This Afternoon In Drama

Just Like Old Times

After fighting with Ryan over combo breakfasts about whether or not my local mystique is still in operation (he's yay, I'm nay), and after spending a half hour arguing with him in the car about whether or not it's possible to have a theoretically-sound revolution in America (with me on the con side, and him on the pro), and after spending a silent twenty minutes with him in Ikea, both of us steaming (about the revolution thing) as we wound through the "world market" (we both finally admitted at the checkout line that we're a little ambivalent about Ikea, neither here nor there), I am tired.  Tirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred.  So I'm taking the week off from the blog, to allow my brain cells to gear themselves up for the coming new year and some gigantic resolutions I've made.  See you soon.

Let There Be Peace On Earth

And let it begin with me and my Lite-Brite prowess.

If the light pegs don't touch your heart, then you don't have one.

I thought about what to do for the blog readers for Christmas, and, as a starting point, decided to look at my Google hits to see what people were wanting the most.  Lately I've been getting tons of hits for "teen toes" (unfortunately, I just increased those hits twofold by mentioning them), but I can't help out because my feet are in their twenties.  I've also been getting tons of "how to put in a tampon" searches, and I became very, very tempted to write out a detailed tutorial, especially since I knew it would drive my mom up the wall.  She hates when I talk about tampons.  However, I don't like to repeat what's already out there, and since there's already free literature inside of tampon boxes, I'll abstain.

(But, just for fun: one foot up on the toilet cover for your first time, ladies!)

What I decided on was informing those of you who are not yet watching Bravo's Project Runway that you are missing a show even possibly better than America's Next Top Model, and by my telling you this in December, it gives you enough time to get caught up on the three missed episodes in time for the series' return in January.   Ho ho ho!

Project Runway is hosted by Heidi Klum, who understands that she's just supposed to stand there and look pissed and move along the proceedings, not dispense platitudes about life and self esteem with wide-eyed concern.  In fact, there is no time for nurturing self esteem on Runway, because the truly unique thing about the show is that there finally exists a reality TV competition in which talent is measurable, specific, and solely responsible for getting its contestants to the final spot.  One of the major problems with The Apprentice this past season has been that "being good at business" is not something that it seems any of the show's judges can define, so sometimes businessness entails education and sometimes it entails less education, and at the end of the season everyone is left with the randomness of Donald Trump's double-fingered firing attacks and the question of whether or not the winner is actually any better than the contestant next to him.  Unless you're devoutly interested in Trump's psyche and need to orchestrate drama, you're not going to come out of the finale with any sort of faith.  The same deal went for America's Next Top Model this season, during which sometimes 'tude was good and sometimes 'tude was bad, and the filmy descriptive "model" was stretched and molded from week to week.  Is Eva really the best model out of the bunch?  I still have no idea.

But on Project Runway, the objective is clean: design clothing well under exceptional circumstances with exceptional materials.  These are contestants who possess a unique, admirable skill (well, some of them), and it's thrilling to be able to watch the creative process go from choosing supplies, to the picking of the runway models (yes- there's young models here too, and one even gets eliminated each week!  and cries!), to the initial design sketches, to the implementations, to the final tailorings (amid blurred out model breasts), to the runway show at the end of each episode, to the bitchy, bitchy Elle magazine fashion director's comments before she and the other judges can one of the hopefuls.  The final garments are always incredibly diverse, and I love trying to guess which of the designs the judges will name "best of the week," just as I subscribe to InStyle magazine because of the naming of the "best dress of the month."  That always kills me, that there's a "best dress" floating around, just being the best.

