This Afternoon In Drama

Open Your Eyes

In the fall I wrote about my brief flirtation with Tylenol PM, which I began taking after spending too many nights thinking rapidly for three to four hours after I laid down in my bed. During this period, I saw such things as my mirror writing messages to me and spiders covering a poster of Trent Reznor (which didn't surprise me that much), and one night I heard my clock radio giving Los Angeles a report on my life. None of this struck me as incredibly bizarre at the time. Once I attended a Bar Mitzvah where a faux-announcer made me an audio tape of a pretend wrestling match that I was competing in and winning, so you've got to understand that the clock radio performing a similarly personalized function wasn't that huge of a stretch. While I knew these sights and sounds were hallucinations, I just attributed them to overexhaustion. I only began to connect Tylenol PM to my fancies of imagination which weren't really experienced as fancies of imagination when I started using it as a sleep aid again this year, after spending some more nights at the mercy of my sub-mind. It insisted on on writing my third novel mentally without my conscious okay. And then I saw the wires coming down from my closet ceiling and the hands trailing down after them. And then I saw a long-haired guy with a knife coming in from my backyard to kill me. And then I saw a (different) man come in the middle of the night and steal my laser printer. When I woke up the next morning and found that my laser printer was still next to the bed, I was pleasantly surprised. Then I became suspicious. I brought up the visions with my doctor and he asked if I'd been taking Tylenol PM. Yes, I said. "You know there's a powerful hallucinogenic in Tylenol PM?" he asked me. "No, I did not," I replied. "That explains a lot." That was the end of the Tylenol PM, although I often think about starting a cult and lacing the punch bowl with the odorless and tasteless drug. And then I will say to the people in attendance, "If you go home tonight and see something extraordinary (or hear- you might hear!), then you have been chosen to join me!" I will charge an exhorbitant membership fee.

Anyway, what I'm currently on is Benadryl, for some bad, bad allergies. And while Benadryl is known to make the taker sleepy, it's the form of sleep that's really been getting to me. Consistently, while on the big B, I have "awoken" in my dreams before I awake in real life, except I am convinced that I am really awake, and the larger problem is that my eyes are glued shut. I know they're glued shut. The people in the room with me (people from my real life, and the room that I fell asleep in), know my eyes are glued shut, and they're really kind of pissed about it. I know that this is the case because my lids are translucent and I can see through my shut eyes, although I very much feel that they are shut. The friends and family members in the dreams (which I have NO idea are dreams while I'm in them) say, "Just open your eyes! Just open your eyes!" I respond, "God, you're so fucking insensitive! I'm trying!" I then stumble around the room, except I am not so much stumbling from blindness (because I can actually see), but because the pressure on my lids and the frustration that results from having no power over them is debilitating.

I tried non-sleepy Claritin, and it was a hundred percent ineffectual. So tonight, again, I sleep the sleep of that guy from the Alice In Chains Man In A Box video, and you would think knowing this before I fall asleep helps when I reach the dream, but it doesn't. I'm stupid all over again every time.

I Know What Oprah's Doing This Sunday

Probably fooling around with Steadman. But I tried.

Hi-C You

I sat down and watched a girls' softball game today at the park, and while I thought I would feel pangs of nostalgia for the crack of the bat, the depressing size of the ball, the tight pants-- once I am removed from most things I hate, if given enough time, they turn "fun" again in my head-- I found myself really missing the Snacks. Yes, I know that I could prepare snacks for myself at home, but I would know what I was preparing. The magic of Snacks was that someone else's mother had packed the eatings in a cooler, and you never knew if her offerings sucked or didn't until post-game. I waded through all those tedious innings just to find out about the Snacks. My mind swam with the many possibilities waiting in the Igloo treasure chest behind the dugout. Capri-sun? Squeeze-its? Double Stuff Oreos? Had Mrs. Smith fucked me over and packed sandwich baggies of carrots? Even if the Snack was disappointing, it still wasn't. It was all in the not-knowing, like the magic of a first kiss. Snacks possessed that electricity every time. I've always marvelled at people who hire personal assistants to run their simplest errands because I figure no one's ever too busy for Sav-on, but today I'm thinking that, if for some reason, I ever end up with disposable income, I will hire someone to let themselves into my house at 3 p.m. and prepare me Snacks. Oh, don't tell me what you're preparing. Don't even ask me if I like Cheez-its or not, because even if I don't, that's not your problem. Just focus on the reveal.

