This Afternoon In Drama

I Came, I Saw, I Went Back To Bed

Thursday was my 25th birthday and I spent it depressed, I think because I'm in mourning for the birthdays of my youth that granted me with the feeling, upon waking on every October 28th, that the world had rearranged its molecules to suit me. I don't really give a fuck if that was a blindly egotistical approach to take to the day. It felt holy. I don't know what I expected this year besides God to reach his pointer finger down from the clouds and touch it to mine, then say in a booming yet calm tone, "On this day you were released upon the word like sweet, sweet molasses," but on the night before my birthday I started to realize that the momentum wasn't there. I had been talking about my birthday for over a month, how excited I was to feel it approaching, but I think that as you get older and don't have the party favors (or even the party) to hand out to those asked to celebrate your birthday with you, you can't expect to feel the "It's your birthday!" aura echoed back to you by their vibrating bloodstreams. Maybe I should have bought some scratch-and-sniff orange notepads, the party favor of my childhood that haunts me forever (it was a McDonald's birthday, too. It's about feeling, not extent of the celebration) and is featured in my first novel because of its indelible print on my soul. Maybe I could have gotten friends and family properly riled up with these fantastic citrus pads. It's not like the people in my life didn't express good wishes for my birthday, but just that no one was vibrating. But maybe, after all, that was my responsibility, to just get myself a-quaking, and maybe the bigger issue is that the sadness of getting older isn't the body aging but the timbre of joy.

Anyway, for my birthday, Brett and I went to see a preview screening of Saw, featuring a Q and A afterward with the twenty-seven year old writer and twenty-seven year old director. Cary Elwes, who had such deft comic timing in The Princess Bride, showed me that the latter performance was probably a lot of thesbianic serendipity because it turns out that Cary's big performance limitatation is that he turns comic whenever he's trying to portray seriousness. Which is helpful and charming in Bride, but in Saw, Brett insists that this isn't supposed to be the effect. I started cracking up when Cary (vague spoilers) starts crying over the imagined fate of his family and makes the decision to try to saw off his foot, and I thought, for awhile, that I was supposed to be laughing. This is because Cary's character is portrayed as somewhat of a dick, and the dramatic irony of the cuts during this scene (I won't give away anymore) gave me the impression that the filmmakers were attempting to sock it to him through storytelling in order to highlight Cary's amusing descent into total pussydom. I said to Brett, "I think maybe it's supposed to be funny here." But Brett insisted, "No," while wearing a grimace because I think he was scared that the filmmakers were in the screening room, gauging reactions. I'm pretty sure they showed up afterward.

During the interview session, the screenwriter, who also cast himself as the other lead in the film, wouldn't shut up. He loved being on the microphone. He loved answering questions intended for the director. And I disliked him for all of it because he is the worst kind of writer- the kind that wants to act. In fact, he was so insistent on starring in the movie that he was part of the package all along as the filmmakers moved through Hollywood studios and production companies, trying to secure funding. His presence in the film was non-negotiable, and he actually sounded proud when he mentioned that repeatedly. I wanted the moderator to ask the screenwriter what he thought his acting brought to the film that no one else could (because really, Cary Elwes and him together were a total trainwreck), and also to tell him that he should never, ever stick lines in his scripts like, "I'll start at the beginning," when setting up a flashback.

The better "spooky" Halloween offering was VH1's most recent episode of The Surreal Life, which sent the D-list celebrity gang to an abandoned and formerly abusive hospital to see if they could contact any ghosts. One of the frightening things for me has been the recent discovery that I am very attracted to Dave Coulier, formerly the Popeye-imitating lamest uncle on Full House. It's already been widely documented that I've had a longtime thing for Bob Saget, so this recent televisual crush leaves me wondering- Is Uncle Jesse next? And what is it about these men?

