming she was headed to Pavilions. I'm assuming she had shopping to do. I'm assuming a lot of things.

Over the weekend, my dad said to me, "You love living in Los Angeles, don't you." And I thought (and said), "Yes, actually." It's one of those things that people who live here get asked. And they have to make the decision whether or not to follow the answer up with a bunch of explanations. "I know there are a lot of shallow people, but..." "I know it's dirty in places, but..." "I know it's hard to feel like you're somebody, but..."

I do love living in Los Angeles. Both in spite of and because of all its peculiarities. The only Los Angeleno instinct I continually strive to unlearn is assuming I can figure everything out in a glance. Summing people up is something I do, usually for the blithe amusement of my friends. But I'm also prone to look at a person -- say, an old lady crossing the street -- and think I could tell you everything about him or her with breathtaking accuracy. And, of course, like all such casual experts, I seldom ask how someone looking at me might similarly sum me up. I seldom even catch myself wondering it. Living in Los Angeles trains you to walk about knowing everyone is looking at you and ignoring you at the same time. When I enter a room, people turn and look right at me in a manner far more forward than you see happening anywhere else. Except maybe for Europe. They look at you and you can see them asking, "Is that someone?" And you just as quickly see them decide, "No. It isn't."

I have never craved fame. At least not the sort that involved visual recognition. Ironically, I only crave the kind of fame advertised in the lyrics of the theme to the movie and television show and then movie again Fame. I would be content to have people remember my name. But to have them see me walk into a room and feel the need to tell someone or to feel the need to approach me for any reason, no thank you. I'm instead working on very slowly earning my reputation through excessive tipping on a server by server basis.

You can live anywhere, and there are certain immutable parts of yourself that will persist. But it's just plain impossible to be so stubborn or so stalwart that you don't eventually let some of your surroundings seep in. You become a part of the place, and it becomes a part of you. It took me a number of years to actually realize that I live in Los Angeles. At first, I spent so much of my time back and forth to San Diego that it still felt like San Diego was my home. And if someone asked me where I live, I'd often accidentally say San Diego. But eventually, you've spent enough time in a place that you know how to get from here to there and you know where to get the best whatever it is, and you take that place in and it becomes yours. And you begin to belong to it as much as it begins to belong to you. And in the case of this city, you get the added benefit of very frequently getting to see it portrayed in film and television, if that matters at all to you.

I'm not suggesting you should move here if you're not already in the neighborhood, by the way. It's hard enough finding a decent apartment. I don't need to fight over it with you. I'm sure you're very happy in whatever place you live, and I don't in any way feel the need to challenge you on it. Please enjoy the rising and setting of the sun as it appears in [Your City], [Your State], and with my compliments.

I transcribed a poem a few years back. You can read it if you like. The bit I am thinking of today is in the voice of the city, and it goes:

Bring me your muscle and spirit and brain --
Here to my glory-strewn, ruin-strewn plain!

I don't always think of Los Angeles in an anthropomorphized fashion. But when I hear her voice, I don't try to drown it out. Sure as the spring is the food of the sea.

Exploring the Savage Mind

In my lack of desire to see if anything else was on, I sat through three re-airings of the same episode of Mad Men. It reminds me of the days when my parents' big old console record player would automatically kick back the needle at the end of a record and start playing it all over again. The intervals were shorter, and there was less of a sense of completeness, as you would only be listening to the same half of a thing again and again. I would usually leave a record playing when I was reading something with many pages or when I was trying to write something that mattered. When we lived in Guam, my father's big wooden desk -- the one where the writing surface folds up on a hinge to reveal a beautiful bas-relief of Japanese ladies carved in shiny, opalescent stones -- was set in his study, in front of a great window. Floor to ceiling as all the windows in that house were. This one looked out on the palm tree on our front lawn and the steep grassy slope at whose base our house sat. I would languish at that desk and gaze out that window without purpose for days on end. Particularly on those days during the summer when my older sister and my mother were traveling to the National Spelling Bee, and I was at home studying dictionaries in the hopes that the next year I would get to make the same trip. So I spent a lot of days in my dad's study, alone with the record player and the reel-to-reel. I mostly listened to showtunes (Grease and Fiddler on the Roof were the first records I ever bought), a collection of Jewish music called Spirit of a People, and a compilation of Telemann and Vivaldi called The Splendor of Brass.

