2008 in CU review

For those of you who missed any, most or all of the last almost-11 months of Continue Unprotected, here's a recap, and links to some of the essentials.

New words:

AMpty-headed
Antichrist Complex
Avoision
Blahgger
Calendarsthenics
Capastrophic
Christmess
Fopera
Halfiversary
Interestomercialitis
Marthastewartize
Nouveau Liche
Reaganitis
Sarcast
Texublican
Virgineers
X-mess


Quantifiable Living:

Measure these emotions in the following units:

Sadness > kittens
Geographic dissatisfaction > cultural miles
Frazzlement > selves
HTR Desperation > fruitcake


In Defense of Poppery:

"A Year From Now" -- Across Five Aprils
"Dog Park" -- The Saturday Knights
"Handlebars" -- The Flobots
"Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill Song)" -- Wyclef Jean, Akon, Lil' Wayne, Niia
"The Mae Shi versus Miley Cyrus' See You Again" -- The Mae Shi
Vampire genre fiction
"With You" -- Chris Brown


My family:

Party Like It's 1999
How we were held over the Styx
1500, military time


Faith:

The Art of Shame
Resurrection
My bionic Jesus heart


My girl:

My Job is Revelation
How I became a McDonald's product
Flying should probably be its own reward


Personal:

Anatomy of an Honors Student: Buckle
"Skin is burning" / "Everyone's a building burning..."
Replace

2008 in CU review, cont.

Movie reviews:

Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
Fievel Goes West
Gidget, Gidget Goes To Rome
Monster's Ball
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Oldboy
Smokey and the Bandit, II
Spring Subway
Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her

Phrases that never help:

"All is lost!"
"...by golly."
"Calm down."
"Chill out."
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
"Don't do anything stupid."
"...I always say."
"I might as well be dead!"
"I only say this because I love/care about you."
"...I reckon."
"...I swear!"
"It's not you, it's me."
"No offense, but..."
"Really?"
"Stop obsessing."
"Stop worrying."
"The dog ate my homework."
"We're NEVER going to get there/finish this!"
"You're not ugly."


As always, if you'd like a copy of any of these mixes, send your address to Alicia's email.

Mixes:

@#%$ [Explicit]
Anaerobic
Animals
B*tches & Ho's
Chill Outz
Colors
Computer Future
Fire + Water
Free 5
GRRL PWWR
GRRL PWWR 2
I'm just sayin'
Lloyd Dobler
LUVV 4-EVR
Music to Die For
NO, it's NOT country, SHUT UP, LA LA LA
NOW 1.0
NOW 2.0
"Oh Trevor! I pine for you..."
Plants
Scientology
Stalkermix
Their eyes were watching YOU.
What should I be for Halloween?
Year


Political mixes:

All Together Now: Pinko-Commie mix for Hippies
Democratic Republic Patriots (In a Consumer Age)
Fascism Familiar
Long Live the Patrolling Militia!: Anarchy Mix


Road trip mixes:

Get the hell outta Dodge
To all the Homies, in honor of Homecoming
I Heart Road Trips


End-of-the-world mixes:

Apocalixx
Apocalixx 2
Apocalypse is Fun!!

Quantifiable Living: Fruitcake - Holiday traffic-related desperation Scale

Emotion: Desperation due to holiday-related traffic conditions


Unit of measure: Fruitcake


How it works: The desperation due to being stuck in holiday traffic or attempting to find a parking space (at the mall or elsewhere) may be measured in the amount of fruitcake (frc.) car occupants would be willing to consume to relieve the inevitable hunger that accompanies hours of sitting in a running-but-not-moving car.

Desperation should not be confused with rage or frustration; as such, desperation levels may not be measurable for some time, then may rise rapidly on an exponential scale.

Holiday-traffic-related desperation (HTR desperation) differs from desperation due to ordinary everyday conditions in its predictable annual appearance, its implications for whether much-loved family and friends will receive appreciative gifts this year, and its focus on the goal of getting to a location that will invariably involve waiting in more lines.

Different activities, even taking the same amount of time, are likely to induce differing levels of desperation, as the closer to the completion of the holiday-related task the holiday-related traffic occurs, the less desperate individuals tend to feel.

Example:

Waiting on shoulder of highway, 3 mi. from mall exit, 2 hours: ½ frc.

Circling mall parking lot for 47th time, 2 hours: ¼ frc.


Limits: The HTR desperation scale is limited to 0-1 fruitcakes, as consuming more than an entire fruitcake has proven lethal to humans. As such, desperation should be measured in fractions (i.e., 1/3 frc.). Individuals indicating they would rather be dead than wait in the car/store/line a moment longer may express their desperation level as 1 frc.

This scale does not measure frustration due to holiday-related traffic conditions, as no known scale is capable of handling the exponentially steep curve and volatility of this type of frustration.

Ongoing studies on logarithmic and possible four-dimension versions of a HTR frustration scale have thus far been inconclusive.

New word: Fopera

(n.) Any songs or events falsely advertised as "opera" that do not include any of the actual plot development, libretto, movements or cultural trappings or tradition of opera, including but not limited to Josh-Groban-esque singing, any choir or "classical" singing done by an individual still covered under child labor laws, and anything using the tag "epic" or the name "Celine Dion" as a promotional descriptive. Alt. fauxpera.

PSA: Things I look forward to in GD II (2009)

*Reality TV "getting real" with Survivor: L.A., where "tribal members" are actual Cryps and Bloods and rewarded for frugal living with firearms; and Big Brother XVII, in which all contestants live in one room in the Big Brother house and rent out the other rooms for cash

*Public works projects on the rise with participation no longer limited to ex-cons

*Sleep deprivation at an all-time low (in unemployed population)

*Recycling at an all-time high (large cardboard boxes and cans requiring deposits especially)

*The turnip finally staging a comeback

New word: Capastrophic

(adj) Related to or evincing egregious misuse of apostrophes, i.e. "This pen is not your's," "Give my pens' back to me," or "I'll punch you in your head if you don't give me back that pen in thirty second's."

PSA: Things I'm actually allergic to

Cats
Dust

PSA: Things I say I'm allergic to but probably am not

Ricotta cheese
Shrimp

PSA: 2x4

I went to the Goodwill to buy new jeans today, with my Goodwill gift certificate.

The first two pairs of jeans I picked out, which I thought wildly unlikely to work out, fit perfectly. So I bought them.

They are both size 4.

New word: X-mess

(n.) the emotional and physical detritus of an ended relationship as it manifests during the holiday season, i.e. which parent the child/ren should visit, and in which order; determining how to act around the ex-in-laws; the fallout from any negative interactions, planning or revenge-oriented gift-giving

PSQ: Digital mees.

*Note: I've decided that the plural of "me" is "mees" rather than "me's" or anything else involving an apostophe.

Anyone have a digital photo or two or a dozen of me? I'm lookin'.

Email them to me.

PSA: X-mas haul (an itemized Christmas list)

Music:

Anytown Graffiti (Pela)
Cherry Tree EP (The National)
Citrus (Asobi Seksu)
Everywhere and His Nasty Parlor Tricks (Modest Mouse)
Santogold (Santogold)
Small-Time Machine (Cassettes Won't Listen)
The National (The National)


DVDs:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6 (x2)
Thundercats, Season 1, V1-2


Books:

American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang)
Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson)
Buffy and Philosophy (Various)


Clothes:

Dark blue tee
Light yellow tee
Long-sleeved waffle striped tee


Misc:

5-piece canning set
$25 Goodwill gift certificate
Three aquamarine, bubble-glass cups and saucers
The Complete New Yorker DVD-rom set
Thermal Diesel cafe travel mug
Kung Fu panda figure set
Rubix cube

PSA: Merry Christmas

That is all.

PSA: White Christmas in numbers

Inches of snow I cleared off my car over the weekend: 18

Number of times I cleared off my car: 5

Number of car headlights currently working: 1

Number of times I thought I might go crazy if I stayed inside another second: 1.76 zillion

Number of times I went to the grocery store just to go somewhere, and spent too much money: 2

Number of times I attempted to go to the mall with Spencer: 1

Number of times I considered turning back due to traffic and road conditions: 17

Number of stores we went to at the mall: 0

Number of stores we went to, outside the mall: 2

Number of items I bought at Barnes & Noble: 0

Number of Thai iced teas I bought at the Asian market: 3

Number of good Thai iced teas I bought at the Asian market: 0

Number of times this year I've thought "I should shop for Christmas presents" and then ended up just ordering something on Amazon: 6

Number of Chrismas songs I've heard on the radio: 0

Number of times I've turned on the radio since November 1: 0

Number of phone conversations in which I told Mom I could drop her off at a department store and pick her up when she called again later: 3

Number of phone conversations in which Mom said I had "an attitude" about taking her to a department store, and that it would be silly for me to go home and come back when I could just stay there with her while she shopped instead, even though I had nothing to do there: 5

Number of phone conversations in which Mom said she's "not even going to try anymore" in a defeated Eeyore-voice, regarding getting to the department store: 2

Number of classic holiday specials I've glanced at while flipping channels: 2

Number of movies in the theater I watched with Spencer: 1

Number of times we almost went to see "Twilight" instead of "Yes Man": 7

Number of people in the theater for the 10 p.m. showing, including us: 6

Number of Christmas carols I've sung this year: 0

Hours per day I've spent with Christmas tree lights on (past four days): 8

Number of wrapped presents under my tree: 2

Number of small glasses of eggnog I've had: 3

When nanotechnology is perfected, this may literally be true.

My girl, watching Kate Winslet's character (Iris) on The Holiday, after Iris has found out her ex is marrying someone else: "Still crying?"

Me: "Yeah."

My girl: "She's broken."

I must have been dreaming of a white Christmas...

After waking up four nights in a row between 3 and 5 a.m., this morning I looked in the mirror and saw a long white hair on the side of my head. I cut it off, but saved it as a sign of things to come.

Local Trivia: Columbo Classic Fruit On The Bottom flavor

"New Haven Peach Cravin'"

Number of UPS trucks my girl and I saw last Friday, 9 a.m. - noon:

24

My song of myself

I am reading, as I have been reading each day for the past three snowed-in days as a sort of Scripture, a Joan Didion essay from a borrowed book – from a punishment book, actually, meant as corrective after a piece of writing I’d done that lacked all writerly virtues (sense of humor, sense of purpose, insightful observation) shamed me by appearing in print; intended, I think, to be a sort of mental laxative – “On Self Respect.”

