So You Thought You Could Dance, I

Recall the raison d'etre of this blog, those who are not fans of this show. Recall it and weep.

After realizing with horror last week that I'd been missing what I feel is the best "reality/contest TV" show ever, I tuned in Wednesday night to what I thought couldn't possibly be as good as I'd remembered.

And of course, it wasn't. It was like a million-billion times better. [High-pitched, girly squealing here.]

Right off the bat, I identified a B-girl, which is my favorite kind of SYTYCD (I'll use SYD for short) dancer. She didn't impress in the main dancing, but she was one of the only dancers who didn't. I mean, honestly. What is it with these people and their mad dance skillz.

Here's my brief apologetic for SYD: It's on in the summer, when reality/contest TV shows should be on; it highlights an activity that's interesting to watch and not just to listen to (unlike American Idol, which could in theory be just as well off on radio, if being an attractive singer weren't so much part of the contest); it features a rotating cast of judges who bring different kinds of cattiness to the process of "judging"; the choreographers for different styles of dance rotate, bringing different sensibilities to the routines every week -- and unlike the American Idol penchant for bringing in celebrity singers who seem to be around only to supervise the singing of their songs, these choreographers are also being judged for their work. (But unlike in Project Runway, they don't actually get eliminated on the show for shoddy choreography. They just never show up again.)

Each routine on this week's show struck me like each song on my latest, most successful mix CD to date -- I watched each couple thinking "I love this; I'm going to be so disappointed when this is over" and then loving the next one just as much.

My favorite by far, though, was the narrative "wife doesn't want businessman husband to leave but he goes anyway, after a fight" hip-hop routine.

I loved the contemporary bench routine with Travis and Heidi two years ago; I love-loved this routine.

The song was "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis, which I like despite all the better judgment with which I've ever been equipped. I like this song in a play-it-really-loud-in-your-car-at-a-red-light kind of way. I like it like sing-along-as-though-you're-a-less-slutty-version-of-Mariah-Carey. That is to say, I like it with the sort of teen-girl-squad abandon with which people are supposed to like these kinds of songs. (I'm a tool of the recording industry.)

Part of the appeal, of course, is the ballad-like narrative feel -- who doesn't love a dance they feel they can understand? -- but for me, the main portion of my love goes to the contrasts. "Bleeding Love" is a ballad, but an female-singer-R&B-type ballad, and choosing it for a hip-hop routine was unconventional, I thought...but it was the sort of unconventional that, as soon as it's suggested, makes people hit their foreheads and exclaim "Of course! How could it be otherwise?"

The hip-hop-style movement expresses angst better than contemporary ever could, even in the case of the bench routine, which seemed wishy-washy in comparison.

I love B-girls, like I've said -- though breakdancing guys don't appeal as much (again, contrast is key -- no one expects a breakdancing girl) -- and I love pop-and-lockers, but those styles aren't as versatile as straight-out hip-hop.

"It's really the dance of modern life," I found myself thinking. No other style gets the mechanisms of industrial society worked in to movement. No other style expresses the kind of intense anxiety of the post-cold-war era. It's no mistake that hip-hop was created and popularized (like all truly American song and dance styles, with folk exceptions) by a minority subculture. It's no mistake that that subculture includes a history of suffering. This is a dance that understands pain.

I haven't gotten the names of contestants down yet, but the girl who danced this routine was so expressive that I actually believed she was going to cry on stage. I realized when it was over that I had leaned toward the television with concern, my face frozen in anxiety for her.

Luckily, I was alone and didn't need to explain my embarrassing level of empathetic engagement to anyone. (Though I did glance around my living room just to make sure.)

Nigel pointed out that he really loved how choreographers over the years had evolved hip-hop routines to include "lyrical hip-hop," which is what this was. I agree. This is the kind of contrast that I love. This is what keeps me coming back for more.

I mean, contrast is the whole reason to watch the show, for me.

I'm a terrible dancer.

Confessions XIII

I did not go to church yesterday, even though it's reached the point of a spiritual anorexia I'm not sure I'll survive.

I watched three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead.

Then I watched Beauty and the Beast. The Disney version. And liked it.

Mix: Lloyd

The Lloyd Dobler alternative mix is now available.

Songs I have requested on the radio, and my age at the time:

"Sweet Caroline" -- Barry Manilow, 10
"Hold Me Now" -- Jennifer Knapp, 18
"It's Raining Men" -- The Weather Girls, 21

Like a Pinto for a...well, a Porsche.

Best trade-up ever: Anne Heche for Portia de Rossi.

Anne must feel pretty stupid.

Local Trivia: We have to steal our bread, but at least we can get bailed out...

Driving from Rt 8N at Waterbury into Oakville/Watertown, CT, on the side of the road:

A club building with a giant sign: "Two club's in one! H20, The Zoo." The building is boarded up and the brick is charred.

A giant factory complex advertising space to lease.

"Mike's Guns & Tackle" -- "Going out of business! 40% off!" signs in the window -- emptied of all fishing and hunting equipment.

"Smitty's Bail Bonds" billboard, shiny and clean.

Have a Herz(og)

Werner Herzog, most recently of Grizzly Man fame, has made his next project in the wasteland of the South Pole -- not shocking that he describes the town he films as an "ugly mining town" and claims he went to find something other than "fluffy penguins."

In terms of hope-in-humanity, Herzog's documentaries make Kristof Kieslowski's Soviet-era films seem like nursery rhymes. If Herzog had filmed The Mission instead of Aguirre Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, Robert De Niro would've fallen off the cliff just as he reached the point of redemption; if he'd directed March of the Penguins, the focus would have been on a particular seal that ate seventeen penguins before being chomped in half by a killer whale. On camera.

So it was with interest that I began to read the interview done by the Associated Press, printed in our local paper.

Herzog predictably laments the lack of adventure in everday life:

AP: You wouldn't characterize anything you've done as an adventure?

Herzog: No, I'm a professional person. Adventure belongs to a different age. It died out in the early or mid-19th century, and that was a time where men would meet in pistol duels at dawn and where damsels would faint on a couch.

I wish I could tell you how the rest of the interview went, but as soon as I read the last sentence -- in which men adventuring would have pistol duels and women would pass out on couches -- I stopped reading it.

Seriously?

The women's version of "adventure" is fainting??

I'm beginning to think feminism is a myth.

Local Trivia: They know where you LIVE...

When I moved to Connecticut, I began paying bills by mail. One day near the end of August, I wished I had some address labels to use -- specifically, I wished that some nonprofit interested in making me a member of their tree-hugging, wolf-and-polar-bear-loving, oily-seal-saving organization would send me free address labels.

About a week after saying this aloud to myself, at home, I started getting address labels in the mail. From just about every environmentalist and save-the-children organization out there.

Coincidence?

Or conspiracy?

You decide.

Confessions XII

I just ordered the following CDs:

Bullfrogs and Butterflies: God Loves Fun
Bullfrogs and Butterflies: God Is my Friend
The Story of Little Tree

The site I bought them from advertises its hotline number as 1-800-Christian. I bought them anyway.

The site also asks purchasers to donate money to Focus on the Family -- James Dobson's charity -- but I bought them anyway. (Without donating any money.)

(Anyone who wants to partake in my inner conflict over this purchase may request copies.)

Mix: "Oh, Trevor! I pine for you..."

(Context for the uninitiated.)

"Bleeding Love" -- Leona Lewis
"Enthroned the Dark Angel" -- Theatres des Vampires
"Bleik Poet" -- Vamp
"Rush of Blood to the Head" -- Coldplay
"Hemorrhage" -- Fuel
"Bloody Mary (A Note on Apathy) -- Five For Fighting
"Oxford Comma" -- Vampire Weekend
"Transylvanian Concubine (The Manson Mix)" -- Rasputina
"Night Vision" -- Rob Price with Ellery Eskelin, Trevor Dunn & Joey Baron
"Blood On My Hands" -- The Sundays
"Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck" -- The Blood Brothers
"Throne of Dark Immortals" -- Theatres des Vampires
"Armageddon Suite" -- Trevor Rabin
"Super Vamp" -- Strategy
"And When I Die" -- Blood, Sweat & Tears

Freudian Slip(pery Slope)s: Evangelical Eros

Freud seemed to think that everything -- everything -- came down to id impulses: Eros and Thanatos. (Mostly Eros...separate post on Thanatos another day.)

I consider myself a Jungian (insofar as I consider myself an anybody-ian), but I'll give Freud credit where credit is due.

Much of what we do to apparently avoid the subject of sex in society seems designed to actually bring it up -- albeit in a repressive, "No, I wasn't thinking about it, get your mind out of the gutter" kind of way.

The Victorians, for instance, supposedly put dust ruffles on all their furniture in order to avoid looking at a table or chair leg and thinking of a woman's leg. But which is more likely to remind a person of a woman's leg -- a wooden chair leg, or a skirt? Only an accident of language connects a chair leg and a lady's until you insist on putting a ruffled, pastel bit of fabric around the chair, too.

