I'm visiting the parents for a few days, and they've been on a remodeling bender for the last few weeks. This also involved killing my old bedroom (which I lived in, off and on, up until about four months ago) by turning it into a blue-and-sailcloth monstrosity with molded windows and my now-dead great-uncle's watercolors of Monterey Bay. It looks like a cabana in drywall and carpet. I miss my old clay-colored Southwestern bedroom, the ol' cave and all, you know. They even got rid of one of my bookcases and packed up all my tree-pulp belongings in bins for me to sort through.
I've gone through three or four of them so far, and I am just blown away at the sheer amount of notebooks, folders, binders, journals, and notepads I scribbled in while I was growing up. I put every private thought down on paper. The horror.
Reliving one's adolescence is not as fun as it sounds. One might respond to this statement by saying, "Fun's not the word I would use." This doesn't begin to cover my adolescence. It's horrible. Making it even worse is my old habit of buying a new notebook, confiding a single secret to it somewhere in the exact center of the book where I think nobody could possibly find it, and then never using it again, meaning several hundred random pages that have to be hunted down individually and torn out so the (blank) remains of those notebooks can be reused.
Then there's the school stuff, mostly from high school. My handwriting, still indecipherable, isn't even recognizable as a form of communication, and most of the homework is incomprehensibly stupid. One wonders how the hell I graduated from high school.
Christ. Most of it's in the garbage. I'm painstakingly erasing every piece of physical evidence of the squirmy side of my youthful mind. Sexually confused? Who, me? Never. Humiliatingly sentimental towards my few friends? Hell, no. Pseudospiritual in an attempt to fit in with my family and social circle? Why, I've always been agnostic, how dare you insinuate.
The truth is that although I've reached a point where I can freely admit how truly mind-bendingly awful my teenage years were and laugh, it still makes me fidget inside to read the proof of it all. To say nothing of the books. So many books. I don't know what my parents were thinking, letting me accrete so much material. I told my mother I was inclined to blame her for the mountains of paper and she looked at me and said, "I had nothing to do with it."
It's true. It's another genetic gift from my father to join my astigmatism, obesity, addictive personality, deafness, pimples, wispy two-tone hair, and cancer. My paternal grandparents had a tendency to accumulate stuff. It just happened. They were well-known throughout the once-, twice-, and three-times-removeds for the teetering mounds of detritus in their house. It's not that they were filthy; it was all books and papers and paintings and knickknacks and bric-a-brac and thingamabobs and pictures and notebooks and crossword puzzles and old lamps and hi-fis and records and tapes and videotapes and pens and pencils and placemats and collectibles. Just the accretion of several decades of life unaffected by a single garage sale, kept clean by, I think, the sheer oppression of history.
In fact, they reminded me of a pair of spiders in a burrow, spinning a cocoon around themselves that grew thicker as the years passed. The longer they nested, the deeper the walls grew between themselves and time. Then, when life happened, it turned out they hadn't built their defenses well enough, and it all came down.
My parents are the same way, although they've spent the last several years patiently weeding things out, slowly winnowing away the material inheritances of their fathers. That's part of the remodeling process--it seems 2008 is the Year of the Heave-Ho, and they've caught me up in it.
Just as well. Judging from the unbelievable amount of books I still have to go through, I clearly began manifesting my genetic gift of accretion at a very young age, gathering my wispy body in, solidifying into mantle and crust, slowly plastering the cracks between the tectonic plates of my memory with floured paper, developing a dusty atmosphere around an internal star.
Throwing away or donating all of these books make me feel naked. I still have a sizable collection, but it's already dwindling to a quarter of its former glory.
O Thoth, give me the strength to go on. It's only paper.
Google Reader has seriously changed my online habits. I spend most of my time on the Internet just reading the glorious products of around a hundred feeds. It's led to some selectivity, and the sources I've subscribed to have, by their nature, lent themselves to duplication--particularly the tech news.
But looking at the trends in Reader (one of the most interesting features I've ever seen on a product), it seems I'm most interested in random shit, celebrity news, tech news, and political analysis that avoids actual political news.
Then there's my newfound selectivity. When you have a hundred and fifty news items up and waiting to be read every time you check Reader, you more or less have to cherry-pick.
