The "I don't want your cat" story

I think it's about time I put this story out on cyberspace.

When I was young -- fifth grade or so -- my family had two cats. Tyler was allergic to them but could generally survive on Benadryl...until spring and the re-emergence of other allergens. It became an annual practice to try to get rid of our cats, who we loved, though we usually failed.

One year, after threats from our pediatrician, Mom got serious about getting rid of the cats: She put an ad in the local paper. It included our phone number and the relevant information about the cats, and indicated that they would be "free to good home."

That's when the calls started.

These were not typical calls from people faking an interest in our cats and then never showing up, or giving themselves away by asking if our refrigerator was running and then giggling maniacally before hanging up. Instead, these calls were from a woman -- by her accent, a Puerto Rican woman -- who, as soon as the phone was answered, would immediately begin to scream "I don't want your cat!" at whoever had picked up.

We were baffled.

"Well, we don't want you to have our cats," we said, trying to reason with her. (Certainly we wouldn't have put our beloved cats in the custody of this strange screamer, even if she had wanted them.) She did not or could not listen, and usually hung up after making her cat-related feelings known.

This continued for several days.

Finally, we got a call from a nice old lady who was willing to take both cats -- a stipulation we had made in the ad -- and could come pick them up the next afternoon. We kids were heartbroken and spent as much time with the cats as possible (though this essentially guaranteed that the cats would be glad to go when the time came). When the next day arrived, we sadly gathered up the cats, their litter, their food, their toys, and waited for the doorbell to ring.

It did, and Mom went to the front door.

To be greeted not by a little old lady, but a detective.

He had been hired, he said, by the "I don't want your cat" woman, to investigate a series of prank calls.

Wait. We were confused.

She was investigating her own prank calls?

Apparently, the "I don't want your cat" woman had been receiving calls in the middle of the night, at all hours, for weeks. The most recent set of calls had been regarding our cats, which the prankster insisted this woman take, and our phone number had shown up on her caller ID. She had finally called us in frustration, trying to get us to stop the campaign of harassment.

Well, we said to the detective, we don't know anything about that.

He asked a few more questions and thanked us for our time, then left. The "nice old lady" had been a ploy he had used to get our address and know when we would be home; she didn't really exist.

So we kept the cats for another year, and Mom never placed another classified ad.

Her phone number is now unlisted.

We never heard from the "I don't want your cat" lady again.

Movie Review: Smokey and the Bandit, 2

(UK: "Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again")

The perfect tagline for this movie would have been "All the fun and thrills of NASCAR without any of the heady intellectualism."

It was that good.

From the very first frame, Smokey and the Bandit 2 promises to be all action, no exposition. We join our heroes -- or no, some other people, actually -- in the air above some kind of rally attended by well-dressed, clearly Southern ladies and gentlemen, who are gathered around the caboose-end of a stationary train. Two men in a plane, apparently a bomber dating back to WWI, and presumably high above the train (there is no establishing shot), dump buckets of shit into the air to fall onto the crowd (apparently) below. So goes the opening proposition of what (according to my mom) proves to be the best sequel to Smokey and the Bandit ever made: "Shit falling on people is funny."

The shitfall is followed soon after by another plane ride, this time taken by other people we don't know -- the ones the shit has fallen on, probably -- who dump red paint from a cropduster over a party of equally (exactly equally) well-attired garden party guests. Some ten minutes later, if we listen closely, we can deduce that the feuding parties are Texas gubernatorial candidates who are trying to earn the endorsement of the current Texas governor, who declares that he will not endorse either of them (due to their shenanigans). Luckily (for the movie), one set of candidates overhears the governor then insisting that he must get a shipment from Miami to Dallas in only nine days, or else.

Enter the Bandit.

Bandit's truck-driver pal "Snowman" is commissioned by the governor-hopefuls to get the Bandit to drive (with) the cargo from Miami to Dallas for a payout of half a million dollars. Snowman finds the Bandit drunk in a hotel room and gives the longest speech of the movie, which serves as a frame for every "man, that guy is drunk" gag invented before 1980. Bandit belches, stumbles, is unable to articulate even the simplest response; after a few seconds of this, the performance annoys the savvy viewer...but it continues. In fact, it continues so long that it becomes funny again, the way that Sideshow Bob stepping on those rakes in "Cape Feare" comes back to funny. (Or, in the case that you don't appreciate "man that guy is drunk" gags initially, it becomes funny for the first time.)

The Bandit's love interest from the first movie, again at the altar with Junior, the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, leaves in the middle of her wedding (when the preacher picks up a phone placed to the side of the altar, then insists that she take the call because "it's long distance") to join Snowman in helping the Bandit back to his Trans-Am-driving feet. They put him through a Rocky-style montage that involves him using one of those machines that's supposed to vibrate fat away, and he's ready to hit the road.

No one ever asks what makes the Bandit, who drives a Trans-Am and not an 18-wheeler, necessary. It appears to be a complete, bald-faced contrivance.

Over the course of the movie, which I won't recount scene-by-scene here (in order to not ruin it for you), the following plot points are also contrived: the cargo turns out to be an elephant; the elephant requires medical attention, which is provided by an "Italian gynecologist" who is left behind by an ambulance at a refueling station and gets the elephant drunk on Italian wine (from which we see no fallout); the elephant is, of course, pregnant; Sheriff Buford T. Justice, whose jurisdiction is apparently infinite, chases the Bandit and Snowman across three states, meeting Mean Joe Green along the way and having his car destroyed in a fall off a bridge being pulled up; the Bandit becomes the love interest of aforementioned elephant; Sheriff Justice calls in his Canadian relatives, named Gaylord (exactly as it sounds) and Reginald (who [for no discernible reason] comes in singing an opera duet with an unidentified woman who rides along in his police car), to help capture the Bandit; trucks and police cars clash to predictable end in the middle of a desert mesa, in what can only be described as a trucker revenge-orgy; the Bandit and Snowman get away from Justice but are waylaid by the elephant's giving birth; the Bandit eventually wins the girl by caring more about the elephant (her tears are like people tears!) than finishing the run.

Now, movies that use Deus ex machina contrivances to sew up otherwise ordinary or reasonable plotlines are annoying; we get the impression that the writers just weren't trying hard enough. It's a cop-out.

Smokey and the Bandit 2, however, is comprised so completely of contrivances that it cannot possibly be considered a betrayal of a reasonable universe. Reason simply does not exist in this movie.

The writers prove their mettle in their dedication to absolute absurdity by leaving plot points dangling left and right -- not one gets tied up by the end, in fact; the two elephants are hitched in chariot-style circus carriers to the back of the Trans-Am -- as though to say "We don't have time for plot or explaining things or making any kind of sense! We're making a movie!" This kind of exuberant disregard for all reason can only be respected -- respected and laughed at -- the way one would respect a particularly talented snake-oil salesman. You don't actually buy what he's selling, but you like listening to his spiel, despite yourself.

After a certain point, in fact, I began to wonder if the writers were making fun of us, the viewers, in the way one feels Monty Python's (incomparable) Flying Circus abuses its audience. "How much will they put up with?" you can almost hear them asking each other, giggling, enraptured. "Let's see if we can add something else! Ooh! Fart joke!! That's a good one!!"

I can't wait to see what they came up with for Smokey and the Bandit 3 (1983).

I think we all learned something, here.

Last Friday, on an overnight, the girl I stay with -- the one featured in the post "I don't want your X-K for now" -- called me downstairs because she had "broken the TV." I worried that she had thrown the remote at it in frustration, loosening a cable connection or finally shattering the CRT screen.

What she had actually done was to press the button bringing her to pay-per-view, then hit "OK," resulting in a charge of $12 and explicit lesbian porn showing up on her television.

It took about five minutes for me to figure out how to turn it off while she waited in the kitchen, during which time many of my secret questions about lesbian sexuality were answered.

As for the girl, who was penitent and somewhat traumatized, I trust she will avoid pressing unfamiliar buttons in the future.

Our Government Makes Me Sick

Last year, and the year before, I sold the use of my body to rich and willing men.

Just my stomach and my brain, though.

And they were psychiatrists, working on research at the National Institutes of Mental Health.

I started on medical studies because I was a volunteer earning a stipend of $50/month, and had noticed an ad in the free daily Express newspaper that comes with a morning metro train ride. The screening calls making sure of my eligibility took place, awkwardly, at work, where I stretched my office’s phone cord to its limit to try to get some privacy. When I had been approved, the NIMH sent a complimentary taxi service to pick me up for a preliminary physical exam and psych eval, and said they would contact me when a relevant study came up.

One did, not long after. I had told the overseeing doctor that I would not be willing to take any drugs, experimental or otherwise, and my handlers assured me that I would not be taking any, here.

There would be pills, of course – but they would be harmless amino acids, the building blocks of life, the essential parts of protein that your body encounters every day. I agreed that that would be fine with me, and they signed me up.

That first study, on tryptophan depletion, went quite well, despite involving the ingestion of no fewer than 76 pills (and possibly more) on each occasion; I went in two separate times, once for placebo and once for the “real” pills – double-blind, of course – and each time completed a computer task while strapped into an MRI. The task was to watch the computer screen, reflected onto a mirror immediately above my eyes, for a flash of yellow dots, followed by a delay and the flash of a single yellow dot. If the single dot was in the same position as any of the dots in the initial flash, I was to press the first button on the button box; if it was in a new position, the second button.

This was a boring task, and I was bad at it.

Still, they paid me for following protocol, not for succeeding at strange yellow-dot-flashing tasks. And they paid me well.

So when they called again a month later for a study involving amygdala response to emotional stimuli – and this one not even involving pills – I agreed to do it.

This time, the MRI task was to memorize two “target faces” and then identify, again by pressing the first or second button, whether the faces shown in a random sequence were one of the target faces or not. The real purpose, of course, was to study the amygdala’s response to the emotions shown on the faces of the randomly sequenced images, not to test a subject’s aptitude for remembering faces. All of the studies were like that: apparently about one thing, but secretly about something else.