I remember the heft of that desk. If I'd tried to move the whole thing, it would have reminded me of my impotence. But the writing surface was on a hinge, so that big slab of wood could easily be lifted by me. The only thing I feared was fully closing it, because I always worried that I would catch my fingers when it shut. I don't know what kind of wood it was, but I think of cedar when I remember its smell. And I don't know why I refer to it in the past tense, as it's sitting in my parents' formal dining room at this very moment.

I didn't learn every word in the dictionary during those summer days. And I didn't write anything important. And I didn't read as much as I could have. But I learned there were certain halves of albums that were my favorites, and I would play those with prejudice.

And if you can look at an excerpt in place of the whole, you can see things worth cheering for without being burdened by the details. You can wish for less and thank for more. You can forgive and forget. You can grow nostalgic without inevitably falling into melancholy. And you can tell yourself it's better than looking at things more truthfully, because not all things must be examined truthfully and directly in order to be properly appreciated. In fact, looking at a solar eclipse without the aid of a camera-obscura will burn your retinas blind. And knowing everything about everything will hurt more than knowing nearly nothing about most things, because knowing carries with it the obligation of recognition and ignorance is more likely to make you popular.

I strive for symmetry even when I don't prefer the look of it. I hate running out of shampoo when there's plenty of conditioner left. I like hot dogs to fit the bun. But I was able to ignore the symmetrical imperative when playing records in my dad's study. I was able to distract myself with the demands of all the words I wanted to learn and read and write and say and all the blank notebook pages I expected to fill.

If I allow myself, I can identify which side of the Mad Men record I would rather play. But it would seem tawdry and for all the wrong reasons.

Day for Night

I feel as if there has been a void in the part of my brain that used to scramble to write down the little bits of inspiration that every day held. I've faulted micro-blogging and social networking for that to some degree, and that seems reasonable. I distill my momentary impressions into brief little bursts and post them with such immediacy that the tangential expressions that used to come from writing down this or that never have a chance to flower. I've thrown a blanket over the creative halo.

And there's also room for the gingerly admission that when certain categories in my life flourish, the writing withers. It's not necessarily because I'm so productive or such a failure or because I'm so happy or so sad. There's just a specific little mix that occurs from time to time -- often for months or years at a time -- that quiets my fingers. I've never been so courageous or so brash that I didn't always worry how things might appear. I am careful not to tread on toes or the feelings that figuratively reside in them. I am careful not to undermine relationships or professional affiliations or perceptions that might be important in the looking back. And that means that the more I work and the more people I know, the fewer things I am free to say. At least in the prison of my own sense of propriety.

It taxes me. If only in my sense of having dropped the torch. What many fires might have been lit had I just worked on my upper arm strength a bit more. And how tired I grow of having to hide behind song lyrics.

When I was a little girl, I loved being inside a tent or a fort or a box big enough for a human of my size. I am a middle child, and I never had much time to myself or space of my own. And there was something precious about an assigned seat or bunk bed. I'm sure I'd have lain contentedly within the confines of a chalk outline if it had been drawn just for me.

There is a difference between reveling in a sweet secret and hiding from what has already been revealed. You can zip up the tent so no one will know you're in there. But that won't keep that family of raccoons from noisily helping themselves to the remainder of your Kettle Chips. They like that sort of thing. And what do you know about camping anyway. Come to think of it, this tent is air-conditioned and what a surprisingly beautiful shade of green marble surrounding the bath! Is that a Kohler tub? I knew it.

I'm tired of diamonds that turn out to be sand and emeralds that turn out to be glass. There's a third part to that statement, but I didn't write it down before I'd managed to forget it.

In-Flight Ramblings

Trapped in the center seat of the center aisle with a non-working audio jack on a flight from New York to San Diego, this afternoon was as good a time as any to break the silence. So here it is.