It is the second of her personal essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I have not read the first – “On Keeping a Notebook” – yet, though I have read “On Morality,” which has taken a seat in my soul next to Helene Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing and “Those Bible.”

I am alone, at home, and it is Sunday afternoon, and I am learning self-respect.

I am not learning to do it so much as how to talk about it, and acting it out. Sitting alone at home on a Sunday afternoon, the day after going to a family gathering I had been dreading, the day after walking out of doors instead of staying to listen to grousing by people who have more to be grateful for than not, after going outside this morning to clear the dry snow off my car despite not going anywhere and not planning to, after wearing a favorite outfit but being seen by no one special, after the night-set dreams I had in which I took care of business left confused and semi-neglected in real life, I am aware of the background substance of self-respect, much different from self-indulgence or self-flagellation, and the ways in which I have learned it.

The beginning of self-respect, Joan Didion says, is being “driven back upon oneself” – being forced to view oneself as one is, and accept it.

“The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards – the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.”

It’s difficult to help others understand oneself, particularly these sorts of things. It is difficult – and in my most desperate times I have allowed assumptions to pass without comment – to not indulge in recitations of apparent injuries, evidences of the wounds standing in for actual ones, to gain false pity.

No one is calling me a hero, so to protest that I’m not one at this point seems rather self-congratulatory. But I’m not doing that. I’m doing a far more self-congratulatory thing, which is saying I am one. I am one, but for invisible reasons, reasons that I suspect not many people can see right away.

I wrote several months ago that I wasn’t good at meeting new people, but that as a friend, I would get better, not to worry – it was a joke, much of the post, on me, but not that point. On that point I was dead serious.

It takes time to see my best character traits, and my beauty, I’m told, and when it happens it happens as a sort of illusion of collected knowledge – the whole that when it comes into view is inexplicably more than the sum of its parts. My good points are not remarkable except in concert with each other. My face and body are not beautiful except when accompanied by the expressions made familiar by love and time. I suspect this is how it is for many if not most people, though I wonder how many of them know it about themselves.

I know it, both that I often appear unremarkable and that I am unexpectedly better than I appear, in truth, in the knowing. I haven’t happened upon self-respect by accident, but I haven’t gained it on purpose in the ways one expects, either – I haven’t joined any clubs with which I’m proud to be associated, haven’t published any academic articles or held what I have published in high regard; I haven’t taken an undue interest in being a college graduate or having lived in China or having set out to learn new skills. It’s not fulfillment of my ambitions or even adherence to some internal lodestone that has given me self-respect.

It’s an increasing ability to care for myself that’s done it, even when I’ve gone off course – the course that God set for me, or one I’ve set for myself. It’s largely work I’ve done alone, and without much thought.

There are a few days in my life that I believe I will always remember as ebenezers – little piles of actions that sit one on the other like altar stones – and none are what they should have been. In college, freshman year, I stayed in one Saturday, all day, cleaned my half of the room and watched six hours of Star Trek Voyager that Tyler had taped off of television and sent to me on a video I still have, in a row; last year, I visited Debbie and, waiting for a cultural studies conference to begin, read Cixous’ Three Steps in one day; last month, I drove myself to Northampton, MA to see the as-yet-unwritten-about Matt & Kim show, alone.

All of these things are mine, things that I did, and alone. I walked myself to counseling my second year in DC, finding my way from the metro station to the church basement I talked out my problems in, learning the bus routes to get to work from there, listening to books on CD or squirrel sounds or music; I wandered the city picking up books, furniture, a holy-grail-like dim sum steamer, from Freecycle. I went to Tongxin Lu to look at DVDs or to Malan Noodles to get the niu-rou-bai-cai-yang-cong stir-fried noodles I special-ordered in China. I bought myself a hatchet and bit it into fallen trees in the woods at college.

There are other days, and other people, that I remember with more acute pleasure. Being able to turn, smiling, to someone else and ask “remember when we…” is one of the most delicious parts of friendship. Recitation of those times has a creedal weight and impact: “I believe in God the Father, and in my friends, with whom I have eaten, cried and fought, who I trust never to forsake me, without whom I would be lost.”

But if these are the characters and events that make my life bright and occasionally, unbearably joyful, fun, meaningful, the background is my self: what I choose to do on a Sunday afternoon at home, alone, and what I secretly recite then. My kind of greatness is not that I achieve things or discipline myself or have a spic-and-span, regret-free history. It’s that I’m beginning to evaluate and respect my failures as well as my successes, and accept them all.

“There is a common superstition that ‘self-respect’ is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

PSA: The funniest two words I've ever published

"Zombie robots"

PSA: Favorite kinds of yogurt, in approximate order

Cherry
Apple
Peach
Raspberry
Lemon
Blueberry
Blackberry
Stawberry-Banana
Strawberry
Vanilla
Orange Cream
Plain

PSA: Spencer returns

Spencer should be getting in at the airport right now, and I am picking him up. He'll be back for two weeks.

Sister, sister.

Last night, my mom called me at 11 p.m. I didn't get the message at the time, but called her back a few minutes later while I was filling Betty's tank in preparation for the impending nor'easter.

"You remember I told you about your father having two other girls, Deanna and Rachel?" she said. "Well, I got a call from Deanna today."

Oddly, I did not feel that shock of adrenaline that usually accompanies news of this magnitude. I still feel no shock.

She wanted to know about me. She said I was the last one they had left to find -- her mother had had other children, too -- and Mom told her some stuff: where she could find my writing online, what I had done with my life, I guess, and probably something about what I'm like. ("She's smart, too," my mom said.)

She just got married two weeks ago, to a Jew, and Rachel got married last year and now has a baby boy. Neither one of them drinks. My father has been sober for fifteen years.

She didn't tell him that she was looking for me, since she didn't know how he'd react. I'd bet he repeats what Mom used to, an old Navy aphorism that doesn't really apply to these situations: "Loose lips sink ships."

Her mother had a breakdown or something when they were younger, my Mom said, and their father (our father) ended up raising them for some time.

It was strange hearing from my mom that some other woman had had a breakdown, and that his presence had made a difference to those kids -- surreal, even. I'm not wondering right now what it would have been like if he had been around while Mom was in the hospitals, but I wonder if I will wonder later, when it all sinks in.

So I'm going to write her and see what she's like.

I have nothing to lose.

Mix: NOW 2.0

"There's a War Going on for Your Mind" -- Flobots
"Grave" -- Mount Sims
"Far Away" -- Tricky
"Call It A Ritual" -- Wolf Parade
"Lost + (with Jay-Z)" -- Coldplay
"Run To Your Grave" -- The Mae Shi
"Giant Hands" -- You Say Party! We Say Die!
"The Season" -- the dodos
"Your Fractured Life" -- Air Traffic
"Yea Yeah" -- Matt & Kim
"Stronger" -- Kanye West
"Destroy Everything You Touch" -- Ladytron
"Van Nuys (Es Very Nice)" -- Los Abandoned
"I Am a Scientist" -- The Dandy Warhols
"Touch Me I'm Going To Scream" -- My Morning Jacket
"Untouched" -- The Veronicas
"Falling Without Knowing" -- Tilly and the Wall
"Lay Your Heartbreak" -- Winterpills
"Deep Water" -- Portishead

And why you???

My application to NYU has been received, down to the transcript I sent from Boston last week.

I think if I get in, I'll have to go there.

Fear and trembling

What I am most afraid of today is the idea of going to church on Sunday.

In which my girl tries to play her "Get into jail free" card

My girl: "I want to go there."

[I glance over at the building she's pointing to, one we drive past almost every day we're together, a large brick compound set far back on a grassy hill.]

Me: "You want to go there? That's prison."

My girl: "Oh."

Me: "You'd have to do something really bad to get in there."

My girl: "Like what?"

Me: "Like hurt someone really badly, or steal something really big. Let's see...what else would get you into prison?"

My girl: "I mean I want to work there."

Me: "Well, I don't know if you can work there. What would you do?"

My girl: "I would put things on shelves, stock shelves."

Me: "Huh. I don't know if they have shelves in prison."

My girl: "What's it like?"

Me: "In prison? It's really boring. People just sit around all day. We could probably find a book about it or something."

My girl: "Or a TV show. We could find a TV show about it."

Me: "Have you ever seen a TV show about prison?"

My girl: "No."

Me: "It would probably be a pretty boring TV show, just watching people sit around all day."

My girl: "Yeah."

Me: "I think I'd rather see a TV show about something interesting, like a carnival."

My girl: "Yeah, I love carnivals."

Me: "Me too. There's always something going on at a carnival."

New word: Christmess

(n) Any untidiness or refuse caused by or associated with Christmas, including but not limited to crumpled-up wrapping paper, pine needles or trees, sugar cookie crystals, red and green plasticware and anything left behind by relatives sleeping on the sofabed.

Local Trivia: When multiples go mobile

Observed: On the side of the highway with an "I'm waiting to be towed" orange sticker on the side-view window, a beige, four-door sedan with a black-background, white-gothic-lettered bumper sticker that says, simply, "TATTOO."

In Defense of Poppery, VII: "The Mae Shi vs. Miley Cyrus' 'See You Again'"

Pop example: The Mae Shi vs. Miley Cyrus’ “See You Again”

What redeems it: “Mae Shi,” or “mei shi” in Chinese, means “it’s okay.” The band’s name is the equivalent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide’s “Don’t Panic” cover – and a good thing, too.

The Mae Shi are an anxiety-producing band for an ex-evangelical. In (what seems to be) their most recent album, “HLLLYH,” they sing on religious themes explicit enough to refer to God directly and remind all of us who did this sort of thing, of the “secular music” purges that used to leave us with nothing but DC Talk and Church of Rhythm in our music collections – minus the Alanis and Counting Crows and Right Said Fred we might have been listening to before (with an exception for Creed and, more recently, Evanescence).

