This Afternoon In Drama

It's National Bad Photoshop Week

"Yo-- ladies and gents.  Dick here.  I'm theeee blog.  I'm fully cognizant that some pair of legs slapped the "name" "This Afternoon In Drama" on me, and I've been hush-hush-little-baby about it for a long time now, but I'm Dick.  I was Dick in the beginning when I poked my head out from the CPU's warm womb into the fresh internet air.  I'm Dick for life.  But, look here, it's time to go balls to the wall because today, good friends, marks my second birthday.  Happy birthday to Dicky boy!  I know, I know, I know, you're looking upon my somewhat rough visage and thinking I look a little worse-for-the-wear for only being two years-old.  But you gotta understand that blog years are worse than dog years.  They're worse than hamster years.  For every human year, a blog ages eighteen-and-a-half, buddies.  When 2007 rolls around, I plan on being ass-deep in my mid-life crisis.  I'm going to get hair plugs and go pump some pretty new jailbait that pops up on Live Journal. 

So today on the Channel 7 news I heard that this scientist broad up north is screwing with DNA, and she's figured out how to extend the life of a worm times six.  That's SEX-tupling, ladies and gents.  Slapping my knee.  Dicky here, though, I'm not so keen on sextupling my existence.  If I look like this now, by five-hundred-something the chicks at Cocktails And Dancing are going to be happier about banging a walking, talking prune, right?  Ohhh, it's too much for me to think about.  Don't want to explode this beeeyoooty of a head.  Anyway, just poking myself (oh, boy, back to the knee slapping) in to say happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Dickkkkkkkkkyyyyyyyyyy.  Oh, and that pair of legs is taking off the rest of this week in celebration of her own birthday.  If you want my opinion, she looks like shit for only being fourteen."

Can They Liquify Cake?

Dr. Greg just sent me my favorite pre-birthday card of all time, made from his favorite patient literature.

My question is this, Dr. Greg.  A couple of weeks ago The Baby head-butted me in the nose, and I saw stars.  Now, when I press the bottom of my nose, I hear an internal popping, much like the "pop" of the infamous Rice Krispies "Snap, Crackle, Pop."  My dad votes for a slight, self-healing break.  What sayeth you?

Listen To The Mandolin Rain

This does it.  I've long insisted that I was a.) adopted or b.) switched at birth, and now, after listening to my visit to Pinky's Paperhaus, I have proof that I was not originally born in Anaheim to a former teacher and a financial consultant, but in Encino to a pair of mall entrepreneurs (the founders of Hot Dog On a Stick?).  Could I fit more "like's" into a podcast?  Could the cadences of my voice be any more like a twelve year-olds fresh out of afternoon gymnastics practice?  It's pretty embarrassing. If you're interested in hearing what it would be like to listen to a valley girl ruminate on her year-old book and DJ too, playing the most epic songs of the past few decades, it's your lucky day.

When I listened to the podcast, I didn't even recognize myself. I have this problem.  I have no idea what I realistically sound like outside of my own head, and what's worse is that I seemingly have no idea what I look like either. Every time someone sends me a picture of myself, I'm like, "Realllllllllly?"  It's not an issue of the photograph being "good" or "bad."  It's that I really thought I had different eyebrows or something. I walk around with a picture of myself in my brain, and every day, I'm not shitting you, when I get home and pee and catch myself in the mirror on the way past it, I'm way confused. I'm like, "Oh my god, what I thought I looked like today totally isn't how I look!"  Every day is an experience of crushing perplexity.  You'd think I'd learn, but I don't.

Recognition has become a serious factor in my TV watching as well, in one case positive, in the other positive too.  No, I'm just kidding.  The second scenario is totally negative.  The first is that because I paid very little attention to Roman history lessons during my five-odd years of Latin, the plot twists on HBO's Rome are completely surprising to me!  I never see any of it coming.  I can't remember any of those significant Roman guy's names (apart from Caesar and Brutus), so when murderous, salacious, or treacherous characters appear on the screen, I don't even recognize them or their narrative functions.  Then, when they turn nasty and pull some crazy ass move, I'm all, "Whoa, best about-face ever!"