The greatest portion of the show's beauty comes from its contestants, though.  Whereas shows like Top Model and Apprentice have been playing the destruct-then-rehabilitate game, making heroes and villains in the editing room, the designers of Runway are vivid in and of themselves, especially because they're under so much creative stress.  It's hard to hide your true nature when you're stuck in a room with your fellow visionaries, able to watch what they're coming up with as you evaluate their merits against yours.  Instead of the abstract "I hope my photo comes out good!" of Top Model or the vague "{Blank} is not a good leader" of The Apprentice, the contestants of Runway have to work on tangible creations side by side, and are forced to continue believing in their own designs even when they can see that the one hanging next to them is kicking ass.  Never have I seen so much raw insecurity for such valid reasons depicted on television.  And this is where I get to the finest assembly of reality TV characters I've found since the first season of Survivor.

My personal favorite, personality-wise, is Jay.  If Ruben is the "velvet teddybear" of American Idol, then Jay is the "gay teddybear" of Project Runway.  He went dressed as Jesus to an auction at which he was supposed to sell one of his designs to ladies who lunch, and the celebrity he most wants to design for is Amy Sedaris.  His personal style is sort of hideous- red fly-eye sunglasses, mini-buns all over his head, puffy jackets- but his silver cocktail dress was surprisingly controlled and amazing, giving him the right to talk as much shit on the other contestants as he tends to do.  Also, he used to work in porn.

Among my other favorites there's Austin, who wears so much blush and lip gloss that he looks like an early 90's Bonne Bell ad, and Mario (unfortunately now gone), who used to spend an hour on his design, announce he was finished- pissing everyone else off- and then instruct his model to flip off the judges on the runway.

On the glorious flip side, there's no shortage of contestants to hate.  At the top of my list is Wendy, who, with her beady little eyes, constantly lets it be known that she is uncontrollably envious of the younger and more impressive talent around her.  At eliminations she always looks one design away from killing herself, as she believes that this is her last opportunity in life to make it in fashion.  I instantly detested Starr (now gone), who couldn't tailor to save her life and who would tear up at the drop of a pin- literally.  Her idea of edginess was making a dress on which she depicted "cancer" with sequins and ribbon.  There's also Kevin, who sort of hangs in the background, but appears every once and while to act like a total prick, and the too-hilarious-to-actually-hold-his-awfulness-against-him Daniel, who was eliminated during the first episode by the sheer force of his own pretension.

It's so refreshing to watch competitors make something using their own brains and hands, and it's double the fun to watch them attempt to explain their inspirations later while Michael Kors looks on in ambiguous disdain.  I can't recommend the show enough, so this is me putting it in your stocking.

Merry Christmas, gentiles.  And to all the Jews- Happy Chinese Restauranting.

Mine Eyes Have Not Seen The Glory

I spent this weekend pummeling through the final edits on my second novel, determined to finish.  And finish I did, although Sunday was filled with much hair plucking, my well-tested fix when I become creatively stuck.  Whenever I don't know what to write next, I pick up a pair of tweezers and pull out a single hair on my arm.  Then an idea comes.  It's like the clapping in Peter Pan, but instead of clapping and bringing a fairy back to life, I engage in plucking and a sentence comes down to me from my head.

Anyway, the second book is now ready to be sold in 2005, and I'm excited.

My excitement might have contributed to what I'm not really sure happened last night, when flashes of light kept going off in my dark apartment around 1 a.m., whenever I was about to shut my eyes.  It was like lightning, except there was no lightning, or it was like someone standing outside of my window and taking a picture with a flash.  After the zips of light I would sit up in my bed and make sure that no one was inside of my apartment and that nothing was ostensibly weird around me, but I am next to positive that the light did not come from my head.  This morning I got up and inspected everything, and the only evidence of something gone astray is that my roll of paper towels in the kitchen is suddenly marked with a deep, grooved pattern all over, like something branded waves into it.  Yeah, I don't know.  All I do know is that when I cleaned the rabbit cage last night, the paper towels were normal.

In other bed news my mom bought me flannel sheets with snowflakes all over them, and since I didn't wash the sheets before using them, I wake up with little flannel snowflakes in my hair.  I kind of like the look.