Another case in point: I have a light fixture in my bedroom that the landlady told me is antique. It has little flowers covering its border, in relief; but other than that, it looks exactly like a breast. It's impossible to think that no one else notices, but the polite, superego thing to do is ignore the likeness.

Don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, the original owners must have spent minutes at a time pleading with themselves, then giggling uncontrollably -- to the consternation of guests who hadn't happened to look up (and to the chagrin of those who had).

What a social liability, hanging a breast above guests' heads and skirting your furniture as though its nakedness would be the equivalent of your daughter's...unless it was intentional. The popularity of the dust ruffle and this particular lighting fixture must have been due (at least in part) to the secret titillation of seeing what they really are, what they reference.

Which calls into question the sincerity of repressive societies and social mores, I think.

(Reconsider "The Emperor's New Clothes": Did the emperor's people really believe that the emperor was wearing clothes, or did they only say they believed it so they could secretly laugh at the emperor in triumph, knowing he was naked as a jaybird right there in public? Was the child who pointed out his nakedness popping the bubble of people's blind faith, or of the secret thrill citizens got from the transgression of public nudity, and the shaming of their leader?)

Joshua Harris, referenced before on my blog, and the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, writes candidly about his problems with lust in Boy Meets Girl (the more infuriating of the two books, if it's possible to rank levels of blinding rage). He writes about the time he sat down in a backyard hammock with his then-fiance, now-wife. He realized, laying there with her, that he was experiencing lust -- so he got up and walked away.

Lust is the sort of monster that chases you, though.

The further Harris got from lines that reasonable people might consider "the danger zone" (since in his case, Harris did not want to -- or want to want to -- have sex with his fiance before they married), the more ground was eaten up by "danger zone."

I mean, he couldn't sit in the backyard in broad daylight without thinking about sex.

Harris's solution is to continually redraw the lines, heading in the opposite direction from lust. This appears to be relatively reasonable until you read his advice for first dates: that after seriously considering whether a marriage relationship is possible with the girl you're asking out (the MAN ALWAYS ASKS), you purchase a book of questions and interview her during the date.

Harris tries to mitigate his anti-anti-anti-sex message in Boy Meets Girl by mentioning somewhere in the middle, in one sentence, that God doesn't mean for you to marry "someone you're not excited about going to bed with." Then he goes back to telling you how not to be excited about it.

But Harris doesn't understand what he's talking about, and it's probably not for the reasons you'd expect. He's actually too experienced.

He admits in I Kissed Dating Goodbye that he has had experience -- too much, as he tells it -- with dating, and with physical contact (though perhaps not intimacy) with girls, and that he regretted it, which is why he's telling teens not to go down the same path.

But he tells them instead to go down a path he's never been on, one that probably doesn't even really exist.

His arguments are based almost entirely in personal experience, but he doesn't have any personal experience in the kind of innocence he's advocating -- innocence not only of actions that may harm self or others, but innocence of impulse...innocence of understanding. ("Ignorance" is the word.)

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris wants us to deny the id, to focus only on the superego.

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris is an idiot.

Put Harris's arguments in terms of Eros and they crumble.

"You can avoid Eros!" Harris says. "Eros is not inevitable! Better yet, turn Eros off until your wedding night -- then do whatever you want!"

Put his arguments in terms of the emperor's new clothes and they're even sillier.

"Don't see that the emperor's naked! Don't see it until your wedding night and then see it all you want! Don't understand what the rest of us are laughing at until then! It's not even really funny until you're married!"

How, after all, are teens supposed to judge whether they've met someone they're "excited about going to bed with" if they've maintained the level of purity Harris is talking about? Purity that extends to thoughts?

I mean, are we seriously saying here (I'm using "we" to be polite) that we want teens to think less about sexual involvement, their boundaries, their safety? Are we really relying on absolute purity/control to keep them off each other -- and then relying on the exhausting, mind-numbing experience of a wedding day to allow them to blow off all the inhibitions they've built up over a lifetime of steadfast not-lust?

(If we are relying on wedding days to break down inhibitions, we need to make them more exhausting -- to really break them down to instinct-level -- and then probably throw in a cage-match or two for good measure, to get the adrenaline going. I'd be in favor of that.)

The truth is that Eros is either dealt with, or it's repressed -- it's not absent.

The repressed type of Eros -- the kind that causes manufacturers to blithely churn out hundreds of breast-like lampshades or thousands or millions of skirt-like dust ruffles -- makes everything into a reference to sex. Joshua Harris runs from the hammock to repress, not erase.

The dealt-with type of Eros normalizes itself. Mention the dust-ruffle-skirt connection and the chair is a chair again. Say the emperor is naked and he becomes sad and pitiful.

So here's my punchline, the telos for this post: This is why Christians claim that your wedding night will be "better" (insert obnoxious winking and nudging here) if you wait until then to have sex.

They don't say it out of a misguided notion that "beginner's luck" will help you through an entirely new and essentially awkward experience. They don't say it (though some may think this is why they're saying it) because losing your virginity to your spouse is "spiritual."

It's not that they're saying it will be more enjoyable, but it's not that they're lying to you, either. I think they're knowingly pointing out the secret of noticing-the-emperor's-nakedness-but-not-telling-anyone; I think they're giggling at the breast-light.

They say it'll be better if you wait because repression really does make everything sexier.

We won't need to burn these -- just soak 'em for awhile.

Slate.com has onlined an article (because why not verb the word "online"?) finally dealing with that question of the ancients: What can breasts do for me?

If I were an infant, or a hetero man, the answer to this would be self-evident. As a mid-twentysomething, twentyfirst-century woman, though, "make me attractive to infants, or men" is just about my only answer -- and hardly something for the feminists to write home about. (Except perhaps in outrage.)

The answer offered by Slate.com author Adreinne So is, in a typically American way, more practical and more efficient than any I'd come up with on my own.

Perhaps the annoying motion of breasts can be harnessed, So speculates, as a source of energy for, say, powering an iPod.

Preoccupied as I am with my own weight loss -- which has put me even less in the market for this concept than I already was as a non-iPod-owner -- the idea of putting superfluous motion to good use still intrigues me.

Or intrigued me, until I read the perspective of the scientist developing the energy-capturing fabric. Asked if a bra made from the fabric could collect enough energy to power an iPod, Zhong Lin Wang answered:

"Definitely," Wang said.

I asked Wang if this bra would be machine-washable.

"You don't need to wash a bra!" he said.

So corrects Wang on this point, but the scientist's response left me shaken and disturbed.

I understand that geniuses -- and I assume Wang is one -- often lack common sense, but...really?

Perhaps the future will be full of magic and wonder and breast-apologetics that make sense -- but I doubt unwashable underwear will usher us into that utopian age. I doubt it very much.

New word: Virgineers

(n.) 1. People who are to virginity what Mouseketeers are to Mickey Mouse;

2. People who attempt to construct society in such a way that no one has a choice but to abstain from sexual contact;

3. People who will not tolerate discussion containing explicit dialogue, even or especially for the sake of commenting on or critiquing social norms (see also "virgin ears").

On the Virgo of greatness...

Rob Brezsny's "prediction" for this week:

How well are you capitalizing on this year's unique opportunities, Virgo? Now that we're halfway through 2008, let's take an inventory. I'm hoping that six months from now, you'll look back and make the following declaration: 'I've learned more about love in the past 12 months than maybe I ever have. I've also become far more skilled in the art of making myself happy. And I've finally figured out how to purge some of the martyr-like aspects from my generosity, which means I'm better able to give without strings attached and I'm more attractive to interesting people who are inclined to give me things I really want."

Well, actually, that pretty much sums up the first half of my year.

Which leaves one question: So WTH am I supposed to do for the next six months?

James Dobson is the new Jerry Falwell

I'm so mad I can't even comment on this. Read it for yourselves. Excerpts below.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement's biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution.

*Okay, how can I NOT comment on this: "FRUITCAKE??" JAMES? REALLY?? Who told you THAT was a good idea?!?...

The conservative Christian group provided The Associated Press with an advance copy of the pre-taped radio segment, which runs 18 minutes and highlights excerpts of a speech Obama gave in June 2006 to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal. ["Call to Renewal," btw, is Sojourners, aka Jim Wallis. Not so liberal, actually.] Obama mentions Dobson in the speech.

"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?" Obama said. "Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?" referring to the civil rights leader.

*Makes sense, right? Huzzah, Obama! And then he goes on to chastise Americans for not reading their Bibles...how, you may be asking yourself, could James Dobson possibly find this offensive? But oh, he can.

"Folks haven't been reading their Bibles," Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus' teachings in the New Testament.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," Dobson said.

"... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

Conclusion: I know it's awfully Pat Robertson of me, but I suggest that Christians unite and pray for an assassination.

(Or I would, if I weren't a pacifist. You're so lucky, Jim. You don't even know.)

So would "flyboy" be a racial slur?

From an online survey I took:

Please choose how you define your race:

Aboriginal Peoples
East Asian
West Asian
Air Force
African Descent
Hispanic or Latino
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
Caucasian/European Descent
Mixed
Other
I choose not to answer

Local Trivia: Head inland.