The second and negative recognition factor having to do with my TV watching is that because I am too well-versed in television actors, I can now instantly tell you who committed the crime on any one of the many crime procedurals (all the Law and Orders, all the CSI's, Numbers, Cold Case, Without A Trace, etc.) because I am able to immediately recognize the character actor who isn't considered a suspect for the first forty minutes, but then becomes crucial to the case (and guilty) in the closing third. I know when I see an actor or actress who is of considerable skill and resume and the show is not using that person to his/her rightful extent, then that person is playing the secret criminal.  It kind of sucks.  I'm ten steps ahead of Gil Grissom. This extensive mental log of pinch actors is also how I solved who killed Sean Penn's daughter in Mystic River within the first fifteen minutes.

But, most importantly, while we're on the topic of recognition. . . better recognize that this kicks off my birthday week:

Like The Red TV Show

Now that I've signed the contract, I guess I can confirm the rumor (see comments): I'm turning Like The Red Panda into a TV show. Well, maybe a TV show.  For sure a pilot.  And yes, this is being done for a Nickelodeon-affiliated channel called "The N," which, uh-huh, you need a decent cable package to watch, but everyone on the planet should have a decent cable package anyway, so to me that's a moot point.  "The N" is a developing channel right now, pretty much showing Degrassi High and My So-Called Life reruns (I spent one-fourth of high school trying to have Angela's hair), but the executives are surprisingly open, seeing as how I asked, "So, can I have drug dealing episodes?" and got a resounding why not, and then asked, "Annnnnnnd, the running persistence of suicidal thoughts?" and got a thumbs up on that too.

My only concern is that a return to working in television might drain some joy from my avid TV watching.  In 2001 I took a production assistant job at a major network soap opera filming in Brooklyn, and the day I got hired, I was running down 23rd Street, doing little leaps and smiling at construction workers who yelled at me that I had a nice ass.  Soap operas had always been a major priority of mine.  In college I scheduled all of my classes around the ABC line-up, and senior year I convinced Brown to let me run my own "independent study" in soap opera melodrama, a study for which I produced a loving, thirty-something page paper made up of heartbreakingly sincere paragraphs like this one:

"Nora must always carry the threat of becoming her opposite (which, in this case, is Lindsay) if she wants to remain a useful character; One Life to Live creates story-lines and suspense by taxing the limits of her goodness over time. Lately, the show has bombarded Nora with the aforementioned anti-memory serum, the re-lived loss of the love of her life, a stalker, a kidnapping, and a possible rape—events that could very well push a normally good character toward villainess territory as her desire for revenge increases.  This psychological flexibility is what leads critics such as Jennifer Poole Hayward to argue that soap opera viewers are “forced into awareness of all points of view…all sides of the story” so that we learn that “every action, every subplot, every character will ultimately be intertwined and balanced.”[i]  According to Hayward, because we can look back and identify both the good and bad within Nora from a vantage point, and because Lindsay is ever present as her foil, neither moral alliance achieves dominance in the end. In arguing that soap operas work toward a balance, she treats the daytime serial as a totality, as though every scene, episode, and arc only achieves meaning through its relation to the one constant of the form—seriality. In other words, she confuses an inconsistent message with a lack of one.[ii]

[i] Poole, Jennifer Hayward. Consuming Pleasures : Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997: 184
[ii] Because the soap opera never ends, Hayward locates its meaning in the ongoing middle of the genre: meaning, however, is not the same as a message. For her, the meaning of soap opera lies in its ability to present multiple opinions and identifications; the element that distinguishes it from other television/media is the way it offers fluid positions that viewers can occupy as morality constantly shifts from character to character, scene to scene. A message, on the other hand, is the outcome of the meanings generated by the narrative. I am arguing that although these meanings increase in number on daytime serials, they still reach points within individual story-lines where messages are legible above and beyond the mere presence of competing moral positions.