Several months went by before I got another call, but then I got three. I was in another MRI study, a PET scan study, and finally, the long and terrible second amino acid study that ended my tenure as a government guinea pig.

This study was testing the effect of tyrosine, a different amino acid, and I had wrongly assumed that it would be similar to the first, almost pleasant, study I had done.

Instead of pills – of which there would have needed to be over 100, the handlers assured me – this study involved an amino acid drink. Orange had been pre-selected as my flavor. I shudder even now, remembering it, though I had no previous aversion to orange.

The drink was brought to me in a giant Styrofoam cup, and was foamy and gritty at the same time, a crazy orange – the hue that orange cotton candy would be, if it existed. I needed to drink 18 oz. of the cocktail within about half an hour in order to allow my body to digest it before the MRI scan. The first half or two-thirds were okay – the drink was bitter, but manageable – but after that, every sip was a trial. I watched hospital cable in an attempt to distract myself from the dreadful knowledge that I would need to swallow more.

I did eventually finish it.

This is the point in the story where the squeamish should stop reading.

After about an hour and a half, when the handlers assured me the drink should be gone from my stomach, I threw up. The nurse who had placed the red biohazard bucket next to me, saying “I always put it here, and no one’s ever been sick on my watch,” seemed dismayed as she removed the bucket and former contents of my stomach (which looked exactly as they had in the cup) from my bedside. The presiding psychiatrist came in to take a look.

“It’s not too much,” he said, evaluating the contents of the bucket. “We can probably still go ahead, if you’re up for it.”

I was feeling better and so agreed.

But the feeling better didn’t last. I got through the MRI tasks – a sort of “slot machine” game in which you won actual money, but through no fault of your own – and the mood scales, and went straight to bed when I got home. It was right before Christmas, so I left work early on my last day before vacation, and hitched a ride back to CT with a friend, pushing the memory of the hellish orange drink to the back of my mind.

I was unsure of whether I should go back for the second half of the study, but the handlers and doctors agreed: Everyone had some trouble one time, but no one had ever been sick in both halves of the study. I would definitely be fine if I came back to complete it.

Two months after the first half of the study, then, I decided to return.

I won’t give a moment-by-moment account of what happened to me then, as it’s almost too sickening for me to recount, let alone to inflict on innocent readers. Suffice it to say that I asked to be let out of the MRI, threw up once an hour for five hours, barely made it home in the taxi before being sick again, and went to bed immediately on my return. For two days.

Well, I thought, at least I was of some use to science.

The next time I spoke with my NIMH handlers, they were trying to convince me to participate in a drug study, which I refused.

“But what happened to the results of that other study, the one where I got sick?” I asked.

They knew exactly which one I meant; no one had ever gotten that sick before.

“Oh,” they said. “We’ve been having trouble with the results from that study. After you, everyone started getting sick. We can’t get accurate results if your body doesn’t digest the whole amount of amino acids.”

So it wasn’t even good for them.

Resurrection

Today, I go to church for the first time in six weeks. It’s Easter, and I have no excuse not to.

Still, I am uncomfortable, feeling discontented and alien and alone. I sit down in the first seat I see, near the back entrance where I came in – late, because I had decided at the last minute to go to the first service, then dawdled over breakfast and getting ready – and look up at the giant projected praise chorus, which is unfamiliar. This is not a surprise, considering my absences: eight years gone, then sporadic attendance at best. This congregation is one I hardly know at all.

I sing along, though not loudly, and let my gaze wander over the people also singing – then stop, on a man who looks, from the side, exactly like my high school English teacher.

But Mr. Caswell has been dead for three years, and it had been at least two before that since I had seen him. He died of cancer, probably lung cancer although I don’t know for sure – he was a smoker – and before I left for my second year in China, in a hotel room outside of L.A., I had written him a last letter. It was a meaningless letter, full of trivia and half-finished reflections on the previous year, because I didn’t know how to write what I meant.

I still don’t know how to write what I meant. Not without falling back on clichés.

The man who is not my teacher moves differently than Mr. Caswell had, his joints looser and his motions more fluid. The effect is obscene, as though someone else were wearing a Mr. Caswell suit. I turn away.

I remember, though, the afternoons after school and finding myself again in Mr. Caswell’s room, sitting there while he graded or talked with someone else, never quite sure what I was doing there, never quite sure whether I wished he would pay more attention to me. Sometimes he did, and we’d talk. He told me about his wife, also depressed, like my mom, and I would tell him about home.

He told me once about a Christmas – he was not religious, and neither was his family – when his family had gone out for Chinese food, he said, because it was the only restaurant open, and they were hungry. He loved it, being together, and the spontaneity. He loved it so much that every year after, he asked if anyone wanted Chinese food on Christmas. (But no one ever did.)

I wrote him letters practically every day, for over a year. I left them with him after class and he read them before the end of the day. I wrote, in one of the first, “I don’t know why I’m writing this to you.” He replied, writing in red pen on the edges as though grading an essay – and this was the only letter he ever replied to – “Kindred spirits, and I tell the truth.”

I am sitting in church, and I remember hitting the nine-year-old, and how the next day at school, Mr. Caswell came into my second-period chemistry class to make sure I was coming to his classroom for my study hall third period. I went, sat listless at one of the desks, put my head down, cried. Mr. Caswell sat in a student desk next to me and pulled mine over until we were face-to-face.

“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but one day, this will fade. You’ll forget. That’s how things are.”

“I won’t forget,” I said.

He was right.

But I did not forget him. He seemed surprised when I visited on college breaks, as though he had thought I would cease to exist on graduation. When I said the last time that I likely wouldn’t be back – the school had instituted a new policy requiring badges for visitors – he said “Well, of course,” as though it were natural that I move on. As though he weren’t the closest thing I had to a father – or as though he was.

He said that secretly, Jane Austen was his favorite author. (Mine was Thomas Hardy.) He said that secretly, he was an optimist. (I was doom-and-gloom.) He said that secretly, he had been scared out of his mind during student teaching. (I never tried it.) I rehearsed these facts until they became second nature; I let them change me. They are still changing me.

I do not know how to conclude my thoughts on him, my best teacher, even though he’s dead, even though the world of what I will know about him has become finite and limited and the possibility of anything new has been cut off. So I won’t. I will remember what he was like the way I re-read my favorite books – with a new eye every time, with new experiences to inform my understanding. I will re-imagine our conversations and the tone of his voice and the gravity with which he signed my senior yearbook. I will reinterpret the way he laughed when I broke a solemn moment in class with some casual off-hand remark, or when he handed me an “extra” copy of a book I had loved, or when he gave me his address so that I could survive the summer through writing letters. I will recall his spirit and I will resurrect him every time.

I leave church, irritated and grateful, and hurry home to change and go to lunch. It will be ham, and my mother will want to know where I’ve been these several weeks, and we will eat candy – more than we should – and watch movies, and I will leave earlier than expected to clean my house. I will wash clothes and vacuum carpets and mop and gather papers into piles and put boxes in the attic. I will listen to music and sing; I will eat a late dinner. I will, secretly, be optimistic about the future, consider the merits of Jane Austen, dwell on the fear of trying something new.

It will be a good Easter, and I will be content, and not alone.

PSA: Shout it out...No, really.

Shout spray, normally a laundry spot-cleaner, also works alarmingly well as a carpet cleaner.

Even on red Kool-aid stains that are two months old.

FYI.

Audio Mad-Libs: "I Want it That Way"

In the grand tradition of such BS-subverting classics as “Gregorian Chant Jenny From the Block” and the “Destiny’s Child carnival remix-o-rama,” here comes AUDIO MAD-LIBS!

Starring such diverse boy bands as THE BACKSTREET BOYS and N’SYNC, with a cameo from ENRIQUE HIMSELF!!!

These PITHY LYRICS will keep you on the EDGE of your SEAT!!!

RE-DISCOVER the SONGS of YOUR youth!!!

ALSO, learn dozens of NEW, REALLY TRUE FACTS!!!!! about your FAVORITE BANDS!

“I Want It That Way”
Backstreet Boys

1. N______________________

2. N—rhymes w/1___________

3. V______________________

4. N pl____________________

5. body part________________

6. Question word____________

7. health problem____________

8. N—rhymes w/7___________

9. time____________________

10. prep—position___________

11. V_____________________

12. pronoun________________



"I Want It That Way"

Yeah
You are my _________(1)
The one _____________(2)
Believe when I _________(3)
I want it that way
But we are two ___________(4) apart
Can't reach to your ___________(5)
When you ____________(3)
That I want it that way

Chorus: Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ____________(8)
Tell me _____________(6)
I never wanna hear you ________(3)
I want it that way

Am I your _____________(1)
Your one ______________(2)
Yes I know it's __________(9)
But I want it that way

Chorus

Now I can see that we're falling _____________(10)
From the way that it used to be, yeah
No matter the distanceI want you to ____________(11)
That deep down inside of ____________(12)
You are my __________(1)
The one _____________(2)
You areYou are, you are, you are
Don't wanna hear you __________(3)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(8)
I never wanna hear you _______(3)
I want it that way
Chorus

Did you know?
When the Backstreet Boys first formed their band, major competitors on the pop-teen-music scene included The Fronters, The Sidestreet Boys, The Back-Alley Boys, and The Around the Blocks!

Take THAT, heathen!

Typically, an Easter dinner involves ham.

It occurred to me to wonder if this was coincidence, or if the Christians who started it were intending to flaunt their disregard for Jewish (and Muslim) kosher laws.

But then, the answer seems pretty obvious.

CGU continues to leer.

Since I decided Wednesday that I would refuse the advances of CGU toward making me one of their L.A.-orbiting, culture-studying acolytes, I've felt the acceptance hanging on my shoulders like a drunken lecher at a bar.

