This Afternoon In Drama

If You Want My Body, And You Think I'm Sexy... Please Just Quickly Cut My Hair

Well, it's official.   I have been knighted with sexiness by the local quickie chain where I get my hair cut.  Family members and longtime readers know that I favor the impersonal haircut.  I'm not a fan of waiting, and I'm even less of a fan of waiting while someone "works" on me.  Throughout my adolescence it always seemed that one of my friends was trying to brush or braid my hair during school, and I remember a classmate combing my hair with her fingers while we watched Ken Burns' Civil War documentary in eighth grade Social Studies.  And there was lots of banjo music and cherub-faced soldiers and I was just like, "Can you please not touch me right now?"  I still feel the same.  Tonight at dinner (and here I have to quickly drop in that I made Jew-brownies for Passover, and they made me really proud) when I said that I hate massages, I got looks from the massage-enthusiasts at the table like I had just taken a bag full of bread crumbs and flung them in the brisket.

Point being: I love not having an appointment; I love sitting down in the chair of a person that I've never seen before and will never see again; I love having my hair rinsed with water instead of washed; I love not being asked which way I part my hair; I love getting an inch taken off quickly without questions; and, most of all, I love escaping the "blow out."

This last week I swooped in for a haircut and was the only customer in the place.  I almost got passed off to the bleach blond hard-liver slumped in the front chair, but then the short guy with the gold chains and indeterminate European accent decided to do my cut.  This was cool with me.

At some point during the trim Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" came on the speakers and my haircutter started to get jiggy wit it, while telling me he was getting "jiggy wit it."  I was like, "As long as you don't pull out the styling products, you can do whatever you want."  In the background, the bleach blond started talking with the heavy brunette at the register about meeting guys on Myspace. 

When I was finished, I took my bag up to the counter to pay, and all three turned their attention to me.  First the blond said, "That's a great bag."

And I said, "Thanks."

And she said, "It's so big and roomy."

And I said, "Yeah."

And then the brunette was agreeing.  The gold-chained haircutter turned around from the register, where he'd been swiping my card, and said, "She's a very sexy girl."

And I was like, "Because of my bag?"

And the blond said, "Very sensuous and soft."  And she was air-tracing the line of my ass with her hands.

And I was all, "Are we back to talking about the bag?"  Because the bag was also deemed very sensuous in its own way, and I wasn't sure how we made the leap.

And the blond was nodding her head, saying, "Very sexy.  Very sexy."

And the brunette was saying, "Sexy."

And the man with the gold chains handed me back my credit card and the statement to sign, and told me, "Very sexy.  You just are like that."

I signed the statement and was like, "Okay.  It's decided.  Sexy.  Sexy it is."  I walked out of the store, having just been handed my sexy certification.  And with hair an inch shorter.  The thing is, though, now I feel like I have to find another franchise because next time I go in there I'm worried I'm going to get heavy-petted.

Too Much Information

The people over at Amazon.com are tripping- and I mean that literally, like I think they're on some kind of mind-bending pharmaceuticals, because they've suddenly launched these wacky new features like "statistically improbable phrases" and "concordance" that serve no ostensible purpose for the consumer. I imagine the staff working late nights in their cubicles, watching unicorns fly across the fluorescent lights and drawling, "Duuuuude, wouldn't it be cool if we could know the syllable per word average in each and every book, like if we could have a better understanding of the rhythm of modern written speech?  And whoaaaa, what if we knew what words occurred most often in every book, like we could actually see these amazing, beautiful patterns that weave their way throughout literature and time?"

My book's new wacky stats are barely interesting to me, and interesting only because it's my book, and I'm heavily solipsistic. I'm especially interested in the words per dollar information, since I like to know what kind of bang my readers are getting for their buck.  (By the way, I think paying a dollar for almost 8300 words is a fucking bargain!  I used to go to the swap-meet in a community college parking lot when I was in high school, and there was always the vendor who had the "fill a garbage bag for a dollar" sale going.  And, believe you me, a garbage bag holds a lot less than 8300 ripped-shirts-with-pit-stains-that-existed-before-I was-born.)  Interestingly, the Flesch-Kincaid Index, which estimates the the grade at which people should start reading my book, is right on.  I've always said "seventh-grade and up" for Panda, and my brother, currently teaching eighth grade math, has a girl in one of his classes who, a few weeks ago, scrawled a suicide note on the blackboard.  There's my young audience in the flesh.

The "concordance" box shows what my supposedly favorite words are, or at least the ones I have a habit of repeating.  I hoped to learn something about my subconscious drives from this indicator, hoped that maybe I'd have sent myself a secret message that could be decoded only with the help of Amazon's crackhead programmers.  It turns out, not so much. I am, nonetheless, somewhat surprised to find out that I must use "oh" much more often than I think I do- but, you know, it's not exactly the revelation I wanted.  And don't even get me started on my two "SIP's" (my statistically improbable phrases), which don't seem all that statistically improbable to me.  One, "red panda," is a bona fide animal, so it shouldn't be so weird that those two words would go together, and the other, "next envelope," is so commonplace that I really can't even figure out why it's up there.