Comic-Con was a familiar yet unfamiliar revisitation of the places and (yes) pablum I make space for year over year. Rob and I even did an interview for ESPN late in the night of Comic-Con's final day. We both made numerous pithy observations about what makes Comic-Con quintessentially CON -- and what might conceivably be done to preserve and even revitalize what is in danger of being lost -- in an hour-and-a-half long phone conversation that yielded a threadbare clump of less-than-verbatim quotations in the final article, through no fault apparently of the reporter. But still. They didn't even use the photos of me in costume I spent an hour trying to send. Maybe that disappointment is precisely what Comic-Con yields for me today. For years, there was so little expectation associated with my annual trips to the San Diego Convention Center. But at some point -- perhaps when I began laying out serious coin to stay at the Marriott Marina and exerting considerable effort to rally the enthusiasm of my friends and family -- I began to feel this BURDEN. And if the experience was ever less than...well, I noted it. And for a few years now, it really has been. Even this year, it's hard not to glare accusingly at the marketing materials. I have literally adopted the position that if I am not actually ON a panel or the close friend of someone else on one, I don't even bother trying to get in. It's not that I'm uncommitted. It's that the whole business has become this clusterfuck of bad crowd management and an impossibly unsatisfactory user experience. Comic-Con needs to hire those Disney engineers that design and manage the line dynamics. Because for some reason, I resent that experience less. I get into line after having seen a full-disclosure estimate of the time it will take me to hop aboard a gondola, and there is an implicit understanding that this is an acceptable exchange of services. I'm willing to wait. But at Comic-Con, there is no estimate. No reasonable expectation of satisfaction. No promise of a repeat performance. No enchanting fantastical environment. No textured walls to run your hands over as you breeze past. No easter eggs.

There's literally no incentive to wait. (Ironically, a similar indictment could be made of me and my blogging dereliction.)

My favorite thing in the five days I was there was the dependable late night reunions in the lobby bar of the Marriott. Where we dissected our experiences and justified our disillusionment. Where we were well looked-after by a server named Cinnamon. Where we ordered our fill and always felt welcome. It was Steve Melching who astutely pointed out that the arrival of celebrities to the Comic-Con line-up was what seems to have ruined the whole thing. The people who queue up for these Hall H presentations aren't (to a one) excited to see the creators preview their offerings or to hear about the magic behind the mask. They're there hoping to catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson. Full disclosure, I just typed "catch a clap of Robert Pattinson" at first. I don't know what that means. I'm just saying.

And that's the seminal disconnect today. Comic-Con used to be the place where you would get to rub elbows a bit with your heroes and creative geniuses. And there was a noble appreciation of the actual creative arts. And a well-placed reverence for the men and women who write and draw and conceive the fantastical characters, environments, and scenarios that Hollywood has co-opted into the money-making machine of studio movie-making. Don't get me wrong. I'm so grateful that Warner Brothers exists. I'm so grateful that well-heeled, well-funded enterprises recognize and revere the value of science fiction, fantasy, and comic book superheroes. I'm so glad I can be transported to these worlds I have loved by purchasing a ticket to an Arclight screening. But at the same time, I wish there was some persistent recognition that the phenomenon of Comic-Con is more about the dedication of the fanbase than it is about the endorsement of the studios. And the teen girls that rally around an opportunity to see their heartthrob are all well and good. But they're missing the big picture. Those actors -- cute as they may be -- aren't, for the most part, responsible for the product they adore. It's writers and directors and musicians and visual effects people and the whole lot. Just seeing Gerard Butler last year at the RocknRolla panel brought that succinctly home. Gerard Butler was above it. An ACTOR looking out on a sea of weirdos. This wasn't an audience in whose bosom he wanted to find himself. Ever. This was, instead, a freaky, funky (in the olfactory sense), socially inept army who came across frightening if only for their numbers and like-mindedness. These were people he was clearly afraid would love him to death. He needn't fear me in that respect. I can assure you.