See?!  I really loved soap operas. They were a part of me.  They were like breathing.  But then I began work at this aforementioned soap, and it quickly became one of the worst experiences of my life.  In the production office I sat with two girls who mirrored soap opera archetypes: the Villainess and the Spineless Sidekick.  The Villainess liked to smile a lot and pretend to be nice, but became an uber-bitch the second an actor, a co-worker, or anyone else (myself included) walked out of the office.  She was a grade-A shit-talker. Normally I am in favor of a fair amount of shit-talking (I've recently realized that my professional motto is, "If you don't have something bad to say at least fifty-percent of the time, you're never going to be a real writer"), but this was energy-draining shit-talking, a pervasive and too-earnest awfulness that squeezed every inch of fun out of the room.  And, believe me, there wasn't all that much fun in there to begin with, unless you are of the mindset that calling actresses their cars and putting scripts in cubbies makes for good times.  The one super fun task I had was opening the sincerely insane fan mail, but after all the NY Anthrax scares, the producers wouldn't let me do it anymore. I disobeyed (soap fans are so not Anthrax people!) and was caught one day while reading a letter addressed to one of the characters on the show, a letter pleading with him that he turn around his love life.  I was thoroughly scolded.

The Villainess liked to toy with the heart of an tragically sincere yet stupid young soap actor from The South who wanted to date her.  She spent hours in the office passive-aggressively yapping about his love for her and how little it meant to her, but the percentage of the day she took up bragging about his behavior made it clear to me that his crush was, to the contrary, very, very important to her.  Not important because she was ever going to dump her amateur comedian (possibly abusive) boyfriend for Actor Who Would Soon Get Canned Because Poor Thing Couldn't Really Act, but important because she was the Villainess, and she enjoyed being terrible. It wasn't the terribleness that I minded so much as the glee she derived from it, tapping her manicured fingernails on her desk and feigning innocence.  Women who trick men into impregnating them on daytime display the same distasteful characteristic.

The Spineless Sidekick was often in tears and wanted to be a lawyer, and I hoped that she wasn't planning on doing trials because she would be requesting recesses every two minutes to run to the bathroom.  She was nice and wasn't so bad on the whole, except what killed me was that she fed into the Villainess's constant, arrogant self-analysis, being the eager sidekick, and so I didn't have any back-up when shooting the Villainess "shut up, shut up, shut up" glances.  She actively encouraged the Villainness.  So when the two of them got to be too much, I would make up an excuse to run an errand, that is until I learned that the errand running depressed me even more than being in the office.

The studio was in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, my Peoples not being known exactly for cheery atmosphere (except for the eight nights of light), and for whatever reason, it got me down to walk past the shipping store named, "Don't Schlep It-- Ship It."  That name made my world feel so very small.  But what was even worse was the neighborhood CVS, which was not magical, shiny, and well-lit as all CVS's should be.  This CVS was dank and moldy, the shelves ill-stocked, the kerchiefed clientele old, and the carpet ratty. Just as my time at the soap came somewhat close to draining my love of the form, that one CVS came precariously close to draining my love of leisurely drugstore browsing.  Thank god there was a sparkling Duane Reade at the end of my apartment block, and I used its sprawling majesty to wipe out the sad memories of the Orthodox CVS and the stale Reese's Butter Cups contained within.

But, hey, let's just see how it goes.

She Makes A Better Jewess Than You'd Think

Last week on The Daily Show:

Clip:  (A bespectacled man at an anti-Bush/pro-peace rally in Washington steps up to the podium) "Are you guys ready for a treat?  Our next speaker is a poet--"

Stewart: (referring to the poet) "And....she'll tell us where the treat is?"

People who know and read me are aware that I am not a fan of the poet. I dislike the deliberate way that every word must drip with interventionist meaning, both on the page and when read out loud. I dislike the way that most women poets I've seen dress in layers of swathy fabrics and too commonly sport the infamous sandals + socks and/or tights combo, and I dislike the drained sexuality of most male poets I've seen, men who often cause me to imagine that small bits of shrimp are hidden deep in their beards and that fungus resides deep under their toenails.  Granted, maybe I'm being a little tough on the poets, but the fact of the matter is that, let's face it (self-included), writers are just not the cutest group on the planet, and as a sub-group, poets are even less cute.  Perhaps that is why they make their words so pretty because, with the rare exception, they themselves can't be.

But I went and saw In Her Shoes this past weekend, and surprisingly, two of the most heartwarming moments revolve around poetry.  And, for the first time, I found myself not minding the intrusion of poetry in my world, as both times these poems sprung from the lips of the truly adorable Cammy Diaz.