Therefore: I am in total control of my news environment.
It's exciting!
On one of my last posts, I actually got a comment. Also exciting! It included a directive to discuss The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Movie versus book.
The book (as far as I'm concerned, "book" here involves all five installments of the trilogy as compiled into a single tome) and I have history together. I first read it for a project in my Gifted independent study class in seventh grade. Since then, I've also read the script for the original radio play, bought the DVD of the original BBC miniseries, bought my own copy, which was ruined when I dropped it in the bathtub, got a second copy which has since become irretrievably lost (I like to think it was recycled as firelighters), bought copies of the first three books, two of which were destroyed in a college incident (I still don't speak to the people responsible), one of which was lost while moving and replaced several years later, the text-based adventure computer game, the recent remake, a DVD of which I of course own, as well as the "Making of..." book.
It has been quite a journey, during which I have become intimately acquainted with the Hitchhiker universe, even through Arthur's fatherhood and the strange temporospatial journeys that seem to be typical of Adams' oeuvre, resulting in a denouement that is as complex as it is puzzling and which left me wishing I had a Guide that was as advanced as the final iteration.
So. After all this, the movie? Well. It certainly displays 21st-century cinematic sensibilities to a T, up to and including a preference for pratfalls over the slightly more cerebral jokes that Adams was so fond of. The visuals are, of course, dazzlingly, gorgeously weird. Some things have been added, others taken away, still more changed.
Still, though, I feel it does manage to capture the spirit of the original Hitchhiker's Guide. There were some things I was thrilled to see--like the Magrathean factory floor, still one of the most outstanding computer-generated environments I've ever seen--and there were some things that kind of fell flat. Zooey Deschanel, for example. I wasn't wild about that choice for Trillian. Zooey's not big on facial expression, and she projects more of an air of wide-eyed innocence than the original character was ever meant to convey. The other casting choices were pretty good, I'd say--Martin Freeman makes for an astonishingly perfect Arthur, Mos Def makes a pretty good Ford (inappropriate displays of affection and all), and Sam Rockwell lives Zaphod. The only quibble I have with Zaphod is how they dealt with the second head, but the practical considerations involved make it understandable.
In the final analysis, it's yet another reinterpretation of a property that was born to be reinterpreted endlessly. The original radio play was altered for the novel--and then expanded into a trilogy, which was again adapted into the miniseries, before increasing by another two books, turned into a computer game, then spent several years in development hell before finally becoming a movie.
In that light, I'm less concerned about the movie's fidelity to the letter of the source material than to the spirit. Since the movie is about an Earthman who has his planet blown up and consequently finds himself in an absolutely bizarre galactic civilization that immediately involves him in the wildest caper ever written--and manages to be both grand and funny--I'd say it does a good job of it. It's one of my favorite recent movies, if only because of all the silliness and the in-jokes (like Douglas Adams' nose being used for Humma Kavula's Temple to the Great Green Arkleseizure).
To say nothing of that amazing musical number that opens the movie. I still load up the DVD just to watch that part. Douglas Adams, if he had lived to see it, would have, I think, loved it unreservedly.
In the end, I'm hoping that The Restaurant at the End of the Universe gets made. If there is a Great Green Arkleseizure, I pray that He expel us this blessing sometime before the coming of the Great White Handkerchief.
An in memoriam from today's obit page that caught my eye and my memory:
Steve Xxxxx Yo, Steve, how are things in heaven. We miss you man. You are in our hearts and minds on this May Day. You were a good friend. We will miss your kindness & generosity and your unique personality. Your positive energy has had an impact that will last forever. You touched a lot of peoples lives. Personally, I miss partying with you, playing rock & roll tunes and singing together. We felt your pain, but we couldn't help you. Then you left us so fast we never had the chance to say good-bye. So, good-bye Steve, we love you, Jesus will take care of you now. From the gang, Petro; Mike; Charlie; Big Lar; Jerry; Gus; Jimmy and Jay. See ya. P.S. Say hi to Elvis for me, you know how I am about Elvis.
