"I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful."

^ I like that. It's from a book I'm obsessing like only a thoroughbred nerd could. BUY IT.

My friend is an EMT. Anyways, what it means is that a few nights a week he has to stay in Sparta and listen to a radio. If he hears something on that radio, he has to head on out in the ambulance to help someone after a drug overdose or heart attack or tragic papercut related incident or whatever. He told me the other night he got a call regarding an espcially drunk Irish man. Apparently he had taken the bus from Sparta to New York and back, and in an attempt to get off the bus, fell on his head. My friend said that when he got to the man, he immediately asked him a few required questions. Among them: "Do you have any allergies, sir?" -to which the Irish man plaintively replied: "Fucking Americans."




Speaking of which, I got back from Amsterdam last week.

I got to tag along with my mom, who had a business conference there. She had meetings during the day, so I ambled around and saw museums and factories. The streets there are crumbling and almost medieval, lined with canals and an incessant stream of regal looking locals on bicycles. Everyone was on bicycles. Some people had baskets in the front, filled with groceries or papers or babies. Sometimes a passenger would precariously ride side saddle on the back, making the turning signals for the driver.

At night, all the professors and scientists from the meetings would congregate for dinner. I was a bit of an oddity then, what with being neither a professor, scientist, or wife of one. I heard a lot of bizarre stories. One lady told me almost nostalgically about revolutions in Argentina, another vegan with an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus told me about a bar fight he had gotten into with an Australian in Brazil. (Apparently caipirinha, South America's answer to absinthe, was the catalyst). There was a man from Switzerland who wore yellow pants and matching yellow loafers every night. Another professor who specialized in sleep warned me about 'pyschological dead time' on airplanes - "NEVER, NEVER sleep on an airplane! There are simply too many factors you cannot control!" Another very round woman from England told me about her family's summer house in the south of France. "We live right next to Johnny Depp!" she told me. "But we haven't caught a glimpse of him yet."

She might have been my favorite. Later, I took a walk with her and her son in the red light district. We walked past glass doors like windows that hookers looked out of, looking for business, some more enthusiastically than others. As we walked past rows and rows of these windows, the woman from England waved and smiled. "Hallo, girls! How are you?" she asked merrily. Her son was not having it. "Mum!" he barked. "You don't say hello! They're prostitutes!" "Oh, shut up, George," she told him. "They're people too!"

It’s been about a week since anyone’s seen Suki. It was bound to happen sooner or later. She was a fat epileptic cat who skulked around doorways and corners, waiting for an exit route somewhere to be left unwatched. The main problem is not Suki, though. The main problem is mom mom, who coddled that cat for too many years for anyone to really remember when it started.

Mom mom and pop pop are up here for the summer. They live in Florida, but treat the Smith’s house like their own personal hotel for four months out of twelve, like clockwork. They’re cartoon characters, like I suspect most people’s grandparents are, and without apologies or consolations for their ignorance (or just plain distaste for anything but their own convention). I love them for it. Mom mom in particular. She came to America from Norway when she was 14. You’d never guess it though. I mean that she’s been in this country for more than half a century and her accent is in tact and beautifully so. After all this time it has never fallen victim to the perversions of colloquial English. She’s sort of invented her own way of everything, again, as I suspect most people past 60 have. They’re experts in cultivating their own sort of opposite teenage rebellion. Instead of spitfire and reckless stupidity, their defiance involves quietly sitting, waiting for everyone else to do all the superfluous things we scream and panic about endlessly.

Mom mom is a wreck over Suki. To pretend you aren’t deeply upset and indignant about her absconding is not cruel, but stupid. Why would you get Mom mom mad? This isn’t the first time the cat's managed to squeeze itself out of some door though. Really, that's a feat within itself. This cat is so fat that its stomach swings like a hula skirt when it walks; a pendulum, back and forth. Suki ran away last summer too. The Rybacks, who live up the street, called the house and turned her in. Mom mom carried her around like a new toy for a week, acting saintly, fulfilled.

Mom mom isn’t related to me really, I’m just over the Smith house all the time, and have been, since I was young enough to believe Ann when she played dead. We were both four and it was a habit of hers then to drop to the ground and stay supine and noiseless. I figured out a way to win the game, or at least end it, after a while. I’d go get Mrs. Smith and tell her Ann was dead. Ann did the same sort of thing now, but in less dramatic gestures.

I knew Mom mom well from all the summers she had been at their house. It was my house too, in the summer. My real house, across the street, was always generaled by a babysitter, whose habits and behaviors seemed to me a mystery not worth solving, at least in the wake of mom mom’s commanding presence. She was a slot machine who shelled out pearls of wisdom when the right circumstances aligned. Once she told Ann and me how she cross-country skied to school in Norway every day, and about her brother Aner who fell asleep in the snow and never woke up. Her voice is always muffled, like her tongue is too scared of the light to venture anywhere near her teeth. As a result she always whistles her ‘s’s and speaks in a way that is the opposite of rushed. It gives her a constant seriousness and infallibility.