Most of us probably shudder to remember these times. I know I do. I’ve rejected those Christian bands now with almost the same amount of conviction I had when I rejected the secular ones.

So when I heard “HLLLYH,” I was worried that I’d accidentally stumbled back into a Christian music scene I thought I’d left behind. But that anxiety was soon replaced by actual anxiety, because The Mae Shi don’t sound anything like the Christian bands we considered “safe” back in youth group. If you listen closely, they’re actually mocking God, or at least organized religion, or at least Christianity.

“Run to Your Grave” is the closest I’ve heard to a God-mockery song, though I don’t listen to Marilyn Manson, and The Mae Shi bring an admirable sense of humor to the whole thing. They parody the “heaven is our home” theology that comforts Christians who are struggling in “this life” -- but that’s historically kept repressed groups repressed, rather than revolting. (This theology is the “opiate of the masses” Marx was referring to.) They complicate the theology by pointing out (satirically) what's wrong with its focus on the afterlife to the detriment of this one. And their songs never resolve the complication: There's no "homerun Jesus" for The Mae Shi.

The effect of the use of this theology in the parody is to make real Christians nervous, the way other Jews were probably nervous when the sons of Aaron were offering “strange fire” to God: You know something bad is going to happen, but you don’t know what, and you can’t stop yourself from watching.

At the same time, even while they’re singing “turn, burn, soil the flesh; God will do the rest,” the song is really FUN – which just makes you all the more anxious. You’re having fun! You’re worried God will smite you! Fun! Smiting! OMG!

All of this is important context for my defense of The Mae Shi’s singing Miley Cyrus’ teenybopper song “See You Again.”

First of all, the title I give as “pop example” is exactly the title as I downloaded it off the web. The Mae Shi set themselves up from the beginning as antagonists in the “we’re on the side of right” war against Miley Cyrus, the same way their lyrics set them against God in “Run to Your Grave.”

But the lyrics for The Mae Shi’s version of “See You Again” are exactly the same as Miley’s lyrics. This would leave them very little room for satire if the lyrics didn’t satirize themselves simply by being sung by non-teenagers who aren’t named Miley:

“I just kept looking down,
st-st-st-stuttering when you asked me what I'm thinkin' 'bout
Felt like I couldn’t breathe, you asked what’s wrong with me
My best friend Lesley said ‘she’s just bein’ Miley.’”

Of course, “she’s just bein’ Miley” was a silly lyric to begin with; with The Mae Shi singing it, it reaches new heights of ridiculousness. In the original song, you get the impression that Lesley is kind of a jerk. (Who didn't have jerk friends when they were 13?) In The Mae Shi’s version, you see how ridiculous the entire situation is.

The Mae Shi further subvert the song by adding what seems to be characteristic “video game” sounds – think Atari or the tinny tones of Tetris themes, but unspooled into non-melodic one-note-at-a-time frills on top of the punk guitars – and by adding a “breakdown” point in the middle, so popular with indie bands who want to reflect on “what music IS” or “what melody MEANS” or “what people will PUT UP WITH.”

But as with the sense that even their mocking of God is actually an engagement with God that most songs don’t attempt, or don’t manage if they do attempt it, the Miley mockery only works because the original song is catchy-and-stupid. The version of the song as done by The Mae Shi is catchy-and-sarcastic, which lets us all off the hook of needing to feel guilty about liking a stupid Miley Cyrus song.

When I first heard the song on the radio last year, the original, I didn’t know who was singing it, but I was perversely pleased that a song about a thirteen-year-old’s concerns – acting like a mute imbecile in front of her “crush” – existed. Then I found out it was Miley and realized I couldn’t stomach the onus of liking anything by her. I gave up my delight with the song reluctantly.

By externalizing the perversity -- the conflicts inherent in being an indie music fan who appreciates a Miley Cyrus song -- by complicating and satirizing the lyrics and melody, The Mae Shi frees us all (internally) to like the song uncomplicatedly. They’ve already done the work of hating on it, so now we’re free to like it.

If a spoonful of sugar is how to get medicine down, this is the equivalent of adding a bit of salt to your saccharine.

After all, as I always say, if it works for chocolate chip cookies, it should work for Miley.

5 chocolate-chip cookies.

Replace

I’m walking down the street toward the library, the familiar urban street where the bus used to take us before we had a car, and the woman in front of me flicks a cigarette ash which sparks down on the sidewalk, like the opposite of a firecracker. She turns and looks at me because I’m walking too close, and I pass around her, again too close, and go up into the library. For some reason, they’re closing at five today.

I hear my mom, sometimes, saying “you can’t manipulate me into saying that” when Tyler asked if she loved us. I remember Mike, my only enemy in youth group, declaring that a horrible thing to say.

“Don’t manipulate, don’t manipulate” might as well have been my mantra for years after that. I was like a Buddhist monk; there was no difference between this and “don’t desire, don’t want.”

“Don’t manipulate,” my bones tell me.

(I am at the core a manipulator. We all are. Everything we do affects something else. I am trying to be nonexistent.)

I can sense the ghost of the new job coach pressing on me from behind, pressuring me to leave and let her materialize, whoever she is, and take over where I’ve left off with my girl.

I feel the presence of my girl’s old job coaches, probably kind, probably delighted by her, as I sometimes am.

Maybe she’s made stronger by all this change, by the memories of all of us blending together, into an Ur-job-coach, or a super-friend or a platonic ideal.

Grandma wanted to grow some special kind of tree once, and I told her about a show I’d seen on PBS about grafting two trees together. She tried it. She cut down two of her trees, ones she’d wanted to cut down anyway, sawed one to a wedge-point, and the other to a V that would take the wedge. She bound them together tightly. I can’t remember the result.

My grandparents were replaced with other ones, better ones. These grandparents that are mine are grafted in – or rather, I am grafted into them. These grandparents are compensation for my own horrible, abusive and complicated biological grandparents.

Grandpa’s graft didn’t take, but Grandma’s did. I was bound to her tightly. Grandpa has grown into me with time, like a wisteria vine.

I am in this place again, and again it is inescapable. What is it about this town, the geography of my heart, that lulls me into the comfort of anxiety and neurosis? I love it, I think, but it’s bad for me. And I can’t leave it.

I asked you if you were going to kiss me good-bye, and you did. Everything that’s happened after that is an epilogue.

I have replaced all of my beliefs with nothing, with air. I have grafted a lifeless, waiting V into my soul and am waiting for a wedge to meet it and bind to me.

Or rather, I’ve rejected the original graft, the one that was working. I’ve gone back to the beginning, when I had nothing but “you can’t manipulate me.” I’ve gone back to when I had nothing.

“Don’t manipulate,” my soul tells me, “just wait.”

I am waiting, like a creature in the dark.

“You can’t manipulate me,” I didn’t think of as horrible. I thought of it as evidence – she was wrong to say it. She was wrong not to reassure. She had responsibilities. Everyone could see that she had responsibilities.

I wrote to my supervisor, telling her I was staying longer, telling her I’m not moving in January, telling her I want to keep my job for a few more months, that I’ll tell her when I’m going, that I’m not going yet.

I am always waiting, that lifeless V longing to be bound to something.

I can’t leave yet – it would be like stepping off a cliff into air.

I have anxiety attacks, which are new to me. I don’t understand where they’re coming from – it’s like they just appear, flare up, die at random. I need to surround myself with people, but there are only a few left: friends, my girl, anonymous newspaper staff. I’ve left my family with the old graft (I don’t want to meet them naked without a new one yet), with church, with Jesus, where they’ll be safe. I’ve left my brothers to their choices, incomprehensible to me. I never found a place for my mother. You kissed me good-bye already and this is an appendix.

These streets are my streets, like my own body. Very like my body: I think they’re cuter than I did before, and I still don’t always like them.

Driving away last week, I cried until my vision blurred. Back at the beginning, before this life, I’d thought what I thought then – that it might be easier, the scythe-like swipe across the left lane, into the median divider, across the highway, than this.

I thought what I’d thought two weeks before: I wonder if they know what I would want – that if I died on the highway, if I killed anyone else, I would want them to remember the guilt. This would be their remembrance, to make restitution to my victims, always, in penance. What they would remember of me would be reenacted and purged in apology.

I am a manipulator, as a Buddhist is imprisoned in flesh.

These streets are the only ones I know as I know my own body – before language, before sensation, before God.

I asked if you were going to kiss me good-bye, and the ghosts immediately began pressing on me, the future (anxiety) and the past (depression) and I welcomed them because that is what I was waiting for. I always wanted to go back to the beginning. I always wanted to be ungrafted, to be nothing, to be a V, waiting. Everything I gain is a manipulation. My mother didn’t love us. Everything that’s happened after that is a postlogue.

It’s evidence, you understand, of who I am: “you can’t manipulate me.” I can’t. I can’t; she’s immovable. You’re immovable. I chose you because you could kiss me good-bye.

You did, and now this is the introduction, for me, the beginning of the beginning. These are the streets that are like my blood vessels, and this is the anxious, sacred, waiting creature I was at first. This is the pitiful, tiny, secret self I have always been – afraid, afraid, and alone. I manipulated you to get to her, this small waiting V. (I knew it was wrong, like a Buddhist wanting, wanting, but the only selfishness I have been allowed is self-destruction.)

I am here, V. I can comfort and salve you, and your tiny fatal wounds.

I am so sorry she said that.

I also could've gone with "Stealy McStealerson."

[I realize my girl has “stolen” the bottle I refill with Crystal-Light-type drinks every day, and look around for it.]

Me: “Here I am telling you you’re doing a good job, and there you are, stealing my stuff! Like a common thief…Thiefy McThieferson…”

[My girl laughs for five minutes. I recover the bottle, which is hidden on the floor behind a cardboard box.]

My girl: “I drank from that, I drank it.”

Me: “You drank from that?”

My girl: “No.”

Me: “Good, because it’s got all my germs.”

[My girl shudders and makes several kinds of grossed-out gagging noises, then looks at me.]

My girl: “No offense, no offense.”

[I laugh.]

My girl: “I hate germs.”

PSA: One-man computero-bands I own music from

Cassettes Won't Listen
Gorillaz
Mt. Sims
Plushgun

Also Girl Talk, which is sampling.

