This Afternoon In Drama

Parenthetical

My galley page-proofs came this week, and it's a much different thing to see your book in a not-chosen-by-you font than it is to see it in the Courier New with which you originally wrangled.  All of a sudden your work seems like it didn't come from you.  And you see it clearly for the first time, see the way it's been put together.  Which is why I sent off an email to my agent, pronto.  (Meaning ASAP, not meaning that my agent's name is Pronto.  That, however, would be a rad agent name!)

From: me
To: doug
Subject: money*

(* I was sent some this week.)**

(** Annnnnnnd the Citibank commercial featuring the slogan, "There's more to life than money" just came on my TV screen.)***

(***When I have enough money to have a frozen yogurt machine purring next to the Icee machine in my home kitchen, then I will know I have enough, thank you Citibank.)
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a commission check is on its way to you.

do you realize i wrote two-thirds of my book in 2nd person?  isn't 2nd person like the most insanely cursed voice of all time?

andreaa.
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I realize this makes me sound incredibly stupid, but I didn't fully realize that I wrote the majority of my book in the voice that dare not speaketh its name before I got the proof.  In AP English senior year, my teacher, Mrs. Schmenk, while teaching The Sound And The Fury, let us know that the second-person is impossible to sustain in any credible or engrossing way, and thus is the bastard of narrative voice choices.  And thus should generally be avoided unless you want to get made fun of.  Which means that I have now started mentally prepping myself in anticipation of getting made fun of, and it will be especially tough if I get made fun of by Entertainment Weekly, which I have a crush on.

And just a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a UCLA writers workshop because I had to observe another teacher's methods (oh yeah, if you live in L.A. and have always fantasized about sitting across a table from me and staring into my dreamy brown eyes, I will be teaching "Novel Writing I" for UCLA Extension Spring semester, and I think enrollment opens next month.  Only fifteen spaces available!  You might have to poke out an eye if you're sixteenth in line), and this one student wanted to know what I thought of third-person omniscient.  I proceeded to go into an explanation about how it's become "unfashionable" and sort of difficult to manage (because no one trusts an "author" anymore and so an omniscient authorial voice becomes confusing, causing readers to ask, "Is God supposed to be telling this story?"  Because the modern mind seems to just need a fictional viewpoint to be assigned to some organized psyche, no matter how abstract that psyche), but I should have told the guy, "Well, at least your book-in-progress isn't written in second-person.  You go, girl.  Middle-aged man.  I mean."

The guy looked extremely sad when he heard that third-person omniscient isn't fashionable, sad in the way that Los Angeles girls will get when you remind us that Uggs are no longer fashionable.  Maybe he'll be the one to restore the voice's status.  I didn't mean to discourage him or suggest that he choose a tidy third-person from a singular perspective, but just wanted to warn him.  Give him a friendly heads up.  And now I'm kind of wishing that someone had said to me, "Second person, what the fuck, homegirl?  That shit hasn't even gone the way of the dodo because it never even was the dodo."  I can't say that the warning would have changed anything (except the book's title, maybe, which would possibly have been, It's Mostly In Second-Person, I Knowwww) but I simply would have had more prep time for the critical pies that will likely get thrown at my head (which might be losing hair (I'm not sure if it is, actually) due to a theoretical health problem, which I went and got blood-tested for last Thursday, f.y.i. Greg The Doctor. Results tomorrow, maybe.)

Anyway, I'm moving to a new place this week.  I will unpack boxes and be amazed to find things that I didn't remember packing from only five days ago.

I Know This Much Is True

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to participate in Fake Writers Day because I was busy MFA'ing, but now that I've returned to California, I feel like I should make my contribution to the James Frey/J.T. Leroy canon.  In the vein of the "What I Did Over Winter Vacation" essays I used to have to write in elementary school, this is my "What I Didn't Do Over Winter 'Vacation*' (*if you think an MFA program in the Middle Of Nowhere, Vermont, is a vacation, then you can only be described as "very sad")," and all information contained within can be verified as being thoroughly untrue.

MY TRIP TO BENNINGTON

Well, thank god I am a diligent and organized girl, because it is a fact that I did NOT book my flight for the wrong night, meaning that my mom was NOT prompted to call me on my cell while I was on the way to airport to shriek in my ear, "Your ticket says Thursday!  Thursday!  Thursday!  It says Thursday, Andrea!  What are you going to do?  Thursday!"  As a result of my correctly booked flight, I did NOT have to go through Cincinnati, OH, a city where Nick Lachey did not attend The School for Creative and Performing Arts, and where, happily, I did not have to wait for my connecting flight while a forty-something man attempted to hit on me by asking if I was really flexible enough to bend over while sitting Indian style to reach my hot chocolate, which I had placed on the carpet a foot from my seat.

