This Afternoon In Drama

Six Word Blog, Kind Of Poetic

BlackBook article: Me, name on cover.
I know photographed articles are annoying.
But scanner was left in garage.
Of one, momma Seigel, in November.
Because of moving in with Brett.
And he said, "Why two scanners?"
"Hey, one household only needs one."
We broke up in December, crying.
I weirdly never retrieved the scanner.
Even though it's just in Irvine.
Which really, is not that far.
Will address bipolar accusations another day.
And the painful MTV VMA's too.
Click on magazine pages to enlarge, readers.

Should Have Been A Park Ranger

My profound nature observation for the week is that opossums are casually optimistic, while squirrels are naively optimistic. The latter is a gentle way of saying "dumb." An opossum, when in danger of me approaching, rolls over and play dead. At least it has a tactic, and if its gameplan doesn't work and I'm going to kill it anyway (I would never kill it), the animal's mentally prepared. Humans would probably be more comfortable with the concept of death if we played it more often. I've read that both Chuck Klosterman and Chuck Palahniuk find it easier to fall asleep at night if they shut their eyes and visualize that they're lying in their coffins. I've tried this too, and it's a relaxing technique, but insomnia generally prevails.

Squirrels, on the other hand, freeze in place when they see me coming, except they don't freeze under the guise of being dead. They just freeze wherever they are, which is usually in the middle of the road or the sidewalk or five feet away on the lawn. They stay still, naively hoping that I'll turn around and start walking the other way, and it never goes down like that. Never. So they lose valuable time during which they could scurry away, and it's only when I'm within a precarious two feet radius that they see their lives flashing before their eyes and get terrified enough to move. Why not move when the danger first presents itself? Why not take action at the earliest possible point? I told you. Squirrels are stupid.

My ex-ex-boyfriend is up for two MTV VMA Awards tonight, having directed the illustrious Hoobastank boys in a jewelry caper, and I'm going to watch the show tonight, rooting for him like an opossum- on my back, playing dead, and casually optimistic that he'll win.

Let It Be Said That I'm Pro-Laziness

This morning I saw the new kids show, Lazytown , for the first time, and if The Teletubbies was the show for the late-nineties Ecstasy popping college set, Lazytown is the extended music video that Speed freaks everywhere have been dreaming of while they manically vacuum and dust.

I only caught the last ten minutes, but I don't think this is why I had no idea what was going on.

Lazytown is an Icelandic creation with a mission: it was specifically developed to encourage kids to be more active. This means that the heroes of the show pretty much bounce off the walls, but, strangely enough, the villain of the show, Robbie Rotten, who is supposedly, like, the laziest guy in the universe, is incredibly tweaker-like, too. He has a prosthetic chin that's reminiscent of Jay Leno's real one, and he's filmed in some kind of stop-motion, so that every other one of his facial adjustments disappears and he appears to be constantly suffering painful ticks.

The protagonist of the show is Stephanie, an eight year-old who wears a hot pink candy raver wig for reasons I have yet to understand. I think the hair is supposed to represent an outer manifestation of her inner physical energy. Anyway. Stephanie's existence in Lazytown is super weird because besides Robbie Rotten and her sloth-fighting superhero friend, Sportacus, who sports the most disturbing and architectural moustache since Hitler's, she appears to be the only kid around with human DNA. Her friends are all depicted by puppets of indeterminate technological make-up. While watching, I couldn't tell if they were foam or animatronic or CGI or what, but I knew that they were stressing me out. In fact, it's not only the enormously frenetic atmosphere of the show that raised my heart rate, but something underneath the Tourettes inspired production that started to cause serious anxiety.

As I was watching Lazytown, I actually began to feel agitated. And I was like, "Why am I upset? Is it because Ziggy, one of the puppets, has gotten taffy stuck in his mouth and now he's going to cause the deaths of his friends because the machine he created that spits multi-colored foam balls won't stop burying the townspeople until he can unstick himself and yell, 'Stop'?" The other puppets were calling for someone to find Ziggy's toothbrush so he could scrub away the taffy, but I was getting sucked into what seemed like a quicker solution (Ziggy's toothbrush was buried somewhere under the foam balls), like Ziggy breaking down the taffy with his saliva. Until I realized that puppets probably don't have saliva. And then I started thinking about how if puppets don't have saliva, it really doesn't matter if they are lazy, because they probably lack other key attributes like muscles and blood. So maybe it was the plot, a little bit, that was making me feel so physically tense.