America's Next Top Casualty

It is in the spirit of The Year Of The Nerd that Shandi lost, and I'm not just coming up with this pronouncement to cover my ass. Well, maybe I am coming up with this pronouncement to cover my ass a little, but that, too, is in the spirit of The Year Of The Nerd: to conjure up with a losing prediction, and then to go down with it. But really- and here I turn to my new friend John McNally- what I forgot to take into account was that Yoanna is a nerd of sorts too. In his new novel The Book Of Ralph, John details the hierarchy of nerddom:

"I knew the pecking order well- the slow-in-the-head kids and the fatsos at the very bottom, the physically weak and nonathletes one tier up, the too-smart-for-their-own-good slightly above them, and so on...Over summer, though, the pecking order's shifts would cause occasional rumbling...that knowledge didn't stop me from worrying that I had somehow dropped down, pushed from my slot by a fat kid who'd lost weight."

How could I forget that Yoanna had pulled one of these shifts pre-season's beginning? In losing so much weight, Yoanna, judging by pictures, had gone from black rim glasses/choker/XL concert t-shirt nerd to under-the-radar nerd. In other words, Yoanna had become a nerd sellout with her brand new tailored threads and faux mohawk, pushing her dangerously over that thin, shaky line into fashionably nerdy hipsterdom. But since it is The Year Of The Nerd, Shandi had to be eliminated- because in order to be an authentic representative of the nerd culture, she could not become America's Next Top Model. I think I was thrown by the overwhelming victory of The Lord Of The Rings at the Oscars, believing that it was the nerd thing to be the underdog winner. But I forgot to take into account that the LOTR cast must still tote Elijah Wood around with them everywhere they go, and in this way they still remain nerd true blue. Shandi, unfortunately, had to leave her boyfriend behind in the United States. If we take into account his Elijah-esque bug-eyed photo and screechy voice, we must concede that had Shandi been able to bring him abroad, she might have been able to take this thing respectably.

The reason I dislike Yoanna as America's Next Top Model is not because she's very skinny, but because I can't look at her without seeing the fat girl within her about to burst from her stomach like the dinnertime visitor in Alien. It is not pleasurable to look at a body type that is trying to exist in a state that's obviously incredibly difficult for it to maintain. Ex-boyfriend Brett pointed out, when the cameras got a profile shot of Yoanna at last night's final elimination, that she's covered with the creepy baby fuzz that anorexics get because their bodies are nutritionally shivering. And while I don't think Yoanna is anorexic (I've seen her eat some vegetables on the show) and while I'm not one to talk about malnutrition (my system gently weeps), I do know that Tyra just made a girl into a professional model who will, as long as she's working, be a physical and emotional mess. I mean, moreso that most professional models.

I once went off carbohydrates for a week, and I have first-hand testimonials about how amazingly miserable I was to be around. Yoanna is an Atkins dieter times ten million. Have you seen the disconnect in action? The way that her eyes and smile are in this perpetual state of suspended excitement because she no longer has the stability to just sort of chill out in the middle? Whether finding out about taking pictures, meeting a designer, getting "Tyra mail," going to the gym, walking down the street, getting in the van, saying goodbye to an eliminated sister, setting the alarm clock, making a bowl of soup, relaxing back at the "Italian" apartment, it's all one-note from Yoanna. She looks like a defreckled Howdy Doody doll: wooden orbs painfully wide, trapped in a Clockwork Orange experiment minus the clamps; "thrilled" smile pulled so taught that her cheekbones seem on the verge of snapping and boomeranging across the room, knocking a tired-from-Lupus Mercedes off of her feet.