Since I'm somewhat zapped out from the novel finishing marathon, I thought I would take a day to kick back and look at fun, pretty things like pictures of beautiful people from the America's Next Top Model finale party.  And then:

GAHHHHHHHH!

GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Oh, Amanda.  I know your family's short on money.  But the extensions need to go back in.  GAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

But who would have guessed it?  Ann, the girl who formerly could not take a good picture to save her life, brings the pretty by finally learning to tilt her chin down and pop her nipple out.  After seeing Jay's triple-strand cross over his man cleavage, she's like eye drops, this one.

Good Friends Sometimes Means Good Pain

Sherry was the pledgemistress of a major sorority at a certain Floridian university, and when Morgan showed up to the "Getting To Toe You" pedicure kick-off event during pledge week, they found themselves paired up with a bottle of "Pretty In Peach" to share between them.

"You do my toes," said Sherry, sitting down on the settee.  "And then you can do yours."  It hadn't escaped anyone's notice that Morgan was the only black woman at the entire party, and suddenly a weighty question began to circulate among all the sisters.  "Never really thought about it before- but have we ever had a black member?"  After all the pledges had cleared out that night, the sisters took down decades of sorority group photos from back until 1960; they stopped there because before that date, they were certain there hadn't been any "sister" sisters.  As the girls flipped through pages and pages of beaming faces and sweater sets, they soon began to realize that no, the sorority had never had a black member.  A few half-asians here and there, but no black girls.  "How could we have never noticed this?" asked the leaders.

But, as Morgan painted Sherry's toes, Sherry began to grow uncomfortable watching a black woman kneeling at her feet, worrying that although she knew she wasn't racist, maybe Morgan thought she was racist.  Sure, everyone was painting toes in the room, but maybe Morgan wasn't aware that it was customary for all pledges to do the toes of the sisters- maybe she thought that she was being singled out and taken advantage of because of her difference from the other women.  Sherry briefly considered telling Morgan that this wasn't so, except then she realized that by acknowledging that she had been thinking about the racist position, even though she wasn't racist, it would appear as though she might be racist. 

"I only have your right pinky toe left," said Morgan.  "It's hard to do, since it's so tiny."

Sherry said, "Oh, don't worry about making it perfect," because she wanted Morgan to feel as though she wasn't being put in an inferior position.  Except then Sherry realized that by going easy on Morgan, she was actually being condescending toward her, which could also be construed as racist behavior.  Right then she decided that the best thing to do would be to treat Morgan as though she was not thinking of Morgan as possibly oppressed, since a racist person would either let loose with the N-word or pretend not to be racist at all out of self-consciousness about her racism, but a non-racist, Sherry, would not be racist in that she could appear to be racist because she did not have any racist intentions at all.  Retracting her earlier statement, Sherry suddenly said, "On second thought.  You better make that little toe perfect, or you're not getting in, dollface."

In fact, all of the sisters, Sherry included, wanted Morgan to get into the sorority.  She was thin, and had nice teeth and a long-distance boyfriend (and the members also liked the idea that they would be the first generation pictured on the kitchen "rememberance wall" to have admitted a black girl).  After Morgan attended night after night of events, the sisters decided to make her an official pledge by giving her a "secret candle."  It was secret in that she was never to show it to anyone, but not so secret in that it was just a candle from Sav-on.

Sherry, as pledgemistress, continued with her current mindset, deciding that she should be harder on Morgan than the other girls to show Morgan that she was not afraid to be hard on her because she was not racist.  When the other pledges had to stay up for forty-eight hours straight and do the other sisters' homework, Sherry had Morgan stay up for seventy-two and do her (Sherry's) homework and her taxes.  When Sherry had the pledges shave a one inch band from the underside of their hair, Morgan was asked to take two-inches from her crown.  When Sherry had the other pledges get naked and go visit the sorority's brother fraternity across the street, Morgan had to get naked and go visit the university's dean.  Morgan did all of these things well, and she sort of looked happy to do them, too.