But he was wrong. Because, in my experience, the true Comic-Con faithful are the most respectful, most self-effacing, most personal space-respecting sort. They might come up and thank you for the entertainment you have provided. They might ask you to allow them to take a picture. They might blush. But these are not the paparazzi. And they won't ask you to sign the interior wall of their uteruses with a Sharpie they will happily provide. And they won't assume that once you lock eyes with them, the whole of the future will reorient itself to adjust to their personal fantasy, heretofore only ever lived out in the company of a lip-print-laden glossy poster hanging above their bed, coincidentally fashioned in the likeness of the Starship Enterprise. The NCC-1701A, since you asked. And if anyone in the world is more anxious to preserve the sanctity of fandom, it's the attendee badgeholders at Comic-Con. Who spend thousands of dollars to attend. Who endure thankless, sweaty discomfort wearing their various helmets and wings and body armor. It's those die-hard devotees who recognize the divide between the fan and the fawned-upon more than anyone. These are fans who aren't hoping that a short skirt or a willing twinkle in their eye will give them a pre-shame glimpse of the color of a celebrity's pants-lining. They're not hoping to be noticed or to be befriended. They're not expecting their lives to be changed. They're purely there to appreciate. And as their ranks have been infiltrated by the scoop-hungry bloggers and the scout-minded studio execs and the panty-less skanks, it seems the landscape has been blurred. Like one of Bert's sidewalk paintings in Mary Poppins after the rains came.

My iPod playlist of choice at the moment is a collection of film music based on a mixtape I once made. I've now gotten to the opening titles of The Reivers. It's a John Williams composition, and it's brilliant and uplifting. The first time I remember hearing it, it was John Williams conducting the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl with Ossie Davis narrating. And I made a note to myself to go buy that soundtrack. And I did it. And I can tell you that, as huge a fan as I am of John Williams, if I were to see him on the street, the chances that I would even disturb him are slight. Beyond that, the chances that I would hope to attract him or fantasize about a night in the future when we might share an intimate dinner (maybe Italian?) are basically nil. That isn't the kind of fantasy I entertain. There's no sexual urgency in my worship. If I love your work, I love your work. And I maintain the steadfast expectation that I might not necessarily like you so much. You don't have to be cute. You don't even have to be clean. Your work stands alone. This is the mindset of so many of the Comic-Con faithful, I find. And whether that comes from having grown up as ugly outcasts, I don't know. And I'm not setting myself apart in that comment, in case it was unclear. My fantasies generally never extend beyond hoping to strike up a stimulating e-mail penpalship with those I admire. And even that I treat as a pipe dream. On occasion, I have found myself in that state of benign disbelief that I am now friends with someone I once placed in an untouchable personal pantheon of genius. And that's definitely a dream. But that doesn't mean I've ever found myself being an out-and-out weirdo. Nor would I. Even if I was meeting Marc Shaiman.

So, Comic-Con this year was fun on many levels. Disappointing on many others. I learned that the thrill of being on the list for this party or that is misplaced. I don't care about the parties. Unless I'm going to run into my friends. And I could just as easily arrange to run into them at a convenient, comfortable place of our choosing. No amount of open bar is worth the harangue of skeevy people and their skeevier expectations and being made to feel that the actors of Stargate are more deserving of the edge of the concrete planter I've been sitting on than I am.

I was having a cigarette outside the hotel with Danforth, and we were talking about the lack of impetus to try and evangelize people about Star Trek. And a lanky long-haired young man in a cape came up and said, "I overheard you talking about Star Trek. Mind if I join in?" That, coupled with the moment on the elevator when a fox-headed Jedi subtly effected the Jedi mind trick before the opening elevator doors, represents the very essence of Comic-Con to me. A welcoming of the often unwelcome. A committed performance of dedicated fantasy. An assumption that the people in the elevator will get it when you say, "Hey. That Jedi just did this [pantomime Jedi mind trick] when the elevator doors opened." And they will. And they did.