But I think it has more to do with A) the frame skipping technique used for both Robbie Rotten and Sportacus, which creates a nightmarish quality to the proceedings. You've seen the same effect in the old Slim Jim commercials where the stick of beef is frenetically bouncing around in someone's stomach. Teletubbies is also fond of time-lapse photography, but the difference is that because the creatures are really men in costumes, the faces of Tinky Winky and Co. don't have the same plasticity as as the humans on Lazytown. It is far more jarring to see a real person's features skip from angry to scared without being able to observe the shift, than it is for a Teletubby to scoot closer and closer to the camera without appearing to have walked anywhere. And B) the bizarre song at the end of the episode (and I'm pretty sure there's a song at the end of every episode) sung by Stephanie, except her lips aren't exactly synced to the words. With the pink wig and the nonsensical lyrics and the neon outfits and the enunciation that doesn't match the sounds, I felt like I was watching MTV Europe or Asia. This produced the woozy cultural alienation well-known to travelers abroad and enthusiasts of Sophia Coppola's Lost In Translation. It was like I didn't really know where I was for a minute.

But I looked over the baby I was hanging out with, and she was smiling, enraptured. Maybe it's easier to enjoy nerve-wracking entertainment when you don't really have other problems in your life. Maybe it just gives you a little buzz because you're not experiencing the stress of putting stress on top of stress. When I was little, I used to like to play "bank" or "pharmacy," because I didn't have to deal with the adult world of banks or pharmacies yet.

Lazytown. You heard about it here first.

My Celebrity Crush

Britney Spears couldn't make me love her any more than I already do. I mean, what else could possibly enlarge my love? You say, "Well, someone could take a picture of Brit, catching her eating a soaking Ranch Dorrito from the wet filter of a public pool," and I'd have to say back to you, "The giganticness of my love already encompasses that likelihood!"

For a long time, it was Christina for me. I loved her insistence on looking progressively uglier and uglier at public events, criticizers of hand-fringed velvet dresses, drag queen make-up, and hair extensions even the Make-A-Wish kids wouldn't touch be damned. But now, I can say without any hesitation, it is officially Britney for me because Britney has out-Xtina'd X'tina. Xtina was rolling around with that signifier in her name, pledging not so tacit allegiance to the realm of supposedly "dirrrty" X-rated cultural artifacts, while Britney, on the other hand, has begun to show us the naked essence of authentic filth. I'm not talking about rubbing store-bought oil onto one's limbs and using assistant applied sweat for a David LaChappelle video. I'm talking walking around real Santa Monica public gas station bathrooms, barefoot for real. I'm talking about being caught doing this twice in the course of one month. I'm talking about wearing the same cut-off jean shorts with the pockets hanging below the shred line day after day, and being too busy lunching at 7-Eleven to change them. I'm talking true love here. This is dirtiniess without artifice. If Britney can even be defined by a word as limiting as dirrrty, I'm going to have to go ahead and alter it, especially for her, to di(r squared to the fifty seventh)ty.

Everyone's yakking about how Britney must be going through some kind of emotional meltdown, but I say, "Au contrair simpletons!" What I loved formerly about Christina was that she'd finally gotten to the point where she became so tired of people deliberating over her image that she just snapped and decided to be herself. It turns out that the real Christina is a disappointment, a girl who chooses Marilyn Monroe as her style icon- and in my book, if you name Marilyn, Jackie O, or Grace Kelly as your ultimate aesthetic god, you're a brainless sheep. So Christina sort of went out the window for me. But Britney, exhausted with the rampant talk about her midriff and her sexual experience and club dance-offs with ex-boyfriends, has shed her created pop tart image like a nasty coccoon, and what hath emerged from that sac proves to be an even nastier butterfly. Proves to be the kind of girl that I just know I could sit down with and bitch about the new, thicker-cut Jack In The Box french fries. And, a girl, I'm confident, who would hate them for the exact same reason I do: because they're trying to be classy like restaurant potaters, and there's no room for that kind of pretension in the drive-thru.