Upon getting to my dorm room at Bennington, somewhat tired from the red eye flight and from having listened to the enormously panicked messages my mom left on my phone about "Thursday! Thursday!", I sighed with pleasure upon seeing the bed.  It did not have a plastic cover coating it that made it squeak like mice corpses roasting in hell, crying out for Satan's mercy, and the blankets the school had provided did not have the consistency of a homeless man's beard.  Once in bed I did not feel like I was slip and sliding upon a plastic tampon wrapper, and when I woke up partway through my three-hour nap, I did not have to switch to my less-favored side because a mysterious, hard object running through the mattress had deeply bruised my right hip, breast, and forearm.

As if the school's dining hall had read my mind, its administrators knew not to skip my favorite dinner, which is "Garlic Bread With Vodka-Sauced Pasta," and what's more, they served garlic bread every night, just for the hell of it, because they intuited that their garlic bread makes everyone happy, especially in winter.  And there were not tomatoes lurking in the middle of the grilled cheeses like nutritious aliens.  And there was definitely not a new flavor of ice cream called "Golden Treasures," which did not prompt an entire week of "Golden Treasures" jokes that heavily depended on the flavor's sounding kind of like "Golden Showers."

Oh, but there was the graduation dance, at which the D.J. was so intuitively skillful at keeping a party going that he did not clear the dance floor within a half-hour period, as he understood that ballads by Lou Reed era Velvet Underground are not exactly uppers.  However, there was not a girl dancing in the middle of the floor who made me scared for her safety because her convulsive dancing included a particularly precarious move, in which she threw one of her legs backward at an almost ninety-degree angle.  The dance was so thoroughly exciting that me and my friends did not stumble out into the blizzard from sheer boredom and did not begin to decide who we would eat first when we couldn't get our bearings.

Wow, before I knew it, it was time to go home.  I lovingly pet the urine cover that was not on the bed goodbye, and I did not tell it that I would be back to lay upon one of its cousins come June.  At the airport, while washing my hands in the bathroom, I did not suddenly see that my baby blue bra was showing right through my green wife beater, making me feel like the first daughter of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline.  Then, as I descended the ramp onto the plane, I did not trip over my own feet because I was too distracted reading about Lindsay Lohan's bulimia in the latest issue of Life & Style, meaning that I did not go flying through the air, rug burn both of my knees upon landing, and receive the worried concern of the line of passengers ahead of me.

P.S. There was absolutely not a woman at the residency that we named Inaudible because of her Tourette's-like habit of furiously barking out, "Inaudible!" at anyone she couldn't hear in the lecture hall.

The Best News I've Heard All Week

According to the Lulu Titlescorer, To Feel Stuff has a 35.9% chance of being a bestseller, whereas Like The Red Panda only had a 26.3% chance of the same success. Sometimes I think my life is going nowhere, but this totally unreliable information seems to say there's maybe hope for some kind of subconscious progress. Release the balloons from the ceiling and the doves from the vents.

On The State Of Being Bitchy

It seems that when in Vermont, an inner haikuer appears, and this is the winter season's extended offering:

PURINA

This woman writes books
About anorexia
It's a tight, hard life.

My teacher stops her
He's genuinely perplexed
And he wants to know

"Do anorexics
have pets?" This is serious
And the woman squints

"Yes," she says, confused.
But my teacher is still plagued.
"But do they feed them?"

At this point I start
Laughing harder than I think
I've laughed in two years.

The others they try
To shuttle past awkwardness
But I can't do it.
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From this same woman I learned that a predisposition toward anorexic behavior is largely genetic, which is news to me.  This information got me thinking about my orneriness.  While at residency, my orneriness rises full-blaze from the ashes, a phoenix that's been napping in California, but is all amphetamined-out in Vermont.  This phoenix is completely wired, spending ten days manically vacuuming, biting its talons down to the nubs, and popping its speed bumps in the mirror clipped to the back of the dorm room door. I think it's because there are so many people at the residency who use concepts like "my soul" and "inspiration" and "poetry" with no sense of "the problematic" attached to them, and the gentle, good spirits of these people basically drive me into an inner frenzy.