Mix: Long Live the Patrolling Militia!: Anarchy Mix

"This Damn Nation" -- Actionslacks
"Break Away" -- Tokio Hotel
"Naked in the City Again" -- Hot Hot Heat
"Better That We Break" -- Maroon 5
"Just Abuse Me" -- Air Traffic
"I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You" -- Alan Parsons Project
"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Troublemaker" -- All Girl Summer Fun Band
"Rebellion (Lies)" -- Arcade Fire
"Freeze and Explode" -- Cassettes Won't Listen
"It's My Own Fault" -- B.B. King
"I Shall Be Released" -- The Band
"Fun, Fun, Fun" -- Beach Boys
"Stayin' Alive" -- Bee Gees
"Creature Fear" -- Bon Iver
"Lost+" -- Coldplay with Jay-Z

Local Trivia: Because speeding, even on the highway, is WRONG.

Between exits 29 and 30 on I-84 East in Southington, CT, is what appears to be an unmarked speedbump.

Watch out for it.

Mix: Their Eyes Were Watching YOU.

"Video Killed the Radio Star" -- Buggles
"Watch Me" -- Jay-Z
"Don't Look Now" -- Minutemen
"Samantha Secret Agent" -- All Girl Summer Fun Band
"Eye In The Sky" -- Alan Parsons Project
"Hide and Seek" -- Imogen Heap
"Videotape" -- Radiohead
"(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" -- Naked Eyes
"We Hide & Seek" -- Alison Krauss + Union Station
"You Don't See Me" -- Keane
"World in My Eyes" -- Depeche Mode
"Highly Suspicious" -- My Morning Jacket
"His Eye Is on the Sparrow" -- Mahalia Jackson
"Children of the Revolution" -- Bono

Planet Machine Revised

My girl agreed yesterday to help me illustrate "The Planet Machine," which many of you may remember attached to an email sent from China my first year.

I'm going to look through all my boxes, haul it out and buy transparencies to have her draw the characters animation-cell-style over the backgrounds I painted originally.

I expect it to be spectacular, and when it is, I'll share it with you all somehow.

NY(I hate)U

I've applied to NYU, officially. All my recommendations are in, and I had two transcripts sent yesterday.

May the Lord have mercy on my soul.

Jaerb Interview

The girls' home/school in Arlington, MA, I applied to work for is considered the best program of its kind; I believe it, now having seen how articulate and direct the director is. He's been there for 30 years.

Before we went on a tour and had our individual interviews, we filled out half an hour's worth of paperwork. Then we were herded into another conference room to get a talking-to by the director.

He said new staff spent 3-6 months feeling depressed AND anxious, because the girls would (abusively) test new staff.

He said restraining the girls physically would be necessary.

He said they're 85% successful with the girls they work with, that it's the only program in the northeast that includes sexual offenders, that if you took the job, you would see blood (from the cutters slicing themselves open).

He said the staff training was excellent, but you'd have to be ready and able to learn new skills in how to interact with the girls, how to praise, how to set boundaries, or you wouldn't make it.

He told everyone that if we didn't want the job, if we weren't up to the challenge, we should, seriously, leave before the interviews and not waste anyone's time.

I went knowing I didn't want the job -- couldn't take it and couldn't move to Boston on time short of a miracle, even if I wanted to -- and the executive director convinced me in his speech to the ten of us there for the position that 1. this was EXACTLY the sort of job people would move for -- a career-making job, actually, in human services, a very difficult, challenging job that would set you up for success in the field -- and that 2. that's not the sort of job I'm looking for right now.

I was the only one who left before the interview portion.

Local Trivia: The War on Christmas joins forces with Madcap Public-Transit Environmentalists!!!

Observed: "Happy Holidays!" on the marquee at the top of a public bus heading from Bristol to Corbin Avenue, New Britain.

Dodge gets the hell out of us.

Democrats have fixed a $15 billion rescue plan for American automakers, it seems.

Clearly, my mix CD came too late.

Local Trivia: SOME parks have MURALS on the walls around them...not ours.

Across from the Waterbury, CT train station is a brick wall around a park. The wall was built to incorporate some of the old tombstones that presumably were there before the wall was -- such that they're half-buried so that the fronts are visible and all are contained in the plane of the wall. Some of the stones are broken in half, thirds or pieces, and in those cases, the pieces are bricked into the wall in the approximate positions they would be in if still whole.

The effect is strange and seems almost manipulative, as though we're using the dead (still) to sell something. ("These people all love this park!")

But it's probably appropriate for a city that is also home to Holy Land, USA.

People watching movie

When we're watching a movie, my girl watches me just as much as she watches the screen.

I wonder what she's looking to see.

Danger Squirrel

Yesterday, bringing friend Carl back to the Waterbury train station, I watched a squirrel try to cross the road with the horror, fascination and resentment usually reserved for car wrecks that have already happened.

I beeped the horn at him four or five times, sending his tentative, nervous little paws skittering back to the sidewalk. The final time, regrouped on the grass on the far side of the sidewalk, he didn't pay attention to me. An SUV was coming on the other side of the road.

"You're going to die!" I rebuked him, as if it would help.

He didn't, though. He made it.

This time at least.

(Sorry. Couldn't resist that last.)

It would mean a pay and leisure-time cut, and an increase in expenses.

So I probably won't take the job if they offer, but I have an interview for a "residential counselor" position on Thursday in the Cambridge area.

If it heals my scraped-up heart and makes me feel significant, and like I could learn something new and vital, I might take it, though.

If I don't take it, I plan on setting myself some new personal goals for reading a lot, seeing old friends and making new ones.

And maybe one day I'll go back to church and let God try her hand at Band-aiding again.

PSQ: Am I failing a test, then?

Are you ever walking or driving along, minding your own business, and you suddenly feel vulnerable and exposed -- like your heart is right out there for everyone to see and you don't know how to stop it?

And like it's just been scratched by something abrasive, like someone trying to remove gum from the bottom of their shoe by scraping it against a curb edge?

Like you wish your friends were around like stuffed animals to comfort you, even if you've just seen them, or even if they are there?

It's a little bit like falling in love, right, but fearful -- much more fearful. Maybe it's more like failing a test.

What do you do about that feeling, and does it always make you want to run away, too?

Elemental winter migration?

Last week, I saw 31 Honda Elements on the way to and in Cambridge, MA. This week, I saw 23. Today I saw 8 -- 6 in Connecticut and 2 over the border in MA.

I suspect that the Elements are migrating, a la Canada geese.

On the other hand, pigs seem to be heading north: I saw at least 8 cop cars on the way up.

Different folks, etc.

Me: “I know you like tomatoes, but I don’t.”

My girl: “Why not?”

Me: “I don’t know. Different people like different things.”

My girl, with utter conviction: “You’re right. You’re right, we do.”

Confessions XXVIII

I preferred boxed mac and cheese to homemade as a kid.

I preferred margarine to butter as a kid -- I still do on saltines, though not for cooking.

Taking my fake Christmas tree out of the box Friday night, I inhaled and realized that I love the smell of artificial Christmas trees -- probably in the same way normal, reasonable people love the smell of real ones.

Mix: Scientology

"Crazy Times" -- Jars of Clay
"Opportunities (let's make lots of money)" -- Pet Shop Boys
"Money Changes Everything" -- Cyndy Lauper
"Flyentology" -- El-P
"Psychobabble" -- Alan Parsons Project
"Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" -- The White Stripes
"Subterranean Homesick Alien" -- Radiohead
"Volcano" -- Damien Rice
"Scientist Studies" -- Death Cab For Cutie
"The X-Files Theme (DADO Paranormal Activity Mix)" -- DJ Dado
"I Am a Scientist" -- The Dandy Warhols
"Gamma Knife" -- The Dead Science
"Fix You" -- Coldplay

Second law of Aliciadynamics

I looked behind me on the highway and saw a car with one headlight, looking menacing, like an adult with a missing front tooth.

That specter of permanence again -- a child with a missing tooth? Cute, because a new one will grow in, and isn't she growing up so fast? An adult with a missing tooth? Threatening, signaling loss and the need for repair.

I unthinkingly drift back to 55 mph from the ten miles over I usually drive, and when I look down and see the speedometer hovering at 56 or 57, it hits me: This is my entropy.

I don't degrade into chaos. I degrade into structure and rules.

Maybe this is what it means to be an evangelical.

PSA: Jaerbs

I applied to four Boston-area jobs today.

And I'm going to soon finish my NYU application -- possibly screwing that whole move-to-Boston thing, in a practical sense, though not in an "I might do it anyway" sense.

Mix: Get the hell outta Dodge.

A dual-disc homage to the need to run away from "home" (Jenny, this is for you, babe) and the need to NOT bail out automakers, who need to get on with it and enter the twenty-first century. (We've been here for awhile, dudes.)

*****

Disc 1:

"One Day I'll Fly Away" -- Nicole Kidman
"Drive" -- El-P
"Down South, 10 Hours, I-5" -- All Girl Summer Fun Band
"Road to Joy" -- Bright Eyes
"Break Away" -- Tokio Hotel
"Move You" -- Anya Marina
"Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) -- Enya
"Way Away" -- Toad the Wet Sprocket
"Far Away" -- Tricky
"Far Away" -- Ingrid Michaelson
"Postcards From Far Away" -- Coldplay
"You're Almost There" -- You Say Party! We Say Die!
"Thank You Lord For Sending Me the F Train" -- Mike Doughty
"Stay Away" -- Nirvana
"No More Running Away (Live)" -- Air Traffic

Disc 2:

"So Many Cars In Beijing" -- China Children's Choir
"I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You" -- Alan Parsons Project
"American Car" -- Mike Doughty
"Broke" -- Modest Mouse
"Bone Broke" -- The White Stripes
"Bend To The Road" -- Calexico
"Night Drive" -- The All-American Rejects
"Speeding Cars" -- Imogen Heap
"Three Car Jam" -- Minutemen
"Shattered [Turn The Car Around]" -- O.A.R.
"I Wrote a Song About Your Car" -- Mike Doughty
"No Cars Go" -- Arcade Fire
"Song to Say Goodbye" -- Placebo

New word: Marthastewartize

v. 1. To add to a functional item something that makes it seem "cheery," "crafty," more troublesome or otherwise Martha-Stewart approvable; 2. to revise a nonfunctional item such that it becomes "cute," "kitschy," or unintentional "camp"; 3. to turn a functional person into a stress-zombie focused only on creating "the perfect holiday centerpiece."