Emmmeffffaaaaay

Because I decided that I want to teach creative writing (or, more precisely, because I started having fantasies about messing with my students by inviting some over to my house for dinner, and some not, and then letting each group wonder if the invitations reflected in any way on their writing abilities), I realized that I had to get my MFA. But, because I didn't want to sit in workshops with people going over my sentences, because I never really take the suggestions of other writers anyway, I knew I needed a low-residency program.

I went to an informational session for one of these MFA programs in California on Saturday morning, and up until that point, I had assumed that it was the only school I was going to apply to. I figured, "I only have to physically attend classes ten days a semester, how bad can it be?" The first clue to this question came when I walked into the room and saw that everyone had been given a granola bar. Bad. Then, the session started, and the prospective students opened up little pads of paper and started taking notes. Worse. (Come onnn- all of the information is online and in the college catalogs distributed at the meeting.) Then, the prospective students proved to be talky and unhilariously jokey, making "inside writer jokes" about the nature of being a writer. Jokes about the nature of being a writer, as a firm rule, are never funny. Jokes about the nature of doing novel revisions are even less so. It got worse. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and the type of work we did, and by the time I heard "historical romance," the program was rapidly dimming in its attractiveness. It's not that I object to the genre of historical romance. I think it's perfectly valid. I just object to hanging out with the type of person who writes historical romance, because time and time again, this kind of writer has proved to be, uhhhh, historically romantically lame.

The school had given every prospective student (besides the granola bars) a university-emblazened pen, and over the course of the next hour I began to have vivid visions about sticking the pen into the head of the man sitting in front of me. He started every question with unecessary, getting-to-know-me commentary like, "So listen, I graduated many moons ago from Columbia, and you know how that is, and now I'm a candidate for the Stanford writing studio, and I just wanted to know how I get a parking pass?" The beginning of the question was always a step away from reaching the end. His voice killed me- a radio announcer voice- and he liked to laugh at every fucking thing that the instructor said. Not laughing at her or with her necessarily, but just laughing because he thought every statement about the nature of writing was a profound comment on his own lifestyle, and he derived humor from the recognition of it all. His shoulders shook when he laughed. He was so easily amused. Everyone in that room was so easily amused. I wanted to take the pen and send it into the man's skull in the exact midpoint of his male-pattern balding circle.

Anyway, this man sitting in front of me asked the instructor, "So I was wondering how you think this program compares to a certain famous program in Vermont? Do you know what I'm saying?" And he laughed at his own cleverness. The instructor said, "I do know which program you're talking about- and (pause) I'm a graduate of that program- and I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret. I can say, without doubt, that this is the better program. Because that other program you guys, that Vermont program? It's snobby." Most of the people in the room started smiling or chuckling, as if she was revealing that the other program was exclusively attended by necrophiliacs. "Whereas we encourage exploration and freedom and support here, that program is, well all I can say about it, is that it's definitely snobby."

Everyone else in the room looked vindicated, feeling really positive about being in the warmer, more welcoming place, but all of a sudden I was alert, like, "Snobby? I want snobby! That sounds fantastic!" I hadn't even been thinking of applying to this Vermont program, but as soon as I heard its atmosphere was more detached and the people less accommodating and the writers more conceited, I knew I had to go there. I knew I wanted to be around fellow students who simmered in their own aloof juices at informational sessions; students who made you work painfully hard for your laughs; students who had gigantic novel-sized chips on their shoulders. I wanted a general air of superiority. There was no other place for me.

My application goes in this week.

Chicken: The Breakfast Of Champions

I've had this ad sitting on my floor for the past few days, trying to figure out exactly what's going on with it. The first thing that struck me was the stealing chicken with a black guy aspect. If you live in a vacuum, then I guess I have to explain that there's a longstanding tradition in this country of associating black people with an over the top love of fried chicken and watermelon, especially. I wondered if McDonald's was aware of the slightly weirdish implications of having a black guy sprinting after his "stolen" (?) chicken, since it seems to play, regardless of intention, right into a racist image that's still in heavy circulation. And then I wondered if maybe McDonald's was deliberately trying to make a statement against these sort of racial implications by featuring a black guy "running after his chicken," as if to say that because there's no inherent connection between black people and chicken, then black people should be able to be depicted as if they're chasing chicken.