And why does Yoanna look and act so perpectually cracked out? I hate to go with the obvious because I genuinely hate the obvious, but it's unavoidable here. The girl's hungry. It's clear from her bone structure that she is not meant to be size 2, and the act of maintaining this size is taking its toll. Had she won, Shandi, obviously naturally a size 0, would have maybe eventually fallen into the model habit of skipping a meal for a pack of cigarettes on the days she was feeling a bit "tubby." But when Tyra and Co. chose Yoanna, they resigned her to a decade of Parliments for breakfast, dinner, lunch. And last night, when they announced her as the victor, I saw this clearly written across Yoanna's face, freakishly and statically suspended in hunger strike shock.

A lot of people have commented on Yoanna's habit of over-enunciation. It is my belief that she's fighting a number of voices ("Bread! Powerbar! Anything!") from within, so that she becomes distracted mid-syllable. This slows her down. Have you ever tried to sing a song while another's on the radio? Hard. But in order that her external voice might triumph over the ones within, Yoanna places intricate emphasis on each word that surfaces in an attempt to show her body who's boss. The struggle takes so many manifest forms, I could go through episode by episode and detail the war. But, put most simply, it's literally often painful to look at Yoanna. Can this be what America wants? Was I on the completely wrong track and it's really The Year Of The Masochist? I think we all under-estimated the box-office power of The Passion Of Christ. And maybe even the staying power of Fear Factor: Family Edition.

Party Monster

Taryn left a comment yesterday telling me that I was rude to one of the hosts of the party I went to Saturday night. The interesting thing is, though, that I was actually going out of my way to be more exhuberant with him than I would normally be. He complemented me on the blog, and whereas my first instinct was to just mutter out a quick, "Thanks," I continued to produce about three to five more sentences, all delivered with what I thought was obvious, joking sarcasm. Apparently, either sarcasm no longer scans, or my delivery is getting so impressively deadpan that it is off the deadpan meters. If the latter is the case, then I am sort of proud of myself. Then I will expect the Guiness World Book Of Records on my doorstep shortly.

For a long time now I've been considering making business cards to distribute at social functions that elaborate on my disposition. If mute and deaf guys at the airport hand out cards that say, "Hello, I am deaf/mute and cannot speak to you. But I am selling miniature eyeglass repair kits," then I think it's high-time for a party card of my own. This might come in particularly useful post readings, because ever since I read how alarmed people are by Zadie Smith's sullen demeanor, I've been thinking that I'm in for a world of trouble. (I'm thinking especially at the Boston "Books and Brew" event, where I just found out that I accompany the audience from the signing to a local restaurant/pub and am expected to make conversation.)

At parties and social gatherings, people hear my flat voice, see the resting expression on my face which I think is just sleepy, but is often interpreted as bitchy, and assume that A) I hate them B) I am rude C) I am in the middle of gigantic personal turmoil. I am considering just passing over a card from here on out, making things easy for everybody.

Love You Mom

My mom hates when I write about her in the blog, but it's unavoidable. You know how parents are in constant amazement at everything their newborn babies do, whether it be gurgling, finger gripping, or pooping? After twenty-four years, I'm still in somewhat constant amazement at her goings-on.

Over Christmas I starting taking to calling her Nell, after Jodie Foster's character in the same-titled movie. Nell, if I remember correctly, had been raised in the wilderness and had developed her own savage language, so that when Liam Neeson finally came and found her and took her into the city, she regarded everything around her with amazed disbelief. This somehow led to a scene in which Jodie spun around in a bar, braless, with her dress pulled over her head.

So my new favorite pasttime is mimicking Nell's tree-language when my mom is floored by any sort of common technology. When I took her with me to an ATM to deposit a check, she watched me insert the envelope with true, bewildered wonder, saying that she had never been to an ATM before. "You mean the money goes into your account?" she asked. And I responded, for the first time, with Nell's magic utterances. "Chay ticcka tay beee, mom. Chay ticcka ticcka tay tay."

Then, on another day, we went to Loehmann's, and the salesclerk told my mom that she could now run her own credit card through the device in front of the register. My mom stared at the machine like it was a two-hundred square Rubik's cube. "Tay chicka tay bee?" I asked her.

Today, this. Which sort of made me giggle, and, as I've stated before, I am not a huge giggler.