PSQ: Why would we WANT THAT?!?

Sherwin-Williams' ad campaign appears to be "Cover the world" -- accompanied, on the side of the truck I saw it on, by a picture of the globe mostly covered by dripping red paint.

Wow.

That is so ill-advised, I don't even know where to start. So I won't.

But clearly the terrorists have won.

Local Trivia: Phaeton now "More American"!

The phaeton, an English carriage designed to be faster and all-around more spry (and dangerous) than its contemporaries, has had its name usurped by a giant RV. I saw one of these errors of judgment on I-90 in Massachusetts today and noted its name compared to its morbid obesity and mediocre "RV art" on the side.

(Topic for another post: What is with the misconception that people will like to look at giant beige behemoths with little slashes of purple and teal winging their way ridiculously across the side? Is this really the aesthetic of all RV owners? And shouldn't the rest of us, who don't get to be inside and so have to look at it more often, get some kind of say in this?)

The car-equivalent to this naming snafu would be selling Hummers under the name "Smart Car" or "hang-glider."

Phaeton-carriage drivers must be spinning in their graves.

Fall (A fourth prose sestina)

A person can’t outline feelings, except as a chalked body silhouette after a long fall. Stripping them down to essentials is impossible.

You’ve asked for an impossible person, and I strip myself anyway, trying to be her. I trace my outline, running my hand across my skin and wondering what’s underneath that makes you miss me and wish I was someone else.

I love fall, but it’s finished early and Indian summer and winter are crashing into each other, clumsy, outside: It’s warm, and the trees are bare. The feeling of the August breeze splitting around bare branches is strange – things that shouldn’t, meeting each other: They should be separated by reds and yellows and crackling brown.

Feeling the breeze is impossible even minus the leaves – falling creates a small personal storm, a cataract with me as the eye. I imagine a person outlined against the sky, desperate for the wind to strip her of secrets on the way down. It wouldn’t. They’d spill out as guts onto the street – too red, too bloody, too vulnerable.

Ancients used to believe that viscera stripped from animals or cradled past muscle in friends and lovers were the seat of feelings. I’m trying to outline why this is impossible. A person falling knows nothing will be fixed by simple exposure.

But the fall itself simplifies, strips a person of feelings impossible to outline. There are only fear and certainty left, as with God. Our solutions are kinetic.

I outline the doctrine of the Fall (we are flawed and struggling and alone) and redemption (it’s okay). It’s impossible for you to strip away disbelief long enough to see that I’m talking about feelings. I’m a person who thinks in faith.

It’s just as impossible for me to strip that away.

You see only my outline when you look and don’t understand my fall from grace. But let me be the bare branches and you will be the breeze – we’ll move through this like a mystery, like strangers. Like the people we wish we were.

When I tell you my feelings, look for that person.

Confessions XXVII

I've wanted for some years to follow my Aunt Betty's hippy-years example and live in a bus.

When we last visited her -- when I was in middle school -- I returned home having decided to put my boxspring and mattress flat on the ground rather than on a bedframe, like Aunt Betty, which I did.

Aunt Betty and her husband Bruce were in a serious car accident earlier this week, cracking the vertebrae in her neck and possibly complicating his recent liver transplant, and as I heard the details over the phone, I found myself violently, aggressively indifferent, even hostile toward having to listen and know about it. I still feel that way.

Dream: Well THAT was unexpected.

I went into a white room where your expectations were supposed to be, and it was blank, blank, blank, except for a hyperlink in red, floating above a white block jutting up from the floor.

Your expectations weren't there -- they were somewhere else entirely -- but I did not feel surprised.

I did not follow the link.

True story

There was a girl in my youth group in high school, a newcomer, who’d just had an abortion. She had just turned fifteen. We were at a winter retreat in the Berkshires and friend Rachel and she and I were back in the dorm-room style lodge. I don’t remember why, or where everyone else was.

The girl began to cry. It was right after chapel, and they’d likely been preaching on holiness or purity.

“I’m a whore!” she cried, and Rachel reached out to her, touched her shoulder.

“No you’re not,” Rachel said.

“I am!” the girl said.

I hated abortion. My mom had talked about it when I was too young to know what it meant, when she was pregnant with Spencer; since then I’d thought back in horror on what our lives would have been like without him.

Spencer was seven that year I was standing in the retreat lodge. I hated what this girl had chosen.

"I'm a whore!" she repeated, and I said the first and only thing that came to my mind.

“So?”

The girl looked at me, astonished, and her crying stopped. We were all astonished.

We stood there for awhile, we three, and I remember thinking that that was one of the truest things I’d ever said.

It still is, I think.

Mix: NOW 1.0

Forget those stupid "Now 29" samplers or whatever they are -- here's the real deal.

*****

"Staring at the Sun" -- TV on the Radio
"Bad Education" -- Tilly and the Wall
"Prescilla" -- Bat for Lashes
"The Geeks Were Right" -- The Faint
"I Can't Stay Away" -- The Veronicas
"Monster" -- You Say Party! We Say Die!
"Shooting Star" -- Air Traffic
"Linger" -- The Cranberries
"Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" -- The White Stripes
"Grounds For Divorce" -- Elbow
"Undeclared" -- the dodos
"The Last One Standing" -- Ladytron
"Analyse" -- The Cranberries
"Skinny Love" -- Bon Iver
"Canadian Boyfriend" -- All Girl Summer Fun Band
"To Germany With Love" -- Alphaville
"Wenn Ich Shon Kinder Hatte" -- Xavier Naidoo
"Kids" -- MGMT
"Up All Night" -- El-P
"I Came as a Rat" -- Modest Mouse
"The Bitten Bite Back" -- Mt. Sims

Local Trivia: Local libraries sponsor loiter-a-thon by local teens

There have been two teen boys loitering outside the Plainville Public Library three of the last four times I visited. Today there were two other teen boys loitering outside the Southington Public Library.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is part of the free services provided by libraries, now.

PSA: Television shows with very powerful episodes reflecting on death, in their fifth seasons

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "The Body," "Forever"
Six Feet Under, the last four episodes

Unsolicited Advice, VIII

Stop using these words:

formulate
utilize

You don't need them. Nobody does.

New word: Blahgger

n. 1. someone who insists on blogging about the mundane, quotidian details of his or her life; 2. someone who posts mediocre photos of progeny, pets or home repairs on a blog

In Defense of Poppery, VI: "Dog Park"

Pop example: "Dog Park" by Saturday Knights

What redeems it: "Dog Park," as one online reviewer states, straddles rap and rock -- with, I'd say, an occasional hint of much-hated reggae. It's shamelessly themed, discussing the abandonment of the singer in terms of the dog his (now ex-) girlfriend also left behind.

Everything in the song is sung in terms of the dog -- which is what redeems it.

The humor inherent in discussing your girlfriend's leaving you in terms of having to take her Chow Chow (my most hated of dogs) to the dog park causes "Dog Park" to be the essential opposite of Across Five Aprils' "A Year from Now" (see "In Defense of Poppery, V"). Where Across Five Aprils laments in glorious, melodramatic detail, the loss of the singer's first (AND ONLY, EVER) love, the Saturday Knight's singer is mainly concerned with the practical ramifications of his girlfriend leaving -- like his having to take care of her stupid dog.

Except that the dog isn't stupid. The singer takes the dog to the dog park, in fact, and meets someone new. He suddenly becomes a very enthusiastic dog owner. Promising to shower the dog with gifts, he says to the dog:

I wouldn't trade you for a stone fox terrier
I wouldn't trade you for a Spanish waterdog

This is where the song goes from maintaining a metaphorical thematic connection to dogs to a ridiculous, LOLly reference-on-every-line preoccupation with them. The singer begins chanting "best in show" in the background, presumably about both the dog and the woman the dog has allowed him to meet.

The references become so hyperbolic that by the end, the song ends up having an "It's Raining Men" optimism without even the seriousness included in that song. (Recall that in "It's Raining Men," the single-girl angel had a problem that she ultimately solved by "raining men"; plus, if you think about it, men falling from the sky is a scary rather than a fun-and-fancy-free proposition, and wouldn't be very sexy if it actually happened).

The song satirizes itself -- which is the best kind of satire.

Rating: Three whippets.

PSA: The winner of this year's Thanksgiving dog show.

The pointer.

Quantifiable Living: Selves-frazzlement scale

Emotion: Frazzlement due to over-busyness

Units of measure: Selves

How it works: Frazzlement (anxiety) levels can be measured in the number of selves that would be required to allow you to take a Caribbean vacation without guilt.

Selves should be measured with the original-you calibrated at zero. Thus, if you are currently taking a guilt-free Caribbean vacation, your frazzlement level is at 0 selves.

A typical day would require at least one self to free you for a Caribbean vacation. The number of selves required on any given day for frazzle-free vacationing should be calibrated by attempting to imagine a schedule for each self that would allow the multiple selves to feel capable and useful but not overwhelmed.

Example:
You have to pick up a jar of peanut butter from the store: 1 self
You have three newspapers to put out at once: 5 selves
You have to fill out insurance forms, pick up a child from daycare, take out the trash and clean the bathroom all at once: 7 selves (with 3 for the forms)

It is unnecessary to calibrate the scale for personal laziness or sour dispositions, as these are legitimate considerations in determining subjective frazzlement levels. However, pity levels for particularly lazy, sour or high-strung individuals may be calibrated according to personal criteria. (Levels of pity will not necessarily correlate to number of selves.)

Limits: Particularly guilt-ridden people will find this scale useless, as their dispositions likely render them incapable of taking a Caribbean vacation without guilt.

People who hate the beach, the Caribbean or vacations in general may have difficulty using this scale.

Travel time, expense and the potential stress created by booking and embarking on a Caribbean vacation should not be considered in the frazzlement scale.

Elaborations: This scale is flexible and may be useful for partial days as well as averaged over whole days, weeks or months.