This reminds me of the villain debates that went on in my college television theory seminars: if a minority figure is depicted as a villain on a show, then does this portrayal reinforce perceived difference or danger for the viewing audience? The other hand is: if minorities are only depicted as positive, benign figures, a case being the "wise, black judge" often seen on TV and in movies, then doesn't this show a greater nervousness on the part of the powers that be, that they're too scared to show minorities as anything other than one-dimensional? And is this limiting, dehumanizing tactic even more harmful? But that's the thing about college seminars. At the end of the two hours, no one really comes up with any sort of answer or plan.

Back to the chicken and the black guy, though. The other week I was talking to a non-Jew about the musical, The Producers, and she told me she'd been extremely offended by the show and the dancing Nazis: but, the thing is, offended mostly for the sake of the Jews. I'm a Jew, and I have no problem with Nazi humor, so this makes me wonder if I'm getting weirded out by the McDonald's ad for a group that may not be weirded out by it. I don't know, maybe black people think the chicken angle's funny. Like maybe it's an inside joke that I'm missing out on or something.

So, even moving on from the chicken and black guy issue, I still don't get why the athlete would be running away from the person stealing his chicken. The text reads: "when someone tries to steal my chicken/ i never run away...i sprint." Isn't the premise of this ad that the chicken is so good that you wouldn't want to give it up? So why, if someone stole it from you, would you try to get away from the thief and your chicken as quickly as possible? I'm seriously baffled.

Additional Avrilnalysis

Every few months, without fail, Avril Lavigne releases a single that I find lyrically problematic. This has usually been because of errant logic in the narrative and emotional thrusts of the songs. With her latest, My Happy Ending, however, it's just lazy rhyming.

Whenever I'm watching Avril's latest video on MTV Hits, in which she romps with a type that always reminds me of Charlie Salinger from Party Of Five, I am shaken out of her romantic melancholy (which is otherwise effective) by the faulty word choice in the second verse when considered in tandem with the first verse. These verses go as follows:

Let's talk this over
It's not like we're dead
Was it something I did?
Was it something You said?

Don't leave me hanging
In a city so dead
Held up so high
On such a breakable thread

It's the "dead" times two that kills me. Same positioning in each of the verses, and enunciated in the same way, too. Avril hangs on the word "dead," which makes the repetition that much more distracting, causing the word to literally create the effect of very, very dead weight in her song. The first time I heard the single, I thought Avril might be going for a distinctive, yet aesthetically unsound rhyme scheme, and that the pattern would reassert itself later in the song. And while Avril's lyrical laziness does rear its head again, it does so in an entirely different manner:

But they don't know me
Do they even know you?
All the things you hide from me
All the shit that you do?

As you can see, there's the replicated "me." I'd be willing to let this slide as bad lyricsmanship if it followed either of the rhyme schemes "established" in verses one and two, which are ABCC and ABCB. The above verse is an ABAB, and the "me" never reoccurs in the following verse in the way that "dead" comes back for an encore. There seems to me to be no conscious effort at avant garde songwriting here, and that's the only thing, for me, that could possibly excuse this listless echo.

What there is, instead, appears to be a remarkable lack of vocabulary skills. I have a rhyming dictionary at my mom's house in Irvine, but without it, I can brainstorm a few alternate words to go with "thread."

-There's bed, which is a good one. "Don't leaving me hanging, all alone in our bed..."
-There's head, also useful. "Don't leaving me hanging, with the thoughts in my head..."
- Said. Always popular. "Don't leaving me hanging, don't forget what you said..."

If Avril really wanted to get crazy with it, she could mix up the verse with fed, lead, Ned, wed, Club Med, etc. There are really a lot of options, which makes the "dead" that much more disappointing. Moreover, she could have tossed out the whole extended hanging/thread metaphor, which doesn't really work for me in light of the fact that the song is evidently written from a post-breakup perspective, when the happy ending is already out of reach. This would say to me that the thread has already been broken, and that Avril is no longer hanging above the city. Disillusionment with her paramour has already set in, and she's been kicked to the curb like one of her neckties from 2002. So really, if I was advising Avril, I'd tell her to lose the entire second verse, write something else (come on- it's four lines), and then she'd no longer have to struggle to find a partner for "thread."

I'm just saying.