At the end of the semester Morgan was initiated into the sorority during a "secret ceremony" to which she brought her "secret candle."  After Morgan had been given her "secret" name, Sherry pulled her aside with a heavy mind.  Now that they were sisters, Sherry felt that she had to be completely honest with Morgan, since sisters told each other everything.  She confessed the totality of her thought processes to Morgan right then and there, expecting that she'd be met with a slap or a hair pull when she finished talking.  Morgan, however, totally surprised Sherry when all she did was smile (good teeth).

"I'm glad you did it," Morgan said.

"What?" Sherry uttered.

"You pushed me to be the best I can be.  I love being challenged.  It was...exciting to have gone through everything this past semester."

"You really mean it?"

"I do," Morgan said.  "But then again, I'm also a little bit of a masochist.  I go to this club every Friday night where I get bound with leather straps to this spiky thing, and then strangers can come and pour wax on me or spank me or whatever.  I can't help it- I love it.  So, you know, pledging wasn't that big of a whoop, to tell you the truth."

"What a relief," Sherry sighed, "to know that I did things right."

Kashi showed up at the sorority's annual reunion in 2003 and took this picture.

I Need A Hero

I feel closer than ever to Tyra Banks, since I imagine that we share a similar artistic battle.  When I turned in my new novel to my new agent (I am now with Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord, ignore the information in the FAQ), he asked me to tweak one of my main characters in order to make him more likable.  This is a hard thing to do, as I'm not sure that I'm the authority on what likable actually is.  But, I am fond of the character, and I'm working with his lines of dialogue and actions in order to make him more understandable to the general populace.  And isn't that exactly what Ty-Ty must be up to these days?  Trying to tease likability out of her main character, the girl that will win "Cycle Three" of America's Next Top Model?

The least likable of the three, YaYa, has become useful to me in that I now have shorthand for why I found the majority of my fellow students at Brown so puketastic.  Prior to this season of ANTM, when someone would say to me, "But it must have been wonderful to be around people so educated and intelligent and 'cultural' and well- traveled?" I could never quite get them to understand that while all these qualities sound objectively great in a person, they are often disastrous when combined.  Now all I have to say is "Yaya."  The other person, "But..."  Me: "Yaya."  Tyra cleverly hid Yaya's suckiness during the first few episodes under a thick blanket of acne, and while I was busy admiring pus mounds, Yaya's inner ugliness was slipping by.  Now that the producers got Yaya some facials and her skin seems to have chilled out somewhat, she's free to talk about something other than her zits, and when Yaya is not talking about zits, Yaya is a terror.

My hope?  Third place.

I started out the season hating Amanda more than any of the other contestants, mostly because I hate people that pull the "I'm a mommy" card and expect that this automatically confers some sort of goodness upon them.  And also, more simply I guess, I just can't stand hippies.  And blindness that resurfaces at amazingly convenient times, and then slinks back to its corner during moments when it would be considered a modeling minus.  But what I've come to realize about Amanda during the past few episodes is that she really can't help it.   She's a slave to her suckiness.  Whereas Yaya breeds her suckiness, Amanda is the chewed up fuzzy catnip mouse to the cat's claw of her suckiness.  I watch her constantly at the mercy of it, just as her personality is at the mercy of her yellow hair extensions.  This is an easily malleable girl, and what's at her center is the type of dippy naivete that comes up with idea that conceiving a baby named Jah Wolf in the middle of the Twin Towers falling down is excellent- because I suspect she believed her love (+ her crystals) could counteract the negativity of terrorism.

I predict second place.