Suki, not pop pop, is Mom mom’s rock. All of us were in a car once and found ourselves at a red light next to a man, naked, or at least from the waist up, singing along to James Taylor at full force with all the windows down. Ann pointed, and I laughed, so Mom mom looked. The potbellied and seemingly carefree man turned to look at Mom mom and winked. She turned to me and Ann, giggling helplessly in the backseat like two girls or something, and said, “You see? Sixty nine years and I still got it.” “What do you think of that pop pop?” Ann asked. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. The light turned green, we drove on.

In the week since Suki’s desertion, Ann has knocked on all the neighbor’s doors and asked incessantly about her last known appearance. I haven’t make any phone calls or anything but felt compelled to go with Ann when she walked around the neighborhood screaming “SUKI!!” There were countless variations and inflections she tried, along with whistles, handclaps, and helpful phrases like “come here girl!” I never had a pet, but figure if Suki wants to, she’ll come home. I offered that as consolation to Ann. “The cat has epilepsy!” she reminded me. I don’t really know what exactly epilepsy entails, or how you'd diagnose it in a person, let alone a cat. My knowledge of epilepsy is limited to the fact that Julius Caesar probably had it. She could be in worse company, I guess.

“It’s like punching someone in the face. If a girl punches a guy in the balls, she has to get hit in the face. It’s like, equal. That’s how fucking painful it is.”
How many conversations come back to this?
We are sitting in an empty parking lot. A steady line of cars goes by like seconds.
Four in a half circle, we are sitting, like a poker game without a table.
Squatting, looking at knees, then cars, knees then cars.

I think of the English paper I finished. I think of the points I brought up; weak, academic, no fear of being proven right or wrong. They are just emblems. I think of an essay I used
on Sylvia Plath’s poetry. ”it is like waking to discover one's adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten childhood hiding place, all the old rejected transparent beasts and monsters crawling out of the wallpaper.” I think of Sylvia Plath on movie posters and television screens, on t-shirts.

Everybody wants passion. We, instead, smoke cigarettes and talk about the police.
How many conversations come back to this?

She says she has four points on her license.
He says he’d kill for that, he has fourteen.
I see his tattoo, black, long lines like metal on his arm. There is a cross in the middle.
He smiles, never off, never on. I think of school pictures.
School pictures and report cards, and the refrigerators they sit on.

She says I’d like him. I look at his white undershirt, low jean shorts and sneakers. He talks about his motorcycle.

She drove me here, brought another one here, like knives and forks in a row.

"Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons."

^ Nietzsche. I dig it.


I read an article today about the woman who wrote all those lite fm love songs like "I Will Always Love You" and "How Do I Live Without You." She's a millionaire who says that she's never been in love. She also mentions that her best friend is her pet parrot, and that she's 50.










See what I mean?

They all need to be the cause

^ The emo lyrics just keep on coming. This time they're courtesy of Broken Social Scene, who I think pull off that whole 'I'm confused and pissed off' thing pretty gracefully.

I'm typing this from my mom's laptop. She's been in meetings all day, leaving me to the Double Dare worthy challenge of amusing myself with roughly four dollars and fifteen cents in Washington DC. I even had one of those oragami style fold up maps in case I got lost.

First thing I did was burn the four dollars on a metro pass. I made an appointment last week at George Washington University. My tour group consisted of a handful of mouth breathers and ugg boot wearers. The parents asked all the questions.

The metro ride might have been the most enlightening part. It's a cross section of all walks of population- Six foot something black guys in Day Glo sweatshirts next to ancient wrinkled ladies in manly 'power suits' next to six year old mini tourists, stumbling to find balance between the stops and starts of the car with the acuity of a surfer. Somehow I managed to find the right metro back to where I wanted to be, and proceeded to walk around aimlessly in loopy, intersecting circles. The streets here are either numbers or states; Massachusets, Rhode Island, Michigan...

I think there's a code that keeps the buildings from being too high. It gives the streets a perpetual feeling of neighborhood-ness, without the gentirfication for the most part. Of course, there's a Starbucks and a Brook's Brothers on the same street I'm staying on, but it seems like the opposite of a place like New York where the buildings work to form mammoth glistening windtraps you can't see your way out of. In midtown, anyway. The officies are more like ornate brick and iron jewel boxes juxtaposed neatly, solemnly, gold plaques stating their purpose: Embassy de Peru, Wexler, Smitt, and Ryan, United Black Caucus...

Eighty percent of the people on the sidewalks here are in suits. And every other car has those mysterious 'DIPLOMAT' liscense plates. Even most of the grafitti has a dominantly political overtone. The slogans range from the obvious and chiding (GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW), to the overwhelmingly imperative (INVADE IRAN). Either way, still more poignant than the grafitti I recently bumped into back home, which stated quite simply- 'FUCK YOU'.