I'm disappointed I didn't see or do more. As evidenced by my one panel reference above being from last year. The convention hall actually seemed less crowded for most of the show. The exception being Sunday, which also happened to be the day I was dressed in my U.F.O. Moonbase Operative costume. I managed to move about on the floor with very little panic for the most part. But I didn't even bother to plan to go to the panels I would have wanted to see. I went to see a couple of panels Rob was either moderating or participating in. And I attended the panel on which I was an actual panelist. But that's what allowed me to breeze in after everyone else was seated. And I have a faint recollection of Comic-Cons past when I could do that -- panelist or no -- at nearly every panel on the events schedule. I doubt that even relocating the Con to Los Angeles or Anaheim or Las Vegas will make that possible. All that will do is make the becostumed attendees that much funkier (again, we're talking about smell here). And wait till a couple of Bladerunner Replicants get mugged in Downtown Los Angeles. The end of the innocence has long since been marked. If the future of the comic arts is as bleak as the future of the biggest, most wonderful celebration of them, I can only hope the Y: The Last Man movie comes out before it all goes to shit.

I don't know if I'll ever be married. But if I'm ever on the receiving end of a wedding dance, I hope it will be Let Me Roll It by Paul McCartney.

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women

It's cold, and the streets are wet. My winter coat had barely been worn, and it already looks like the weather has had its way with it. Few things manage to remain new. Even things that are black. Maybe especially such things.

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you on a chair with a dead magazine

I had plans of pressing down with greater force in these waning days at the year's end. These are always days I fill with examination and plans. Mostly with little outcome. When the mornings smell of recent fireplaces, and there is never a perfect temperature. If my hands aren't cold, the rest of me is too warm. If the rest of me is cold, my hands are useless. Every hour feels like something I've set free. And as soon as it's gone, I regret the release and weigh it all as waste. This is an apathetic passage in an otherwise apathetic season.

There's a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews

I don't go looking for memories so much as I go feeling around in the dark, hoping I won't happen upon something sharp. And I keep everything in such disarray that it's a wonder I manage to stumble on things that are relevant. And yet I do. My fingers are nearly blue, barely visible at the ends of my coat sleeves. It's much safer to listen to songs in French. I both love and loathe the smell of artificial heat.

The hyacinth wild on my shoulder, my mouth on the dew of your thighs

There's so seldom time to reminisce about all the out-of-doors kisses and projects with no purpose and moments of irresistible inspiration. Nor time to act on reminiscences and the inspiration you find in them. I can go back to those places again and again. But they've changed. And I've changed. And I can't just put those clothes back on and have it be the same. I can't even wear my hair that way. I've long since discarded those tresses. I long ago decided there was no beauty there.

And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there, and the moss

I was telling the story of how I slipped in my socks and fell down the stairs in our house in Japan and how the rest of the family heard me thudding, step after step, and laughed as soon as the falling stopped. They always had greater faith in my resilience than I did. But I managed to stand up and walk again, grudgingly proving them right. If I'd remained at the foot of the stairs, paralyzed forever, they'd eventually have come running to comfort me. Once the blame had been carefully placed.

And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross

I prefer it to be cold and sunny if I have to be outside. I've never been to Vienna. But I've listened to Leonard Cohen. A pretty song with a real violin and a synthesized trumpet. It isn't Vienna that I go to when I hear it. But it's a place where you can order schnitzel.

Collectibles

When I hear dates, I put myself in them. Meaningless markers that are part of the legitimacy of a television script. There is no radius that reaches out to me. But when I hear, "December 2, 2004," I go back to that date in my brain. There is a vague haze of what was going on at that time. If I look it up in the blog archives, I can see that I wrote something about SpongeBob watches at Burger King. (I did end up getting two of them.) But it's nothing so specific. It's just a color code. A flavor of marshmallow that envelops the era. It's a circa.

Time and distance refract all of it, reducing it to the most obvious details. This is what I was wearing. This is what my hair looked like. This is what I wore. This is where I lived. This is what I did for a living. And in the vicinity of these larger points are the more hovery details. A broad brush that paints those eras in one opaque tint. I remember measuring things in moments. And every wall was painted a different color. I remember time seeming both immovable and uncatchable. But now it's all just a field of green. Or blue. Or pink. Or angry, suffocating red.