Today I got the financial aid document in the mail, but not the acceptance packet. It's like said barfly pulled out his wallet to show a wad of fives, oblivious to the fact that I am not interested at all, money or no -- and that it's not even enough money to brag about. It's not convincing that they'll give me a third-tuition fellowship when the annual price tag is well over $30K, and it's a five-year degree.

I mean, I'm flattered and all, but at this point, all I want is the exit.

.gov/blog

The TSA has its own blog where travelers can snipe about various inconveniences and injustices perpetrated against them. ("When can we quit this charade and begin to carry our water and toothpaste with us again?" and "I think you seriously need to stop stealing toiletries from people" are just two stellar examples.) As far as I know, the TSA is the only government agency to start a blog.

It's pretty funny, actually.

According to the AP (I haven't read the entire blog):

"TSA learned that certain airports were requiring passengers to remove all electronics from carry-ons. TSA investigated and found out that local TSA offices set up the exercise. TSA had the exercises stopped and posted a "HOORAY BLOGGERS!" message.
"Blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night (Fat Tuesday of course)," the post read in language that was surprisingly glib for a government agency. (White says the blog is written in a style that is consistent with the blogosphere.)"

Saying this is "surprisingly glib" is like saying the Wayans brothers have gone "slightly awry" in their recent movie choices. (Or, hey, all of their movie choices.)

The success of the blog, in terms of helping people understand why things happen as they do and allowing for feedback that occasionally makes a difference, and in terms of showing a sense of humor in a government typically as funny as a child born with Tay-Sachs (that is, not funny at all), makes me wish other government agencies would follow suit.

After all, my Lenten activity of last year -- sending one-line letters to the White House, reading "President Bush: I completely disagree with you," each of the forty days (figuring it would be useless to detail my reasons, or even the subject of disagreement, since he's notorious for not reading even reports he commissioned) -- would have been so much easier on a blog. I could have simply logged on and pasted my sentence into the comments, obviating stamps, printing onto new sheets of unrecycled paper and envelope-licking.

Of course, the blog would be dull, dull, dull. "Stay the course," "hang in there," "just kidding about Harriet Miers": It would be the same stuff over and over. The most interesting thing about it would probably be searching out the grammatical errors -- and that only to weirdos who like that sort of thing.

So I would spend hours reading it, in other words.

The TSA does delete some comments from its blog, but only if they "contain foul language, threats, attacks, or require TSA to divulge sensitive information." If FEMA had its own blog, it would likely have to lift the ban on foul language.

There's a risk that government agency blogs, if universal, would quickly be squeezed of all their surprising glibness by the only thing produced rapidly and in great quantity by the feds: regulations.

Still, I suspect that if every agency had its own blog, at least half of them would be funnier than SNL is now.

All-Bran with Extra Fiber

You were either lying then, or you're lying now, "All-Bran."

My life is not a chess game.

This is what I will do: When the acceptance packet comes from CGU, I will refuse it.

I will stay in Connecticut until the end of the year. I will spend time with my grandparents and my brother before he goes into the Navy. I will help my mother drive the truck she will rent to South Carolina, to live near him. I will apply to new graduate schools in the fall.

In 2009, I will move to Boston.

I will work in one of the regional non-profits, or adult ed schools that I found while job-hunting last fall. I will live near a dear friend and see her as often as possible. I will be equally close to my grandparents in Connecticut and my brother in Vermont. I will apply to MIT. I will apply to Harvard. I will take Chinese classes and eat Chinese food. I will fail to attend church at least two out of every three weeks. I will complain about traffic and transportation and pollution and litter. I will not be living in New York. I will be miserable, and joyful, and pained, and anxious, and adoring. I will be free. I will be constrained by my choices.

But they will be mine.

GOD HAS DONE IT AGAIN

I found this subject line on an email that, for some reason, went to my bulkmail folder. I didn't read through enough of it to see what God had to do with my winning (yet again) money from a dead Nigerian relation, as I think it's pretty obvious: God must be involved when statistics go this awry. I mean, that's my fifth Nigerian relative to die this month.

In other news, news that I dread telling, I got accepted to a grad program. This, I suspect, is also God's doing, since God knows just how to piss me off.

Now I have to make a decision. Honestly, I hadn't considered that when I sent the applications in, and I find myself at a loss as to how to go about it. This isn't one of those regular decisions, like what to eat today (which I so often answer with "nothing," anyway) or what to wear (which I never answer with "nothing" -- sorry) or whether to watch a movie or read a book or take a nap. This is one of those life-altering, nothing-will-be-the-same-again, what-do-you-really-want-here, where-do-you-see-yourself-in-ten-years-type decisions. It snuck up on me. Even when I got the acceptance email last week, I didn't think much of it.

Until I went to New York this weekend and hung out with my lovely friends, who are a mere two hours away, and who will still be in roughly the same places next year (NYC and Boston, anyway). And had such a great, relieving time that I couldn't imagine not being able to see them again for months at a go.

And I thought about my life right now, which is pretty satisfying, and how much fun I'm having being a fake (that is, unpaid) copy editor, and going on spur-of-the-moment road trips, and how my schedule is nice even when my job is stressful.

Then suddenly, I panicked. As though the fact that I was having fun meant that I was living my life immorally, I felt I needed to move across the country to go to grad school -- despite the fact that I applied there mainly because its deadline was Feb. 1, and that I had originally only intended to apply to schools in New England (Pennsylvania at the farthest), and that I don't know whether I want to work in the cultural studies field long-term (but can't think of anything more flexible or fun to study), and that it costs over $30K a year, and despite that I think I'd hate L.A. The honors-student, anal-retentive, I-hate-joy side of me started kicking regular-me's ass. And that bitch is tough.

The trouble is that in my mind, God is always on the side of the type-A personality. The strident moralizing of the evangelical church fits in well with the strident moralizing of the control freak; I am a recovering evangelical and control freak, so I am particularly susceptible to the foibles of both.

The other trouble is that I don't want to be wasted; I want to live a meaningful life. I just can't figure out what that means in practical terms, anymore.

Does it mean moving to L.A. and learning how to criticize (even more) popular culture and what it does to our brains?

Does it mean moving to Boston and working for one of those regional adult ed nonprofits I found while job-searching last fall, and being near friends?

Does it mean staying here in Connecticut to be with family?

I've always thought of intelligence as my primary quality, to which everything else was a distant second. I'm smart. I've always been smart. So I should get a doctorate.

But I've opted-out since college. I've chosen other courses, and they haven't been bad. I've done and seen and learned things I never would have if I had gone straight back into academia. And I like some of those things. I like some of them a lot.

What I don't like is all this pressure. If I decide incorrectly, I'm afraid of being cut off from my own soul, and that would be worse than any practical consequence. But which one is right? They all feel, potentially, like versions of hell. These are the options provided me by the supreme deity?

That God -- he's a wily devil.

Unsolicited Advice

You should really get a haircut. Seriously.

QWERTY verse

I have long thought – for years – that contemporary poetry analysis should include a physical component: studying the movement of the poet’s hands on the keyboard.

The qwerty keyboard was invented in order to make typing more difficult, so that typewriters (the people) wouldn’t jam up their typewriters (the machines) by typing too quickly. All the most common letters have to be typed with the weaker left hand, and their placement is difficult and inefficient. Punctuation is, for some reason, included on the main part of the board, but numbers aren’t. When you think about it, qwerty is weird.

But everyone got used to the format, and now it’s standard, despite the practical limits of a metal bar striking paper being eliminated.

This strikes me as being a poetic sort of progress. It’s certainly not a practical one.

There have been movements to produce and popularize a more efficient keyboard system, now that we have only screens to worry about, but they seem to fail as badly as the doomed-from-the-start Esperanto. Some people bother to learn it, but most don’t; it seems natural now, this bizarre setup, and making it more efficient seems crass and strange.

I find that I think of my hands differently when I’m typing than when I’m doing anything else. I am typically right-handed, using the left only as a stabilizer or guide, except when I’m typing. Then my left hand becomes familiar and useful. My right hand becomes the outcast, relegated to o and k and j and semicolons. It’s a small but persistent shift in my thinking, and it happens automatically.

And there are times when I find myself typing things out in my head – things I might say in conversation, or the content of signs, or headlines, or quotes I remember – and thinking through the interaction of my two hands, as though they reply to each other through striking different keys. As though they’re talking.

So sometimes, when I read poetry, I imagine what it was like to type out the words, to hit enter, to add and delete and add punctuation, what the poet’s hands were saying. I wonder what effect it has on a poet’s psyche to delete permanently, to remove from a screen rather than strike off of a paper. I wonder how many poets actually use computers to write, and how many fearfully or stubbornly or gratefully stick to plain paper and a pen. I wonder if they consider whether their words are graceful, in terms of the movements they encourage, as well as how they sound read aloud, or how their shapes look on the paper.

Maybe there should be a poetry that is based on the idea of movement, like a dance of writing. It wouldn’t have to make the same kind of sense as a sonnet or a villanelle – it could be mostly about harmony between sounds and appearance and motion. Instead of reading it, we could practice it, treat it like a piano score instead of a book. We could make typing – its strange anachronisms intact, in the midst of practical technological advancement – into a kinetic art.

Or not.

But I think it’s worth some thought.

My Job is Revelation.

When I was little and an avid Bible-reader, I would occasionally sit down with the good book and open up to one of my favorite chapters, and read for awhile.

The two books (of the Bible) I can remember reading as a fifth-grader are Job and Revelation.

Both books have apocalypse in common, which is what starts me thinking on this topic now, when my dreams have become filled with tribulations and end-times, and I think that was part of the appeal. Job undergoes a terrible personal transformation, a complete negation of his life before God intervened (or let the devil intervene, I suppose, but let's not argue semantics); the churches and the world-at-large undergo an equally total annihilation and rebuilding in Revelation. When I was in fifth grade, my family was just beginning its apocalypse; I think I wanted a manual.