This is my happiness and it freaks me out

^ Some spectacularly emo lyrics, no? It's part of a Fall song I caught while I was driving around the other day and stuck with me. Please, if you never listen to anything else I say, secure yourself a copy of This Nation's Saving Grace. Here, I'll even make it easy for you : http://www.amazon.com/This-Nations-Saving-Grace-Fall/dp/B00000189I/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8308037-3835338?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1176066441&sr=8-1

Easter is usually at my house and is again this year. Only my aunt and her fiance came. I haven't been keeping track, but I think she's had about a bottle of eight dollar grocery store wine. It makes the idea of being a writer to me seem a little less glamorous, less big. Not that she is one, but every writer seems to have a run in with alcoholism at one point or another. That or schizophrenia.

If she can drink that much I can sneak off to my room to type something. This weekend has been inordinately depressing. All the parties don't seem like parties. Just kids running from something ugly. Getting drunk not in a 'fuck it, lets have fun' way. More like they're trying to fill up divets and pock marks, hoping no one will notice the clumsiness of the math. Me too. I need a cigarette and to leave, but I can't. The emotions of everyone at my house seem bundled up tight by some kind of holiday observance code. Everyone's paperdolls with quaint, accessory-like problems and hobbies.

My dad's cousin usually comes to our house on major holidays. He is an only child, and the rest of his family apart from us is dead. My grandmother is his aunt, but she never lets him come to her house. Something about him seems to offend everybody. My dad swears the girlfriend he talks about whevener he visits only exists in pictures, and those pictures are the ones that come inside the frames when you buy them. I like him, asthetic inconsistancies aside. He always talks about something bizarre, unfitting, somehow, like his Polish grandfather, his experience on the Princeton horseshoe team, or the tenure of Tolstoy's stint in a Siberian prison. Its a welcome respite to me from all the vanilla conversations about the weather, summer vacations, and silent preening and general 'look how socially accpetable I am' contest every holiday is at my house. I seem in the minority. My parents constantly remind me to keep on his good side. "He went to Princeton, you know! He could write you a letter." I wonder how he got to be so hated.

Usually on holidays I see a movie with my brother and my dad, just to get out of the house and leave my mom alone. We saw Blades of Glory. I got the impression that it was written in a conference room of giggly movie writers trying to one-up each other. It made me want to try my hand at it, like trying to watch someone open a stuck jar or unlock a stubborn door. You get the secret, resolute feeling if someone just gives you the opportunity, you could take on whatever shit other people drown in.

Tomorrow I go to Washington DC with my mom. She has a business trip down there and asked me if I wanted to tag along. Going with her on business trips is like a seminar in efficacy. There are no missing papers and frantic questions, each day is like a checklist where everything gets crossed off, one by one, with a thick black line.

I'm going on the parlance of visiting colleges, which lately, has seemed to me a colossal joke and misunderstanding. Scores and volunteering opportunities and pyramid schemes that build up to something insurmountable, some peak so zaftig and high, nothing short of death could drag you back down to normalcy, to failure. Getting into college seems like some bourgeoisie caste system, where you can assign a mathematic value to an 18 year old based on where they study political science or Russian short stories.

Traveling is enough of an excuse to go to Washington for me. Seeing people and guessing which ones wake up to coffee and newspapers, which ones have grandchildren, which ones wish they were somewhere else entirely, it makes my confusion seem more reassuring. I get the feeling there is a paint by numbers sensibility to things like careers and opinions. Something you work towards that ends up finished and done.

Hillary Duff is full of snot

Because of a set of circumstances that are too long and unimportant to explain, I recently watched that Hillary Duff movie, Cinderella Story. Basically, all you need to know is that Mr. Most-likely-to-have-gonorrhea falls for the hapless bookworm Hilary Duff, because, he says, she doesn't care about what she looks like.

Which got me pretty mad. I mean, I am not campaigning for narcissism or materialism or anything, but this movie's key demographic is like ten year old girls, no? The movie presents them with two old, tired female archetypes: the loser brainy girl who doesn't care about what she looks like, but is 'real', and the bulimic popular cheerleader who does and is 'fake'.

Why should a girl ever think that those are her options?! What a horrible idea to present to impressionable kids! A girl can still be 'real' and wear a dress every now and then, no? Why is it that most classic ideas of what's 'girly' are intrinsically linked to the subservient, lipgloss-for-brains, 'ditz' ideal?

Just saying. I mean, even Gloria Steinem wore Pucci.

This is why New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is such a rockstar to me. She won a Pulitzer and is not immune to wearing leopard print on occasion. Anyone with lingering doubts, please refer to her misguidingly saucy-seeming book about how feminism backfired- Are Men Necessary - much, much cooler than the horrible title suggests, I promise.


Whatev, H-Duff. You're making like $10 mill a movie, so I see the sense in that.