I hear a date on a TV show, and I react as if the universe is trying to send me a message. The universe is opening a time capsule for me. And I can't help but wish I'd put more things in it. I can't help but wish there were more details and less marshmallow.

A further criticism

What is it with all of these erectile dysfunction medication commercials using swing dancing as a metaphor for fucking? Guy gets urge, makes eyes at old lady, then the two of them suggestively engage in a lame living room tango. What's sexy about this? I know you can't show the actual act of coitus -- particularly because they're always old people -- but this just seems like a really archaic and uninspired way of saying, "These two geezers are about to get their bone on." And I frankly don't applaud the spontaneity that says the old lady should be up for it when grandpa comes over all hot and heavy while she's wearing her house sweater and lounge pants. If you're doing it that seldom, it seems like all the more reason to gussy up. Tell Daddy and his union suit to go make themselves comfortable while you put on something pretty. Seriously.

This took the language right out of my mouth.

I was looking for parking near my office today, and I saw a man hanging by the neck from a noose made of a green garden hose. He was moving. Flopping kind of like a fish, but not really moving his arms and legs. And his entire lower body, from the pelvis down, was on the ground. The noose was only a couple of feet above the ground, but his head was through the eye of it, and he was suspended by the neck to some degree. I could see him moving and twisting, and I couldn't really tell what I was looking it. When I see things I don't expect to see, especially here, it's my habit to look around and see if someone is filming or if it's part of some joke or perhaps some private activity that is none of my business. Because no one hangs themselves on a street corner at ten o'clock in the morning, right? I stopped my car and didn't know if I should call someone. I couldn't see the man's face. Only the back of his head. And because he was still moving around, I wondered if he was just trying something out. (I don't know what. There's no use asking me what I mean by that.) But it bothered me, and I felt like I should check and see if he was okay, and at the same time, I didn't want to embarrass him. And I was a little bit afraid. So I went into my office and told Jessie, and she called 911 for me and they said they would send officers to check it out.

The police called my office a short while later and spoke to me directly and asked me to tell them what I saw, and even at that point I wasn't sure if they had actually seen the man, or if they were just about to go over there or if they were documenting the report but maybe when they got to the scene there was no one there. That's what I was thinking. But the officer said, "Oh, no, no. We've already been over there. Another neighbor saw him and cut him down and he was taken to the hospital, but we don't know if he lived." And I was shocked and I felt sick. I still do. Mainly because I've never seen something like that. And I can't get that picture out of my head. Everything feels very delicate and brittle right now. Like if I move too quickly, it will all break apart. And my brain is stuck on it. I didn't make an affirming statement to myself or reconsider my own tenuous attachment to life. I don't even know what to say in the privacy of my own thoughts. I don't know who that man was, and I don't know what was happening in his life. But I felt very bad about it. And it really, really bothered me. Really. And other than being able to say that, I don't know what words to use.

Blood-Brain Barrier

There was an episode of House. A little girl was dying of a number of things. Mostly cancer. Dr. House posited that her bravery was not admirable but a symptom. A symptom that could lead them to an answer that could enable them to prolong her life. At one point, they even surmised that she might be mature and manipulative at the hands of molestation. But eventually, they found the blood clot. It wasn't in the amigdala, rather it was in the hippocampus. Ergo, her courage was not a symptom. They fixed her up. She walked out of the hospital, and everyone clapped and cheered for her. And she went and hugged Dr. House and said something brave. And he looked uncomfortable. And I realized that I was quietly rooting for it to turn out that there was something wrong with her. That she was broken in some way. Because who can face death with such aplomb. Who can be so selfless as to choose to go on suffering to spare her mother the loss of her for as long as possible. All the while wearing the signature kerchief of the cancer girl.

I love the show. I relate to the character. I balance my judgmental dissatisfaction against the wry membrane of disinterest. I don't excuse it. Or me. I should be doing more. I should be more valuable. I should be mattering. I should be making the difference that supersedes my lack of interest in making a difference. I should be transmuting what I lack. Defying alchemic laws. I should be taking fearless journeys. Or cloaking my various fears with opaque bravado. Even though, if you ask me, I will say I detest being inspired.