Mode and mean are both relevant measurements for frazzlement, as it is legitimate and useful to discuss both the highest number of selves necessary in any given day as well as the average number of selves you would need to experience a guilt-free lay-out on a Caribbean beach.

Recipe for learning about haute cuisine (Excerpted from email to Heather, 6 June 2007)

I got into the chef books after picking up a biography called The Perfectionist about a French chef who shot himself in the head in 2003.

If you're at all interested in the weird world of French cuisine, the intro to that book was a pretty good primer for me -- and if you read any farther than that, I recommend doing what I did: get the book out of the library, read about 40 pages initially and then put it down, reading a few pages at a time up to about 80.

Then let it sit there quietly while your maximum number of renewals run out.

On the day that it is due, go to the library and sit in an uncomfortable wooden chair for several hours, racing to finish it before the library closes.

THIS is when you'll start to really enjoy what may have started out as an academic exercise in willpower; this is when you'll get to know the man, Bernard Loiseau, and wish that he was still alive. It's tough breaking into the world of three-star french cuisine for you, but it's even tougher for HIM, and right around that point in the book where you had stopped before is where the anecdotes begin.

It was after that that I started looking up and putting holds on chef books. Of course, I've read the requisite Anthony Bourdain phenomenon, Kitchen Confidential, which I would recommend for its colorful descriptions of kitchen manners and its advice on garlic (in short, that people who don't have time to mince fresh garlic don't deserve to have any garlic at all). I've also listened to A Cook's Tour, which was less good, unless you'd like your food descriptions to take place in exotic locales, in which case, it's your best bet.

I'm somewhat disappointed; I was going to recommend Ruth Reichl to you and now you've revealed that you've already read two of her books. I read those books in semi-reverse order: Garlic and Sapphires, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples (instead of the chronological TatB-CMWA-GaS order).

If you've already read Garlic, then I recommend the other one that you haven't read. If, like a more normal person, you've read them in order and are left only with Garlic, I say go ahead and read it while understanding this: that it's not the same as the first two, the tone is somewhat different and the timeline is shorter, but also that it's her time at NYT that made her famous enough to write those other ones and find an audience. Sometimes I found her discussing her disguises to be annoying, but I did always enjoy her about-the-food writing, and some of the recipes -- though I have yet to try them -- looked promising. [Ed. note: I still have yet to try them.]

One set of chef books that I thought was really excellent (and which I would recommend above the others I've listed so far) was Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef. The second and third don't come up to the standard of the first, but they do continue what I think is Ruhlman's true theme: the pursuit of perfection in all areas. I liked his writing enough -- the clarity and subtlety of his anecdotes reflects his subject matter very nicely (form! content!) -- to purchase a book he wrote on neonatal heart surgery called Walk on Water. I think he's the only nonfiction writer I've been faithful to as though he were writing novels -- typically I would follow the subject matter rather than the actual author, with nonfiction.

If you're interested in Italian cookery (as opposed to the French), Heat by Bill Buford was also pretty good, affording some decent and memorable story-telling. The movie "Mostly Martha" is also cute and definitely worth watching. ("Bella Martha" in its Italian title, I believe.)

I have Toast, but I haven't read it yet.

Flying should probably be its own reward.

My girl, passing a tattoo parlor: Can I get a tattoo?

Me: Do you have money?

My girl: How much do they cost?

Me: Probably $75. Do you have $75? Because if you do, I'm going to make you pay me for lunch.

My girl: No. I have it in my pouch at home -- I'll go home and get it.

Me: Okay. You'll have to get there and back in 45 minutes.

My girl: I can't fly!

Me: If you could fly, I'd get you a tattoo.

[My girl jumps up and down a few times.]

Me: That's called 'jumping.' That's not flying. You're not going to learn to fly that way.

My girl: You have to jump to fly.

Me: Good point. That is the first step.

I am breaking up, with you.

I am wearing grey long underwear with tiny purple and pink flowers printed on them. I’ve had them since high school, and they’ve worn out and ripped in back, in a long line-turned-to-a-hole down my thigh. No one will ever see them, though, so I let them stay in my drawer and save me every time I need to wash the thin silk ones I got to take to China.

I’ve rolled them down today, in a two-inch flat swath that stretches from hip bone to bone. I am aware of the stretch, aware of how I look with bikini-cut underwear underneath them, the thin straps crossing my sides alone, over that bone that juts out more than ever. I’ve lost a lot of weight.

The awareness is yours, though, created by you. It’s an awareness of you more than of myself.

That was all you wanted to create – like God, blindly indifferent to the unwakened desires of his creatures before he made them – as though I’d wanted to know just this, my own power. As though I’d wanted an education.

The new self-consciousness – not insecurity, the opposite – is a kind of knowledge. It must be why scholars focus so myopically on whether Adam and Eve had sex in the garden, before the Fall.

“Maybe they did, but they had no lust,” some speculate.

But that doesn’t make sense. I had no lust.

My desire was, as the curse says, “for my husband.” The whole person. Not a part to use.

My desire was for the work that happens between two people, between midnight movies, between kissing and groping. I kept waiting for it, my hands tentative and untouching until I could grasp what wasn't there.

I wanted all of it, you see, especially the unfilled spaces, especially the interstitial reflections on how to be a better person – I wanted you as a reason to be a better person.

I am glad I stopped before I realized I was the only one wanting this. Slightly before, but I’m glad I did. You had been dividing me.

I should have known earlier, by the way we discussed my body as a separate entity. I should have known by how often you told me you weren’t paying attention to what I said or wrote, or the way we laughed at things that were mine and serious.

I couldn’t know earlier, though. I could not have understood the possible divorce between part and part. I was trying, always, to be a whole person and could not see the severing between me and me as it happened.

I get it now. I see myself as a series of parts, as an intoxicating array of them, as a set of qualities I can use to force the between-questions, to force men to do the work with me – to love me.

I could manipulate you, or anyone, in pieces.

This is never what I wanted. I wanted the work of being together – of being a together person.

All I have now is this empty, unconsoling reward.

PSA: AIM (Aggravatingly Inserting Messages)

Me, on AIM to my girl(1:12:19 PM): Hey, J----. I'm bugging you while you're writing to Marc!

Me (1:12:49 PM): Look at me bugging you!

Me (1:12:59 PM): You can't write to Marc while I keep doing this!

Me (1:13:02 PM): Ha ha!

[My girl laughs uproariously for two whole minutes while she tries to form a reply by AIM.]

Me (1:14:23 PM): :0

My girl (1:16:13 PM): ok i get you r sily nis im trying to wit to marc

[I wait until she's started back on the email, so the window will pop up in front of it again and get in the way.]

Me (1:16:24 PM): Hahaha

[My girl: "Alicia!" We both laugh.

This derails her for ten minutes.]

Dream: I haven't even been reading any Anne McCaffrey lately...

It’s dark, or almost dark, but the dusk is gritty and uncertain, darker in some places and less in others, in a way that makes me think it’s ash creating it, blocking out the sun – or the moon.

There is a woman with dark brown hair that curls around her shoulders, and she holds the standards. The flags themselves are rich brown and burgundy reds, and I can’t see what the emblem is. They’re on gold-and-wood poles, and she carries two.

There are dragons behind her, at least two, but I only see one at a time. That one is also deep red, dark like too much blood, and has the dart-shaped head, two long animal arms that end in claws, wings, a spike-ended tail, haunches. It sits over and on and around the castle, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes paying attention to us, sometimes looking beyond us. It’s inscrutable, but interesting to watch. I am not afraid of it.

When the dragons are vanquished, or vanish, I go inside the castle. It’s set down into the ground of the hill, like a bunker, but the front entrance opens onto a wide, cleared, inset park. The sides of the hill curve around the small park – a court, actually – like arms hugging it, lovingly, actually – comfortingly. It must be a good defense. Most of the castle is hidden from view from any other vantage point – this is the only real entrance, unless you can fly.

There are no moats at all. The castle entrance is parched, barely growing grass, and people walk over it all day.

I go into the castle, and it’s more high tech than most would expect – not outfitted with command consoles or anything military or laboratory-like, just not medieval – and in the back, on the upper level that juts out onto the rock of the mountain behind it, is a Salvation Army.

I go inside, with my brother and his wife, who become other couples as we’re in there, but are always together and happy and always out of my reach, and to the housewares section. I don’t need anything there, but I look.

I come across a plastic comforter bag half-filled with stuff, sold as a set or with additional things I’d choose to put in, and start to look through it.

There are tank tops, all in size S or XS, all my new size, and I take them out and fold them individually. One says “America First” on it, on a patch that would sit between my heart and throat. Another has a Chinese character that, if I wore it, would sit right above my belly button. It’s a black character set in a small peach-colored oval, on an otherwise green-and-olive swirl.

I don’t discriminate. All of the shirts are in the bag I chose, so I’ll keep them all, and I’ll add more from housewares – they’re tools, even the tea cups and saucers and plates, for deciding how to live and executing. There are other things in the bag, but I don’t get to check them before I wake up.

When I wake up, I have the sense that a vampire is standing over me, waiting to puncture my neck, and I let him.

What I most want you to know.

You will only grow old alone if that's what you choose.

Even if you choose that, you're not powerful enough to keep things and people in the world from loving you; the best you can do is refuse to acknowledge or feel it -- refuse to acknowledge or feel for them.

Go ahead.

But it takes more energy than anything else I've ever done.

PSA: Sir, your truck appears to be on...oh, wait.

Observed: A semi with a metallic cover on its grill painted to resemble flames shooting up from the radiator.

PSA: "You can't sing here! This is not a concert hall!"

My girl, pleadingly, as a song she loves to sing comes on (but she can’t sing along because we’re at the chamber of commerce): “Oh, Alicia!”

Me: “Do you need me to skip this one?”

My girl: “No, it’s okay. If you hear me singing it, slap me on the hand like this." [Demonstrates how to slap her hand; ten seconds later, she starts singing absent-mindedly.]

Me: “I’m not going to slap you!”

My girl, dismayed but laughing: “I can’t HELP it!”

Midnight, in my kitchen (A third prose sestina)

Last night, I stood on a chair with a weak supporting bar between the legs and stretched my hands up toward my kitchen light, which blew as soon as I flipped the switch on Sunday. I stressed the glass trying to turn what ended up being unturnable, and it creaked resistance before beginning to go – counter-clockwise.