In the first instance, Cammy reads the entirety of the Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art," and (spoiler alert, but not that big of an alert) makes the reading of a poem aloud palatable by virtue of her character's near-illiteracy.  Because she can't really read English, this means that she also can't place sickeningly dramatic emphasis on particular vowels or words.  She's too busy just trying to get through the thing without embarrassing herself.  And never have I liked an Elizabeth Bishop poem more than when being read by an actress pretending to be, I'm pretty sure, dyslexic.  Cammy proceeds slowly enough that the listener has the time to grasp the meaning of the words for herself, but necessarily leaves her own theatricality out of the oration.  What the moviegoer gets out of this is the poem as a body of thought, not performance.  In fact, the stunted reading of the poem suits it thematically, as the difficult delivery mirrors the difficulty of acknowledging inevitable loss, of having to let go.  And it also helps that Cammy is pretty with great cheekbones-- it turns out that it's kind of refreshing to watch a poem read by a character whose life clearly resides outside the realm of poetry, so that she isn't all "the sound of a soft "ch" makes me orgasmic!" but instead accepts the text at face value.

Later in the film, the "make moms cry" moment pivots on a poem of ee cummings, which is one of those poems that you can read at a wedding and everyone's all, "Oh yeah, that's about love, I can tell."  Cammy charges through ee's line breaks and spills the thing out like she just made it up herself there on the spot, which seems to me the best way to present poetry.  Yes, we know that the act of writing poetry is one of intense syllabic placement and agony over the word choice, but the truth of In Her Shoes is that poetry has the most impact when offered as if it's as simple as the inside of a greeting card-- a heartfelt eruption of sentimentality, made palatable only by its secret, elegant construction.  Cammy does a fine job of keeping that construction hidden. It's odd to think that an actress playing someone reciting a poem does the least annoying (e.g. honest) job of reciting a poem that I've ever encountered by pretending to mean it instead of pretending to present it, but maybe that's what it takes.  Someone who's at least allowed to pretend to care more about the feeling she's supplying than the dignity she's bestowing upon the words.

The best moments of my life have been haphazard, and that is why (to me) poetry has always seemed such a dishonest presentation of experience.  It filters content through form, celebrates language as it's own signifier instead of the gimpy system we have to grapple with to get at least some kind of idea across.  It mystifies the wrong thing-- expression.  Life is what's already mystifying enough; we should be doing our best to detangle our hardest moments.  But this is what Cammy's character uses poetry for in the film-- as her selfishly (in the best sense) illuminating crutch, the puppet she slips onto her hand to communicate with the rest of the world-- and for once, while listening, my eyes weren't rolling up into the back of my head.

Smell You Later

After five hours of being social tonight, I am too pooped to Sunday blog. All I'm capable of thinking right now is that the Antonio Banderas cologne sample sitting on my bed smells EXACTLY how I thought Antonio Banderas would smell.

Cover To Cover

So Harcourt put it up at Amazon today, which means it can go up here, too:

I've been warned that there still might be a few "tweaks" to the cover before it goes to print (this book isn't coming out until August '06), so don't be shocked if you end up seeing this on shelves instead:

My Dust Bunny

Once Brett told me that in college he discovered he produced more lint than the average person.  By lint, he meant those mysterious balls of dust and shed skin cells and unknown particles that ball themselves under a dorm bed.  Not to brag, but I think that I produce an average if not low amount of personal lint.  Scooter, on the other hand, is a fucking lint machine.

I only clean my house twice a year because cleaning literally makes me sick.  More on this later.  Since getting Scooter, however, the durations between house-cleaning have become much more dicey.  Sometimes I will be watching t.v. and a gigantic tumbleweed blows 'cross the bed, except instead of being made of weeds, that tumble is formed of gray and white bunny hair.  As it passes, I reach out to pet it.  Soft!  Sometimes I will catch one of these hairballs out of the corner of my eye and think that it's Scooter.  "Come here, baby. Come here," I'll say, and since Scooter doesn't respond to entreaties anyway, I won't notice that the hairball is inanimate until I get down to scratch behind its non-ears. 