I will say this. There's too much Dave Matthews Band in House.

It's not that I can't bear suspense.

But I'm on page 438 of Carter Beats the Devil, and it's a highly suspense-charged scene, and as I cross over the gutter, the syntax doesn't seem quite right. One minute, I'm in the middle of a sentence being spoken by a magician, and the next minute, there's something about what the newspaper reporters printed and the excitation of atoms. Three seconds and two glances later, I realize my softcover copy of this book (paid for at full retail price) skips from page 438 to page 455. Just like that. There is no poetry in how much dissatisfaction I feel tonight.

I may be a little late to the fundraising party.

But if you go here http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/maryforrest you can join me in supporting Barack Obama by putting your money where your mouth is. I just gave on my friend Adam's page. Please give on mine. Or create your own. This is no time to be shy. I'm buying ponies for all of you to celebrate the Obama-Biden victory. But if McCain and Palin win, I'll have all of these ponies and nowhere to put them. Please think of me for once in your life. And those precious, innocent ponies who never hurt anyone.

This began as a response to a comment thread on one of my friend Steve's Facebook notes.

I'm tired of all the talk about the importance of values as if they trump all other decision-making factors. Ultimately, the job of President is a job. And the qualifications and experience one has, including past job experience and past life experience, are relevant in the job interview process. You don't go to a job interview and expect to get hired just because you go to the same church as your boss or just because you both like the Mets. That might help pave the way to the conversation beginning, but eventually, you're going to be asked what you bring to the table. You'll be expected to have real accomplishments under your belt. And you'll also be expected to be able to balance whatever's going on in your life in such a way that nothing personal ever seeps into your job performance. That's what millions of working people contend with. Some of them even contend with drug tests and background checks and credit history reports. Because what you've done and where you've been matters in certain jobs. And here we are, examining applicants for the highest executive office in the country. And suddenly, we're not supposed to care what the candidate's actual skills and experience are? We're supposed to applaud her because she believes in this, but we're not supposed to care that she believes in that?

What I don't like about this discussion is that -- in my experience (and my parents watch nothing in their home but Fox News and Dancing with the Stars) -- many conservatives exhibit a sense of triumph when they can ferret out the personal failings and scandals of liberal candidates, but conservative candidates with the same personal failings and scandals are applauded. I suspect there are plenty of conservatives who share Sarah Palin's moral values but who are still disappointed to learn about her daughter's choices. The conservatives I know email me every time they find a blog that says Obama is a Muslim. But not a one of them has emailed me to talk about whether Sarah Palin is a good choice. It's like we're not allowed to openly discuss our opinions about these people despite the fact that one day, two of them are going to lead ALL OF US. I have just as much right to want John McCain to pick a qualified VP, because if he ends up President, I still have to live in the country the two of them run. It's relevant for us to talk about it. It's reasonable for us to ask questions. ALL OF US. Wouldn't it be beautiful if we could all actually talk about it without the iron curtain of partisanship dividing us? I would think every American would hope that both candidates would pick a great running mate, no matter who they personally support. We don't always get to choose our bosses at work, and when you find out your boss has hired some other person to exercise authority over you, it certainly helps the relationship if that person merits your respect and can wield your loyalty in a positive way. Why would this be any less true for the running of the country?