Which leaves me with Eva, who has become dearer to my heart now that I am trying to rehabilitate my own similarly solipsistic and unsympathetic romantic lead in my latest book.  I know Ann's gone now, but that doesn't mean Eva gets stripped of the "romantic lead" title.  Eva, whose last name- Pigford- I found out from TV Guide yesterday (which is a pretty tragic last name considering that she has repeatedly received judges' criticism about the piggish quality that her nose can take on in photos), sort of has fire and sort of wins points for adopting early 'tude toward the majority of the other girls, but she's also prone to fizzling out.  During the moments that we find out (sometimes even without the help of Tyra's mom) that Eva's confidence is really a facade for her churning insecurity, I am often left with the feeling that there is not much at the core of this girl either, as evidenced by her ability to rapidly shift into her icky "Baby Doll Lolita" personality without a drop of irony in the portrayal.  While Tyra may insist that a model should be, above all, a chameleon, I am still going to insist that there should be a ground floor to begin with.  I mean, the chameleon's got to be something at the end of the day, when he goes home and kicks it under a rock.  There are times when I like Eva, but mostly I think that I am liking her dislike of everyone else.  And liking that super cute white linen top she wears to panel- the backless one.

But I think she's going to win.

You Will Never Know

In the book I'm reading, there's a death of a character and then these lines: "Their mothers, our aunts, told me that, as the oldest child, I would know three years of mourning, "Nothing but mourning!" and then, after the third year, "Happiness.  Like you have never known."  This approach strikes me as integral, the necessity of sadness, the waiting out of it, instead of willed banishment.  Then the happiness that arrives is earned, and that is why it is so explosive.

Brett and I called it quits for good yesterday and, as I left his apartment, I noticed that the paintings I've made for him have been taken down from the "Andrea" wall.  This got to me.  I turned to him and asked why those paintings were gone, and he told me that looking at them made him too sad.  That answer seemed sadder than sad to me, that he was attempting to bypass his reaction to my absence by pretending that I was absent anyway.

I'm the youngest child.  And I think the youngest child, the baby, usually gets a break.  And there hasn't been a death, so I doubt I'm looking at three years here.  But whatever that period of mourning, I will live in it.

While in the shower today I was thinking about Brett and the paintings put away in a closet and how misguided I felt this was when I heard a thud in the bedroom, like something had fallen from a high place.  I got out of the shower and went to take a look, and the photographic print that Brett bought me this time last year (and which has been up on the wall since January) had fallen to the floor.  The wooden frame broke at its seams.

I joked to my parents that god had forced Brett off my wall, the way Brett forced me off his.  Their reaction was, "Oooh.  A sign."  I was far more convinced that my telepathic powers had risen to the occasion again, that because I had been pondering the removal of my stuff from Brett's wall, my ultra-powerful brainwaves had removed his stuff from mine.  It seems entirely more possible, that of course the brain responsible for generating such powerful emotions, it can both crush a day and knock down five pounds of wood, paper, and glass.

Tomorrow I'm going to my dad's to see if he has some two-way nails, so I can fix the frame.  Then I'll put back the photograph back up on the wall.  I want my upcoming happiness to be as big as it can.

If Jew Don't Know Me By Now

The first line of this article bewildered me: "Andrea Seigel doesn't really look Jewish." 

Uhhhhh.  What?

Are you kidding?

I don't know what was in her coffee, but-- knock me over with a yarmulke.

This "interview" is intriguing because never have I seen my book combed quite so thoroughly for the Jewstrands© contained within it.  I feel like one of these articles should show up in every type of magazine, pitching Panda: "Are you personally vested in boats?  They appear on page x, x, and x, and here's a boat quote.   Whoa, don't leave.  I thought you said boats.  I didn't realize you said nubile girls.  They're all over chapter two."

So what did I get for the first night of Hanukah?  The MOST FUCKING GENIUS IDEA for a book ever.  It is so good that I had a dream in which I was part of a "bad girl" clique at an east coast college, and we were so bad that we got kicked out of the dorms.  Somehow my two other friends hooked up with the devil, who had a disguised mansion in a brick building at the edge of town, and as we sat in his deceptively (from the outside) gargantuan and lavish living room, he said to me, "Your other friends have already agreed to this.  I'll let you girls live here for as long as you want, only you have to promise to me half of all the money you make over the next year."