What I paid for gas in East Lyme, CT (shoreline) last night: $4.39/gal

What I paid for gas in Cheshire, CT (south-central) this afternoon: $4.29/gal

What I could have paid for gas on the Berlin Turnpike (central) this afternoon: $4.21/gal

Driven by Distraction

In the middle of the second half of Cerebus volumes, I put down the comic book and picked up Sarah Vowell. I read The Partly Cloudy Patriot while I slogged through Guys and Rick's Story and Going Home -- but I didn't do it because I was sick of Cerebus. I did it because that's what I do.

Focusing on essays about patriotism somehow helped me to focus on comic books about aardvarks. I don't know how or why it works. It just does.

Maybe I was built for the petite seven-course meal rather than the smorgasbord -- ironic, since I'm Swedish -- but that implies that I've been lying with all this "I learn through obsession" stuff. And I don't think I have been.

It's just that one of my obsessions appears to be multi-tasking.

I found, sophomore year in college, that I wasn't able to focus as well as I used to. I suspected that I had peaked in high school, which is a terrible thing to think. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

I was distracted in class, distracted from studying in my bedroom, distracted by small whims quickly snowballing into elaborate daydreams. I consulted "my lady" -- my on-campus counselor.

"Are you having trouble getting your work done?" she asked.

"Well, no," I said, confused. Of course I was getting my work done. "I just feel like I'm slipping, like I can't focus like I used to."

I lowered my voice and admitted painfully, confessionally: "I'm worried I'm getting stupider."

To her credit, my counselor didn't laugh. Instead, she suggested that maybe I was having the opposite problem -- that maybe my brain wasn't engaged enough in the tasks set before me because too much of my attention was left unused. Maybe what I was trying to focus on wasn't enough anymore.

It was a revelation.

I solved the problem first semester sophomore year by eating peanuts while I studied. The automatic motion of my arm and the chewing and swallowing seemed to provide enough focus for the rest of my brain to allow the thinking parts to concentrate. I solved the problem second semester by getting involved in a series of overwhelming personal crises.

The personal crises worked well beyond expectations.

Since then, I've been on the two-year cycle I mentioned in my first carte blanche answer post -- two years of boring, neutral info-gathering followed by one year of intense application and engagement.

The engagement, I think, comes from distraction.

I am pro-distraction.

I am for setting aside work that really needs to get done for work you really want to do right now. I'm for spending time washing dishes when I'm on deadline; for going to the circus when I should be sleeping; for dishing with friends when I should be applying to grad school. I am for using distractions when I would otherwise be bored to tears, and for knowingly applying distractions to my life when I suspect I may be approaching boredom.

Distraction as boredom prevention, that's my motto. (Pretty boring motto -- but look over here!)

But not only distraction to ease time passing -- distraction to create possibilities that wouldn't have existed before. Distraction to help me see peripherally what I couldn't have seen directly. Distraction to highlight connections between disparate actions and ideas; distraction to get me out of myself and into the world.

Maybe the watched-pot theory of time isn't a theory of time at all. Maybe it's a theory of mass and energy. Maybe it's not that the pot will seem like it's taking forever to boil -- maybe it really never will. Maybe applying ourselves to tasks not only makes them seem harder; maybe it makes them impossible.

Writing is like this. Finding a new friend is like this. Life, I suspect, is like this.

So in the middle of my second Sarah Vowell book, I set her and the assassination of President Garfield aside, and read some Alfred Bester.

I suspect Sarah, Al and I are all better off for it.

New word: Reaganitis

(n.) Inflammation of the Reagan, usually Ronald Reagan though occasionally Michael:

Symptoms of Ronald-Reagan flare-up include the obsessive tendency to name things “Reagan,” including but not limited to airports; and to insert Reagan into conversations or words ostensibly though tangentially related to the late former president's policies (i.e., “Reaganomics”), combined with a tendency to forget his former work as an actor, his part in the Iran-Contra affair, everyone else’s part in the fall of the Berlin Wall (particularly the Germans’), and other Reagan-is-martyr-like delusions.

Symptoms of the more acute though less widespread Michael-Reagan flare-up include intense irritation on the part of listeners or readers, followed by the desire to expatriate (applies equally to Democrats and Republicans, though the parties will cite different reasons for expatriation).

Mix: Colors

"White Flag" -- Dido
"Red Rain" -- Peter Gabriel
"The Red House" -- Jimi Hendrix
"Orange Crush" -- R.E.M.
"Tangerine" -- Led Zeppelin
"Yellow" -- Coldplay
"Evergreen" -- The Fiery Furnaces
"Green Gloves" -- The National
"Green Light" -- Sonic Youth
"Green Eyes" -- Coldplay
"Screenwriter's Blues" -- Soul Coughing
"Calling You" -- Blue October
"Natural Blues" -- Moby
"Galileo" -- Indigo Girls
"Violet Hill" -- Coldplay
"Purple Toupee" -- They Might Be Giants
"With You" -- Chris Brown
"Black Math" -- The White Stripes
"Black Flag" -- David Byrne

If you would like a CD copy of this mix, send your address to Alicia's email.

My bionic Jesus heart

My faith is as earthy as it can be – as earthy as I am. It’s rugged enough that I suspect it will never be replaced by anything else wholesale, as it has replaced what could or would have been fundamental parts of me.

This replacement is like waking up with a bionic arm one day; you may not know how it works or how it got there, or whether it’s superior to your old arm. After awhile you stop wondering. It’s just your arm.

You stop wondering until someone else points it out: “Hey, what’s up with your arm, by the way?”

“Oh, that,” you say. “Yeah, it’s bionic.”

Unless they continue irritating you with questions you can’t quite answer, you go on doing whatever you’re doing.

If they do irritate you, you find yourself in a quandary. You don’t know how you got the arm; it just appeared one day. Maybe someone told you the old one was diseased, or maybe it seemed to you like a magical gift you’d received. Maybe it just struck you as a simple fact, like the grass being green. Whatever your justification, its origin is mysterious, and anything you say about it is bound to be half lie, since you don’t know the answer and can’t explain it to yourself.

At this point, I usually fall back on metaphor. My English-major faith in the desirability and possibility of expressing the inexpressible finds its home here. I am comfortable with metaphors.

The bionic arm metaphor, for instance, quickly reaching the treacherous level of conceit, above.

This is why my faith may be called earthy – because I have an interest in relating it to the earth. But take away the metaphors and the impulse toward practical response, and what you have is a mystic. (What you have is a bionic woman.)

I am, I think, interested in playing with the mystery more than settling on answers. I am interested in this because I have been a player, and have felt something mysterious playing back – playing with me. I am interested in this because those origin-mysterious parts of me are attuned to seeking out mysteries, and know what to do once I find them.

I don’t understand why or how. There have been no literal radioactive spiders in my life, and I don’t give any thought to secret Krypton-like origins. The closest I’ve come is an exhausting, semi-tragic childhood that in the end, I escaped. The coming-out-from-under potentially crushing weight may have sharpened my sense of irony, of the spiritual, of others.

It almost certainly necessitated the transplants: bionic sense of self, bionic sense of wonder, bionic heart.

And here’s why the metaphor: Because when people ask me now ("what do you believe?"), I don't know what to tell them. Or rather, I don't know how.

I have this hope, I might say. It's a transplant.

Paul – lovely Paul, who I know and hate like my own brother – says we should have an answer for anyone who asks where our hope comes from. Presumably, he means that we should have thought through our beliefs and faith enough to be able to articulate them. In practice in modern America, it’s translated to always having a tattered and handy copy of the “Four Spiritual Laws.”

I’ve never been a “Four Spiritual Laws” kind of girl.

I've been a "what do you think about aliens," "why should evolution contradict Genesis," "God how do I live through this next moment and the one after that" kind of girl. I've been an "if I don't have you, I don't have anything," "I'd rather be dead and I'm serious" kind of girl.

I've been melodramatic and sincere like the Four Spiritual Laws, sure, but I haven't been simple like them. My trust has never been simple. People who say "just believe!" make me want to scream.

I do "just believe." I just believe the way I just wake up in the morning, groaning, or the way I wish I had some ice cream, or the way I used to play My Little Ponies when I was little. I just believe the way people believe in their own bodies, but it doesn't simplify things.

How do you explain your own body? (Scientifically, parts labeled and categorized? Poetically, in terms of movement?)

And how to explain the workings of bionic, transplanted parts to the fully intact?

To those who are injured, as an upgrade? "This arm'll go miles and miles without ever getting tired! Trade up for the newest model in spiritual welfare!"

To those who are self-satisfied...as what? Maybe this is what Jesus meant, always saying the sinners would accept (him) but the righteous would not.

Selling -- evangelizing -- a part of yourself seems too modern (too commodifying, too commercial) a take on faith. I do not believe, and pass along or promulgate or push my beliefs. I am my beliefs.

So, to those who wonder what I believe, I say that I can't tell you. It's untellable. (I'm untellable.)

But watch closely and you may see it -- I may see it: the evidence of the amputations and revisions and attachments.

They are what I believe.