Sometimes, I think the values issue is exactly what gunks up the debate. I think it's possible for a person to be against abortion but to not actively try and legislate against it. In the same way that it is possible for a person to be against pre-marital sex without insisting that it be made illegal. Your personal values shouldn't influence every choice you make as a public servant. Our shared value -- the protection of the Constitution -- is the one value that should supersede all others. You may not like the idea of gays getting married. You might even believe it's morally wrong. But that doesn't mean the Constitution doesn't attempt to offer all Americans the same protections and the same rights. You may be someone who once believed that Blacks and Whites should not marry either. At this point, I hope you know you were wrong to believe that. And if you don't, I hope you aren't serving in public office. And if you are, I hope you at least realize that you are able to believe that your bathtub is the Oracle of Delphi as long as you don't bring it to work with you. I don't want to know about your religion. I don't want to know what brand of greeting card you buy. I don't want to know your favorite color or whether you like Thai food late at night. I don't care about that. At least not at the time of the job interview or at the periodic subsequent performance reviews. At the job interview, I just want to know what kind of worker you are and whether you are willing and able to do the job you are interviewing for. Once you're hired, we can go out to a micro-brewery and you can tell me all about what you believe and whether you own a cat and what your dining room window looks out on and whether you were able to get a Wii. There's always the risk at this point that you will refuse my invitation to go to a micro-brewery because you frown on the consumption of alcoholic beverages, at which time I will make a mental note to never invite you anywhere ever again. And that will significantly hamper our ability to be best friends. But we'll still work together fine. I mean, it's work, right?

And that is the most important lesson of all. We shouldn't be trying to elect the guy who is most like us or who shares our personal philosophies. We're not going to be best friends with him. If you want a best friend, sign up for a social network. Facebook is open to everyone now. Or join a community sports league. Or hang out at Borders and talk to strangers in the section of books that most interests you. This is the time you should be looking to hire the best man for the job. And, believe it or not, the job you are hiring for isn't "best friend." You're not hiring a guy to be your neighbor or to try new restaurants with you every Thursday. You'll probably never even see this guy once he gets started. What you should care about is whether he knows how to do what he needs to do. And whether he is resourceful enough to solve the problems you weren't able to anticipate in the interview process. And in the event he has to step down, you want to make sure that his understudy will be able to step in smoothly and finish the work he started. So the two of them should definitely have a lot of similar qualifications. You might even want to pick the runner-up for the job, since they were already almost good enough. Or you could focus on that guy's religious beliefs, get spooked by them, and pick someone by drawing up a game of M.A.S.H. Be careful, though. That's how you end up living in a shack, driving an ice cream truck to your job as a mailman. Also, you have eight kids and a pet hamster. Sorry.

Anyway, as a woman, I wish I could be encouraged by the selection of a woman on the GOP ticket. But the fact that Sarah Palin is a woman who doesn't support my reproductive rights is a problem for me. I don't mind that she doesn't believe I should have them. But I do mind that she would actively seek to take them away. That makes it hard for me to think of her as "one of us." I would never blindly vote for a woman just because of her gender. That's as foolish as not voting for one just because of her gender. I'm also bemused by the double standard. Conservatives who disliked Hillary Clinton were often unable to simply not like her politics. Some of them shouted things out like "make me a sandwich," and pundits in the media even offered that one of her barriers to acceptance might be that the shrillness of her voice would remind men of the nagging wives they'd sooner forget. Are we meant to believe that these gender-specific barriers wouldn't apply to Sarah Palin just because she's prettier* than Hillary Clinton? That's about the most sexist and ignorant possibility of all. Are we really suggesting that the glass ceiling is being broken by John McCain? If there are truly millions of cracks in the glass ceiling, I suspect it's because the fat cats dancing on it have been eating more fried foods.

Incidentally, I'm voting for Obama and Biden.

*Prettier? Maybe. But does anyone dislike polar fleece as much as I do?

Cry Baby

I was on the treadmill at the gym yesterday, and CNN was playing a story about the gorillas murdered in the Congo. I had heard the story on NPR last week, but I saw the pictures of the gorillas with the leaves and grass stuffed in their mouths and noses to suffocate them and the murderers triumphantly carrying a dead gorilla on a stretcher, and I just started crying. Right there on the treadmill. Tears sprouting out of my stupid eyes while I ran to George Michael singing Freedom! '90. That story just breaks my heart and infuriates me.

Later on, I was watching The Paradine Case, and a commercial for the ASPCA came on. It's that one with Sarah McLachlan singing Angel and showing all those cute, needy pets, and I totally started crying again. Later in the night, I signed up to donate to the ASPCA. And you should, too.