In other book news, Girlfriendsbooks.com has chosen Panda as their featured book of the week, which actually is surprising because, judging by the site's graphics and dominant font, its editors are way more happy and nice than I am.  But thanks.

Unfantastic Sams

In college I wrote film reviews with a whole bunch of guys who loved cute girls with boy-short hair.  I kept hearing about all these girls in their computer programming and math classes (always math) that had close-cropped dos, and these guys would rhapsodize over the way the hair skimmed the ear or the neck as the girl bent her head to do nerd problem sets.  I never understood the appeal of this style, and I especially detest it when it hijacks story lines on my favorite shows.  The most famous example of this is when "Felicity" cut off all of her amazing hair to release break-up and emotional baggage, and the WB series saw its ratings plummet.  Clearly viewers were in passionate agreement with me, as the short-haired Felicity projected an unforeseen unlikeability.

How can a simple haircut do this?  Easily, especially on a pretty girl, and really, a pretty girl is the only one whose facial features can theoretically handle a boy-short haircut.  When pretty characters undergo a drastic haircut, it is always in order to demonstrate a newfound inner strength.  There is the fictional belief that if the character severs her long, shiny feminine trappings, she'll emerge more grounded for it, that she will achieve a masculine distance from her personal "drama."  But what a short haircut on a pretty girl never approaches is masculinity, because an emotionally-driven short haircut on these pretty faces only emphasizes the initial struggle that inspired the chop.  Once the hair is gone, there's nothing but a undisguisable neediness written all over the character's face, constantly reminding the viewer of the character's hole in her soul that she thought she could fill by losing some of her physical self.

I think this is why people started turning away from Felicity.  It wasn't just that Keri Russell looked shittier with her short, tight curls, but that Felicity's already borderline solipsism and insecurities became foregrounded when she abandoned her glorious lion's mane.  That hair was representative of her touching attempts to protect herself from what she even recognized as a dangerous vulnerability, and once it was gone, this vulnerability ran willy nilly all over the television screen, and things got ugly.

The latest character to undergo the storyline-dictated boy haircut is Jenny, Mia Kirschner's character on my very favorite show, The L Word.  As I wrote last season, Jenny was already an infuriating character because a) she's a sucky writer who thinks she's good and b) she has no idea what she truly wants, so she sucks other characters into her passive-aggressive web, alternating between her two favorite personas: victim and lolita.  And I can hardly believe it, but Jenny is a million times more infuriating this season now that she asked androgynous sexpot, Shane, to cut off all her hair.

That hair was the only thing keeping Jenny's wimpiness from overrunning each scene.  It used to hang in her face- those long bangs especially- and mask the doe eyes and coy smiles that she threw in the direction of anyone she thought could make her feel better about herself.  Now that she's got the Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby cut, however, she's such a walking wound that I cringe to see her interacting with other characters, since she always seems on the verge of being squashed.   No longer the successful temptress, this season Jenny is a back-up distraction for Carmen (who really longs for Shane), and watching Jenny's sad seductions without her bangs as a merciful veil is almost too much.  She has nothing more to play with or pull on than her sleeves, and Jennifer Love Hewitt wore out that routine during her Party of Five days.

This week's preview shows that Jenny overhears Carmen saying she's only temporary, and god help us all (all=Showtime subscribers), get the girl a wig for her oncoming breakdown.

I Can Barely Handle Being Human

While I was spending my year up at Berkeley, I suddenly became overly aware of the nagging divide between my body and my consciousness.  I felt like a floating mind inside a creaky apparatus.  I would always take the stairs down to the language lab in Dwinelle, and every time I stepped I couldn't think of anything else but my knees- the way that the bones and the joints were operating.  It became a visual problem.  I'd see knee bones dancing in my head, and it becomes very distracting to walk and take stairs when you have knee bones dancing in your head.

Lately I've become fixated on the larger picture- how I'm a consciousness looking out not only from knees, but from a whole container.  I'll catch sight of my hand and think, "How did this part end up with me?" like it's a barnacle that happened, out of sheer coincidence, to attach itself.   I really have no idea what I look like when I'm away from a mirror.  Every time I see a picture of myself, I have to get reacquainted.  Sometimes I think it's possible that if you took a picture of me in a group of girls that resembled me- if we all wore the same thing- and if afterwards you digitally rearranged us, so that I couldn't use my memory of my place as guidance, that I might not be able to pick myself out.

When I walk through a room , I feel the strangeness of my sight the way the audience does when they're forced into first-person perspective in a movie.

There is something about my eyeballs that hasn't coalesced with the rest of me physically, so they're the remaining organ left to function as public spokesperson for my agoraphobic brain.  I feel them all the time, and I don't know if this is normal.  I feel my eyeballs like they're viewfinders that I've held up to my face, and I feel like the rest of me is that difficult, stiff lever that I have to maneuver to get to the next picture.