Mix: Fire + Water

"No Cars Go" -- Arcade Fire
"Fire With Fire" -- The Gossip
"Set the Fire to the Third Bar" -- Martha Wainwright with Snow Patrol
"Night on Fire" -- VHS or Beta
"All Fired Up" -- Interpol
"The Theme from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me"
"The Fire Breathers" -- Skillet
"World on Fire" -- Sarah McLachlan
"Here Comes the Flood" -- Peter Gabriel
"Healing Waters" -- Mr. Mister
"Cold Water" -- Damien Rice
"Holy Water" -- The Gossip
"Bridge over Troubled Water" -- Simon & Garfunkel
"Waterloo" -- ABBA

If you would like a CD copy of this mix, send your address to Alicia's email.

I disinvented the Internet.

My recent discovery that I can create my own mix CDs has spawned the obvious impulse to share those song lists, for better or worse, with others. (See here, here and here.)

But by sending actual CDs through the mail, I realize I've taken several significant steps backward from the Web revolution. I've invented -- nay, reinvented -- a low-tech Napster.

Huh.

Still, take advantage of my new hobby. You'd be surprised, if you started out with expectations as low as mine were, how decent themed mix CDs often turn out.

"Is it Love? Take the Quiz!" (The Man of My Dreams)

Finally, I thought, an ad in my email I can really use.

They wanted my name and sign, my crush's name and sign.

This is foolproof. All I have to do is guess at my potential future The ONE's first name and zodiac sign, and I'm golden. If I persevere, I can definitely find out who he is by Christmas.

But then they wanted my cell phone number.

I don't mind giving my name and my sign (Virgo, in this case -- though I was a Leo again in a statewide, monthly LGBT newspaper in TN a few weeks ago), but why do they need to call me?

I mean, if this crush is The ONE, then who else do I want to get called by? No one, right?

So I exxed out, disappointed.

Guess internet website isn't the way I'll find 'im.

*****

The truth is that I've known for awhile now when I'd find "The ONE" -- or, rather, "The Six."

A few years ago in China, as I lay languishing over the bizarre, ill-advised infatuation I had with my teammate, I had a dream. (I must have fallen asleep.)

In the dream, some guy showed up in front of me, out of a crowd, speaking Spanish. He said "Te adoro," but I -- clueless and awkward even in my dreams -- leaned forward, cupping my hand around my ear and shouted over the noise of the crowd: "What?"

He repeated himself, and the crowd quieted a bit, focused on whatever was going on in front.

Embarassed, I realized I couldn't respond in Spanish. (This was post-breakthrough, when Chinese had begun eating up my college-level Spanish in huge chunks, like Terry Bisson's "Smoother".)

"I understand," I said, loudly. "But I'll have to go learn how to speak to you."

He nodded or indicated understanding somehow, and turned from me, pulling me along by the hand. I understood, somehow, that his name was Owen Czyk -- pronounced "six." (I called him "Mr. Six" in my dream.) He introduced me to his friends and left me there with them.

I don't remember what, exactly, they said, but all his friends -- some of whom were surfers, as I recall (but why they were in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses and holding surfboards in what was obviously some sort of municipal assembly was never explained) -- talked to me over the next hour or so. They were all exceedingly warm, but not in a creepy way, and most of them mentioned that Owen had talked about me a lot, saying only good things, and assured me that he really liked me.

Which, when I thought about it later, was weird, since I'd never met him before.

But spending time with his friends convinced me. Not only did he have nothing but good things to say about me, but his friends had nothing but great things to say about him. Every time they mentioned him, it was with genuine affection and respect. And they seemed like such great people, I knew they wouldn't be friends with him if he weren't at least as great.

And that was it. He eventually came back, but the dream ended shortly after, and I hadn't re-taught myself enough Spanish at that point to have real, in-depth conversations with him.

(I've always sort of thought of Spanish as a language of emotion, though I'm not sure why, since it's not my mother-tongue. Something about !Que lastima! just seems to sum things up so much better than any English equivalent.)

I woke up and wrote down the dream, though I hardly needed to in this case. I've written this account from memory.

*****

So the question is, what number am I on now?

There are different ways to count, but I'm sure I've gone through at least four. I could have missed six and be on eight or nine.

For my money, I'm just past five.

NIGHTMARE!

"So You Think You Can Dance" is back ON already???

And nobody TOLD ME??????

I mean, I mean...How many weeks have I missed already?

Someone get me a paper bag!

Nightmare

Last night: I had just started a new internship at the newspaper, but it was also midyear conference in Thailand (from when I worked/lived in China). It was night. I drove into the building I was to work in, but the garage entrance brought me to the basement of the building instead.

I came up through the basement, where I had parked amid exposed pipes and cement pillars, and into a cubicled office space. Two women I recognized worked there; I hadn't seen them since college, or before. We greeted each other and talked about what they'd been doing since then, developing an instant rapport. They looked professional, in charcoal-gray pantsuits, their hair tied back -- but they acted casually, like friends.

There was going to be an assembly, so we all gathered in a darkened auditorium. It also seemed to be underground, as the basement had been, and the slant of the bleachers was severe, to the point where they seemed dangerous. The stage, at the bottom of the bleachers as though in a pit, lacked a proscenium, and the ceiling was exposed pipe and darkness. We filed in from the top of the auditorium, and I sat near the top.

As we chatted before the main speaker came, someone climbed up the bleachers and took my purse -- the blue suede-ish one I carry in real life -- but I didn't object. I figured there was a rule about bringing bags into assemblies that, since I was new, I didn't know about. I trusted that I would get the purse back afterwards. [This is the only time I remember this kind of foreshadowing showing up in any of my dreams -- certainly the only time the plot has been this complicated and yet made a kind of narrative sense. You'll see what I mean.]

The speaker came on and began to talk. He was young and clean-cut with light brown hair and a dark suit* -- he was the one who had taken my purse. I have no recollection of what he said. The atmosphere was still friendly and social.

About forty-five minutes into the lecture, a woman came onto the stage, holding my purse. I looked down curiously as she seemed to drop it, spilling the contents partly onto the stage. Several other people had come in from the sides of the stage, holding bunches of papers in their arms, which they began handing out.

The speaker was saying something, but as had been true through the dream, I didn't listen and could not understand what he was saying. His aspect indicated that this had been the real purpose of the assembly, that the preceding speech had just been a way to kill time -- a filler.

One of the papers reached me. It looked like it had been printed on an old machine requiring hand-setting the type -- there were tiny, random flecks of ink all over it. The top said "Alia" -- but I understood that this was a misspelling of my name.

There were several paragraphs formatted onto the page, underlined subheads over each one. The first subhead read "boys Alicia finds most captivating" [The use of the word "boys" indicated to me that the list went back to high school or middle school -- it was in order from most to least "captivating" of all the boys I'd ever been interested in. I didn't read it, so I didn't know how thorough or current it was.]

I understood with a shock what was going on. They had stolen my purse, sorted through its contents -- including my journal -- and written up the most embarassing things they could find. This had probably happened to everyone in the auditorium, as a sort of initiation. The shared shame of our secrets being exposed was meant to bind us together [like we were in Skull and Bones, I thought].

My mind raced through the options -- play it off as funny, act normally and pretend I wasn't mortally embarassed by the revelation of what were essentially such common secrets that they were barely secrets at all, throw up, give a desperate lecture, or leave, in either humilation or righteous indignation -- and I stood up automatically.

Some people turned to look at me, but others were busy reading the sheet. After a few seconds, I asked, my voice cold, "So who's going to get the purse?"

My purse had been moved to the center of the bleachers but was still several tiers of steep steps away, and I didn't want to risk the attempt to retrieve it.

Several women -- girls, really -- raised their hands hopefully. [They had misunderstood my question, thinking I wanted to give the purse away.]

"No," I said. "I was asking who was going to bring it up here and return it to me." I regained a bit of my balance and sense of humor: "It is a nice purse, though, from Saks. I got it for $1."

Before I could dissolve into tears or meaningless demands (meaningless because I was powerless), I left, without the purse, through a side door that let me out into the basement where my car was.

I knew that I would never go back, whether they eventually returned the purse and its contents or not.


*I mention this because it's not what you'd expect someone who turns out to be SATAN to look like.

In Defense of Poppery, I: "With You"

Pop example: Chris Brown's "With You"

What redeems it: Your typical R&B love song, "With You" features Chris Brown crooning in those extra, breathy trills that are supposed to make our hearts swoon.

That's fine and all, but since Boyz 2 Men, it's been ye olde hat. What makes Chris's crooning sweet and, ultimately, winning, is the generosity and innocence of the lyrics.

"With You" starts chorus-first, letting us in on the plot: "I need you boo / Gotta see you boo."

At this point, people who have no experience with African-American sweetheart slang are probably confused. People who do have experience are delighted. To me, "boo" seems particularly personal and genuine, much better than "baby" or "girl." He also refers to his love as "little shawty," though by the time he does this in the song, it's lost the sexual overtones it often has in, say, a 50 Cent song. (But then, what word in a 50 Cent song doesn't have sexual overtones?? He could make Clorox bleach sound dirty.)