Subject: Good Morning
Date: 3/22/2004 8:14:32 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: Nell
To: Andrea

Hi~

Did you get a good rest last night?

Don't roll your eyes, but....you don't rewind a DVD once you play it, right?

What I wanted to ask you Saturday was that I was getting a black band on the top and bottom of the DVD, like it was narrowing the screen, but it didn't affect the picture or the play. Was there anything I could have done to widen it?

Enjoy the movie later and let me know what you think of it.

Love,
Mom

(I write back.)

Subject: RE: Good Morning
Date: 3/22/2004 10:02:49 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: Nell
To: Andrea

Put your eyes back where they belong.

Ok, so if you can't rewind, can you forward? What happens if you want to stop in the middle of the movie, take it out, and then go to the same place or even start over---how do you move where you want to be?
__________________________________________________________________________________

I now defer to the Internet Movie Database, for a more accurate quote:
"Chicka, chicka, chickabee. / T'ee an me an t'ee an me. / Ressa, ressa, ressa me, / Chicka, chicka, chickabee."

Why This Isn't a Real Post

I didn't sleep last night, and I don't mean this as in I didn't sleep very well, but that I never shut my eyes. I spent the night in Kim's living room talking to a cat and watching many, many videos on MTV and a bizarre divorce movie on HBO starring a young Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen. I couldn't believe that Burt was ever a sex symbol. Neither could the cat. I couldn't believe how hot Candice Bergen used to be. The cat agreed. The cat and I watched the sun rise over West Hollywood and then I kissed her on the nose and left.

It's Friday. (Shrug).

When I got my box of books from my publisher last week, they were quiet and well-behaved.

But then they heard that the other books from the first printing were whooping it up in hedonistic bookstore party joints nationwide, and suddenly they were-

Drinking.

Pole dancing.

Calling LA Weekly and ordering up hookers on my dime.

However, inspired by their everybody's-working-for-the-weekend attitude, I've decided to attempt going to a party for the first time in months tomorrow night. Last time I attended a get together I ended up trapped on a couch explaining to a cooperative farming enthusiast why I believe that people who are genuinely passionate about cooperative farming can never be emotionally complex, but maybe tomorrow eve holds better things.

The Mating Habits Of The Nerd

After the long touted "Orgy" episode, you might have come away with the misconception that Shandi, my original pick for winner of America's Next Top Model, has departed the Road To Nerdville. You, bewildered, point to last night's shenanigans in the hot tub with Italian playboys, her abundant tongue action, frisky, nearly-anonymous sex in her Italian Apartment (hey, I'm not coining this one. That's all Tyra. "The eliminated girl will be going back to the Italian Apartment." You mean you guys aren't going to fly her back to the states one more time, to unpack her Italian trip suitcase, then repack in the New York Apartment? Whaa?) even her new designer two-tone sunglasses. You, however, would be wrong.

Shandi's romp in Milan last night only proved to me that she is forever a nerd inside. While her European sexcapade may have given the surface appearance of a change in personality, upon closer examination, it only further revealed the hardcore psychological nerd mechanisms deep at work within her brain.

When I got to Brown, I was confronted with a whole bunch of former high school female nerds. They showed up to the first day of the dorm-move-in with impressively frizzy hair (Providence gets pretty humid at the end of summer), pre-med courseloads, keys hanging on a university lace around their necks. And then, inevitably, during the first week the frats would hold their welcome parties, distributing invites as freely as STD's, and these dork-girls from my unit would come back to the dorm and excitedly run down the hallway squealing about how they had been paid attention by some Gamma Sigma Neu in their bio section, how he was expecting them for a round of beer pong. Friday night, 11 p.m. would roll around. I would poke my head out of the door of my room. Behold the parade of fuck me pumps! Lurex mini-skirts! Blow-dry-straightened hair! The nerdgirls had been waiting their whole lives for an occasion like this, and their heads were nearly exploding. "Do I look all right?" was the song that echoed down the hallway, fading into sad refrain as the partygoers made their way out of the building and down Waterman street toward campus. Saturday morning, 10 a.m., there was a new chorus. "I got so drunk, Shannon, and I slept with him! Gahhhhhhh!"