I can remember thinking, reading Revelation, that if this ever happened, if the horsemen ever descended and began to destroy the earth, I would hide under my desk. It was at least as silly a plan as living in the creek would have been, if my mother had been finally taken away, but it comforted me just by virtue of being a plan, period. I can't remember a time before I sought to prepare for contingencies.

In college, I remember crossing the street with Sharon, and seeing a backhoe on a flatbed that was hitched to another truck. I realized suddenly that without thinking, I had planned three escape routes in case the flatbed came unhitched and the backhoe rolled down the steep hill we were walking across. It was automatic, that I did this. I worried that it was a sign.

It would have been a sign that I still wasn't normal, which was the goal.

My mother has always had a way about her, the ability to warp reality and turn reasonable events and statements into insanity. Growing up, I could hardly tell the difference between what she said was true, and what was objectively true -- which is the case for all small children, so nothing special. But it continued beyond the point where I could see differences -- between her ways and others', her world and the real one -- and split my focus between the two. She created a kind of fantasy land, in which we were the ogres and she the maligned saint, or the imperious queen, or the put-upon, unrecognized, cinderellian princess.

We lived in both of these worlds, this one that she had created, and the one where we went to school and to church and had friends.

I learned to translate, probably before I could read, between these worlds. By high school, I was an expert. I could recount a story from home to outsiders, knowing exactly what sorts of words to use to convey the sense of the injustice or offense my mother had caused, despite her most spiteful, vindictive behavior making sense almost exclusively in the realm of her fantasy.

She helped, of course, by using English to abuse us: "You're lazy and manipulative," she said when I didn't clean the bathroom to her always-fluctuating standards; "you're a leech," she said when I talked on the phone with my best friend; "you can't manipulate me into saying that," she told Tyler when he asked her if she loved us.

Really, really ridiculous stuff. So radically ridiculous that even the most practical real-world dweller could see how stupid and wrong it was. This needed almost no translation.

I argued with her almost constantly, and epically. My arguments were never short; somehow, I always expected her to see how wrong she was, if only I could come up with the perfect way to explain. I would fight until she said something so outrageous that even she had to see its flaws: Once, after probably two hours of loud debate, she finally said (in answer to "Why won't you trust anybody?"), "I don't trust people because if you do that, they might want you to do things for them, like wash their car."

I waited, watched her face for any sign of recognition.

Nothing.

But there were things that couldn't be explained to outsiders without serious effort: chores, and why they were such a struggle; why "not doing chores" could mean anything from forgetting to deciding not to, to doing them but not "good enough," to Mom just being in a bad mood; how a person's whole self-worth could be tied up in chores; what it was like to be grounded for months, for no reason (literally, no reason); what it was like to have her barge into your room, yelling because you had been maliciously keeping her from the phone -- when she had never told you she was waiting to use it. These required stories and metaphor to be understandable to others.

There were other things that could never be explained. They needed to be translated into words or events with the closest available meaning in the real world, to encourage appropriate feelings and responses in real-worlders. Real-world people saw, when it started, that she was admitted to one psychiatric hospital after another, sometimes for weeks at a time. They saw that we were without our mother, guests in others' homes, and separated, with our schedules disrupted, with our family in pieces. They felt sorry for us, for that.

They felt sorry for that instead of for the times we were home and together, when it was worse. They felt sorry because of the hospitals, so I let them.

Mom being home and going to bed earlier every night, asking me to put the boys to bed, not making dinner, laying prone on the couch for hours, became Mom going into the hospital.

Mom being so angry she would choke out insult after insult, became Mom going into the hospital.

Mom accusing us of trying to manipulate her in irrational paranoia, became Mom going into the hospital.

Eventually, Mom passing out on the street, altering her medication, calling me crying from a psych ward, Mom asking, absurdly, what cars were in the driveway or where we had put her "special pencil, " Mom needing help to get to the bathroom, Mom driving while drugged, Mom taking the handsets off the phones when she went out so we couldn't call anyone, Mom hissing in my ear that if we talked to DCF we would be separated forever "and I would be glad," all became Mom going into the hospital.

People could understand hospitals. Hospitals were bad.

But I can remember coming home from eighth grade and approaching our back door, seeing the handle before I could reach it, holding my breath: If it turned, she was home, and it was another day with her. If it didn't, she had been admitted again, and I would need to call people to stay with, and get the boys' clothes together, and make some biscuits (the only thing I could make) for dinner. Both options were terrible. But I never breathed a sigh of relief when it turned.

My guidance counselor from the eighth grade kept us at his house a few times, after we had exhausted Grandma and Grandpa's ability to watch us, and most church people's, and I described this to him once, this coming home and turning the handle, blithely, as a small point of conversation. He turned to me from the driver's seat with shock and a kind of horror on his face.

"I always knew when it was coming," I said, in explanation. "When she was getting closer to going in again."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" he asked, and I was taken aback.

"Well who would I tell?" I answered.

When she would go in was home-world knowledge. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone outside home would believe it. Tyler knew. Spencer probably knew, though he was very young. But I didn't expect anyone outside the house to notice the subtle changes in her voice, her appearance, her schedule, her speech. And it never occurred to me to ask for help, even when I noticed. I just started packing our overnight bags.

Staying at other people's houses was like a small personal apocalypse every time. Everything you had and had been was exchanged for something new. Each home had a different smell, a different layout, a different type of family, a new dynamic. Some people treated us like family; some people treated us like guests. I watched them from a polite distance, like an anthropologist, and imitated.

These erasures of us, of our home, annihilated the whole fantasy-world, at least for a time. They were revelatory. They were, in a sense, grand-scale.

And there was always the possibility, always disappointed, that this time when she came out, she would actually be better -- this time, the medications would work, and she would be cheerful and normal and praise us and love us and stay with us. Maybe this time.

It never happened. She never recovered completely, though she stopped going into the hospitals, and last year when I was finally told her diagnosis, I could see why. I immediately began checking books out of the library and researched, hoping to recognize us in these real-world volumes, in real-world terms. We were there. One book described my experience -- the fantasy-world, the alternate reality, the apparent mind-reading, the compensating, the translation, the metaphor, the contingency plans, the invisible and inevitable apocalypses.

I saw that I would never be normal. It was too late for that.

But what I am left with, now, from this past, is a sense of magic: That is, an understanding of the fantasy worlds that people can live in, and how they affect us. I empathize automatically. I see the truth about people. I see the complications and the greys. I translate. I explain. I understand.

My job is to reveal -- my clients to the community, to me, to themselves, out of their fantasy-worlds so they can see the real one, too.

And that is why I'm good at it.

Squirrel Thanatopsis

Yesterday in New York City, Carl and Sharon and I talked and laughed, and Carl told a story about a time a squirrel jumped onto his pant leg. I told about the time Tyler went to put the trash in the dumpster and a squirrel jumped out onto his arm, and clung there in terror as he tried to fling it off. We laughed some more.

But it reminded me of these dreams I've been having, apocalyptic-type dreams, all involving small animals. In the most recent one, several towns were putting on what amounted to an indoctrinatory political play, each town casting the parts with native citizens -- many of whom were somehow woodland creatures. I went to see another town's performance, two nights after my own town had performed it, and watched the rabbits and ducks and squirrels act out the plot under a broiling, dark sky. In my dream, I almost began to cry: Several of our cast members, ducks and squirrels, mostly, had died while we showed our version of the play, and the bitterness of the loss was still fresh.

Today, on the way to work, I saw a squirrel running across the road in front of me and didn't think much of it, until I noticed how slowly it was going. I slammed on the brake and my car screeched to a halt, leaving tire marks I could see on the road, two feet from the crossing animal. The squirrel dragged itself the rest of the way across, using its tiny front paws like a butterfly-swimmer, its back legs hanging uselessly behind it.

I continued down the road to pick up my girl, unsettled, and wondering: What happened to that squirrel? Was it a car? If it had been hit before, why did it seem to wait until I would almost certainly kill it before starting out across the road? What does that squirrel think about life, about its life? Does it remember what it was like, before?

It's only a matter of time for that squirrel. How can it even climb a tree?

So consider this my elegy -- premature, but sincere.

Carte Blanche 1: "Have you read...what the hell is wrong with you...should I go into religious studies?"

"Have you read Cornell West's "Democracy Matters"? if you haven't, what the hell is wrong with you? it's the best book i've met since college, by far. anyway, since west's job title "professor of religion and philosophy" at harvard, is pretty much the best one i could imagine, and since the u of m rejected me, should i go into religious studies?"

Technically, I should point out that this is three questions, but because it is the first carte blanche question, and because they are related, I will answer them all. (Magnanimous of me, isn't it.)

First: I have not read Cornell West's "Democracy Matters." Yet.

Second: Sometimes I have no &#*%ing clue what's wrong with me, but I can speculate, if that would help.

In the matter of Cornell West's "Democracy Matters," I haven't read it for probably the following two reasons:
1. I've never heard of it before.
2. I have over 1300 (other) books in my library...er, bedroom.

In the matter of what the hell is wrong with me in every otherwise, I can tell the following story -- with which you, englshmjr18, will relate: I am coming out of a long winter.

That is, a three-year winter.

My internal cycles used to go two-years-neutral, one-year-good, and by that count, last year should have been the good year -- but it wasn't. (Oh, how it wasn't.) My work, which I had loved the first year, fell completely apart as the school moved to a new location across town (to which I had to take the bus, adding an hour and a half to a nine-hour workday) and became more corporate than I could really put up with. We went from having walls painted multiple colors and the roof falling in -- an atmosphere I liked -- to cubicles and ordering matching furniture that took four months to arrive. The trend was upsetting to me, to say the least, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. (Though I did still love teaching, and the students.)