At The Service Of The Porcelain God

At the Chinatown reading, I was sort of drunk, but I like to think that I did what I did not because of alcohol, but because I'm a good Samaritan. At intermission I waited in the ladies' bathroom line, and the girl who came out ahead of me didn't bother to tell me that the toilet wasn't flushing. So I got in there, beheld the flotsam and jetsam and, because I spent my childhood with the aforementioned constipation problem, I greeted the bar's plunger like an old friend.

I thought to myself, "I am going to fix this toilet for the benefit of all the girls here tonight." During childhood I learned how to plunge toilets with skill far exceeding that of your average plumber, who usually has to bring in the chemical drain solutions and specialized wire pokers. But me with a plunger in hand is like Paul Bunyan with an axe. I think Paul Bunyan had an axe. Maybe he was just tall and strong, but I think I'm remembering an axe, too.

So I picked up the plunger and, in a semi-drunken haze, began plunging the bar's ladies' toilet. I felt really good about it, like I was on a mission and like I was actually snapping out of my usual solipsism to do something with greater purpose. I felt like a humanitarian, kind of. I knew there was a line of girls doing the pee-pee dance outside, but I plunged with grand diligence and seriousness, knowing that keeping them waiting a little longer was worth it, for their own sakes.

Maybe it was because I was inebriated and maybe because I find things enormously interesting when I am in this state, but the plunging felt fantastic.

After sensing that I had applied the proper amount of heave-ho suctioning, I went to flush the toilet and discovered that it hadn't been the pipes at all, but the flusher mechanism. The chain connecting the flusher to the water supply in the tank had obviously become loose (I know all about this, too), the same way that the chain on a bicyle is wont to do. In order to correct this problem, I would have to lift the lid off of the water tank and fiddle around with its inner workings, and this is where my benevolence ran out. It was too much work for a public toilet.

I exited the bathroom and, putting my hand on the shoulder of the next girl in line, broke the situation to her like a war buddy delivering the bad news about a comrade's injury. "The toilet's flusher doesn't work. You should know this before entering."

"Thank you!" she said with genuine appreciation, and I thought, "Good deed for the night: accomplished. I am Sunday's child."

I related what I'd done later to a friend, while sobering up, and asked, "That was kind of weird of me to do, huh? Plunging that toilet."

"I'm so grossed out I can't even think about it," he said, looking at me like he'd never truly seen me before that moment.

I Woke Up Extraordinarily Lazy Today

And probably because I happened to step in the ant spray in my bathroom on Thursday night, which I figure, though not intentional, was the least I could do to honor the genocide of the housebound ants by suffering a little with them. Having never dealt with insect sprays before, I didn't realize that you were supposed to rinse your skin for twenty minutes, so instead I went to bed. And woke up with flu-like symptoms, which have turned into a lingering malaise, which really isn't so different from my regular state of being.

All this laziness reminds me of the perfect job that my dad told me about last week. I don't think it exists anymore.

Years ago, in Canada, you couldn't get a divorce unless there was proven adultery, so when a couple wanted to split, a lot of husbands would just hire hookers to "look suspicious" in hotel rooms. They didn't want to get their female friends or coworkers to play the role of the accomplice, because then they'd be dragged into the proceedings. And the wives didn't want to dishonor themselves. So the way I figure, if I had been in Canada fifty years ago, I could have started my own little business where all I did was lay in hotel beds in a nightie and wait for the private investigators to come and witness my lying in bed next to trembling, Canadian men. It sounds like the majority of time there was no sex involved, just the illusion of sex. This is like being a very, very lazy magician.

Two Day Notice

Another reading landmark: I think I'm going to try reading slightly drunk for the first time ever. I've written in the blog about typing drunk, but never before have I attempted to read something out loud to other people while kind of tipsy. I figure it's the appropriate thing to do, since the event is being held in a bar. The only time I can remember attempting to read something drunk was the night before I flew out to college, when I inadvertently became so smashed that my parents found me wandering around the house in only underwear, and when my ex-ex boyfriend tried to give me his copy of Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks as a gift, and I was too blurry-eyed to figure out what it was. I remember turning it around in my hands, trying to read the track listing. But not trying out loud. Sunday night will be the first instance of the "out loud" variety of drunk reading.

Also, CNN still thinks I'm a boy.