Last night I took a walk with the teenage girls who own Sequoia's sister. (I think I'll start calling them Rachel and Alice.) Rachel's older and really good at everything she does, and so she continually puts down Alice's achievements. Like Alice was valedictorian last week, and I asked about her speech. Rachel yelled, "It wasn't a speech! It was two paragraphs!" Alice always remains unperturbed and I'm always left marveling at her incredible self-esteem, which seems to have a life of its own.
The conversation devolved into a discussion of the various merits, or lack thereof, of Nick Jonas vs. Joe Jonas, two movie "stars" I've never heard of. As usual, Rachel tried to patiently explain to Alice how far her judgment had erred. Alice defended her case by jumping up and down and yelling, "But Nick is so sexy!"
If you've ever tried to elicit information from kids, you'll understand why it took me 45 minutes to establish that Nick and Joe are brothers who together form a boy band (I learned later that there are actually three brothers, but the oldest, much like Merrill Osmond, isn't worth anyone's consideration). Nick (and I gathered, also Joe, although this wasn't immediately apparent) was in a Disney channel movie about, guess what, a boy band. Not their own boy band, mind you. A fictional one. (Which is why it took me a while to understand that they themselves are also a boy band,)
Alice's beloved was the main focus of our conversation. He was described alternately as having "sexy curly hair" and "the face of a dweeb" depending on which sister was talking. After about 20 minutes of this, Joe was introduced as the "cool, long-haired one" with chiseled features and a perpetual squint. Somewhere along the line I was told that I'd be more attracted to Nick, since I like geeks. The sting of the implied insult paled in comparison to the stark terror I felt envisioning myself attracted to any teenage boy whatsoever.
But my complete disinterest in underage boys was dismissed and my binding arbitration was demanded as the girls took their battle to the Internet. Before I knew it, I was staring at a screen-size photo of two overly-made-up boys who bore an eerie resemblance to both Donny Osmond and each other. It was true that Nick had curly hair. But I suspected their business manager had ordered Joe to get his chemically straightened in order to attract more segments of the teen girl demographic.
I was summarily booed down when I pronounced my verdict that the photos were of possibly the same person wearing different outfits. But when I mentioned that they both were wearing too much stage makeup, Rachel made the interesting confession that she loves eye shadow on men. (I guess that should've been obvious from her longstanding crush on Johnny Depp.)
Somewhere along the line I found out that the Jonas brothers are fundamentalist Christians who wear purity rings and sing about God, but both girls vowed not to let that interfere with their fantasy lives.
All this got me thinking. The way they took charge of their own fantasies was impressive -- add a little eye shadow here, remove a promise ring there -- these girls simply refused to accept the proffered "role model" relationship. Instead of reconsidering their beliefs to accommodate a cute boy, they reshaped the cute boy to accommodate their own idiosyncratic tastes.
Since the Jonas boys are bound to be in rehab long before Rachel and Alice finish college, it makes sense to just relegate them to the job of eye candy and leave their personalities outside the masturbation session. I'm just not sure I was as confident at their age. (Although I did manage to shove aside Donny's whole Mormon thing, so maybe I cooler than I thought. Says the woman who had a crush on Donny Osmond.)
I wanted to tell them about Mortified, a collection of teen diary excerpts I'm reading right now. There are lots of entries by girls involving imaginary sexcapades with Duran Duran or porn film scripts starring Christie Brinkley. And even real romances with real boys. I was struck by the difference between how people generally describe female sexuality and these incredibly private unbridled accounts of real sexual feelings.
But I couldn't talk about stuff like that with Rachel and Alice! Ironically, the stuff written by girls their age is way too steamy for girls their age. Random hookups, polyamory, verboten power fantasies -- it's all there, complete with designer underwear. Proving that real women -- even 12 year old girls -- are just as slutty and visually stimulated and insensitive to romance as men. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank have I read anything as unabashedly, charmingly, subversively sex-positive.
Which is why it's still underground.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Unanswerable questions
I recently showed my house to prospective renters. It went: normal, normal, normal, freaky. Crazy girl asked questions like:
"Can I ride my bike to work?"
"Is there traffic on the 24?"
And the best question ever…
"Will my dog get stolen?"
I had a question of my own. How does this woman get herself dressed in the morning? My responses to her, in order, were:
1. Check Google maps.
2. Depends on when you drive.
3. Take your meds.
This experience made me think about what types of questions annoy me. Like the preposterous dog question. Anything outrageously paranoid (except my own extremely cogent fears) bugs me. (Obviously, after talking to the freakshow I had to check the dog theft statistics - the chance of her dog being burgled is 000.1%. )
But the worst thing about the dog theft question is that answering it requires me to predict the future. I'm no risk assessment specialist. In fact, I have trouble even calculating simple cause-and-effect. I always think that nothing bad will ever happen, no matter how much I tempt fate. Shampoo my hair while talking on my cell phone? Electronics are notoriously hardy! Forget to water my plants for three weeks? Pour extra water on the shriveled leaves and watch them burst back into life like sea monkies!
The bike-to-work question is maddening for the dense mass of personal variables it presents. Does she have time? Does she mind busy streets? How far does she usually ride? Notice that she didn't ask for information upon which to base her decision. She asked me, a complete stranger, to simply make the decision for her.
I used to have a friend (emphasis on "used to") who asked questions like this all the time. She once borrowed some ibuprofen from me and asked, “How many should I take?”
I haven’t read an analgesic label since I was twelve, which is when I realized that you can pretty much take as few as you like or as many as you dare.