This might explain why last year wasn't a good one, but when I say "good," I mean "intense." As in, significant and difficult and engaging, and a lot of bad things are all of those. I've never had a "good" year that wasn't difficult. Last year could have been intense, and I could have been engaged, but I wasn't.

I don't know what happened, there, why I missed the year; but that's less surprising when you consider that I never knew the reason for the 2/1 sequence to begin with. It just seemed to be the way things were for me.

So this year, I'm thawing. It's difficult; I feel off-kilter much of the time. It makes it hard for me to be coherent and focus. It makes things that should be easy or natural for me, nearly impossible. I say truly idiotic things every day, and cringe. (Much of my blog is littered with apology for these things, though it may be difficult to find.) And I am tired; I have moved across national or state borders four times in the past five years and left behind friends each time, friends that will never be all in the same place, and so I know I will always be missing someone. My job is difficult but instinctual for me because of how I grew up; it doesn't engage my brain, much. I was reading a book a week the past three years and watching movies as though I were entering the information into a database. I stopped writing, that whole time, thought I had given it up. I was like an automaton. Until two months ago, I hadn't listened to music in probably a year.

Life was easier, if not satisfying, on auto-pilot. I want most of the time to go back into withdrawal, I feel my sharp edges and awkward movements so keenly. But I can't, because it won't help.

And anyway, all of you are out here.

Third: Why not?

Meeting New People

When I was little, I used to be shy. Tyler would get candy to sell from the Y, and we would traipse around the rich neighborhoods of our city selling $1 bars door to door. Mom trailed us in the car but never approached the homes (since kids selling candy is cute, but an adult selling candy is kind of pathetic). Tyler chatted with whoever would come to answer the bell or knock, always beginning with “Hi would you like to buy a candy bar to help support the YMCA daycamp?” delivered all in one breath, but ending up talking about other things, like the weather, or his Fagan league baseball team, or whatever the potential buyer wanted to talk about.

I stood mute through these conversations, contributing nothing. But I must have picked up a thing or two, because sometime in adolescence, I realized that I could do it: I could meet new people.

In fact, I can be excellent at meeting new people. I can be accommodating to the point of solicitude, friendly to the point of seeming genuinely nice, especially with people I wouldn’t normally get along with or can’t relate to. I’ve developed an ability to chat, and smile, and encourage, and to ask questions that indicate an appropriate level of interest. I can even be impressive, I’ve been told, in this area.

But it’s not the core version of me. It’s like a parallel-universe-Alicia. It’s an exploration of what I would have been like as an extrovert – like trying on a wig to see what you’d be like as a redhead. It takes a lot of energy to sustain this, especially when I’m still figuring out how to relate to the new people I’m meeting. Once it’s settled into “person X likes to discuss her pet” or “person Y believes in astral body projection,” I’m usually okay. We just talk about that topic incessantly for however long I know them.

Which is not often long for people with whom I carry on these types of conversations. They rarely go anywhere, very rarely break through into some real human connection.

This is not the case with people with whom I could be real friends. In fact, I identify potential real friends often by whether I switch over into solicitude upon meeting them. If I am still myself – sarcasm and awkward-skeptical foibles intact – it’s a good sign. Still, there’s that awkward phase to get through, as in all friendships, of trying to find some way of showing that you’re interested in being friends without being a pathological weirdo; I mess this up more often than I’d like to recall. (Possibly because I am a pathological weirdo, which is a difficult thing to hide.)

There are, however, even more potential obstacles, besides my absurd ability to say exactly the wrong things in exactly the wrong ways, which I retain well beyond the beginning of friendship. In my malleable, solicitous, meeting-new-people state, I can end up saying things or laughing at things or possibly doing things that are disagreeable to me, in an effort to be an agreeable and apparently sane person. I could, for instance, continually repeat a simple-but-false explanation for why I’m doing whatever I’m doing; to give a specific example, I was once instructed to go with a teammate in China to help a senior German woman fix her computer, despite my total lack of computer knowledge, and for a ridiculous reason. I could not tell her why I was actually there, as the reason was too complicated and would embarrass us all, so I continually repeated the slightly-less-embarrassing reason that I had wanted to see her apartment – and felt increasingly idiotic. Once I get into these situations, it’s almost impossible for me to get myself out. Later, I groan and wish never to be confronted by those people’s version of me again, which more or less precludes ever seeing them in the future.

It’s also nearly impossible for me to interact with people of different categories at the same time; if there is a real friend about, and a new person, I find it exceedingly difficult to attend to both. I often opt for ignoring the real friend until later, when I can theoretically explain, since this seems less rude than ignoring the new person – but they are equally rude in reality, and I almost never do explain, since I find this flaw embarrassing. Add to this that my offense is proportional to my desire to not-offend: the more I would wish to talk to the real friend, the more likely I am to talk to the new person, and vice-versa. I over-compensate in an effort not to be rude, thus ending up being much ruder than I would otherwise have been.

And then there’s my personal tradition of telling people more than they ever wanted to know, directly, which is mainly under control but does return with a vengeance every so often. This may be the most horrifying of all, since unlike with my other troubles, I can’t use the excuse that they just didn’t get to know the real me; the problem is that they did.

This is a baffling set of behaviors that causes me to wonder how anyone, ever, has decided to befriend me. (Crying, mainly. I burst into tears at some point.)

But the good news is – and I’ve been told this by more than one real friend – that I improve in the knowing. So don’t give up.

I’ll get better, I swear.

Confessions, V

A few weeks ago, I found a crack pipe in the back room at Pizza Hut. I know whose it was.

On my first day at the paper, I strongly suspected -- and suspect -- that someone was doing drugs in the first stall of the ladies' room. I don't know who it was.

When I was little, I deliberately made a friend cry and then suggested to her that she must be crying due to her body's attempt to rid itself of excess salt and not because of what I had said, because I didn't want to get in trouble.

Ninety-nine reasons to go to Agave Grill

When Deb and Jeff came up to visit a few weeks ago, I promised them a tour of northwest Connecticut, complete with old factory sightings and scenic routes through countryside. After stopping in Cheshire for hot chocolates from Greenwich Coffee – an independent coffee-shop offering “Mexican hot chocolate” and “Ancho Chile hot chocolate” as well as bubble teas – we headed north to Torrington, where we were to eat lunch.

It was a chilly day. This is important, because it helps to explain the grievous lapse in judgment to which I will soon admit.

We walked up the streets of downtown Torrington, looking for a place to sit and eat. There were a few places with local color, including a Nicholas Pizza (which appeared to have a little too much local color – as in, ties to the mob or some such) and a little café named after a Helen or a Hannah, but for some reason, we didn’t stop there. We headed back, instead, toward the strip-mall parking lot I had parked in, and decided to go to our back-up choice, the Ninety-Nine restaurant.

I had never been to a Ninety-Nine, though I knew it was a chain. But how bad could it be? I thought. All chains are basically the same. We won’t get anything great or unique or truly interesting, but we won’t get anything terrible, either.

But Ninety-Nine, by the end of lunch, impressed me with its ability to get almost every aspect of the bland, corporate chain-restaurant concept, wrong.

First, the menu made no sense, unless it had been designed around the idea of being moderately appealing to all of middle-class America. I ordered fish tacos, for instance (not very good, and the cilantro was horribly wilted and almost nonexistent); Deb ordered beef tips (clearly not the tips of anything, but steak, cut up); I forget what Jeff ordered – pork chops? – but I recall someone commenting on the chicken pot pie. What have these meals to do with each other? What sense of identity (even a corporate one) can be surmised from this?

The waitress, who was cheerful and bubbly, also brought us what seems to be Ninety-Nine’s signature, free appetizer: a basket of butter-flavored popcorn.

The food wasn’t very good. My fish tacos had clearly been made to suit my assumed “American” tastes, and Deb’s beef tips were large enough to necessitate cutting – but this was not nearly as ridiculous as her broccoli, which was plated intact, as in, one very large stalk of broccoli, the cutting of which ended in a gravy disaster for Deb’s sweater (which cleaned up miraculously well).

The décor was no help. Ninety-Nine had clearly, like all chain restaurants, imported sets of items to be displayed on the walls; still, there was no sense that the design teams inevitably called in for this purpose had any better idea of what should go where, or why, than a three-year-old scribbling in crayon on the hallway wallpaper.

None of the pictures or plaques or artifacts were hung crookedly. That was the up-side.

Here’s what they should have decorated with: bottles of beer. The reference to the song would have served several purposes, in addition to being the most clever decorating scheme a restaurant called “Ninety-Nine” could hope for. It would have warned us all about what to expect – a crass, slightly hick-town feel in a chain restaurant – and it would have added a sense of coherence to the theme. They could have made themselves into a brewery.

As it was, decorations seemed to have no common theme. Unlike at Pizza Hut, where large photos of Italy adorn the walls, or Chili’s, where there’s at least an effort at displaying southwestern memorabilia, looking at the objects on Ninety-nine’s walls was like looking through a trunk in your grandmother’s attic – in a bad way. There was one sign that made a saucy reference to Lizzie Borden’s school of etiquette, and many of the objects were made to look antique-American; but in the corner of the room, suspended from the ceiling, was a TV showing baseball spring training. What do sports have to do with Lizzie-Borden-type Americana? (This is a rhetorical question.)

The plaque reciting the creation story of the restaurant revealed that the incoherence likely dated back to the first, probably charming restaurant, which had (for no reason, or for personal ones) a horseshoe nailed around the name; thus, the horseshoe had become the corporate logo when the business became franchised.

I once visited Bird In Hand, PA, with my grandmother, and stopped at a barn sale. A man – possibly an Amish man – had died, and all of his things were being sold out of the barn in which he kept them. Fascinatingly, the man had kept what looked like every single newspaper he had ever read; the rest of his things offered similar insights into his character: LPs, old blankets, glass bottles from decades ago. I bought an old, empty bottle of Dr Pepper and one of 7-up, likely from the 70s (or whenever 7-up’s motto was “You like it. It likes you.”), which I still have. I was very happy with the barn sale, the items inside, and my purchase. I like these sorts of haphazard, idiosyncratic experiences.