Throughout the self-esteem classes in elementary school I was told that orneriness, also known as bitchiness, dickheadedness, and the cuter, Disneyfied grumpiness, was the result of ones own insecurities, a lashing out at those whose capabilities or characteristics one found threatening. But just like how for a long time people thought the source of anorexia was the enthusiastic desire to be skinny, I am belatedly discovering that it's highly possible that this orneriness is just genetic, too, and that it stems from a predisposition and not a focused goal (e.g. "I want to mentally knock that person down to raise myself up").  In other words, it just is.  Which brings me to my parents.

My mom has her moments of extreme bitchiness-- for instance, when she will swipe another customer's spot in the mall parking lot during after-Christmas shopping, holding the wheel like she's throttling a neck while she also insults the other driver's weight or face-- but her orneriness usually takes the cause-effect form, meaning that you must do unto her before she'll get all nasty on your ass.  The only context in which I've seen a consistent inner bitchery arise is when it comes to issues of taste or class, as in when we are watching Trading Spaces and she gets particularly terrible about the red-team wife who sees no wrong in her green wall-to-wall carpeting and has neglected to touch up her dark roots for six months (trashy hair and clothing seem to particularly insult her truest sensibilities). Then a dark cloud will rise within my mom and the bitchery will pour forth.

But, on the other hand, she has chosen to decorate her kitchen with wallpaper bearing plump fruits, and she leaves unironic messages (this happened today!) on my answering machine like, "Hi sweetie," despite knowing very, very well that I am just not sweet. She is so prone to draping herself on me when I sleep over at her house and dwelling on how meaningful a child I am to her that this past holiday season I finally christened her, Wet Blanket Seigel, a nickname she doesn't love so much.  She possesses some of these more genuinely awww-shucks traits on display at Bennington that I find myself bouncing so hard off of, like I just encountered the giganticist oppositely polarized magnet-end that the geekiest virgin scientists ever assembled. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that if my mom was in a workshop with me and I didn't know her, she would say some sentimental thing that would make me inwardly roll my eyes.  If she was in a workshop with me and was still my mom, then I would openly roll my eyes and yell, "Wet Blanket, shh!  (Love you.)"

So I'm not sure I get this deeply ornery DNA from her.

If I look to my dad, I can pull out the way he'll start staring out into space if you start describing any incident in too-romantic detail, if you veer out too far from the subjects of financial consequences and health insurance benefits. It's not necessarily a straight orneriness he possesses, because he is most often pretty genial, but more of an impatience for bells, whistles, frills, and anything overdone.  Last year he started reading the manuscript of my forthcoming novel, but told me that when he felt I introduced one too many characters into my story, he stopped.  I think this was around chapter two, and that manuscript has never been lifted again.  I see the relative of my orneriness in my dad's straightforward evaluations, in the time that we were watching a televised pageant together, a contestant appeared on stage wearing a one-piece that V'd down from her shoulders to crotch, and my dad simply announced, "She should win."

Still, there are so many friendly strands in my dad's personality that did not make their way from his body to mine, especially his willingness to participate in shockingly corny joke-exchanging with that vacationing Midwestern family at the table next to ours at the restaurant, and the fact that he knows all of his neighbors' names and will not sprint back into his house from the mailbox when he sees their garage doors ascending.  Also, in the way that that he will enthusiastically attend swap-meets and buy bunny-themed items, and the way he seems to be a direct aesthetic descendant of the guy who originally invented those, "Hang In There!" kitten posters. If he was in in a workshop with me he would simply lose interest when talk turned hokey or foo-foo. It wouldn't torture him in the same way it does me.  This is where we diverge.

Since neither of my parents are a slam-dunk DNA source of assholery, I've also found myself thinking about assorted not-so-nice relatives, of whom I have plenty, but it's very difficult for me to discern whether or not their orneriness was a lifelong affair or whether it simply accelerated from the impatience of old age and sickness; I only knew these relatives in their AARP years.  I specifically think of my excessively ornery nearing (or has he reached there? I forget) eighty-something cousin who, until he got bitched out by other relatives, was leaving me hostile, anonymous comments on this very blog.  But apparently, and this is kind of amazing to me, my orneriness even outsizes his, as when I once wrote a post about being unfriendly at parties, he emailed me an angry diatribe in which the line "It's a shanda for a goyem" was used. For those of you (gentiles) who do not know, this means that it's basically a shame for a Jew to act this way, and this scolding struck me as arising from a very strange concept because I believe there is a long and lengthy tradition of Jewish girls practicing olympic-level bitchery, and why stop that line here?

