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.