The best part of the episode was lovebirds Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen hovering over a Ouija board together in the pitch black former file room of the hospital, trying to contact a dead orderly who felt he'd never been appreciated. Together (Flav's gold teeth shining every time the ray from the flashlight passed them) they asked the spirits in the room, "Are you angry that we're here in the hospital disturbing you?" Unbelievably, something knocked a "yes" on a nearby metal door, leading me to believe that those hospital ghosts are total fucking idiots. Who could ever be mad about Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen right in front of your face, doing their bizarrely smitten passion play? If I was a ghost, I'd want those endlessly fascinating two to stay so I could watch them flirt and profess undying love and feed each other bananas forever and ever. Which goes back to the ways that things suffer as we get older- maybe by the time we're beyond dead, we've lost the joyful appreciation of every single amazing thing.

One

Tonight I got a call from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I was like, "Arnie, my birthday's not until Thursday. But better early then never." Then he kept talking about voting for a Republican candidate, and I realized our friendship has really gone to shit.

And, oh yeah- today is the blog's first birthday. A year ago today I started the blog to sell books, and it turns out I sold some books. So what did I get the blog for its birthday? The scanner out of my mom's garage in Irvine!

Here's the Lee Jeans ad that was shot on America's Next Top Model. Eerily, they went back and added the discarded models in post, so for those of you who didn't get enough of Magdelena (anyone?), here she is in her vaguely doped up glory. The real stand-out of the shoot is Nicole, except I can't bring myself to like her enough to root for her because she keeps facially kissing so much ass during every task. She beams at Jay Manuel's lame, bare-chested announcements- thank god she's not in the room when he does his uber-creepy Covergirl zombie ads- and pretends to be hearing Tyra's rundown of the Top Model prizes for the first time every time, which is almost a sign of brain damage. She's too accommodating, and I hate accommodating.

What I've realized during the past few shows is that Toccara could take this thing, and it wouldn't be a naive, painfully idealistic move on the part of the judges. All along I've been thinking that it's completely unrealistic to name a plus-sized girl "America's Next Top Model" unless housefraus in Missouri become the basis for the redefinition of "sample size," but recently I've finally understood that Tyra's not naming "America's Next Top Model" anyway. Hence, why not Toccara, who photographs incredibly? (And who has the biggest ta-tas ever.) Believe me, I love this show, but it's time to recognize that what Miss Tyra is doing is picking "America's Next Somewhat Regularly Working Model." Season one winner Adrianne Curry, as much as I adored her, too, has disappeared into the ether, which might be another name for Joliet, Illinois. Season two winner Yoanna House seemed to get some jobs during L.A. fashion week- but so did Anna Nicole Smith, I think, so that's nothing to write "home" to your Italian non-orgy orgy partner about. So while I still contend that it would take a cultural revolution for Toccara to truly be embraced as "America's Next Top Model" if that's actually what UPN had the power to designate, it is entirely possible and smart to crown her the best model out of the group. After last week's episode, I see an ass lotion ad for her, which would make her the most visible winner yet.

P.S. Next week's preview shows Ann playing a "practical joke" on Cassie by doing something to what look like Cassie's "brownies." First, Cassie eats brownies? Second, no matter what Ann puts in those brownies, Cassie is going to throw it (a concentration of extra calories? liquid carbohydrates?) up anyway, so it seems like the real prank is on Ann for putting in the effort.

Paternity Suits

I anxiously await the launch of www.mychildsaysdaddy.com, currently under construction. I became aware of the future website when the big white "My Child Says Daddy" van pulled up next to me at the light. On it was painted the company's slogan: "No more baby mama drama." This almost makes me want to apply for a receptionist job at the MCSD headquarters, so I can answer the phone, "Good afternoon. No more baby mama drama for you. How can I direct your call?" In custody court I imagine the MCSD lawyers will close powerfully, replacing "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit" with "If the baby mama causing drama, gotta give the lil laddie to his daddy." "If there's baby mama drama, give that girl fast as you can back to her old man." Then- the coup de grace. The baby mama's baby (sitting in the courtroom, wearing sweet, polished shoes) will yell out a cute, "Daddy!" and the first chair will solemnly say, "See your honor? The child says daddy. What can I do but rest my case?"