Because this past Saturday marked October 1st, a.k.a. the official start of My Birthday Month, I thought that I, as a preparatory gift to myself, would do a top-to-bottom cleaning of my apartment so that I could head toward my 26th feeling like an angel.  I'm not a nasty-dirty girl, as in old food under the bed and milk spills on the carpet, but I'm a disorderly-dirty girl, as in many, many US Weekly's splayed across the floor and shit, I haven't dusted in ten years. 

The problem with me and cleaning is that I get really nauseous.  My mom laughs at me whenever I insist upon this, but a large part of the reason for the nausea is because I have a very low visual tolerance for repetitive motions.  So when I'm wiping down the counter with the pre-moistened Swiffer cloths (I am wayyyy too lazy to spray my own cleaning product) and my hand is going round and round, round and round, I end up wanting to puke.  So then I lay on the floor for a few minutes, waiting for the dizziness to pass.  You can see how this might make cleaning a very time-consuming endeavor. And maybe you're saying to yourself, "Why don't you just shut your eyes while you're wiping, Andrea?" except I have tried this, and the sensation is akin to that of being in the tilt-a-whirl at a county fair, and you are worse off for having your eyes closed because then your brain is free to concentrate on the nausea.

Cleaning is emotionally taxing as well, since I will inevitably find spiderwebs in corners, likely still active, and feel like a totally bad person for wrecking something that the spider put such earnest effort into building. As I take the spider out into my backyard, I apologize profusely, giving a quick little pep talk about how I just know the next web s/he will build will be even better and stronger than the one I just destroyed, and if I was a spider, I would bite me.

I concluded my cleaning Friday afternoon and by evening a major migraine had set in.  All that repetitive motion, I'm sure of it.  What I am not sure if is why we don't have Cleaning Lady/Man Day when we have Secretary's Day.  This seems a massive injustice, as at least in between answering phone calls and drafting memos, when you're a secretary you can chop up the circle by fucking around on the internet or eating some jellybeans.  Anyway, I spent the evening writhing around on my bed, trying to pinch various pressure points to see if I could alleviate the cranial pain.  Lately, a lot of people have been telling me I should really try acupuncture, and in a moment of weakness, I considered getting the needles out of my mini sewing kit and just poking them around on my forehead and temples to see what would happen.  Too deep in pain to get up to get the needles, however, I instead found my sharpest nail edge and poked myself with that instead.  There was no relief. I badly wanted to watch Amy Poehler's appearance on Conan O'Brien because she is so lovable that she kills me, so I turned upside down on the bed, squinted one eye, pressed a hand to my forehead and two fingers to the top of my skull, and listened carefully to her adorable conversation through my groaning.

When I woke up with my head cleared, I thought I would feel fantastic.  My house was clean!  So clean!  And I could embark upon my birthday month with a clear mind and spirit.  Right after cleaning, I suddenly feel emotionally balanced.  But, of course, this relief is only temporary.  Because about an hour after waking up on Saturday, I began to get stressed out about how clean my apartment is, and how impossible it is to maintain this level of cleanliness. I'd see a lone Scooter hair flying through the air and leap to catch it.  A crumb from my raisin English muffin would fall to the tiles, and I'd be on the floor, searching manically.  The natural world was doing everything it could do to reverse time, to restore my milieu to the state of anti-order that it existed in before my cleaning, and I was but a mere speck struggling against it.

And, as often happens, I saw that human life is just the hand upon the tile, continually wiping, wiping, wiping in circles. 

But anyway (again), while cleaning out my bathroom, I realized that I jumped the gun and bought red-hair-maintenance products before I actually considered how long I was going to keep my summer look.  Because I can't stand wastefulness, I am looking for a reader of the blog (near Los Angeles or Irvine please, since I'm too cheap to ship shampoo (heavy!) and will be dropping this off on your doorstep) who would like the Andrea Red Hair Gift Pack.  Look, it's my first blog giveaway!  In this pack, you will receive dye that will take your hair to a bright shade of fuchsia (highlights if you please),  a temporary dye to try out a reddish autumnal shade, and then a color protective shampoo and conditioner set to protect your vivid new hue!  All new and in original containers.  Email if interested. 

If more than one person wants it, we'll do some "guess what number I'm thinking of."  Or maybe we'll just do "guess who lives closest to me, thus making my errand the easiest."  The final decision will be made next Sunday.