The song's bridge makes good use of slang, and for me has a semi-comic effect that adds to the song's overall cuteness -- it helps that Chris recognizes a typical guy-reaction to all this fuzzy-wuzziness and heads off our "yeah, right" reaction by earnestly declaring that he "won't front" and he'll "be straight" if only he can have his "boo":

And I will never try
To deny that you are my whole life
'Cause if you ever let me go
I would die, so I won't front
I don't need another woman
I just need your all or nothing
'Cause if I got that
Then I'll be straight
Baby you're the best part of my day

(I admit it's hard to see how Chris would be satisfied if his shawty said "Well, have my nothing, then" -- so he really just needs her "all," then -- but I suppose a sloppy line or two can be forgiven.)

But the chorus is the reason to listen to this song.

Instead of insisting, self-centeredly, that no one else has EVER FELT THIS WAY BEFORE EVER (see "Hey there Delilah" for an annoying example of this), Chris looks at the world and sees that everyone must be feeling this way about their own boos. He even sings about them in a variation on the chorus near the end of the song:

I need you boo
I gotta see you boo
And there's hearts all over the world tonight
Said there's hearts all over the world tonight

They need they boo
They gotta see they boo
Said there's hearts all over the world tonight
Hearts all over the world tonight

And now I know I can't be the only one
I bet there's hearts all over the world tonight
With the love of their life who feel
What I feel when I'm with you, with
you, with you, with you, with you...

How many love songs do you know that manage to seem both self-consciously genuine and un-self-centered?

Not many, I'd bet.

4.5 stars, out of...oh, I don't know...whatever.

Confessions XI

I have a pair of suspenders hanging on a towel rack in my bathroom -- I bought them just in case I ever found pants they would go with.

Now that I no longer have short hair, I will likely never wear those suspenders. Nor the clip-on ones in my bedroom.

I clicked on the Dr Pepper ad in my email account two days ago in an effort to see more of those and less of the seizure-inducing "THIS IS NO JOKE -- YOU ARE 100,000 CUSTOMER!" ad; then I looked through all the decade-themed Dr Pepper ads before closing out.

These are our intentions.

We care because apathy is destructive.

We are secure because insecurity is a drain on society, others and ourselves -- more so than we, ourselves, could ever be.

We do what we love because this is the most efficient, effective way to contribute.

We are kind because kindness makes us stronger.

We refuse spite and bitterness because spite and bitterness make us weaker.

We refuse worry because it is a parasite and jealousy because it is a poison.

We are creative because the only alternative is maintaining a false status quo -- false because nothing remains the same, because everything is dying -- or destruction.

We risk only what is ours to lose, and nothing more. We do not risk others. We do not risk more than we have because that makes us dependent on others to fill in the gaps -- to pay our debts.

We do not begrudge ourselves dependency on others because it will not make us less dependent, and because it is a blessing to others to give.

We do not begrudge ourselves failures of all kinds because life is not a test and we are not being tested. (God is not a proctor. God is not a chess-player. God is not an overseer. God is not our fathers or mothers. God is not a light just dim enough to confuse us. God is not hiding, waiting, or crouching in anticipation. God, the world, is not hating us.)

We fill ourselves up so that we'll have more to risk and give.

We take care of ourselves so that we can take care of others.

We will walk through and not around, because around is not a way.

We will speak the truth in love because without love, it is not truth.

We will not refuse to be surprised.

We will allow for mystery.

We will not refuse hope.

We will intend love as an end in itself.

Movies I watched on vacation

Princess Mononoke
Philadelphia Story
Knocked Up
MST 3000: Mitchell
Country Boys, parts 2-3

"This must be what they drink in the valley of the uncanny..."

My mode of transit for the limes, fresh ginger and hot Thai peppers I brought on vacation -- stuffing them into a pitcher with a lid -- apparently backfired.

I discovered this yesterday when the diet peach tea drink I had mixed an hour earlier in said pitcher came out tasting suspiciously like Thai-hot-pepper-peach tea.

The effect can only be described as bizarre and alarming.

That's quite a theology you have, there.

Observed: Dump truck with the words "IN GOD WE TRUST" lettered on the top half of the back of the truck.

Underneath, the warning: "KEEP BACK 200 FEET."

Mix: LUVV 4-EVR

"Searching for Your Love" -- The Sterling Stitches
"Love Comes Quickly" -- Pet Shop Boys
"Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" -- Sophie B. Hawkins
"Is It Love" -- Mr. Mister
"Failing a Test Falling In Love" -- Danielsons
"If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" -- Belle & Sebastian
"I Love You" -- Sarah McLachlan
"Show Me Love" -- t.A.T.u.
"It's True That We Love One Another" -- The White Stripes
"Bleeding Love" -- Leona Lewis
"Modern Love" -- Peter Gabriel
"You Love It When It Rains" -- Outerstar
"Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above" -- CSS
"Length of Love" -- Interpol
"Love Will Tear Us Apart" -- Joy Division
"A Martyr for My Love for You" -- The White Stripes
"My Lover's Gone" -- Dido
"No More 'I Love You's'" -- Annie Lennox
"Love on Haight Street" -- BT

If you would like a CD copy of this mix, send your address to Alicia's email.

JESUS THE INSTAPUNDIT

THE OTHER DAY WHEN MY BF BROKE UP WITH ME I PRAYED AND JESUS TOLD ME THAT EVERYTHING WOULD BE FINE IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN. BECAUSE MCCAIN STANDS FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHICH IS THE PARTY OF GOD. THE DEMOCRATS WHO ARE AGAINST VALUES ARE AGAINST GOD WHICH IS WHY THEY KEEP LOSING. AND I CALL THEM DEMONCRATS, LOL.

ALSO, PAT ROBERTSON KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT. AND WE SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM.

SO I WENT TO THE STORE AND BOUGHT THE BOOKS BY ANN COULTER AND BILL O'REILLY AND JESUS SAID TO PAY IN CASH, SO I DID. BUT I DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY FOR THE TAX EVEN THOUGH I SUPPORT THE TROOPS, SO I HAD TO USE ALL THE PENNIES IN THE PENNY TRAY AND THEN I WAS THIRTEEN CENTS SHORT SO THE CASHIER SAID "GO AHEAD" AND I SAID "GOD BLESS YOU" BECAUSE I FIGURED THAT WAS WORTH THIRTEEN CENTS OR MORE BUT HE ROLLED HIS EYES SO I THOUGHT HE WAS PROBABLY GOING TO HELL ANYWAY. AND EVEN THOUGH HE WAS CUTE HE WILL NEVER BE MY BF BECAUSE HE IS AGAINST GOD AND PROBABLY A DEMONCRAT.

THEN I WENT ONLINE IN THE STARBUCKS WITH THE COMPUTER GOD HAS BLESSED ME WITH AND GOD ALSO BLESSED ME WITH A CHAI LATTE (BUT THIS TIME I HAD TO PAY CREDIT BECAUSE OF THE PENNIES BUT THE FATHER OWNS THE CATTLE ON A THOUSAND HILLS AND WILL HELP ME PAY IT OFF LATER IF I AM FAITHFUL) AND AN HOUR OF INTERNET. AND I FOUND OUT THAT OBAMA IS THE DEMONCRATIC NOMINEE, AND I SAID A PRAYER TO BIND DEMONCRATIC SPIRITS. THEN I LOOKED AT MY BF'S FACEBOOK PROFILE FOR AWHILE TO SEE WHAT HE WAS DOING AND IT SAID HE WAS IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH MY FRIEND NAOMI AND I WAS SHOCKED AND APPALLED THAT HE WOULD DO THAT. BUT I PRAYED FOR STRENGTH AND REMEMBERED THAT JOHN MCCAIN WAS LIKE THE BEST HOPE FOR THE FUTURE AND IF HE WON GOD SAID I WOULD GET A NEW BF BUT IF HE LOST IT WOULD BE LIKE THE TRIBULATION, SO I WAS DETERMINED TO HELP HIM WIN. AND I DECIDED TO WRITE AN EMAIL TO NAOMI TO TELL HER THAT IT WAS AGAINST GOD'S WILL FOR HER TO GO OUT WITH MY OLD BF WHEN SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MY FRIEND, AND THAT'S A SIN.

I REALLY MISSED MY BF BUT IT WAS A SIN TO CRY WHEN JESUS IS MY BF FOREVER AND SO I BOUGHT ANOTHER CHAI LATTE INSTEAD AND PICKED UP THE NEWSPAPER FROM A TABLE WHERE SOMEONE HAD LEFT IT. THE NEWSPAPER WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES INSTEAD OF THE NEW YORK POST SO I PRAYED A PRAYER AGAINST THE LIES THAT WOULD BE IN THERE AND I DECIDED TO READ THE NATIONAL SECTION ANYWAY AND BELIEVE THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT IT SAYS. BUT THEN I READ THAT OBAMA WHOSE NAME IS LIKE OSAMA SAID HE MAYBE TRIED COCAINE ONCE AND I DECIDED TO BELIEVE THAT AND ONLY THAT INSTEAD OF THE OPPOSITE. BUT FOR THE REST OF IT I BELIEVED THE OPPOSITE. BECAUSE DEMONCRATS LIKE TO LIE ABOUT REPUBLICANS AND GOD, BECAUSE THEY LIKE TO LIVE IN SIN.