But imagine that a corporation had noticed the popularity of the barn sale and decided to franchise it. Across the country, you would find “Amish Barn Sale” buildings going up, concrete but with stressed wooden facades to make them look authentic; inside, you would find novelty newspapers, probably sorted so that you could find your birthdate, and definitely overpriced. What had been a window into one man’s personal (packrat) habits would become a vehicle for corporate interests: that Dr Pepper bottle would be a Dr Pepper ad, as all “nostalgia”-based, ye-olde-style, mass-produced items are. Soon, “Amish Barn Sale” stores would be in the malls next to Abercrombies or Old Navys or Gaps. It would be disgusting.

We left Ninety-Nine and drove around the hills of Litchfield and Torrington and New Hartford, saw some old factories and a sugar shack, and went home.

The next day, having failed to drive to Boston in the several inches of overnight snow, we debated where to eat. I had recently noticed a new restaurant on the road-that-is-a-strip-mall, Queen’s St., in Southington; I had noticed it because it was an Agave Grill, the restaurant I had taken a friend to, in Hartford, right before she moved to Kyrgyzstan this fall. I had assumed that Agave was a single restaurant, and though seeing another instance of it made me suspicious of franchising, my friend and I had had a good time there, so I suggested that Deb, Jeff and I try it out.

When we arrived, the greeter informed us that there were “plenty of seats on the patio” – a joke, since the patio was covered in snow – and we laughed. When we sat down, our waitress, Michelle, came over and immediately enchanted us with her unselfconscious banter and apparent intelligence. She was so impressive, in fact, that Debbie suggested we hire her as a “consultant waitress”: “Oh, no,” Deb said, as though speaking to waitstaff at another restaurant. “We’ve brought our own waitress.”

The food was pretty good, well-plated and nicely presented. The atmosphere was coherent and low-key, allowing people to focus on each other rather than a crazy décor. They did not offer us popcorn.

As we left Agave Grill, satisfied with our experience as a whole and charmed by the staff, a man coming into the restaurant noticed Deb and I and said, as he swung wide the door, “Ladies” – as in, “I’ll hold the door for you.” As Jeff appeared behind us and came through the door, the man said “But not you,” pretended to let the door go, and laughed. We all laughed.

But we never did ask Michelle if she would free-lance for us.

Maybe next time.

Deborah Harbin contributed to the writing of this post.

The Emperor's New Roadwork

Yesterday, on I-84 East out of Waterbury, I – along with many other drivers – encountered construction trucks with giant yellow-lighted arrows mounted on the back, instructing us to shift one lane to the right, as the left lane would be closed. I obligingly moved into the rightmost lane and crept along as other cars drifted into the middle lane from the left, their various levels of frustration showing clearly in how tentatively (or viciously) they cut in front of other cars. About a mile later, the same thing happened again; orange dump trucks indicated that middle-lane cars should move to the right again, crushing us all into a slow and annoyed queue sure to stretch on longer than many of us could tolerate.

If I hadn’t been so busy making sure no one cut in front of me, this common suffering may have caused some fellow-feeling to well up in me – but alas, I was so engaged.

When we had passed the last construction truck, I – along with many other drivers – looked curiously to the left to see what mammoth undertaking was causing such a snarl in our already tangled traffic patterns, expecting to see a crew laying pavement, or a major accident, or a giant pit where the left lane used to be. Instead, I saw…nothing. No crew members with hardhats and orange reflective-taped vests; no chain-gang cleaning up litter or mowing highwayside grass; not even another giant orange truck. Traffic quickly moved over to fill the two previously banned lanes, drivers again sorting themselves into most frustrated (left), annoyed and confused (middle), and people who always drive the speed limit, anyway (right).

Several miles down the road, near the exit I would normally take to get home, a giant yellow-lighted sign mounted on an overpass alerted us to construction on Exit 34. Being familiar with this exit, I craned my neck (from the left lane) to glance at it as I passed: again, no construction whatsoever.

Today, again on I-84, I was waylaid at a different spot for what was becoming a familiar lack of roadwork, by orange construction trucks; I noted the sign for Exit 34 construction again, this time with the addition of trucks shifting traffic into the left lanes – a dangerous proposition at that particular point, where a left-exit merge to Rt. 72 makes changing lanes tricky even under the best circumstances. I turned off the highway before my usual exit, mainly to avoid seeing another example of completely nonexistent construction being done by no one.

Now, I have long been familiar with Connecticut’s tendency to experience what I call “phantom traffic,” particularly on I-84, in which traffic bottlenecks for no apparent reason. I am acquainted with hours of sitting outside Danbury waiting for the traffic jam to break up, only to find no original cause. I suspect that much of the blame falls on the drivers at the front of this pack who shift into the left lane and find themselves driving neck-and-neck, at roughly the speed limit, with the car to their immediate right, for miles; but I have no evidence of this. It is pure speculation. Whatever the cause, phantom traffic is a fact of life in Connecticut.

Is it possible that the state has noticed this tendency as well, and is trying to make it official policy somehow?

Like having a state bird (robin), a state tree (mountain laurel), or a state motto (“Qui transtulit sustinet”), perhaps Connecticut decision-makers feel a state traffic pattern (the bottleneck) – one of the most annoying, and thus most noticeable and readily associated with a state’s identity – would engender a sense of unity in CT residents. Perhaps they hope that we Conn-natives will feel a sense of fierce loyalty and even pride as we become jammed up with drivers who only enter our state in order to exit it – in transit to New York, or Boston.

“Take that,” we’ll think, “you lousy out-of-staters.”

Or perhaps this is Governor Rell’s ingenious plan: What better way to enforce her new platform on state troopers (pro), truck safety (pro), unsafe teen drivers (anti), and to create new jobs for people whose skill set includes driving orange dump trucks very slowly and occasionally standing on the side of the road, surveying traffic and chatting?

I have to drive 84 every workday, or else face the hellish red lights of downtown Southington on Rt. 10. I hope that whatever the reason for this trend, it extinguishes itself quickly and thoroughly, and that the powers-that-be end up feeling very, very ashamed.

Party Like It's 1999

I had a weekend that could only be properly captured on film if Samuel Beckett wrote the screenplay and Steven Spielberg directed.

It was that absurd.

On Sunday, my brother Tyler came down from Vermont with his fiancee to attend a wedding shower in their honor, attended by church members who would not be at the April wedding but wanted to celebrate. It was held at my grandma's house, and she and I were the hostesses. And my mother came, with my youngest brother, Spencer.

In case it's hard to spot, "my mother came" is the punchline here. But I should start with context: not from the beginning, which would take too long, but from the beginning of this particular absurdity.

The last year my family was all in one piece -- and this is a loose designation -- was 1999.

My mother kicked me out of the house after my first year in college, over chores. It was even stupider than it sounds and was, as most things are, secretly about something else. On the day I left, she followed me around the house asking why I was "rejecting the family" and "putting [her] through hell," and saying various insulting things about my character. (But this was nothing new.) The weekend following, she put all my things on the back porch and arranged to be gone when I picked them up. She hung up on me when I tried to call the boys, sent back letters I mailed, stood in the doorway laughing at me (literally, laughing) when I went to ask for my birth certificate. I was reduced to tears in front of the police officer that eventually showed up; I was reduced to tears by many, many things, but they were mostly tears of relief at being out. I lived with my grandparents, her foster parents, through vacations and summers until I left for China.

She kicked my brother, Tyler, out of the house after his second year in college, for equally ridiculous reasons. (She said he had put his name on her AAA membership.) He moved in with Grandma and Grandpa, too. My expulsion from the family had lasted some six months and been broken when I finally replied in anger to a series of hateful emails she had been sending me, but Tyler's lasted much longer. Most of us who knew Mom began to suspect that she would never speak to him again. By the wedding shower on Sunday, it was going on three years.

But something must have changed. I have no idea what it was. I had had several hours-long conversations with her since moving back here, about how she should reconsider her complete rejection of Ty, but she couldn't see that she might be wrong, might be interpreting events rather than relating "the real facts." She couldn't see that three years of estrangement was too vicious a punishment for any offense, let alone something as small as Tyler's. (Also nothing new: Once, Tyler was punished with two years of no television for not doing chores.) She wouldn't, or couldn't, budge.

Until she did, last week, as though a switch had been flipped, or everything that happened in the past three years had been erased. I've seen her do this before, on a smaller scale: When we were young, when she got upset, her face contorted with rage, and if I asked why she was angry, her face would change completely, become placid and calm, and she would say "I'm not angry." It was frightening.

It was a strain on her, being at my grandparents'. She had cut them off completely, too, first for housing us after we were excommunicated, and then last summer for letting Spencer, my youngest brother, see Tyler; I didn't expect them to ever have contact with her again. But she treated them the way she would treat anyone at the party.

I tend to believe this means she's angrier at everyone else than she admits, too.

We sat, the four of us family, me, my mom and two brothers, and talked and told stories about when we kids were little, and laughed. We took an "updated family photo." But the strain wore on her until she suddenly demanded to be taken home -- not fifteen minutes from now, after I cleaned up, but NOW. I drove her and Spencer home to their apartment, and continued down the street to mine.

I had a headache. I still have a headache.

This happens to me: that when I get what I want, I am overwhelmed by the conflict between the joy at getting it -- finally, finally -- and the sorrow of the memory of years without, years of missing. Every moment we sat laughing brought to mind weeks and months when we didn't. I can only embrace both at once; I cannot divorce the two. My mother cannot marry them.

And that is why apprehension blots out joy and sorrow. She has not changed, not fundamentally, and it's likely only a matter of time before this -- estrangement, rejection -- happens again.

At least now we can tell ourselves the bad times are likely to end eventually, too.

I can live with that.