About a month ago I went to go get my eyes checked at the optometrist, and my doctor told me that she has a new machine that actually takes a picture of the eye.  She told me that it was extra money to have the pictures taken, and that I'm too young to have the more debilitating problems that the intensive camera picks up- did I have any interest in having the scan done anyway?  "Yeah," I said to my doctor, "and can you email the pictures to me?"  She thought I was sort of gross for wanting the pictures of my eyes.  When I saw them, it was like someone had found a way to take a picture of my soul and transmit it through AOL.  That light fissure in the middle of each  image is my optic nerve (incidentally, healthy).  That is what I see out of.  That is me, or as close to me as I'll ever be able to see. 

Right eye:

Left eye:

Puppies Having Puppies

While up in the mountains, I learned that it's a total bitch to cook pasta at high altitudes.  I also learned that The Lady And The Tramp is totally messed up!  I watched the first thirty minutes with The Baby one night, and witnessed Lady going from speechless, infantile pup to fully sexualized dog-woman in one quick fade.  "How much time has passed?" I wondered, since I know that one of our years is supposedly equivalent to seven of a dog's.  Mrs. Darling answered me when she gave Lady her very first collar on the occasion of being alive for "six months." 

The gift of the collar was like Mrs. Darling buying Lady her first pack of birth control pills, since in the film, it functions as a marker of Lady's having "grown up."  If it's not exactly scientific to say that Lady's six months makes her equivalent to a three and a half year-old, then consider that most breeding experts advise owners not to breed their bitches until they're at least two.  This means that Lady's being sent out to shake her tail-feather probably even before she's gotten her first period, and definitely before she should even be bearing babies.  If Lady were a human, this is the point at which her parents should be saddling her with a fake, crying spaniel so she can see that having a kid is "not fun" instead of giving her a hoochie collar that says to the neighborhood mutts "line up, boys."

And it's such a shock when Lady goes to show off her collar to her friends because this is the first time she opens her mouth and we get to hear her voice.  At six months old Lady doesn't have the cutesy rat-a-tat-tat of a pup or the bubblegum cadences of a teen, but the genteel drawl of a thirty-something San Franciscan socialite.  When I first heard that voice, I thought of those blond babies that get entered in beauty pageants and forced to play adults before they're even adolescents.  Lady knows nothing of the world- nothing- and yet she's feigning the voice of a wizened woman, a farce revealed when Mrs. Darling gets pregnant and Lady has no clue what's going on.  This just shows how naive she is on the subject of "the birds and the bees"- that she's not able to recognize the consequences of sexual intercourse when they appear in her own household.

I seriously doubt that The Tramp is six months old.  In one of his first scenes, he passes a pet shop window and marvels at the little puppies in the window, addressing them with a wistfulness that reveals his own distance from their carefree world.  It's as if he understands where they come from and what they will turn into, and it is only with some time on earth that this wisdom arrives.  Tramp would know a pregnant human if he came across one- I don't doubt that.  Later he muses over what he should have for breakfast and, as he catalogues his many (even international) options, there is the sense that Tramp has been alive long enough to explore many different types of cuisine, and that his tastes have become somewhat refined as he's aged.  Moreover, when Tramp saves his two friends from the dog catcher's truck, the trampy dog (who the film subtly suggests is the dog equivalent of a floozy) treats The Tramp as if the two of them have slept together before.  I think Tramp is at least two. 

Thus, it is not only street-smarts and class issues that divide Lady and The Tramp, but a legitimate statutory problem.  The movie makes an issue of Tramp ripping an uptown girl away from her posh lifestyle, but the real underlying issue for me, as I watched that first half-hour, was that it appears as if The Tramp is robbing the cradle.  Even though I didn't get to finish the film, I think I remember that it ends with Lady getting pregnant (by The Tramp) and having her own brood.  This makes me wonder if there is another time-lapse fade before this event, or if she becomes Tramp's baby mama by the time she's one.  Ghetto.

Assk Me No Questions And I'll Tell You No Lies

I'm in Telluride. Last night I had a fever so strong that, in the midst of a three a.m. hallucination, I thought my brain was boiling. Then I was like, "If my brain is boiling, I don't even know what my ass cheeks are undergoing," because I reached down my pants and they were even hotter than my head. My ass was on fire! I went and opened the door to the bedroom I'm staying in, which looks out on a snow-filled terrace. In the black of the night the snow was glowing, almost begging me to come put my ass down on it. I was already naked at this point, I was so hot. I put a finger out to the snow, and the coolness felt good on it. I thought to myself, "Should I really go put my ass out on this snow, this snow at this house where I am a guest?" In the midst of my delerium, I was trying to figure out snow/ass etiquette. I'm not saying that any of this makes sense now, but it did at the time.

I came to a decent compromise with myself by letting the wind from the outside brush the coolness up off the snow, and then across my red hot ass cheeks. It felt amazing. Tomorrow, I guess, is the last day of the official season here, and everyone goes skiing in bikinis or birthday suits. At the airport we were looking at an article about the event in a local magazine, and some guy's junk had to be airbrushed out. Anyway, I get it now. The feeling of snow-kissed wind across one's ass is something that everyone should experience in his or her life. Tomorrow I think there will be a lot of happy customers.

Be back soon.