Old Peep(le) Show

So it turns out the Leisure World crowd? Probably not so much my audience. As I was standing at the podium, freewheeling about my volatile college boyfriend, my hair, my love and devotion to TV, and the endlessly fascinating topic of teen suicide, I looked out upon a group of three hundred seniors, mostly bearing looks that said, "Bitch, we're worried about cheaper medication from Canada, not Tiffany's ninth grade cutting problem."

Afterward, I was collecting my stuff when an elderly woman came up to me and stuck her finger in between two buttons of my tight men's shirt. These two buttons happened to be the ones vertically demarcating my cleavage.

"You hellraiser!" she said, her eyes going down to my breasts, where I always have a shirt-gap when I wear button-down garments because of the pull on the fabric. "Are you even wearing a bra?" She gave me a pals-in-conspiracy grin.

"Actually, yes," I said, "but I'm wearing this shirt because I wanted to give you ladies a little thrill." Then I pulled open the gap in my shirt, showing her my bra and the upper curve of my boobs.

She shrieked with joy and chucked me on the shoulder. That one interaction made the entire appearance worth it.

Afterward I went to hang out with the aforementioned volatile college boyfriend, who makes me insane. When we were in love, the tender moments provided downtime in between his manic theorizing and uppity arguing/dancing, and now that we are just friends, he is just impressively exhausting. I thought about how people say that if an ex can make you crazy, then you still must have feelings for him- but what this cliche doesn't take into account is that your ex might be legitimately, objectively draining, from anyone's perspective, and that crazy feeling you experience is the only logical, out-of-love reaction.

I'll Be Appearing At:

This week I have two "appearances," the first being tomorrow morning's Brandeis Women's Alumni Luncheon at which I am supposed to "...just be yourself and talk about the book, how and why you wrote it. The audience will be enthralled by your youth and personality..." except I really operate much more like an old hag and I wouldn't say my personality is one that exactly lights up the room. The funny thing about this luncheon is that it's being held at Leisure World which, when I was little and riding in the back seat on the 5 South, I believed was an adult playground- sort of like a heterosexual Fire Island, since I don't think I knew or understood that much about gay people at the time. Because my parents had never taken me to Leisure World, I assumed it had to be for adults because if it had been for kids, we would have so been there. Off of the freeway there's a gigantic sculpture of a metal globe that says "Leisure World," and I imagined that beyond this globe there were co-ed (stage-wise) strip clubs, lots of raw meat (dinner-wise), and gambling. It was only when I got older that I found out that Leisure World is a gigantic retirement community, a globe filled with old people and their hispanic attendants. Whee! In fact, Leisure World is a lot like a microcosm of the city of Irvine- planned out, constantly watered greenery, and people who just don't want to leave (until, I guess, their organs make them). I have been promised Cornish Gamehen (Game hen? Game-hen?) at this luncheon, which I've never tasted before.

Unless you are an alumni of Brandeis University and live in Southern California and have RSVP'd and have a vagina, you cannot attend this luncheon, which I think limits a large portion of the public.

Then, on Saturday I am reading at the open-to-everybody California Writers and Readers Fest at the Fullerton Library. I go on at 2:30 P.M., and again, am just supposed to be myself. I think none of these organizers have thought through that 'myself' is somewhat antisocial and antagonistic. They assigned my half-hour of speaking the title "How Writing a Critically Acclaimed Novel at Age 24 Changed My Life" (I'm serious), except I wrote the novel two years ago and having written it hasn't changed my life all that much, since I am, generally, a pretty unchangeable person. Still nap daily. Still eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese by the boxful. Still living month to month.

And lastly, I just became aware of this "quiz" I did many months ago going up on this website. I see they left off my answer to "What would you wear if invited on Oprah's show?" which was "crotchless panties."

You Can Never Have Enough Good Friends

Patty was a Schizophrenic, and one of her most dominant alternate personalities was that of a fifty-something Filipino man named Tuazon. While Patty was Tuazon one afternoon, she attended a local "Filipino Pride" festival, where she met Buncio (also a fifty-something Filipino man) while he was manning a Halo-Halo ("Mix-Mix") stand. They were bonding over the concoction of fruits and beans topped with ice-cream, wiping the spare pinipig flakes from each other's chins, when suddenly Tuazon/Patty remarked that she missed waking up to the sight of Mount Apo kissing the clouds.