AND THEN I THOUGHT, MAYBE NAOMI IS A DEMONCRAT AND THAT'S WHY. SO I WROTE TO MY BF SAYING HOW MUCH I LOVED HIM AND THAT MAYBE NAOMI IS A DEMONCRAT AND HE SHOULD LOOK FOR SOMEONE BETTER, LIKE ME. AND HE SHOULD PRAY ABOUT IT.

I READ ON THE INTERNET THAT OBAMA ALSO READS THE KORAN WHICH IS EVIL EVERY DAY AND DOESN'T REALLY BELIEVE IN JESUS AND IS ONLY SAYING THAT HE DOES SO HE CAN BE THE PRESIDENT AND MAKE AMERICA A GODLESS NATION WHICH IS THE SAME AS THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS. AND I BET HE SAYS HAPPY HOLIDAYS INSTEAD OF MERRY CHRISTMAS, WHICH JUST GOES TO SHOW YOU.

SO I WILL BE WORKING ON THE CAMPAIGN BECAUSE WHATS THE POINT OF STAYING HERE ANYWAY WHEN I DON'T EVEN HAVE A BF. AND I ASKED JESUS WHEN I SHOULD START AND HE SAID RIGHT AWAY SO I GAVE NOTICE ON MY LEASE EVEN THOUGH MY ROOMMATE WASN'T VERY HAPPY BUT I TOLD HER JESUS WILL FIND A WAY AND TO GO ON CRAIGSLIST. BUT MAKE SURE TO PUT "CHRISTIANS ONLY" ON THE AD, I TOLD HER, OR YOU NEVER KNOW WHO YOU MIGHT GET.

TOMORROW I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT WHEN I WENT TO THE GROCERY STORE AND SOME OF THE THINGS ON MY LIST WERE NOT THERE.

Local Trivia: Johnson City edition

For years, the only two people I knew who lived in Johnson City, TN were named Jeff. (They're still named Jeff -- I just know other people who live there now, too.)

A restaurant named Cootie Brown's has not only what it claims (almost certainly rightly) is the best key lime pie in the world, but also key lime cookies and other "key lime" meal items.

One of the murals on the wall of Cootie Browns -- one of many, each of which feature Cootie in a different situation and outfit -- shows Cootie eating a key lime pie while in the bayou. A crocodile looks longingly at Cootie's pie from the shore while four flamingos, apparently in various states of drunkenness (the largest one clearly suffering from a hangover) trot across the river in front of Cootie's boat.

Local Trivia: I-81W edition

Virginia is burning large piles of mulch -- which blows into the car in tiny specks, settling on all your CDs and comic books -- making everything smell like a campfire.

There is a restaurant called "Apple House" whose logo, according to the "FOOD" highway sign, features a silhouette of a man carving a turkey. (Not an apple to be found.)

Bristol is a town in Virginia and in Tennessee -- like Kansas City, MO and KS.

Unsolicited Advice IV

In Johnson City, TN, as in the rest of the South, iced tea is called "sweet tea" and unsweetened iced tea is called "unsweetened tea."

There is nothing called "just regular iced tea." Do not harass the waitresses by attempting to order it.

Recipe: Black Bean Soup

1 c. chopped onion
3 garlic cloves
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper or jalepeno
2 Tbs vegetable oil
1 tsp cumin
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes
2 16-oz cans black beans

1. Saute onion, garlic and cayenne in oil for 5 min.

2. Add cumin and tomatoes (include liquid). Bring to boil, simmer 5 min.

3. Add beans with liquid. Simmer 20 minutes.

4. Blend. (Hold blender lid on tightly if blending while still hot. Otherwise, cool, blend and reheat.)

Local Trivia: D.C. edition

The number 10 fire engine in Northeast Washington, D.C. is the most-used piece of equipment in the nation. It gets taken out an average of 26 times a day.

The police in D.C.'s Trinidad neighborhood are already at the highest alert level possible -- which includes riding horses around the neighborhood.

There seems to be a bird in Northeast able to mimic the sounds of various emergency sirens and car alarms, which is willing to chirp them all in random, rapid succession.

"I'll see your sip and raise you a swig."

You can pay for things in Pepsi now.

I think we all knew this day would come, but like me, you probably suspected it'd be Coke.

(Luckily, as with our paper money "representing" gold, Pepsi allows us to redeem "Pepsi points" for things we want rather than having to cart around jugs of cola.

Though one wonders in the new coin of the realm, whether a can would be like a buck? A two-liter would be like a ten? And you'd pour some out into the cashier's cup to give fractions of a dollar?

But then when you got change in return, wouldn't it have all the backwash of everyone in line ahead of you??)

How I got ready

Last Thursday night: I find myself standing in the parking lot of the newspaper, arms across my chest, leaning against my car, ill-at-ease.

"I'm not ready," I say, partly to see if it's true.

It is. I feel the weight of it settling on me, solid but flighty -- like a pirate's parrot on my shoulder.

How absurd. I think. There's nothing to be ready or not ready for.

I'm distracted from the reassurances of my friend by the litany of tasks I have yet to accomplish (running through my brain like breaking news on the CNN scrolling marquee). This is normal and does not explain the spreading dread I'm feeling.

"I'm sure you'll be ready to go in the morning," he says -- or something like that.

I eventually get into the car and drive home, still mulling over what I have yet to do -- finishing packing the car, remembering to bring the essential things I can't pre-pack, checking the house one last time before I close it up -- but not feeling any better. By the time I push my key into the lock, fake gold into fake bronze, I feel panic creeping in at the edges of my thoughts.

I go in and turn on the lights. I put my things down on the coffee table in the living room, where small piles of papers still sit waiting for my attention -- where they will remain through my vacation -- and go into the bedroom. I change for bed, hoping sleep will erase the dis-ease -- hoping I can sleep at all -- and try to push the panic out, or down, or back, but it's like trying to push water.

This hasn't happened to me before, I think. This is not like me. This is a road trip, which I love.

But things won't be the same, the panic replies. When you return. And you haven't said good-bye.

It's stupid to say good-bye, I say, when I'll just be back in ten days.

But you haven't spent any time with your family since your last trip. You've avoided them.

With good reason. They talk about nothing but how I avoid them.

You won't have a chance to tell them. You'll feel guilty -- you feel guilty now.

But I don't know, or refuse to think about, what I'm supposed to have said -- to have told them.

In desperation, I pick up my journal and write: "I feel like I should have said a REAL good-bye to everyone."

The feeling of dread, premonition-like, frightens me. The conviction that things won't be the same again is like a lump in my throat, hard to swallow past. The idea of missing my family is strange and unfamiliar -- like the idea of death.

I am tired, though, and I sleep.

In the morning, I pack what is left to be packed. I check my list, twice, and, satisfied, pull out to return my movies to the library. From the library parking lot, I remember that I haven't had my mail stopped -- and I was going to call her anyway, to tell her I'm going -- so I call my mom.

"Mom, I'm leaving now," I say, in a light tone (betraying none of the anxiety or conflict of the night before [she senses weakness as a wolf does]).

"Fine," she says, neutral. "Where are you going? Delaware?"

I laugh, the sound mostly hollow. "No, D.C. I've never gone to Delaware. I don't know anyone there, really."

"Oh. And when are you going to be back?"

It pinches the nerve of my missing, this question, and I feel my heart go out to this mom -- we had discussed this, I hadn't been remiss, I do still love her despite (because of) my neglect: I laugh again, more hollowly.

"I told you this," I say, "we've talked about it."

I say it lightly, as lightly as possible. I mean it to excuse myself, but it's what causes the shift.

"FINE," she says, in her coldest tone (reserved only for leave-taking, I realize suddenly), "GO. HAVE A GOOD TIME."

Her "have a good time" makes use of the same tone in which most people would say "rot in Hell, you bastard." But suddenly, I wonder if she means it -- that she hopes I have a good time.

"Now, wait," I say in my "let's-get-one-thing-straight-right-now" teacher voice. "I wasn't criticizing. I'm going to answer your question. I'm happy to answer your question. I just wanted to point out that this is not the first time we've talked about this. I told you several weeks ago that I was planning this, and I remember because you asked me whether I'd be back for Spencer's graduation, and I said yes, that of course I would, that I wouldn't ever go if it meant missing his graduation."

"Fine," she says, partly placated -- in Eeyore's world-weary voice, now, which is an improvement, at least. "Have a good time."

She hangs up; I hang up.

I let my shoulders fall and gasp, tears shocking me and spending themselves quickly.

Why is it so hard with her, always, I think, the rut of the refrain worn smooth and deep with use.

I realize suddenly that this had been the missing. This ritual of leave-taking -- arguing, being yelled at, crying -- the lack of this has been the source of my anxiety, my feeling of missing my family, my impulse toward a permanent good-bye.

My mother's resentment at being abandoned serves -- has always served, I see now -- as my benediction (or malediction). It is how I know she needs me, loves me, wants me to return. It comforts me. Somehow, it is my bulwark against death. (It is immortal.)