The clock in my kitchen is the only one I haven’t turned back yet. I must like the mental correction of having to subtract an hour – it’s a constant reminder: I’m not there yet, I’m not there yet – which I know is perverse. I'm backward.

I am unfaithful to you. I’m here, then not here – in the kitchen making egg salad: putting the eggs on to boil, selecting watercress and rinsing it, putting it green on top of the plastic bag I took it from, running back in to type – but you don’t know the difference. It’s all one time to you.

Lucky for you, too, since time doesn’t turn back. You wouldn’t get those minutes returned to you if you had to wait for me.

The light’s cover wasn’t a screw-on. It’s held up by three nails, each keeping tension on the indented lip of the fixture. I was unfaithful to its form and kept trying to force it around, loosening it from one of the nails, but not enough to pull it down. My arms ached; I stretched backward to peer up at the whitened glass and promised myself that I’d fix that last clock, which ticked at me from the table.

I would have gotten to the clock just in time to turn it backward on the hour – 1 a.m. – if the light hadn’t been so unfaithful to me. It kept threatening to fall, and just as my arms threatened to give out, I saw the nails as I turned, and twisted them out.

That stupid, unfaithful clock continued unheeding, ticking away an hour in the future. My shoulders were clenching. I pulled the light down just in time, turned away, almost fell backward off the chair.

My faith has gone backward – I’m backslidden, they’d say, gone down the slippery slope into unfaithfulness. (Dear God, why don’t you love me? You’re so far – but it’s not even you I’m talking to; I’m not turning toward you. Does some internal clock always tell us when it’s time to head away from the light? Is the desert necessary in one’s late twenties, sans babies, sans prospects, with only self to focus on?)

The light recedes, if it was ever really there, heading backward until it’s a pinpoint. This time it’s definitely not me being unfaithful; it’s you.

Last night, I picked up the clock and considered turning its knob, watching its hands cradle the correct minute and rest between accurate hours.

But the time to be unfaithful wasn’t over.

I screwed a new bulb into the kitchen light socket, but let the pinprick continue heading backward, illuminating only my past.

The clock continues an hour in the future, turning my kitchen into a prophecy.

PSA: "Prose sestinas" and other stuff I made up

In college, I wrote a rambley, two-page, impossible-to-title thing that ended up getting published in the Minnemingo Review (semiannual campus literary magazine), as "untitled."

It rambled on a few topics, bringing them up in different orders and contexts, including Captain Picard from Star Trek TNG, a deer heart, earl grey tea (obvious connection to Capt. Picard, there) and salvation. It was weird, but I liked it.

I mainly liked that it seemed to have a structure behind it, despite its being freewriting and essentially unedited. (I changed two words in the last line.) I decided that since it came back to the same topics repeatedly, I'd call it a prose sestina. I'll never write a real sestina -- a medieval form poem that follows a complicated pattern of end-words through six stanzas and a tercet -- and it seemed the closest I'd ever get.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote what seems to be the most famous sestina, about a grandmother, a stove, an almanac, tears, a child and a house. I'm not sure whether nouns are mandatory for end-words, but they do seem like a good idea when you're going to have to use them six times.

The challenge of a sestina seems to be in getting things to stay interesting the whole time, in moving on with only the same words to help you express yourself. Maybe that's why I like it so much. Using old materials to make something new seems to be a theme in my life.

Anyway, it's mysterious, the reasons for liking things and for writing what we write. I write prose sestinas to see what I think, not to tell what I've thought.

So yesterday's "prose sestina" I call the second one, thanks to Capt. Picard and the deer heart, and I understand that it's not very well-structured. It's cheating.

But it's surprised me by being concerned with what I've been concerned with, recently and in general. It comes as close to a manifesto as I have right now, in its obsession with seeing -- correctly and incorrectly; supposing we see but not, really -- and hearing, interacting with the environment, in its quotidian detail, and it's all 100% true.

I have always been concerned with truth.

The next one is all true, too, and its structure is better.

Blood Flower (A second prose sestina)

Blood Flower is a milkweed and contains a white milky poisonous sap that exudes from the foliage when cut or damaged.

Extract of the root is used as an emetic and laxative. A decoction of the plant is used as an abortifacient (a substance that causes abortion).

*****

I feel sick and I wonder how long I’ve been bleeding into my stomach. Surely I have an ulcer by now – perforating, as I sit here – leaking stomach contents into my body, letting them float free around my other organs.

It seems like a mediocre lesson: Everything has its place. Letting things out where they don’t belong is dangerous. I imagine blood mixing with acid and leaching out into the rest of me.

I am sitting in the library, in a corner, near windows, at a desk. The window frames touch each other at the corner, coming to a wooden-cornice meeting point that rounds off the edge with three gentle, relieved stripes running sill to ceiling. They were obviously planned as a pair, not jumbled in like some corner-to-corner windows. One of them is secured by ADT.

I can see everything from here. I’m facing the window that looks out onto the back entrance of the library, the entrance everyone uses, and I can see through it to the airlock double set of double doors, the people (patrons) coming and going; as it grows darker, I see also everything behind me reflected in my twin windows. I can see the two desk carrels behind me, one twentysomething man at each, and the Dr Pepper bottle one of them has placed, illegally, by his study materials. I pull out my glass bottle of diet peach-mango green tea (with caffeine) and put it on the sill next to me.

My stomach still feels empty, hollow, and I wonder what happened to the dinner I just ate: Are black beans and jalapenos and cheese and tortilla running in tiny winding rivers down to my feet? If they were, would my feet swell? Would I be able to remove my shoes?

My feet feel fine.

It’s my stomach; it’s my heart. Maybe I’ve had too much caffeine.

I’m wearing my headphones so that no one will try to speak to me. It’s like I’m invisible with these on. It’s like I’m a panopticon operator.

One twentysomething boy runs past me, behind, and appears ten seconds later outside, at the back entrance. He’s on his cell phone. I can’t hear him because he’s outside, but I pretend it’s because I have my headphones on.

I might stay here forever.

What a scary thought.

The boy with the Dr Pepper is still behind me, pretending to study.

I look up and stare at the reflection in the window, the soda’s yellow cap and maroon label, and something moves – I realize I’ve also been staring at a person, outside, a woman who looks like a man or vice versa, who shifts, looks at me, goes inside. I don’t know her. Or him.

I can see myself floating in both windows, face-to-face and in profile, wearing the headphones, putting my chin in my hand, leaning into the desk. I pretend to study my computer.

Maybe I need more caffeine.

I want to listen to something, but I can’t decide what. I want to listen to everything at once – I want to hear all the good songs I know at the same time, to pile comfort on comfort until it feels like sinking into a giant, white down comforter. Maybe every song blends, like every color, into nothing, into white; maybe all the noises together turn into silence. I am listening to silence now, but I wish it were louder.

The cell-phone twentysomething comes back inside.

“How long are you going to stay here?” he asks his Dr Pepper friend.

“Probably til nine,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Til it closes?” Cell-phone guy asks. “My dad’s going to come pick me up so I can go check into the hotel. Do you want me to bring my tools here?”

I’m glad I’m not listening to music.

“It feels like high school,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Yeah.” Cell-phone guy. “Keep seeing double?”

Dr Pepper guy nods.

I think I’m getting a headache. It’s creeping in from my ears like the taste of a copper penny or a nine-volt battery, or blood. It’s thin and wiry, and I imagine the nerves stretching from my ears across my scalp, firing tiny pins of pain across my head, criss-crossing like a net. Cell-phone guy gets another call and is outside again.

When he returns, I catch only part of the conversation.

“You’re a caffeine drinker,” he says to the Dr Pepper guy, who says something I can’t hear.

“I’m getting a car from Fairfield – they’re putting me in the system,” cell-phone guy continues. Dr Pepper guy gets up and they leave. I look down the skinny stack I’m next to – Mystery, MCD-REU – to the librarian at the end, her blue shirt and white-white hair a shocking contrast, and watch cell-phone guy, his back to me, check something out and leave. Two people walk around the corner outside, passing both my windows, and come in.

There is nothing in my stomach. There won’t be for a long time.

I put on “Blood Flower” by Tilly and the Wall.

You'd better watch where you're walking
There might be somebody's blood flower growing
You'd better watch what you're doing
Don't go fucking around in the garden

It’s darker and darker outside. I have nothing else to do.

My hands smell like pennies.

I might stay here til they close.

PSA: How to deal, overly literal edition.

My girl, of a papercut she got while putting invoices into envelopes: “Ow – it hurts.”

Me: “Suck it up.”

My girl, pulling in her breath and holding it for half a second, then exhaling and pausing to think: “I can’t.”

Confessions XXVI

When I was 15, I spend the four days of Thanksgiving vacation teaching myself German. I got up to the week 6 lesson in my Berlitz self-teacher and was able to read a paragraph on "der Fleisch" and "racht"ing and could probably have asked anyone (all conjugations) for sugar in my coffee. If I'd been a coffee drinker.

I started teaching myself German just in case my class won the Daimler-Chrystler award of a month-long summer trip to Germany, and then just in case I wrote the winning essay for my class.

I stopped teaching myself German after going back to Spanish class the following week and only being able to remember "Strasse" instead of "calle" when trying to say "street."

Please hold for technical difficulties.

This blog will be down for maintenance, temporarily.

Emotional maintenance.

On the part of the author, exhausted by a two-post-a-day pace, a recently completed JFH, grad school application personal statements, interpersonal difficulties, etc. etc.

Please stand by, though not literally, or indulge yourself in reruns until sweeps week.

PSA: Feel-good, girl-power bands with half-hour albums

All Girl Summer Fun Band
Tilly and the Wall

Local Trivia: Its the best place.

Observed bowling hall sign: "Highland Bowl: Duck pin at it's best." (Upper left corner of the website.)

I'm hoping "it's best" is a heretofore unknown type of duck pin bowling, or possibly the name of the bowling hall itself, rather than an egregious grammatical error.

PSA: Binary Betty

Over the last month or so, my car has been sending binary-coded signals into the atmosphere -- if showing them on the odometer counts as "sending signals into the atmosphere."