Working on the obits always gives me pause. I read through each death notice, noting the name, date, place, and family. Sometimes you get a long paid notice that gives some background information, but those tend to be the least interesting ones. Ditto the memoriams. Those I delete, though. Like Steve's up above. It's the rules.
I've known old folks who see the bone sheet as their generation's scorecard and cheer whenever they see that they've outlived someone. "There's a lower limit to that, though," one of those people told me once.
I feel like a Grim Reaper type because of this, but I feel as though, by reading, preparing, and storing those obituaries, I'm contributing to their deaths, in some way to the remembrance of all of those total strangers whose lives mattered enough for someone to pay for the death notice. It's like there's a list in my reptilian brain beneath the surface, and those names are checked off one by one. It's not my list. I don't think it's anyone's; it feels like one of those things that are shared by the rest of the species, like fight-or-flight or the rhythm of copulation.
Steve's memorial, though, is as perfect a remembrance as anyone could ask for. Because of it, Steve doesn't need me. No further details need to be filled in. All it lacks, in the end, is a brief moment of speculation on whether Elvis is, in fact, where anyone expects him to be.
On the other hand, we had a Cuban immigrant die the other day, one whose life merited a story obit by one of ours, but the photo that accompanied the story came from the decedent's visa. This in spite of nearly 40 years of dry feet. What an interesting statement.
All this makes more of an impression than the story of a woman who vanished in 2005 and was found three days later in a swamp, so bloated her cause of death was impossible to determine. And yes, to my non-local friends, Florida is full of swamps, conveniently located for all of your corpse-storage needs. I have a chemistry Ph.D friend who assures me that for suspicious causes of death, nothing obscures better than a decent glade and a few days.
Funny how, when I look out the window, Florida looks so drenched in sunlight that it seems like nothing bad could ever happen here. Then I turn around and remember that even though bad things happen all the time, they don't happen often.
"It must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
Right on, Arthur.
For some reason, the feed for this particular blog didn't register Sunday's post, and it's frustrating the hell out of me. A lot of things are frustrating the hell out of me, actually, including the end of my cigarette habit (at least for now).
One thing that isn't frustrating, though, is the big one, the thing that seems like the elephant I shot in my pajamas. Nobody knows why I shot it, why I was wearing my pajamas while I shot it, or why the elephant was even in there to begin with, but it was and I did.
Today, my boss took my coworkers and me out for drinks to send off a couple of folks who are leaving. I sat at one end of the table, and most of the conversation happened at the other end. I barely spoke, hardly anyone spoke to me, and I spent most of the time drinking and watching the lacrosse game between Johns Hopkins and Towson. This is, believe it or not, utterly normal.
It's funny to watch. When I'm with a group of people who can hear, it becomes very interesting to observe how they try to acclimate themselves to the situation. They tend to vacillate between asking me direct questions from time to time to avoid feeling as though they're leaving me out, and ignoring me completely.
For the most part, though, they're extremely nervous. It's the cognitive dissonance, I think, of having this presence with them that is nevertheless completely apart. They feel I should be acknowledged in some way--which is perfectly fine and proper--but are not sure how far they need to go to avoid making me feel left out.
Truthfully, the answer is "not very far." I'm used to being left to my own devices among friends or coworkers simply because of the impracticality involved in ensuring my full inclusion. It just can't work. This is a fact of my life that can never be changed. I made my peace with that a long time ago. Someone told me once that they thought of the whole situation as being similar to having a foreign exchange student who can't speak the local language very well at all.
It's very true, even beyond the language. There are cultural referents involved in everyday conversations, most of which I lack because I couldn't just pick them up as I grew up. Tone of voice and word choice are the two big ones; sometimes I say the right things in the wrong tone or the wrong things in the right tone, and people get very thrown off when they speak to me. There's also the lack of a natural conversational rhythm, the misapplication of body language, and an inability to fully understand how to achieve a unwritten or unspoken message. This last is especially important when writing professional documents, like resumes or recommendation letters.
That's also especially galling. I tend to laugh it off as simple ineptitude with artificial bourgeois modes of conduct, but the truth is, I like to write and I like to try to write well. I often fail miserably when the writing is done for personal reasons (like this blog and its siblings), but that's fine; it is, in the end, for me alone. The readers are purely incidental. But when I write things that are specifically intended to be read by an particular individual for a discrete purpose, it's time to call in a hearing proofreader to point out the flaws, which bothers me to no end.