Quite simply, I'm not going to stop that line here. I'm going to continue the fine parade of bitchery that my peoples have established before me not because I'm making an intentional decision to do so or because I wish to be such an old man in a somewhat young girl's body, but because the orneriness is as natural a function to me as peeing.  And because if I didn't inwardly puke a little at a workshopmate's announcement that Bennington is like Hogwarts without the wizards, but still with the magic, well then I'd be being an asshole to me.

My Next Project

My ex-boyfriend, Ryan (1997-2001), and I are writing a book together about having been together, which has prompted a lot of talk about the inertia of our personality traits.  Upon seeing each other for the first time in months this Christmas, I said, "You look like a decrepit David Cassidy" and Ryan said, "You look like a psychotic Pippi Longstocking."  While his sweet, elfish mom, making lemon bars, shook her head at us in the background, Ryan and I just sort of stared and made eyes at each other like, "Oh well, this is us."  And as we hung out later that night at a bar and I said, "Your pants make you look like a midget," and he said, "I think you're going cross-eyed," we just couldn't help ourselves.  According to Ryan, I had and have difficulty being a "nurturing" person (not the first time I've heard this complaint), and, according to me, Ryan has slid into a sad sack persona with unfortunate bursts of extreme showing-off.  We had a long, depressing phone conversation about how the same problems we encountered when with each other are the same problems we're dragging around today, and how, when together, we probably bring out what is most raw about the other.

Ryan and this book have really gotten me thinking about just how trapped we are by our at-the-end-of-the-day personality traits.  Also having me thinking about the inescapability of "being us" is repeat contestant Daniel Franco from Project Runway.  Franco was kicked off the first episode of the first season for being such a mental case about his tailoring.  He made a hideous vest/jacket-thing out of butcher paper, insisting that it was awesome because he took eons working on the pattern and adding unnecessarily elaborate seaming and lining.  What Daniel never grasped was that Heidi Klum doesn't give a Scheiße (the internet swears this means "shit" in German) about complicated tailoring if she doesn't think Seal will say the outfit looks cute on her.  Daniel was then "out," telling the camera that he had to go "follow his Bliss," which to me meant that he was going to go get a hot stone rub or something.

But when Daniel came back for a second round of Runway this season, it became clear that his "Bliss" was really a raging demon in a taffeta prom gown barnacling inside him.  He had chosen to reinterpret his most self-destructive designing qualities under the "Bliss" label, almost investing them with superstitious authority.  I'm sympathetic to this.  I have a bad tendency to insist that my innate bitchiness is the fount of my being and writing, but at least I call it "bitchiness" and not my "Joy."  In avoiding calling his "Bliss" what it is, which is a debilitating combo of OCD, failure to see a big picture, and incessant pacing, Daniel reminded me of the women in The Witches of Eastwick, who could never pin the true name of Jack Nicholson's devil, and thus, never destroy his influence over their lives and wombs.  In the same vein, as long as Daniel clings to this idea of his "Bliss," he's never going to drain its power over him.

This was never more clear than during Daniel's latest elimination, when he designed three black lace nighties that were carefully assembled, but devoid of vision.  I went to Loehmann's yesterday and got a $12.99 Rampage bra (with pink ruffles and embroidered flowers) that had more personality and inspiration than Daniel's trifecta of baby-dolls.  You'd think that having once been outed for a reward-less attention to detail would have alerted Daniel to the danger of following his "Bliss," but then, I guess, you'd be underestimating the pull of personality.  Daniel just can't get out of the way of himself, and this became tragically evident when he departed the show a second time smiling loopily, his lids drooping like Michael Kors had just slipped him a roofie.  His "Bliss" is his pimp, and it keeps kicking in his teeth and leaving him out on the curb, but he thinks it's all he's got.

Telling Daniel to stop with the tailoring bullshit and to start making pieces where tailoring fades into the background, letting the garment read as a totality, would be like telling Ryan and I to be openly sweet to each other.  Would be like telling me to not say, "But he's too ugly to be an actor!" when Adam asked him if that's what he did for a living.  Would be like telling Ryan not to murmur in my ear that if I was an actress, my nose would be twenty gazillion feet big up on the silver screen.  He and I have our timeless, frustrating rituals.  But I guess we believe they're actually worth something.  That's why we're writing the book.