"You know Mount Apo?" exclaimed Buncio, excited to find someone who had been to his mother country. Even most of the Filipinos at the festival were second generation Americans with no desire to return to their homeland.

"I am from Mount Apo! Born and raised," Tuazon/Patty corrected, gesturing that she'd like another Halo-Halo.

Buncio assumed this meant that the woman's parents had been ex-Patriots who settled on Mindanao. "What's your name?" he asked, growing more fascinated with her by the second.

"Tuazon," answered Tuazon/Patty.

"Tuazon? But that means 'eldest grandson.' It's impossible for you to be the eldest grandson."

Patty/Tuazon just stared at him in a dazed manner and replied, "In what way is it impossible?" And then she began to chuckle. Bencio believed that she'd been joking with him, and he began to laugh heartily, appreciating her humor. He decided that he would call her "Tuazon" from now on, regardless of her real moniker, since it was such a charming nickname. "Well, come on, Tuazon," he said, "let's walk around the park and share in the memories of our childhoods."

As they strolled around the festival, Tuazon/Patty and Buncio discussed the monsoons they'd survived, the fertile valleys of the island they both happened to be from, the volcanos, and the first time they remembered sucking out balut, the salted unhatched embryo of a duck. The more they talked, the more they discovered they had in common, until they were almost speaking in tandem as if about the exact same life.

"This is so bizarre," said Buncio, "how much we are alike. Isn't it?"

"We are cut of the same bahag!" joked Tuazon/Patty, referring to the traditional hand-loomed loin cloth of the Mountain Province.

They spent the whole day together, and when evening arrived and they had exhausted their energy for reminiscing, Buncio and Tuazon/Patty started to move onto other subjects while lying on a blanket on the grass. As Buncio tried to shift positions, he remarked that his arthritis was acting up again, and Tuazon/Patty nodded sympathetically. "Mine too."

"You have arthritis?"

"I do," reaffirmed Tuazon/Patty.

"It's like we're the same person. When you start telling me that you're having prostate trouble, I'm going to really get scared."

"I am having prostate trouble," said Tuazon/Patty with a straight face, but this made Buncio laugh even more.

"You are a real piece of work, Tuazon!" said Buncio, almost crying from the mirth. "A real piece of work!"

"It's good that we can laugh about our ailments together," remarked Tuazon/Patty, and this just made Buncio laugh even harder.

When the park had grown dark and all the festival attendees were going home, Buncio asked Tuazon/Patty if he could have her phone number. She wrote it down on a scrap flyer for him, and they hugged their goodbyes. But Buncio was already missing her so badly by the next day that he decided to call. A young, Russian child answered the phone.

"Zdravstvuite," said the child, who sounded no more than six years old.

"Hello," said Buncio. "May I please speak with..." He realized that he hadn't ever gotten Tuazon's real name, but he nothing else to call her by. "Tuazon? From the Phillipines?"

"один момент пожалуйста," the child told him. The child was also Patty, and she handed the phone over to herself. Within a minute, Tuazon was on the line. "Hello?"

"Tuazon, this is Buncio. I know I'm calling very soon after our first meeting, and maybe this seems a little suffocating, but I was just thinking about how great it was to meet you yesterday. It feels so good to have someone that I identify with so completely, despite the fact that you're white and a woman."

At this Tuazon/Patty began laughing this time. "White and a woman. Funny!"

"It is funny, isn't it? asked Buncio. "How well we get along? Anyway, the reason that I'm calling, and maybe this is a little stupid, is to say that I really hope we can be good friends."

"Of course we'll be good friends!" exclaimed Tuazon/Patty. "We'll tell each other everything. There will be nothing between us."

Six months later Tuazon/Patty and Buncio were posing for Kashi, but, by then, Buncio had started to realize that Tuazon might be batshit crazy.