In the end, though, it's another thing I need to make my peace with...at least, after I figure out whether it's an attempt to disavow any personal responsibility in the face of Mother Nature and my aberrant genes.
In the meantime, the Black & Tan is now my new favorite drink. It's all business up top and leisure down below!
As I've been more focused on keeping my life as coherent as possible than on making verbal sense of it lately, I haven't updated much.
However, the story of Aliza Shvarts made me shvitz like a shmendrick. She's an art student who inseminated herself "as many times as possible" over nine months, and then took an unidentified abortion drug equally as often. Then she videotaped herself ejecting blood every month around her period.
The idea, according to this explanation she cobbled together (which sounds like one of my art history papers from undergrad--pure bullshit), was that the blood she emits could be either from her period or from an induced miscarriage; even she doesn't know which. She thus wished to address the following points with this project, as I understand it (along with my responses):
The power of identification (of naming) and its ideological basis. It is not an aborted fetus until you, the viewer, see the blood and decide it's a "miscarriage."
This could work if there weren't an objective reality involved that's being hidden by omission.
The "myth" of female sex organs being used only for male penetration and breeding.
That's how they evolved, but I can't see how anyone would argue with the fact that vaginas have considerably more uses now than they did in the past.
The lack of public discourse about the sanctity of life.
As though we don't already have enough people gassing on about being pro-life.
The idea that function follows form; since uteri are shaped like vessels, they should therefore be used only for that purpose.
Dude. Seriously?
The transformation of the act of impregnation into something unnatural, forcing the viewer to question the heterosexually-oriented norms they've been raised with.
Whether the woman wants to admit it or not, humanity--along with virtually every other mammal--has evolved with binary sexuality. If Shvarts wanted to question the notion of gender and its role in sex, she should have come along 20 years ago. These days, gender is starting to become a conscious, psychological construct that's distinct from simple genitalia and chromosomal makeup. Part of that is the greater recognition of intersexuality, transsexuality, homosexuality, and variations in gender identity that don't fit into the "classic" man-woman dynamic.
Hmm, I'm tempted to say it's interesting, but several other people brought up a very salient point: it's not a particularly singular project. Half the species can easily do the same thing, to say nothing of the debate that's already been going on for the past several decades about human sexuality. There's nothing original, new, or profound about it.
There is one thing she accomplished, though. She managed to strike up quite a bit of discussion, although it appears to be mostly ridicule.
For my part, I think it's a damn stupid idea. She may have damaged her reproductive apparatus permanently, not to mention the commoditization of abortion she managed to achieve here. Hey, great--killing babies is now a matter of mass consumption.
Don't get me wrong. I'm completely pro-choice, especially if the kid's already been born and is especially irritating, but abortion is an intensely personal, significant decision for a large number of the women who undergo the procedure. And this stupid kid fools around with it for a grade?
Christ. Nicotine withdrawal and this are enough to drive me to bed.
I live in one of the most densely populated counties of Florida. Where I live, literally every square inch of land has been converted to human use.
It is therefore unusual to see a lot of wild animals. I live next door to a park, but it's painstakingly manicured and populated by ducks, geese, and seagulls.
Aside from those, I've seen jays, crows, hawks, eagles, cats, squirrels, raccoons, and snakes.
The raccoon took me by surprise the other night. I was leaning on my truck in the parking lot, having a smoke, when something peeked out at me from the other side of the driver's-side front tire. It pulled itself out to full view, and looked at me curiously--I thought it was a cat at first until I saw the mask, hands, and bulbous body.
My thought, of course, was rabies. Still, though, it wasn't aggressive, just curious and surprised by an object with a face.
Then, today, I was fiddling with the cable connection to my building. The boxes where the connections are made are on the side of the building, located over a small patch of dirt populated by air-conditioners, weeds, and forgotten household items (like a welcome mat swiftly converting into moss). I must have disturbed something, because a few minutes later, I passed by the same spot, and there was an average-sized black snake, looking rather put out.