This is why I called her: to be yelled at.

We are so backwards, I think.

I pull out onto the street, heading toward the highway.

Panda Express

Secret: Red pandas are way better than giant pandas. They're like all you want in a panda, in a smaller, faster package.

Recipe: Egg Salad Sandwich

Sorry, vegans. The more intrepid among you may attempt this with an egg substitute.

5 eggs
About 2 Tb. mayo
watercress, chopped
cilantro, chopped (1/5 volume of watercress)
green onion, chopped
sunflower seeds, pre-shelled

Multi-grain bread
Olive oil, for frying

1. Hard-boil the eggs using some sort of fool-proof method.

2. Shell eggs and smash them with a fork. Add mayo to taste. (You may add salt, pepper, paprika or cayenne at this point -- but the other ingredients are tasty enough to make spices optional.)

3. Mix in all the green ingredients.

4. Mix in sunflower seeds to an even distribution, and in a proportion you like.

5. Heat olive oil in pan -- do not attempt to use a substitute oil.

6. Make sandwich and fry in oil.

Mix: Animals

"Animals" -- Coldplay
"Doctor Worm" -- They Might Be Giants
"I Came As A Rat" -- Modest Mouse
"Mammoth" -- Interpol
"I'm a Cuckoo" -- Belle & Sebastian
"Birdland" -- Weather Report
"Spider" -- They Might Be Giants
"Of Mice" -- Birdmonster
"This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)" -- Peter Gabriel
"Broken Wings" -- Mr. Mister
"Dinosaur" -- David Byrne
"The Raven" -- Alan Parsons Project
"Snowbirds and Townies" -- Further Seems Forever
"The Geese of Beverly Road" -- The National
"Sparrow" -- Birdmonster
"Birdhouse in Your Soul" -- They Might Be Giants
"Wild Pack of Family Dogs" -- Modest Mouse
"Coyotes" -- Don Edwards
"Animal Instinct" -- The Cranberries

If you would like a CD copy of this mix, send your address to Alicia's email.

My ultimate reason for opposing legalized prostitution:

I don't believe in people getting paid for anything.

What's good about my job

"See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya" gets a big laugh, every time.

Recipe: Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings)

Filling:
1 lb. ground pork
Medium Chinese cabbage or Napa cabbage, chopped small
2-3 tsp. salt
1/4 c. green onion
2 Tb. cornstarch
2 Tb. soy sauce
2 ts. sesame oil
2 ts. white sugar
1 ts. pepper (black or white)

Wrappers: Pre-made round jiaozi wrappers, probably purchased from a Chinese supermarket.
(DON'T try to make your own jiaozi wrappers. Like accountants, lawyers and doctors, the people who make these are professionals, and you will only make a fool of yourself trying to do their job.)
Rice bowl of warm water.

1. Mix all filling ingredients in a bowl. Get some teaspoons for scooping.

2. Put about a teaspoon of filling in the center of a wrapper. Dip finger in warm water and trace edge of wrapper, then fold in half over filling.

3. Fold edge of jiaozi wrapper so that it won't come apart.

4. Boil in large pot until done, when jiaozi floats, wrapper is slightly translucent and has adhered itself to filling inside. (Looks kind of vacuum-packed.)

4, alt. Steam in dim sum steamer until done.

4, alt. Fry in canola or sesame oil until done.


Dipping sauce may include all or some of the following:
("All" highly recommended.)

Salt
Soy sauce
Sugar
Sesame oil
Peanut oil
Canola oil
Garlic, minced or powdered
Ginger, minced or powdered
Red chili oil and/or paste
Red pepper flakes

Mix to taste in rice bowl. Add some jiaozi water from boiling pot before dipping jiaozi, initially.

Don't worry, you won't feel a thing.

I'm going on vacation, fools.

But thanks to the miracle of blog-scheduling technology, I've plotted out daily advance posts for your convenience -- with the exception of June 14's Worst. Blog post. Ever.

It's up to you to make June 14 worth waiting for.

In the meantime, enjoy my short ramblings and recipes.

Movie Review Double-Feature: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington/The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

Jimmy Stewart and Carey Grant make for a great double feature, I can tell you that.

"The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer," 1947, stars Carey Grant with Myrna Loy as his eventual romantic opposite, Shirley Temple as a 17-year-old, and some other people. Mostly it's Carey Grant we care about.

It's horribly unfeminist, this movie -- let's get that out on the table right off. (It would be anti-feminist if it had come after or during the feminist movement.) As with "Song of the South," the prevailing theory of the movie, and the basis for the reasonableness of the romantic connection between "Dickie" (Richard Nugent, Carey Grant's character) and Judge Margaret Turner (OMG, A WOMAN JUDGE -- the movie startles itself, here), is that what women really need is a man around the house.

Uncle Max, the court psychiatrist and uncle to Margaret and Susan (Shirley Temple), sets up the need for Margaret to marry from his first scene. In an appalling breach of all ethical considerations, he also discusses Margaret's "Oedipus complex" with Richard Nugent when Nugent is sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial for punching an assistant D.A. (It's a long story.)

Max, in the end, becomes the "Deus ex Max-china" that manipulates Margaret and Richard into getting together.

But before that, there's greatness.

For one, there's the scene in which younger-Turner-sister Susan corners Richard after he gives a lecture at her high school. She claims to be the editor of the school paper and gets him alone in a room before he can escape. She insists that he tell her everything about his life; he insists that it's been a dull one. She presses. Realizing he won't get anywhere if he doesn't give her the sort of story she wants, he says "alright then, I'll tell you."

You can see the transition plainly on Carey Grant's face -- the amused bemusement, the decision to make up a story to suit Susan -- and it's laugh-out-loudable. It's also so clear he's making stuff up that it tells us a lot about Susan: how immature she is, and how infatuated with Nugent.

Like all old-tyme comedies, this one relies heavily on contrivances to be funny; since they are funny, I mainly forgave them for being so contrived.

And they allow for lines from Myrna Loy, who gets most of the best dialogue -- like "I'm sorry. I've never been subjected to so much charm before."

The best line of the movie is delivered by Loy as Judge Margaret Turner, at a date-gone-awry at which every side character has arrived: As she stands up to go, distraught, she shouts with equal, desperate emphasis on all parts of the line, "Shut up! And thank you for a lovely evening!"

Like most comedies relying on contrivance, the failure of "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" is how contrived its ending is -- but hey. If we can forgive Shakespeare (and some of us can't) for the end of "As You Like It" (or any of his comedies), we can forgive Sidney Sheldon for the end of this one.

Note: Bizarrely, the IMDB.com page for this movie suggests that if you liked it, you might also like "American Beauty." Uh, right, IMDB. Thaaaaanks.

Spurred on by the success of "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer," that Cary Grant/Shirley Temple vehicle (depending, you know, on who you like), and inspired by my own upcoming jaunt to D.C., I decided it was finally time to see "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," that Jimmy Stewart/Frank Capra vehicle. On the list of classics every American is supposed to see before she dies, "Mr. Smith" hasn't had much of a chance with me -- I saw "Gone With the Wind" in college, and was dis-impressed enough to stop watching the Great Classics.

One cliche after another, with these movies, I thought. (Citizen Kane being an always-notable exception: See it.)

But in addition to having had recent success with old-tyme Carey Grant, I'd also seen (most of) "You Can't Take It With You," another Jimmy Stewart-Frank Capra movie. It was quirky and worthwhile, and I had hope that "Mr. Smith" would fall more into this category than the good but treacle-filled "It's a Wonderful Life."

It did.

But it also fell into the category of "HOORAY FOR AMERICA!!" which aren't typically movies I list in my top hundred. (With the possible exception of "Independence Day," because who doesn't love Will Smith saving the world??)

Still, "Mr. [Jefferson] Smith" surprised me. Of course, I'd heard about the filibuster scene, but I didn't know particulars. I won't tell them here, just in case you haven't seen it and want to, but I was impressed with how relatively normal these things were.

What most impressed me among the surprises was how small and understandable Mr. Smith's ambitions were: All he wanted was a boy's camp.

Of course, the camp was a metaphor for the ideals of American life, etc. And it seems to me that it was the small-time focus that allowed for some of the statements that amounted to a practical communism. Mr. Smith waxed eloquent on the idea of boys of "all nationalities" and economic backgrounds coming together in the wilderness of his (unidentified) state.

Much of the rest of my impressed-ness is reserved for how scary parts of the movie are. When a whole state -- even a fictitious, midwestern state seventy years ago -- can be trampled on by a political machine, especially when that machine controls the press, that's scary. And maybe a little too close to home.

The violence against the Boy Rangers defending Mr. Smith (by spreading newsletters that tell the truth) escalates admirably, so that each new level of hushing-up done by the Taylor political machine is startling and ultimately sickening. It gave me chills.

I liked the end, too, though it wasn't until that point that I understood why certain things had happened earlier in the storyline than they typically would (the romantic interest subplot, for instance, was clumsily handled and finished off before the final third of the movie or so -- but major points, there, for the girl-friend winning over the terribly attractive incompatible floozy).