I use this example not to make light of the nerdgirls, but to explain how the world works. Nerddom is a vulnerability, a wound in the psyche. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is. I could see it visibly churning as Shandi sat in the lap of her Italian in the hot tub. There she was in her tankini- a key, key, key clue to what was boiling beneath. If Britney Spears was not a girl, not yet a woman, Shandi is not a one-piece wearer anymore, but not yet a bikini sporter either. She's still trapped in that bathing suit limbo between gawky self-consciousness and eventual acceptance of her frame. This unwillingness to be either here or there also shows up in the way she was behaving in front of the guy behind her. I couldn't help but notice that Shandi refused to look at him (until she finally turned and began devouring his face), instead always laughing at the antics of the other girls around her. She was pointedly un-interactive. Classic nerd body language, revealing insecurities about her own desirability and her ability to attract the stud. Instead, she let his arms slide around her body and his manhood knock on the back door of her bottoms, removing the chance of possible rejection. And then once Shandi understood she was "in," so was her tongue.

I am convinced, more than ever, that Shandi is winning, not only because I'm sticking by this Year Of The Nerd thesis, but because Tyra banks is getting into the spirit, too. For two weeks now I've been hearing about this "orgy," this debaucle so shocking, so nasty, that she had to go back and re-edit the episode in the wake of Janet Jackson's nipslip. While I haven't seen the lost footage, unless it contains buck-wild, naked partner swapping and double penetration, I'm going to have to call a spade a spade. There are eighth graders in Irvine having a nastier time in the Woodflower hot tub than the girls of Top Model. Sure, there was some splashing. There was some drunkenness. There was some making out. But a French kiss does not an orgy make.

But what's important isn't that the orgy wasn't actually an orgy, but that Tyra seems to think it was. Undoubtedly she dubbed the tub party an orgy partly to stir up public interest, but in interviews about the episode she also displays a certain nerdy excitability about the incident. Ty-ty baby told Conan O'Brien, "My girls on the show were doing the nasty. There's eight people making out at the same time, kind of, in the same vicinity. I don't want to say orgy--but I just said it." The key phrases in this statement are "kind of" and "same vicinity." So Shandi was doing the freaky-deaky in the bedroom and Yoanna was mp3 swapping with her guy in another part of The Italian Apartment, and Tyra's calling orgy. This reminds me of myself at the height of my nerddom, when, in eighth grade, after being felt up by Paul V. for the first time, I yanked my accompanying friend outside with me, made my eyes really big, paused a moment for dramatic effect, and said, "Do you realize that I almost just had sex?" That's the dork impulse- to turn AOL chats into a romantic relationship, to turn boob brushing into third base, to turn kisses in the jacuzzi into a UPN orgy. It's the poetic need to fit the world to your own quaking nerd scale, when the non-nerd people around you are indifferent to the same events because they consider them ordinary business. Tyra's showing her nerd wounds now, too. One significant executive producer vote for Shandi on the way.

On a very side note: Did anyone else notice that Stephen Fairchild, featured designer on last night's episode, is a dead ringer in looks, behavior, and especially voice for serial tickler Yaqi from the Howard Stern show?

Like The Red Premature Panda

So I guess my book is out? No one told me. While it isn't supposed to be available until April 5th, my dad's broker in Tennessee walked into a Barnes and Noble and bought it today. And then my dad walked into a Barnes and Noble in Orange and bought it, too, even though I already know he's pre-ordered, like, twenty on Amazon.

So I was sort of expecting to have some big announcement post on April 4th saying, "My book's out tomorrow! You've saved up your allowances- now go blow them!", but. . .I think the book is in stores. Today. Which is sort of anticlimactic, since I was planning to have a special night pre-April 5th. Curl my hair. Rig some streamers to fall down from the ceiling when my alarm went off in the morning. Eat a special dinner of Pastaroni White Cheddar and Shells (if you haven't tried this, do). Etc. If I had known the book was going to be out today, at the very least I would have put on some new underwear.

Anyway, go buy my book.

Sincerely,
Andrea.