Seer

Sometimes, like today when I look at the blank white sky, I see tiny radical movements, like the vibrating strings of string theory -- particles of floating, disembodied ether, what I imagine real sorcery would look like.
I know that this is because of a problem with my eyes, as hearing high ringing is the death of that tone for ears, and I worry that if I can see magic, I soon won't be able to see anything at all.

I know, this is a total cat-out.

Find your existential humour somewhere else today.

Thanks, Debbie and Jeff.

Virgoing to get you

My horoscope, with which I have become fascinated, reads in the Hartford Advocate, for last week:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “The moon asked me to meet her in a field tonight,” wrote mystic poet Hafiz (trans.). “I think she has amorous ideas.” You might soon feel a similar suspicion, Virgo. According to my reading of the astrological omens, seductive offers will be coming your way, and not just from the moon. Secret suitors may emerge from the shadows. Temptations could lure you toward the far ends of your imagination. The sheer profusion of invitations you’ll receive might make you giddily agitated.

I’m not sure how long these horoscopes are supposed to last – until next week? When they get replaced by the next horoscope? – but if this Rob Brezany is serious about his “reading of the astrological omens,” he might want to check his chart again.

First of all, “not just from the moon” implies that one of the “seductive offers” about to be received by anyone born between my birthday and Sept. 22, will actually be from the moon.

Sorry, moon. I’m not available for your sort of interlude. I know you, all shifty and waning, here one week and gone the next, and I’m not up for that sort of disappearing act.

And anyway, according to Hafiz, you’re not my type. I like men.

Secondly, the three sentences making up what is presumably the prediction for my week are strangely unrelated. I like the tentative wording – “may,” “could,” “might” – because it implies some level of humility on Rob’s part, but it frustrates an attempt to read this horoscope as a coherent narrative. Will all three happen, in order? Is there a cause-and-effect relationship, here? If the first one doesn’t happen, will the second or third? Presumably, the “temptations” of the second sentence are related to the “secret suitors” of the first and the “profusion of invitations” of the last, but how, exactly?

And what about setting? The secret suitors are coming from the shadows – which, by the way, sounds pretty ominous and creepy to me; I mean, why not just knock on my door, like normal people? Why be all Batman about it? – while I’m being lured to the far ends of my imagination – away from said suitors, or towards them? And where are they inviting me?

Because I don’t really go to bars or dance clubs or anything. I mean, I would rather spend time watching a movie or walking at the park or sitting in a coffee shop or going on a road-trip. So if they wanted to invite me to “go clubbing,” it wouldn’t impress me much.

I have to say, he was right about being agitated.

Thirdly, the prediction is so incredibly unlikely that thinking about it does, in fact, add an element of giddiness to my agitation – the way the rain of frogs at the end of Magnolia makes one feel a bit giddy. It’s miraculously unlikely.

But the universe does seem to be conspiring on some level. My girl says to me today, as we’re sitting at the library, from out of the blue: “You got a boyfriend yet?”

I say, “Nope. Not yet.”

She says, “Are you gonna get one?”

I laugh. “You mean at the boyfriend store? What do you think – should I go for the cheap model?”

She laughs. “Get the expensive one.”


Now – just in case – at least I’ll have some idea of which one to pick.

Confessions, IV

It is my belief that my knees are my most unattractive feature.

I am afraid of falling or biting something hard and breaking all my teeth.

My earliest memory of a family story: When my mom was four, her biological mother lined all the kids up in the living room and called her husband in from the kitchen. When he came through the door, she hit him over the head with a hammer. He went to the hospital, she went to jail, the kids went to foster care. I knew this story was shocking when I was young, but I didn’t begin to wonder why I had been told about it, and so casually, and when I was still so young, until I hit my twenties. It has only recently started to seem strange to me.

Fine lines and wrinkles

I am shocked every time someone does or says something nice to me. I cannot emphasize this enough.

In fact, I’m taken so off guard that I often respond with confusion or an idiotic non sequitur. I say something overly serious in response to a joke; I say something sarcastic in response to a serious personal statement. I in all ways fail to recognize “the hand of friendship.” I hit my head with my palm as soon as I leave the room, wishing I could return and ask for a “do-over.”

I can be gracious. I have learned to say “thank you” to compliments even when they seem patently false; there’s no need to discuss the issue, drawing even more attention to my lack of good quality X. The complimentor would only insist, necessitating my increasingly specific and personal examples of times when I showed terrible judgment in the area of X. And anyway, there’s no need to argue if I already know the truth.

So even in my “gracious” moments, I spend most of my time defending myself against other people’s good opinions of me.

I send gifts, write emails, call people up, occasionally say nice things. I apologize for actions or comments that I feel stupid about, even when I was probably the only one who noticed. I try to be helpful, as much as I can. I like to inform, to take on extra work for others, to do favors. I will listen to interesting people talk for hours and wish they would continue. And despite my own tendency to grow suspicious and wary of anyone being this nice to me, I expect other people to accept this as their natural due, and not to question.

But often, they do.

(At least the good ones do.)

In the attempt to answer, I make stuff up: I like doing this kind of spring cleaning; I’m good at writing emails; I can’t live without spending hours at [insert apparently boring task here]. It’s not all lies – I would go so far as to say 90% of the time, my reasons are practically lie-free – but it’s not the whole truth, either.

The truth is that sometimes, I don’t know why I do what I do, and that sometimes, it’s your fault.

Call me a closet optimist – very closeted, some would stipulate (with a derisive laugh) – but I’m easily inspired by people doing great things, or by great people doing anything. I want to get on board when people I like are involved (see post on high culture). I want to understand (see post on ed psych). I want to relate (see…um, the whole blog, I guess). That's the end-game.

But then I explain, or try to explain, to people who ask, that I have some selfish reason for all of this. It seems rude to blurt out "because you're cool." Instead, I try to convince them that I’m doing it for me; this has the bonus effect of releasing them from the obligation to pay attention, or feel guilty, or reciprocate or, worst of all, thank me.

I expect to be invisible. This is obviously a stupid expectation; I have no superpowers, and I only know three or four blind people (who can hear very well, so I’m not even invisible to them). But I expect my work, my efforts, my presence, to be taken for granted, and also to not, myself, take others for granted. It’s a terrific double standard that should work out well for everyone.

The main problem with expecting to be taken entirely for granted is that it requires that everyone else in the world be a jerk, and the people I know are not jerks at all. In fact, they’re mostly pretty great, which is why I do all that stuff for them.

It’s a fine line, of course, between doing things for people because I like them and doing things for people because I like them, and whatever the reason, the results are the same. I end up doing the same whatever-I’m-doing. I end up learning a lot, about people and spring cleaning/emailing/apparently boring task Y. There’s no need for me to ever reveal my real people-oriented motivations.

But here’s the wrinkle in my plan to hide my true, relational purposes: It occurs to me that it might matter to you, my many, many readers, who could feel used or undervalued by my pretensions to a mercenary motivation. So be assured: It all comes from affection. I don’t have a mercenary soul; I’m not even that practical, in the end. I just like you, and I’m not looking for anything in return.


Now get cracking on those “carte blanche” questions.

Categorically speaking, I'm nothing.

When I first took the Meyers-Briggs personality test, I was designated an ESTJ. When I took it again three years later, I was an INFP – the exact opposite of my original designation. I asked the scorer what that meant for my personality, but she only kept repeating that it couldn’t happen.

By some star charts, my birthday makes me a Leo; by others, I am a Virgo. These signs are generally acknowledged to be opposites.

On a “right brain/left brain” inventory in biology class, I scored an equal number for left and right brain-edness. My teacher insisted that this was not possible, and was somehow not convinced by my argument that there were an even number of questions if you eliminated the drawing of a dog. (Whichever way the dog faces, right or left, supposedly indicates which hemisphere is dominant; I had drawn the dog facing me, straight ahead, which was completely neutral.)

If I were an X-man

I would be Jean Grey. Hands down, no question. Telepathy and telekinesis? Dude.

Happy 83,842

Congratulations to my car and I, for our 10,000-mile anniversary. I’ve been a bit neglectful in acknowledging this milestone, since my little blue hatchback—for some reason, named Betty, but never referred to by name—hit 83,842, exactly 10,000 miles over her mark when I got the certificate of title in mid-August, on Sunday. We were somewhere around New Haven on I-91 N when it happened.

You may ask why my car and I have driven so much in less than seven months. The answer is that I drove her up from DC originally; went to help out a friend; went to college homecoming; went to work 3-7 times per week; and visited friends, and had visiting friends.

I owe my working relationship with this, my first and only car, to you-my-friends, the supervisor whose brother sold me the car for $20 (US), and most of all, my mechanic, who agrees with me: “She’s a good little car,” “She’ll last forever,” and “She’ll probably need new brakes at 90,000.”

May we live to drive 10,000 more.

Year of the Chicken

When I was in China my first year, I went by bus or van to the capital city of my province to get a burger at Grandma’s Kitchen, a western restaurant-now-franchise started by “Grandma” in Chengdu, about once a month. I began doing this after experiencing an almost hallucinatory craving for beef following my long anorectic phase in the fall, and continued on the advice of my (own) grandmother, a retired RN, who insisted that I needed more iron and B vitamins than I was getting from pork, vegetables, and rice.

As I have low blood pressure, a tendency toward anemia, and a ridiculously melodramatic history of fainting – rivaling any hysterical romantic heroine of the nineteenth century – I listened to her.

I ate hamburgers then the way I now take my car in to get its oil changed: as necessary maintenance. Not that I don’t enjoy beef, because I do. I just don’t normally eat much of it and don’t think about it, ever, unless one of those crisis-like cravings hits me, which they occasionally do.

You can see, then, why I was less surprised than I might have been when, Monday night, I suddenly began fantasizing about eating an entire chicken.

Okay, I thought. Where did this come from?