"I broke up with my psychiatrist. I told him I had suicidal tendencies. He told me from now on I had to pay in advance."-- Rodney Dangerfield '21-'04

Recently I did an interview with Sean Carman about, among other things, suicide and Good Charlotte. It's up at Maud Newton's today, but I don't think my parents or anyone from my publishers should read it (I know that makes you two groups curious about it and then you want to read it even more, but remember all the times you guys said you knew what was best for me, and just to trust you? Trust me.)

Jah Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

(Quick note: it's entirely possible that while this blog is on the lighter schedule, it just may devolve entirely into America's Next Top Model analysis.)

On the blog I called "drum circle." In my private life, I called (to Brett) "spoken word enthusiast." I can spot them a mile away. They move their limbs like broken robots with iambic joints. They carry their heads like the thoughts inside are too heavy to hold in the upright position. Their lips are stuck in a coerced shape that lends itself to expressions like "butterfly" and "womb" and "my sisters/brothers," and I saw it right away when Amanda said that her son (otherwise known as "Jah Wolf") would flourish like a "rose growing through concrete," despite her running off to go sport hand cream in a UPN modeling contest.

It was further confirmed during the last five minutes of last week's episode, when Amanda decided to bust out her poetry journal and read some lines for her fellow models. And there it finally was: that enunciation developed by spoken word enthusiasts, that enunciation adopted in order to make sure their listeners know that every single one of their words is important. It's a way of forcing your audience to hang onto your syllables, even if they're not worth it. There is no style of speaking that makes my knuckles curl quicker. It is fingernails on the chalkboard of my mind. I have no problem issuing the blanket statement that I detest spoken word enthusiasts. I took an instant disliking to Amanda, and it was just a gut feeling beating the proof to the punch. Because not only is she into spoken word, but she's a self-professed "hippie," if that sort of designation is possible in this day and age. I know there's a continuous debate constantly being waged, and I say we just lay out a Hippie vs. hippie arrangement like we (or the Germans) did with Expressionism vs. expressionism.

I have a sentence in my new book that best sums up my thoughts on why I hate hippies (sorry that I have to reference myself here): "She denied her judgment the way that hippies denied the variety in humans, the fact that there were just some, plain and simple, impossible to love and unworthy of loving." It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of to say that you love all people, the same way that so many guys assert that they "love women." I'm sure I could round a few up with belly buttons the size of Canada that you wouldn't love so much. While I can respect the concept of having respect for all people, based on the simple common denominator of shared humanity, love is an entirely different issue. That generic, wide-reaching love, to me, is the same kind of love present when Gwneyth Paltrow shouts "I love you, too!" to her fans from the MTV VMA stage. It's bullshit. So for Amanda to come into the contest saying that she's just a "hippie" who "loves everyone" and who wants everyone to "love each other" confirms to me that she's at least semi-horrible inside.

And, as I think most of us know, the ones who profess to love so much are always the ones with the blackest hearts. All it took for Amanda's to emerge was a really nasty weave and a bowl of bleach. The thing about hippies is that it's precisely this feeling they possess that they need to "care for" everyone that leads to varying levels of evil. Hippies remind me of vampires, in that the vampires (in most stories and films) are going around either sucking the life out of or converting everyone they can get their hands on, but in the long run, they're fucking themselves. By consuming everyone or wanting to turn everyone like them, they're totally depleting their life source.

Amanda seems to me to be like that, too. Her caring takes the form of conversion, of getting everyone wrapped up in each other's business to the point of eventually consuming each other. She can't keep a secret. She has to spread it among her "sisters" because she "cares," and then when that caring comes back, boomerangs her in the ass, and everyone decides she's a backstabber, she calls her mom crying. If she spreads the loving and caring to all of the other girls, they're going to end up "better" than her, and ultimately defeat the purpose inherent in her asserted self-image. George Bush has a vein of this neo-hippieism in him, too, that he believes that his way of living is the best one for everyone. And it's his conviction, one that that leaves no room for difference, that is what makes him vampiric and freaky. That, and the blinking.