Among the messages she's sent are:

100000
100001
100010
100011
100100
100101
100110
100111
101000
101001
101010
101011
101100
101101
101110
101111

My only hope for our survival is that none of these mean "destroy our planet now," or else that no one is paying attention.

Local Trivia: Zodiapet

The other day on Route 9 north, there drove past a van marked "Zodiapet: Animal Massage, Animal Communication."

Zodiapet uses Reiki, crystals, and other New-Agey stuff to help you talk to your pet. Dead pets, too, because "communication is telepathic."

I don't have any pets right now, but probably the cats we had as kids are dead, now; or those cats from the farm; or the twenty or so birds I've had over the course of my life, all of which are now dead (with one possible exception, in China).

But I want to take it one step further. I felt like I knew, generally, how my pets were doing when they were alive. What I want to know is how I can exploit this angle for monetary gain.

I mean, think about it: If we could talk to Barney, what would he say that would help us impeach Bush? If we could talk to the pets of the stars, how much money could we make selling their stories to Star magazine or the like?

If you want in on this plan, Zodiapets is holding a seminar in New Haven= -- "If Only They Could Talk" - Animal Communication Class. It's $35, and pre-registration is required.

Let me know if you're interested. I will donate room and board to anyone who wants to commute from my place to New Haven and then give me a detailed rundown of the general themes and weirdnesses of this conference.

Mix: Democratic Republic Patriots (in a Consumer Age)

"The Freest Man" -- Tilly and the Wall
"Free" -- Cat Power
"Fake Empire" -- The National [as heard in Obama campaign commercial]
"Free To Decide" -- Cranberries
"If I Had $1,000,000" -- Barenaked Ladies
"Free at Last" -- dc Talk
"Jesus Was A Democrat" --
"Buildings & Mountains" -- The Republic Tigers
"Fly free. Then take a right." -- Good
"The Employment Pages" -- Death Cab For Cutie
"Sell Sell Sell" -- Barenaked Ladies
"Start a War" -- The National
"Dear Sirs" -- El-P
"The National Anthem" -- Radiohead
"The Freest Man (CSS Remix)" -- Tilly and the Wall

Mix: All together now: Pinko-commie mix for hippies

You've seen the mix for Fascists -- now here's one for the severely socialist among us.

*****

"One In A Million" -- 2005 Million Man March
"Back In The USSR" -- Billy Joel
Chinese Daddy Cool
"Two of a Kind" -- The Story of Little Tree
"We Both Go Down Together" -- The Decemberists
"Unundustrius Worker" -- Good
"It's Not the Spotlight" -- Beth Orton
"Do I Want Another Working Day?" -- Skallander
"To The Workers of The Rock River Valley Region, I have an idea concerning your predicament, and it involves an innertube, bath mats, and 21 able-bodied men" -- Sufjan Stevens
"Common People" -- Church of Rhythm
"Not The One" -- Collective Soul
"Lose Yourself" -- Eminem
"Babiy Yar" -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, read by Milt Commons
"We Come Together" -- Newsboys
"Happy Together" -- The Turtles

Mix: @#%$ [Explicit]

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Local Trivia: "Video Temptations"

This is the name of an adult video store on the Berlin Turnpike.

To this I say "try again, guys."

As far as I can tell, there's nothing coy, alluring or "tempting" about sodium lights and money shots -- they're the opposite of tempting. They're instant, badly plotted gratification.

I could degenerate into a series of suggestions for pun-laden alternate names, here, but I won't.

Feel free to suggest your own in the comments, though.

PSA: "Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice."

The other night on the local Fox news station, Channel 61, there ran a feature on girls kissing girls. The feature ran alongside the story about our local papers shutting down, though it ran about five times the length of that story -- probably about ten minutes.

It showed the same video of two hot coeds kissing in a bar repeatedly (probably five times), even slowing down the footage, either to let us better critique technique, to get us more turned on (because non-lesbian women kissing each other is SO HOT), or to try to fool us into thinking it's different girls the third and fourth time.

They interviewed girls in New Haven bars, most of whom said they understood the fun of kissing other girls to get men's attention, but wouldn't do it, themselves.

Well, good to know, Fox.

We hope you win a Pulitzer for this groundbreaking report.

Local Trivia: New England Safety Shoe

And here I thought all we had was the clam chowder.

Mix-up: Veronicas

I confess, despite this not being a confessions post, that I bought the Veronicas CD, "Hook Me Up," at Newbury Comics last week. I couldn't help myself.

On listening to it multiple times -- because this kind of perverse addiction never goes down easily -- I began to play a relational Tetris with their themes. When put in a proper order, the fictional woman singing the songs appears to be going through a relationship.

I re-ordered the songs here for your convenience, with original track numbers and a one- to two-sentence summary for each, using the name Veronica to indicate the fictional woman in a relationship and "you" to indicate her crush/boyfriend/ex.

This may be useful if you ever find yourself with the Veronicas album and want to program it to make sense.

Let me know if you have alternate orders that make more sense to you.

*****

1. Untouched: Veronica soooo wants you.

6. Take Me on the Floor: Veronica’s been waiting all night for you to pay attention to her.

8. Popular: Veronica is so awesome she can hardly stand it.

7. I Don’t Wanna Wait: Veronica wants you; now decide whether you want her or not – quickly!

2. Hook Me Up: Veronica wants to go somewhere far away.

4. This Love: Even if Veronica goes away now, you’ll still be together and in love and everything, don’t worry.

5. I Can’t Stay Away: Veronica shouldn’t be with this other guy, but she can’t help it.

9. Revenge Is Sweeter (Than You Ever Were): You left Veronica for someone else, and now you want to be back with Veronica, but that’s too bad, jerk.

3. This Is How It Feels: So you rejected Veronica, did you? Well, now it’s your turn to be rejected.

11. All I Have: If Veronica had realized you’d be this upset, she wouldn’t have slept with that other guy.

12. In Another Life: Veronica really, really loves you, but she can’t stand being so far away from you any more, so she’s breaking up with you. Maybe next time, buddy.

10. Someone Wake Me Up: You and Veronica broke up; it was a mutual thing, but it still really pains her.

13. Goodbye to You: Bye.

Our version of the horses that go throughout the earth.

Me: “There’s a tow truck towing another tow truck!”

My girl: “Oh my GOD!”

PSA: Herald and Bristol Press go under?

As the Hartford Courant has reported today, the Herald (New Britain, CT) and the Bristol Press newspapers, owned by the Journal Register Company, are up for sale.

Or they should be.

Instead of trying to sell the papers as the assets to the communities they serve that they are -- or that they would be if they were properly staffed in any department, or, say, had a Web platform chosen by actual people instead of by some sort of bizarre lottery that included only terrible, terrible options, as though by a robot determined to take over the world by inflicting alternating tedium and confusion on readers -- JRC seems determined to let the Herald and Bristol Press go down without any kind of fight.

They're not in negotiations with any buyers, said publisher Ed Gunderson, according to the Courant, and it seems they're not interested in beginning any.

JRC announced that it wanted to sell the Herald building months ago, to make way for a greenway, residential and retail buildings in the center of New Britain as part of the city's revitalization plan.

They're also not interested in printing the only story in town today -- their own -- despite the Courant's coverage, ABC Channel 8 filming outside the building this morning, and multiple calls and visitors who knew the news but didn't have the inside scoop.

But that's the Journal Register Company way; it was listed as one of the ten worst companies of 2006 by 24/7 Wall Street for their decision to pay 415 million for a group of Michigan papers, for which 274 million of the price was assigned to "Goodwill."

Not the nonprofit organization that you and I love for used furniture and clothes, that is, but corporate charity.

As though they'd decided that making money, in a business that was losing newsroom employees and press operators and everyone who works in the newspaper industry, by the dozen, was overrated.

In September 2005, according to 24/7 Wall Street, JRC's stock was trading above $20 a share. In 2006, when the article was written, it was down to $5.74. This year it dropped below a dollar, was de-listed, and dropped some more.

JRC's stock has been at a penny for a long time now, and in theory, they considered filing for bankruptcy (then didn't), so the writing has been on the wall for awhile.

But it's only upper-level JRC's idiocy in management and maintenance of the newspapers that's brought them to this move, and the most frustrating part of it all is that like Kenneth Lay or other Enron execs, or like the idiots who end up with golden parachutes from other companies, the jerks at the top get rewarded, and the people who suffer are the ones on the bottom.

Not just the employees, though, not in an industry that actually produces something (unlike Enron, which just seemed to sell shortages and fear -- and still failed, despite an infinite human capacity for these products). The citizens suffer. Local communities suffer. JRC doesn't care.

The alternative explanation to JRC being idiotically run is that it's being diabolically run. Maybe JRC execs are anti-newspaper. Perhaps they're anarchists, or rogue capitalists looking for monopoly in a post-regulation world, trying to garrote a free press before screwing the public.

More likely, they're a bunch of idiots in a room cavorting through big business like lords in a feudal society, wanting to exert small-minded control over an industry best run on big ideas like liberty, civic responsibility, and finding the truth.

JRC is painfully, ironically committed to a complete lack of transparency, not only in dealing with the public (the blackout on publishing a story in these papers about their own demise, for instance -- I mean, are people just supposed to wake up on Jan 13 and know, magically, that their papers will never show up again?), but in dealing with their own employees, and equally committed to constricting and obfuscating their business practices internally by circulating memo forms that don't make sense, that need to be signed by every level of management (guaranteeing nothing will ever get done) and yet that don't include enough sign-on lines to include all the required signatures; not allowing firing or hiring of employees without a labyrinthine process of proving they're necessary or incompetent, respectively; and adhering to a policy of positions themselves becoming defunct when the person occupying them (say, community/education reporter) happens to move on to another job.

The only explanation for handling a business in this manner is that the top tiers of JRC are full of men who decided to band together after meeting each other on a "choke fetish" Web site, and form a business they could choke to death. How else to explain the way they've dominated and gutted their company, making bad decision after bad decision while explaining nothing and listening to no one?

Or perhaps they were taking their cues from the Bush presidency.

Whoever let people like this into the American business mainstream should be ashamed -- and how.