And I was like, "Can't do it.  I thought of this genius premise for a book, and I'm going to sell it and make a lot of money.  Sorry."  And I got up and walked out.

This is all true.

Now all I have to do is convince my ex-boyfriend, Ryan, to collaborate, and I'm set.

Drink To Life

On my way to work I was taken aback by a bus stop ad.  It featured a gothy young woman in signature death pallor make-up and Stevie-Nicks-gone-less-hippie-and-more-macabre fashion- a type of styled model I don't see all that much in the world of mainstream advertising (with the exception of a television cereal ad that aired a few years ago, where the gothy daughter and the Stepford dad ended up agreeing on the same type of breakfast, despite their obvious aesthetic differences.  Yay!)  What was she being used to sell?  An energy drink.  I was tickled.

To me, energy drinks have always been the province of a certain type of consumer: a frenetic "squeeze the life out of life's balls" type who demands that extra hour in the day to spruce up that powerpoint presentation for tomorrow, who feels the pounding pressure of being the last one out of the dance club at night despite a hard week of work (Lindsay Lohan), who needs to keep going and going in an urgent quest to find the meaning of life within one year despite her energy-draining diet of Cheetos (Britney).  The energy drink may be the chosen beverage of a lot of different genres of people, but I can't say that I ever imagined it landing in the be-ringed hands of goth kids.  The idea of imbibing something to fill one's dark self with boundless vigor, enthusiasm, and social tenacity seems to me the opposite notion a company should be targeting toward this branch of the alternative community.  That's why I've started to think that the people at energy drink company Vamp N.R.G. are sort of either genius or naively optimistic in their attempt to subvert the immediate associations of their happy go lucky product.

Now, instead of energy being a force linked to sporting, dancing, or social butterflying, it is linked to the fortifying secrets of the romantic undead.  The "N.R.G." within the Vamp drink is an elitist type of energy (it can't even be spelled, it's so mysterious!), as it enables its consumers to sidestep the limits of the ordinary human being and become, according to the company's literature, "supernatural."  So now, instead of just being that anonymous, hyperactive kid at Dragonfly with the rest of Hollywood's young denizens (and Demi Moore), you are a mysterious child of the night who's found a way to overcome pedestrian aspects of life like sleeping and eating solids.  Congratulations.  Puncturing your friend's neck with your porcelain bicuspid implants was getting so messy, and deep down, you weren't sure you were really reaping any benefits of eternal life other than being left with the earthy taste of iron in the back of your throat all day at the bank.

Energy, formerly something uncool because it implies effort and action, becomes a gift stolen from the spookiest recesses of time.  Vamp N.R.G. has "taurine, ginseng, guarana...and the maximum caffeine allowed by law," making it naughty and ancient and antiestablishment and willing to push the human form to its extreme physical limits- not in the sense of rock climbing or x-treme mountain biking- but in the even more truly extreme sense of conquering death and becoming something new.  Dark, yet new.  If Red Bull gives you wings, then Vamp N.R.G. gives you bat wings.  Children of the night, come fill your goblets.

Now, I have no idea if this pitch is going to work- if any of the targeted young, pretty, dark things are actually buying into the campaign- but I can only hope that one day Vamp N.R.G. will show up in a glass vial around a goth kid's neck,  a sterling gargoyle clinging tightly to the stopper.

All I've Got is Gelt

If you don't celebrate Hanukah, you're not going to get it.

Watching a double feature of Desperate Housewives and the hot med students (except for the chubby guy, who's still hot in his own way) movie Flatliners has left me pondering the nature of guilt.  More precisely, they have me thinking about the absence of it in my life.  I'm not saying that I'm a moral paragon, but- even if I was- that would be besides the fact, since guilt isn't attached to an objective moral "reality."  It's just about how shitty you feel about what you've done, regardless of whether or not your actions or good or bad by a higher power's standards, by the Landers sisters' standards, by the severed head in your fridge that telepathically communicates with you's standards.  You feel good about chopping off that head?  Then guilt has no place in your life.