Oh well, next week's the runway in the dark episode. Tyra- you're evil!

Winter Agenda

Since I just hit page 300 in my second novel, I've decided it's time to ease up on the blog a little into the new year. This doesn't mean I'm pulling a William Gibson, because while I do agree that blogging definitely isn't "writing a novel," I don't think that you can't do both at the same time. But I do want to focus in on what I think are the last hundred pages of my new book, so I'm probably going to be dropping down to a more intermittent blogging schedule, and I only know that means "probably not ever other day like I've been doing." See, along with the second novel, other things are eating into my time, most recently:

1. The perm that I just got Wednesday, which I've had to stop and explain to every single person I've said, "I'm getting a perm" to. In sixth grade I could just say, "I'm getting a perm" and everything was cool. Nowadays, it's not a statement. It's a question with neverending branches.

If you've ever been to my main website, then you know I have this weird longstanding mermaid fixation, which has always partially expressed itself through an envy of mermaid hair. For all my life I've wanted "those mermaidy waves," not really stopping to consider that the mermaids have those waves because they are swimming in water and so the current does things with their hair and its shape that is probably not achievable for those dealing with gravity. Also, I never really stopped to consider why I found mermaids such attractive fantastical icons, considering that they are (mythology-wise) really the offspring of a drunken night of bestiality, and that's lineage that's not so cute. I only vaguely started to realize that mermaids are a kind of gross construction when I saw The Garbage Pail Kids (series 2, I believe) cards 108a and 108b, "Smelly Sally" and "Fishy Phyllis." Which are Cabbage Patch Kid mermaids with blond braids and starfish bikinis sitting in gigantic tins of fresh sardines, soaking their tails in fish juice. Then it really hit me that mermaids are half fish. I still liked their hair, though. No one else seems to get it- the perming, I mean- but if everyone else was sleeping with fish, would I? No. You can't just got through life following the crowd, as evidenced by my Bat Mitzvah table assignments:

2. While I've been accepted into the not-snobby of the two MFA programs I applied to, I will find out in the coming week whether or not I was accepted into the snobby program of my choice. And then, if I am, I will need some additional time in my life to read the submitted works of my peers in anticipation of the first semester residency, and honor the snobby code by marking these stories/excerpts up with red, "constructively critical" remarks in the margins.

3. All of a sudden, I have this weird sideline campy/goth baby portrait painting business going. I've received two more commissions in the last few weeks alone.

4. I will be trying to stop pet owners from dressing up their dogs and cats for Halloween. You hear a lot about societies intent on protecting animals from Satanist/trick or treater violence, but you don't hear a lot about the anti-pet-costume movement. I got this picture from an email Petco sent me, telling me to come in and get my four legged friend a vampire cape.

I know what it's like to have the urge to be mean to animals. Sometimes I find little animals so cute that I want to pat them on the heads really, really hard or put them in a garbage can with a revolving top, but I don't, usually, because even though their cuteness kills me, I know that's my problem. I need to handle the cuteness. People who have the desire to put their dogs in Dracula costumes need to practice the same sort of restraint. I know it seems kind of fun and mean. But you won't feel good about it the next morning, so why don't you just dress yourself up as a dog this Halloween and hurt yourself instead?

She Works Hard For The Money

I was shocked to read this Library Journal article and find out that my novel has "sales totaling 42,000 copies—so far." The thing I never realized about being an author before I became an "author" was that royalties are only paid twice a year, in October and April, and those are also the only times that you receive sales statements. During the other months, no one tells you anything, and you assume that you're chugging along at 15k or something, and you're grateful. Then you read a LJ blurb, and you think, "Uhhh, couldn't someone over at my publisher's have dropped me a line?" It was always my talked about goal to have my total sales exceed American Idol reject/nerd William Hung's first week of CD sales (a reported 37,000). And I know that's a very sad goal, illuminating just how few book buyers there are in America when you hold them up against the novelty CD buyers who thought that the Hung record was entertaining enough to own- but today I'd like to thank the people who took the time and gave up the thirteen dollars to sit down with my work for a few hours.