I continually feel as though a large event is on its way. The behavior of the local animals reminds me of the stories one hears about earthquakes and tornadoes and how people's pets start acting oddly just before the event.
Perhaps even more ominous, I turned 23 the other day. Consequently, people have been bringing up the movie and the many, many theories on the significance of 23.
What makes it worse is this view from a gas station yesterday:
It's been a few days, I think. I have my periods of quietude.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've started paying more attention to the briefs relating to homicide, suicide, manslaughter, or accident, as well as the obits. It's interesting to try to read between the lines.
For example, I've noticed that homicide tends to occur in rhymes. There was, uh, Herrera-Carrera, who was murdered by a man named Ferrera-Rivera. H-C had been going with F-R's mother; however, both men were exactly one year apart in age.
A woman died the other day because she had a fatal heart attack at the wheel. One wonders what brought it on. My favorite theory is that she was leaving an especially nasty argument with a loved one, and the stress of that triggered the attack. Not my favorite because I consider it pleasant; my favorite because it's one of the more horrible things I can think of happening to someone. Just imagine if it were true! Life might then turn out to be just as nasty as we all secretly suspect it is.
Or the very sweet young woman who was killed in a car accident on her way to Urban Outfitters with some friends. She was a local, and had been the subject of a newspaper feature last fall on the topic of shopaholism. The feature obit about her ran today along with her picture, and while archiving the photo, I came across another one from several months ago that had never run in the paper. I could see why--the lighting in the photo made her appear to have an Adam's apple.
Unfortunate! It did get me thinking about intersexuality, though; the dead girl notwithstanding, I wonder how many leggy, gorgeous blondes are walking around with that nasty Y chromosome. Then again, it might not be so bad. I dug Middlesex.
Sounds like I'm speaking ill of the dead. I think it happens when you work for a newspaper; you grow accustomed to maimings, shootings, draggings, sawings, stabbings, slicings, poisonings, overdoses, crashes, ejections, explosions, blazes, slayings, and mowings. You don't care about how it happened because it always happens. What you do care about is why it happens, and those briefs can be frustratingly, well, brief. Only when it's a real blockbuster do you find out in excruciating detail all about the total dissolution of one's life.
I'm in fine form, I think. Sweeney Todd has got me all grim-like.
I'm deadlocked on a story. First sentence: "We turned it loose in the Wild Lands." That's basically more or less it. I just can't seem to figure out the "IT'S PEOPLE!" angle without coming across as either clichéd or glib.
Alas, restraint is lacking. I thought I'd wait a few days before posting again, if only because I'm beginning to feel like this is becoming the blog, the repository of my thoughts. Yesterday belongs to my cell phone, but today belongs to this.
I came across something unexpectedly delightful today. Interestingly enough, though I spent my customary five hours at Barnes & Noble before coming to class (I'm posting from school), the delightful thing was not to be found there; that has become a matter of routine, a desire to finish The Sandman (which, incidentally, I did--next week, new books!) left unsatisfied.
No, I came here, found the computer lab, and signed on to Blackboard. Guiltily aware of my dereliction of my online course, I checked it out and read through the announcements. Imagine my surprise when I came across a quote from a student's posting about a blog that the professor particularly liked:
“The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or desire for more.” --Gabriel Zaid
Validation! Of course, the fact that he's a literary critic condemns his viewpoint as biased (for what addict does not think his fixation is pleasing?). Still, it's always nice to know that I'm not being negligent for having actual unread books in my collection. I'll get around to them...eventually. In the meantime, I don't see why I should stop getting more books. I'll get to those...eventually. When I'm done with the one I'm reading. And, of course, the one after that (apparently Proust can change my life; I thirst to discover how).
I also have to cop to a sin: I've had moments, weak, slavering moments, where I feel crushed by the mountains of books and cultivate the need to throw the bums out. Despite my parents' urging (the self-interested things...as though they needed an office or sewing-room), the need passes, and I am myself again. Perhaps that's what Zaid meant by not losing one's composure--at least, not enough to actually follow through with the devilish deed.
I've got the last line of a Sandburg poem running through my head right now: It is so thin a splinter of singing.