In Flatliners Julia Roberts and her band of admirers in white coats keep killing each other, so that they can prove whether or not there is a "life" beyond brain and heart death.  The problem is that when the members of the group are resuscitated, they bring back physical manifestations of the people they feel most guilty about wronging.  Julia brings back her dad, who killed himself after she had the nerve to interrupt his getting high.  Billy Baldwin brings back all the chicks he secretly videotaped while nailing, and they're angry (I can see how- I imagine it's embarrassing to get caught doing a Baldwin).  Kevin Bacon brings back a black girl he yelled mean things at on the playground, although all racial implications of the bullying are subsumed under the later revelation that he picked on her because she was "ugly."  And Kiefer Sutherland brings back Billy Mahoney, a hockey-stick wielding youth with a mouth too big for his face.  It's cute on Julia Roberts, not so cute on the demonic kid who materializes in your present day life with tangible powers and proceeds to kick the shit out of you night after night.

Anyway, the movie got me thinking- I mean, about things besides Joel Schumacher's gargoyle fetish and the glacial pace of early nineties "blockbusters" with art-film pretensions- about who would come back from my inner psyche to attack me if I was hanging with the Flatiners crew.  And really, the only person I can remember actively doing intentional and significant harm to in my life is Lisa H., who I abruptly turned on in sixth grade when I suspected she was staging a coup.  I was the queen of the "gifted" class, which is a pretty depressing crowd to be the queen of, but whatever.  I had my in-demand boyfriend, I had my purple eyeshadow stick, I had black cowboy boots and peach off-the-shoulder sweaters, I had my inner circle and my lesser minions, and no one was usurping my kingdom.  When Lisa started getting a little too uppity, I announced to the rest of my gang that she sucked (except the explanation was much more intricate, elegant, and uplifting), and that she wasn't worth our time anymore.  I made up a song about how much she sucked to the tune of "Frere Jacques" (timeless) and devised corresponding hand motions to go with the lyrics.  I shut her out of the cotillion carpool.  I was shitty.

One day Lisa didn't show up to school and word on the street was that it was because she had a hernia.  I had no clue what a hernia was, but I assumed it was stress, and thus me-related, and that I had single-handedly orchestrated the destruction of Lisa's inner organs.  I felt bad about this.  After she recovered, she was reinstated into the carpool.  I haven't seen Lisa in a few years, but when I saw her last, her eyes told me that she has an deep, longstanding hatred burning for me and it's not going out any time soon.

Do I feel retroactive adult sorriness about how I acted toward Lisa?  I do.  Do I feel guilty about it to this day?  No.  That leaves me unsure about who would come back with me from the beyond, since it seems to be no one.  Which is okay considering that all the demons from the Flatiners' pasts turned out to be majorly aggressive hellions, except if you went through the trouble of dying and returning, wouldn't you want a souvenir?  You'd want it to feel like more than just a fleeting dream.

I've been emailing with a future classmate at Bennington, who says that if you can say you're an asshole, then you're not an asshole.  I disagree with him.  Assholeness is like guilt in that it can be self-assigned, and unlike madness in that it can also be stepped outside of and recognized by the self.  But to recognize that you're an asshole is to have a certain measure of self-acceptance about your shittiness, which is also the same quality, this resignation to your faults, that cancels out guilt.  I think being raised Jewish also cancels out guilt, in that you're born being pelted with it by your mom, and so you learn at a very young age to assume and then discard it instantaneously.  It's like being born Paris Hilton, being swathed in so much money that credit cards cease to signify credit.  They're just automatic payment.  That's me, except instead of riches, replace them with guilt.

During this season, which I love so much, I am left with the reminder that I have even less to atone for than the Christian population, which is bogged down in the complications of celebrating the birthday of the guy who died for its sins.  That's rough.  My condolences, but you do get the amazing twinkly lights, magical songs (with bells) and fun, sparkling trees to ease the pain.