While I don't know that I would have taken to Mr. Smith's patriotic prattle in real life, it was a good movie. (And who doesn't love Jimmy Stewart saving the world??)

Dave Sim's Feminine Mystique

I walked alongside Matt as we went back to the apartments one night, after we'd climbed out of the big van we rode to and from the home of the family who hosted our church group. We didn't say much -- there wasn't much left to say -- but when we got to the stairs of my section, Matt spoke.

"Alicia," he said, almost shouting (he did this with secrets, as though able to say them only if they seemed casual and public), "you scare me."

I blinked, waiting.

"I don't know how you know what I'm thinking or what I'm going to do," he continued.

"Well," I said, and explained how I had known we would "break up" the first week of the new school year. It seemed obvious to me, I said.

He shook his head slightly and went up to his apartment. I went to mine.

-----

Last week, I read Dave Sim's Reads, which is the ninth or tenth book in his Cerebus comic book anthology series. It was less comic book than the others -- partly because it contained a fair amount of text, probably making up half or more of the volume.

Sim starts with a thinly veiled avatar of himself in the "reads" author, Victor Reid. The style of the account of Reid's life and times as a suddenly famous "reads" author is pseudo-Victorian, probably meant to be styled after Oscar Wilde (who Sim includes as a main character of a previous book, Melmoth).

I had no problem with Victor Reid.

About a third of the book is comic -- a depiction of an epic battle between the title character, Cerebus, and the head of the matriarchal society in which he lives.

(By "comic," I mean "illustrated," not "funny.")

The last portion of the book is another section of text -- interspersed with battle -- written about and from the perspective of, alternatingly, Viktor Davis.

Viktor Davis is so much Dave Sim that the use of a pseudonym seems like an artistic statement on the nature of identity.

Sim draws "the reader" in by referring to "the reader" in the text. He neutralizes the fact of his diagnosis as a borderline schizophrenic by admitting to it; he tells the reader that stopping the reading here is the only way for the reader to retain control -- otherwise, Viktor Davis has all the control.

And then he goes to work.

He manipulates "the reader" physically, imposing images and uncomfortable lack of distance as directly as he can in a text -- "the reader can feel Viktor Davis's breath in the reader's ear"-style.

He tells the reader how the reader feels: The reader is captivated, for instance, by a glowing orb in space, more beautiful than anything the reader has ever seen. The fact that you may not care even a little about the glowing orb is never acknowledged; you are forced to share the reader's subjective position, or else skim or skip the text. (Skipping is cheating.)

All of this is designed to paralyze. Your honor is at stake if you leave (crybaby, couldn't handle it), and your identity is at stake if you stay. You're not allowed the distance of judgment (he knows he's schizophrenic) or of looking away (the cigarette smoke, his breath in the reader's ear, the reader stares at the orb).

Your only permitted movement is three-dimensional -- out of the book.

I stayed (wanting to test my identity).

Then he started in against women.

Women read minds, he had said in his previous (comic) books. Reading minds and changing minds is the equivalent of rape, he said. Men rape women physically; women rape men mentally.
I stayed and did not flinch; this was a test.

I felt like I'd been left in a room with a raving lunatic who had a knife. I felt like I'd been jailed for a year without a trial. I felt like I'd been tortured.

(Feelings are all women talk about, he said. [And they're rubbish.])

Viktor Davis droned on -- Viktor Davis, self-involved -- Viktor Davis, over us all -- the victor, Viktor Davis.

Viktor Davis's cadence reminded me of nothing so much as Silence of the Lambs: "It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

(The irony of "Buffalo Bill's" wanting to become a woman by stealing their skin is not lost, here.)

I stayed; this was an unpassable test.

As a woman, nothing I could respond with would have been adequate defense, and you don't try to reason with a knife-wielding lunatic, anyway. You stay calm. You make no sudden moves. You endure it.

He kept circling but never lunged -- for whatever reason, incapable of carrying out his threat. (Distance and time, perhaps.)

I finished the book despite knowing that in part I was finishing to prove myself better than Dave Sim -- to prove him wrong -- and that I could never receive acknowledgement for this. I was invisible to him, not even eyes peering out from behind "the reader" mask.

Dave Sim argues, two books later in Guys, that men want only to "get er innabed" while women want to "get to know him better." Men are forced to pretend to be what they're not -- someone who doesn't only want to "get her into bed" -- and then need to decide, once they've gotten what they wanted, whether to continue pretending to be that other, fake person in order to get what they want again, or to move on -- to wear the mask or to cast it off.

I only wanted to read my Cerebus comic book, and I only needed to read it once. At the end of Reads, I cast off the mask.

By my figuring, if he exists in some parallel universe as a separate entity, every moment Viktor Davis becomes more and more of what he hates -- a haughty, manipulative, mind-reading "woman."

(Though as Buffalo Bill learns, putting a woman's skin on it doesn't make it woman.)

-----

He may have a point about the telepathy, though.

PSA: Outsults

My lifetime quota for the following insults has already been exceeded (aka, don't call me this):

A leech
Bitter
Lazy*
Manipulative
Negative
Stupid*


*Lazy and stupid may be used only if you really, really don't mean it.

Application of these insults may result in one or more of the following: morbid introspection; unattractive levels of self-pity; debilitating guilt; blinding rage.

Unsolicited Advice III

Never name your child "Dick."

"Richard" is okay.

Phrases That Never Help: Lies and Damn Lies Edition

The following are instructions on how to use these phrases effectively as a joke, and why and how to avoid them under other circumstances.

Past editions of "Phrases That Never Help" can be found here and here.

"It's not you, it's me."

As a joke: Say this anytime it's 1. unrelated to a romantic relationship, and 2. it's obviously you.

For real: This phrase actually creates miscommunication. There mere act of saying it can be interpreted roughly as "I am willfully sabotaging real communication in order to shorten this conversation."

Though an understandable novice's error, and as helpful as it often seems to shorten break-up conversations, the problem with this lie is that the liar believes it's a lie, while the listener knows it's true.

The positive effect of this "lie" is that listeners can roll their eyes as they walk away, congratulating themselves on having just gotten rid of someone who would say something so inane, so cluelessly.


"The dog ate my homework."

As a joke: Say this anytime no one is talking about homework. Be persistent: The fourth or fifth time, it will become funny.

For real: The classic didn't-do-your-homework line, this lie has one fatal flaw: So what, even if it's true?

You should've done it over again.


"...I swear!"

As a joke: Add this to the end of a sentence whose assertion has never been called into question.

For real: This lie, like others, reveals itself in the saying. Substituting "I'm lying to you right now!" for this phrase does not change the communicated content.

Local Trivia: See under Freezing over, Hell

I looked out the window of the Goodwill on Sunday and saw what looked like a serious snowstorm.

"Is that snow?" I asked incredulously, my voice betraying apprehension.

The cashier glanced out the window and paused a second, then went back to wrapping my "bric-a-brac" (as the cash register categorized it).

"No," she said. "That's pollen."

She was right, but still -- it was eeries to walk out into the hot sun with white stuff swirling around me.

Local Trivia UPDATE: Local City still like E.T. game

In a plot twist anticipated by loyal moviegoers -- and Democrats -- the nefariousness of the Republican E.L.G.O.A. (aka mayor) has been revealed!

The $3 million deficit was the result not of the state reneging on promised education funds, but of bad budgeting by the mayor at the beginning of the year.

The mayor budgeted $72.5 million for education coming from the state, despite irrefutable evidence that the state would not allocate this much to Local City public education. Last year, the state gave $64 million. This year, the state raised that amount by what Our Hero Tru-worthy said was an unprecedented percent increase, to $70.

The fault, in other words, is in E.L.G.O.A.'s budget.

This is what O.H. Tru-worthy meant when he claimed mismanagement, and the source of the tiff during which one alderman was told to "rot in hell."

Indeed, this is like the inevitable scene where the supposed father-figure reveals himself to be the evil mastermind behind the "getting-rid-of-Our-Hero" plot the whole time. It happened in Ella Enchanted; it happened in Iron Man; it happened in Local City.

Sadly, unlike in the movies, blasting E.L.G.O.A. off the face of the earth (though reluctantly, and thus morally) or allowing him to be done in by his own poisonous ambition won't ameliorate the situation. O.H. Tru-worthy, sidekick Surewould and the rest of the band of merry aldermen are going to have to deal with this mess, almost certainly by extracting the funds from the Fund Balance account.

I guess that's the main difference between politics and action movies.

(I mean, Arnold is governor of California. What other differences could there still be?)

Can't sleep, virusware will eat me...

I'd been worried that the ads showing up on the top of my email account were the result of some uncanny spy-camming from the past -- Dr Pepper ads, for instance, abound, despite my not having had a single soda (with the exception of three sips of a new flavor sometime in February) since New Year's Eve -- but yesteday when I logged in, it was advertising me Father's Day gift discounts.

Well. Perhaps there's nothing to worry about after all.

Or perhaps the new killer Norton installation on William J. II, here, manages to plant red herrings in the path of my spy-bot advertisements.

Which means now I have to worry about the Norton, instead.