I tried to think of what vitamins or nutrients a chicken might have – an entire chicken, especially – that other foods wouldn’t, but couldn’t come up with anything. After all, everything tastes like chicken. It’s the most unassuming, unobtrusive meat we have.

I tried to assuage the feeling by meandering around the Stop & Shop, which was closing in less than an hour, and eventually settled on some pre-cooked “sweet and sour chicken tenders”; for some reason, my fantasies involved only pre-cooked chicken, and as I had neither “chicken tenders” nor an entire chicken at home in my freezer, I decided that giving in to this was alright.

I ate the three “chicken tenders” for dinner, and lunch the next day, and I thought that was the end of the fantasy.

But today, even before lunch, I find myself thinking about it again: a whole chicken, glazed and brown, sitting in a petite plastic black-and-clear container. I eat my crackers, with marmalade. I eat more of them than usual – but no matter how many I eat, they are not chicken.

On my way home from work, I make up my mind. I will go to the store – to Gnazzo’s, the local grocery, which removes a bit of the corporate edge from my plan to buy something pre-cooked and packaged in plastic – and I will buy an entire chicken.

I will eat it for dinner.

I pull into the parking lot, find a space immediately, and go inside.

I’ve never bought an entire chicken before, not even one I would have to cook myself – I didn’t even buy the one my students brought into my house to turn into chicken nuggets for class one day, which they had selected live, and which was the best seaweed-flavored-saltine-coated baked chicken I have ever had, or expect to ever have – so the whole experience seems a bit daunting.

I am distracted by a sale on waffles – so inoffensively bland and convenient! – but the sale is “Buy One, Get One Free!” and each package has sixteen waffles in it.

“I don’t see how I could ever need thirty-two waffles,” I mumble regretfully, and pass them by.

The kind of cake my mother wants to try is on sale, but they don’t have lemon, so I pass those as well.

I am approaching the chicken stand. This is my last chance to abort this strange mission.

It’s a big responsibility, I chide myself. Are you sure you’re ready for this kind of commitment? You’re not going to have fun with it on the first day and then neglect it, letting its leftovers rot in the fridge until trash pickup three weeks from now? You’re not going to decide tomorrow at lunch that you’ve had enough of chicken, that chicken is “so yesterday”?

No, I answer firmly. I know what it means to buy a whole chicken. I can handle it.

So I go to the “rotisserie chicken” display – which has no actual rotisseries, but boasts a number of packaged chickens whose labels claim that they (the chickens, not the labels) have been cooked by rotisserie – and look down on my choices. They are all similar, a disappointing “Brown Sugar and Honey Flavor,” and yet unique, as chickens are in life. The packaging refuses to guess the size or weight of each chicken, the amount of air-space seeming to anticipate something larger than what rests inside, but the Nutrition Facts listing “Varied” as the number of three ounce servings per package. These chickens are from the Allen farm in Seaford, DE.

I choose a small-looking chicken with peeling skin. I’m not sure what a family with kids would go for, or someone having company for dinner, but they might care more about presentation than I do, so I leave the nicer-looking ones behind. I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog, anyway.

Uncertain of the etiquette involved in planning to eat an entire chicken, I also pick out the smallest container of chicken stuffing I can find. Then the chicken won’t be alone, I think absurdly, though I have no idea whether “chicken stuffing” refers to bread that’s been cooked inside a chicken, with chicken pieces in it, or just with spices that complement chicken in a meal.

I take my purchases to the front and pay, asking for a paper bag – again, to lessen guilt, and for my recycling – and drive the one block home.

I set the chicken on my living room coffee table and open the package. I get a fork and steak knife – though again, whether this is strictly proper seems to matter more to me than I had anticipated, especially considering that I’m eating out of a plastic take-out container in my living room. I put out the stuffing and some applesauce, and I eat it with the chicken.

I eat probably a third of my chicken, which, again, is small, but no Cornish game hen. I learn that dark meat really does taste better than white meat, and that my tendency to view poultry as a conduit for salt probably results from my tendency to eat white. I remember what it was like to eat the skin and ask for more as a child. I marvel at the bone structure under the meat and wonder if the heart is still inside.

Then I put my chicken away, on the top shelf of the fridge where I’ll be sure to see it tomorrow, hoping for the best.

After all, tomorrow is still so far away.

Who knows what I’ll want to have for lunch?

If you Google my blog, you get AIDS

Try it.

Lieberman goes to the Dark Side

I hate watching that little-boy Anakin in The Phantom Menace. He’s just so wooden. The scene where he leaves his mother leaves me wishing he’d just go, and give her a chance at a normal life—one that includes emotions.

Although I haven’t seen Attack of the Clones, I’ve heard that Anakin doesn’t get any better; I’ve been told he and Amidala have absurdly little chemistry. I imagine the love scene going something like this:

Hayden Christenson, in dull monotone: Oh. A-mi-dah-la. I must have you. I cannot live. Without you. [limply extends arm in general direction of Portman]
Natalie Portman, beautiful as ever but playing down to make Christenson look less stupid: Oh Anakin. We should not give in to our passion. Which is great. But let’s do it, anyway.
Christenson: Yes. Let’s.

And then Anakin goes to the dark side.

Kind of like Lieberman.

It started with a complete lack of observable emotion, followed by questioning the basic tenets of the Force (in this case, the DNC) and siding with darkness in a few key cases (lured by the completely unseductive RNC—substitute Ron Schneider for Natalie Portman, here) to ultimately begin a war that his generation won’t finish.

When, exactly, did Lieberman get in bed, so to speak, with the Republicans? Was it when he lost the DNC’s endorsement and ran as an Independent? Was it when he voted for the Iraq war? Or has it been written in the stars since the beginning of time? I suspect that he’s been admiring himself in the black cape and practicing with the red light saber in secret for some time now.

I’ve been waiting, since Lieberman endorsed McCain for president in 2008, to hear that the RNC has officially gathered him into the fold, will pay for his campaigning, etc. Whether Connecticut will continue to accept him post-defection is questionable.

May the Force be with us.

Zen and the art of McDonald's "feng shui"

Recently, I was involved in choosing and copy-editing an article out of California on a McDonald's franchise restaurant that incorporates "feng shui" elements into its design plan. The proprietor had ridiculous things to say about the attempt to appeal to Asian patrons, claiming that this McDonald's wanted people to feel that they could linger over their Big Macs and artery-clogging transfatty fries, in a calm and peaceful atmosphere -- ignoring, apparently, the entire ethos of McDonald's and all fast food establishments, in the process.

But far be it from me to criticize someone wanting to take down McDonaldization a peg or two. My problem is not so much with the corporate-subversive feel of the feng shui-ed restaurant; it's with the headline that accompanied the AP article.

"Do you want fries with that Zen?" the article headline read. "California McDonald's aims to boost sales with feng shui."

Now, on the business page, the reference to boosting sales becomes less cynical and more practical -- and anyway, it's nice to see them admitting that the bottom line is the bottom line, "qi-balancing" Eastern philosophy aside. The problem with this headline, which I forgave, and ran basically intact (because it also appeared on China Daily, which is an English-language in-China newspaper), is the reference to Zen in an article about feng shui, as though the two are interchangeable.

Getting "Zen" and "feng shui" confused is like referring to an "English kiss" -- which, let's face it, would have to be something between the inaccurately named "Eskimo kiss" and the mob's "kiss of death" -- when what you meant was a "French kiss." Just because the nations are in the same hemisphere and their citizens look basically the same doesn't mean that their cultures are interchangeable.

In fact, the opposite is true for Japan and China, as it is for England and France. The textbook controversy a few years ago -- when the Japanese re-published a series of history textbooks glossing over their actions in the "Rape of Nanjing" which was, well, pretty much what it sounds like, in WWII -- is only the tip of a very large and ancient iceberg. My ninth grade students sat morosely in my class, looking shell-shocked and confused, on the day they learned of Japanese actions in the second world war. The Japanese language teacher at my school stood up at the end of the year and gave a speech, in which he cried, imploring Chinese to please stop making fun of him and treating him badly for being a Japanese.

A shop-keeper at a market, when he found out I was American, immediately launched into a discussion of our countries' similarities, beginning with an animated hand-sign depiction of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "We have mutual enemies," he seemed to be saying.

The longer I was in China, the more I picked up this paranoid, borderline hostility toward the Japanese. I enjoyed the interaction with the Japanese teacher, who taught my housemate to make sushi, and the karate instructor, who often watched movies with us. But when confronted with any element of Japanese culture -- Battle Royale, the Japanese remake, for instance, and the only movie I've ever turned off after seven minutes, being too frightened to continue -- I could only respond with bewilderment and occasional horror. The efficiency, the compact, neat lifestyle, the attention to detail, contrasted sharply with China's sprawling and messy way of life, its cobbled-together solutions to problems that should have been anticipated, its flagrant and dangerous use of fireworks whose detritus littered the streets for months after Spring Festival.

To conflate the idea of Zen, then, with feng shui, seems almost inconceivable to me.

It's a vocabulary slip-up, really, since we American English-speakers have imported the word "Zen" to indicate inner harmony, and the words "feng shui" to indicate putting our physical space in an order that promotes inner harmony; we sample what suits us, and use imported words generically to indicate whole and diverse worlds of (foreign) thought. It is on par with calling everyone who looks even slightly Asian, "Chinese."

We're going to have to stop this, especially considering the likely economic position of China -- and other Asian countries, like Japan, South Korea, or the rapidly developing Vietnam -- in our future.

But I don't expect a revolution in terms to begin with McDonald's.

Confessions, III

I often eat in my living room using a "Lady Lovelilocks" metal TV tray.

I have hit the following things with a car, in chronological order: a parked minivan, a nine-year-old boy, a squirrel, a deer, a turtle, another squirrel. The squirrels and turtle died; the deer totaled the car; the nine-year-old is fine, and much older now.

I wrote two horrible novel-length stories in high school, which you will never read.