She also once asked me if she should wear a helmet skiing. Normally, I would say that wasn't necessary. But it was hard enough taking care of her when she had all her faculties. I seriously didn’t want to deal with her after a head injury.
I even hate the “Where’s the bathroom?” question in a restaurant. It’s in the back. Probably near, or possibly through, the kitchen. Or in chain restaurants like Chevy's, it’s by the telephones near the front entrance.
I mean, intuit, people!
Any question that requires me to put myself in someone's paranoid, indecisive, stranger-to-inductive-reasoning shoes makes me want to forcibly show the questioner how to create a flow chart.
That said, last week I asked Lisa how much curry to put in my curry.
"Can I ride my bike to work?"
"Is there traffic on the 24?"
And the best question ever…
"Will my dog get stolen?"
I had a question of my own. How does this woman get herself dressed in the morning? My responses to her, in order, were:
1. Check Google maps.
2. Depends on when you drive.
3. Take your meds.
This experience made me think about what types of questions annoy me. Like the preposterous dog question. Anything outrageously paranoid (except my own extremely cogent fears) bugs me. (Obviously, after talking to the freakshow I had to check the dog theft statistics - the chance of her dog being burgled is 000.1%. )
But the worst thing about the dog theft question is that answering it requires me to predict the future. I'm no risk assessment specialist. In fact, I have trouble even calculating simple cause-and-effect. I always think that nothing bad will ever happen, no matter how much I tempt fate. Shampoo my hair while talking on my cell phone? Electronics are notoriously hardy! Forget to water my plants for three weeks? Pour extra water on the shriveled leaves and watch them burst back into life like sea monkies!
The bike-to-work question is maddening for the dense mass of personal variables it presents. Does she have time? Does she mind busy streets? How far does she usually ride? Notice that she didn't ask for information upon which to base her decision. She asked me, a complete stranger, to simply make the decision for her.
I used to have a friend (emphasis on "used to") who asked questions like this all the time. She once borrowed some ibuprofen from me and asked, “How many should I take?”
I haven’t read an analgesic label since I was twelve, which is when I realized that you can pretty much take as few as you like or as many as you dare.
She also once asked me if she should wear a helmet skiing. Normally, I would say that wasn't necessary. But it was hard enough taking care of her when she had all her faculties. I seriously didn’t want to deal with her after a head injury.
I even hate the “Where’s the bathroom?” question in a restaurant. It’s in the back. Probably near, or possibly through, the kitchen. Or in chain restaurants like Chevy's, it’s by the telephones near the front entrance.
I mean, intuit, people!
Any question that requires me to put myself in someone's paranoid, indecisive, stranger-to-inductive-reasoning shoes makes me want to forcibly show the questioner how to create a flow chart.
That said, last week I asked Lisa how much curry to put in my curry.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
cactus flower
My recent obsession with Goldie Hawn culminated in a whirlwind reading of her autobiography A Lotus Grows in the Mud. You can't make up titles like that. Well, she can, but not me. As I do whenever I have embarrassing subject matter to read, I enlisted Wendy to get the book out of the library for me.
Last time I did this resulted in a coup for Wendy. I systematically stockpiled every single book on lesbianism I could find (including, So, You Want to Be a Lesbian) while she went about her way browsing the detective novels, blithely unaware. At the last minute before checkout, I dumped the lesbian books on the counter and asked the guy to put them on her card. (I'm almost always sans library card, for reasons too numerous to go into here.)
Predictably, I was several weeks late returning the books. Which meant that next time she went to the library, the sexy butch librarian who rules the Piedmont branch with an iron fist "spoke" to her about them. Sure, she had to pay fifty cents, but that's a small price for the patronage of such a powerful figure.
This time, though, it didn't work out so well. The librarian called across the room, "Is this your Goldie Hawn biography? Miss?" As Wendy frantically tried to figure out how to believably claim it was "for a friend."
It was all worth it for me, though, as I struggled to answer the question: how is Goldie not embarrassed about herself? For years I've wondered this. I see her on TV every now and then, saving elephants or telling us to recycle or talking about her screenplay in which a widow travels to India and is visited by the ghost of her dead husband. How can she not want to crawl into a hole in the ground? The sheer existence of Goldie in the world is a justification for hari kari.
And yet she continues. Nay, flourishes. I wanted to know her secret. Apparently it all boils down to being not all that bright. Still, I'm glad I read the book because she seems to be an incredibly loving person. (I thought that about Paula Abdul, too, because she was once nice to Wendy in line for the women's room at a restaurant -- and boy, was I wrong about her.) But Goldie (her actual, honest to gosh name) seems to be without snobbery or affectation.
She did have some cool things to say about success making you feel estranged from your family, and how success engenders jealousy and guilt -- all the stuff that people who change classes or cultures go through. Apparently nine years of analysis helped her deal. But besides that (not surprisingly, in retrospect) Goldie has very little to teach us.
Whatever, I still liked Foul Play.
Last time I did this resulted in a coup for Wendy. I systematically stockpiled every single book on lesbianism I could find (including, So, You Want to Be a Lesbian) while she went about her way browsing the detective novels, blithely unaware. At the last minute before checkout, I dumped the lesbian books on the counter and asked the guy to put them on her card. (I'm almost always sans library card, for reasons too numerous to go into here.)
Predictably, I was several weeks late returning the books. Which meant that next time she went to the library, the sexy butch librarian who rules the Piedmont branch with an iron fist "spoke" to her about them. Sure, she had to pay fifty cents, but that's a small price for the patronage of such a powerful figure.
This time, though, it didn't work out so well. The librarian called across the room, "Is this your Goldie Hawn biography? Miss?" As Wendy frantically tried to figure out how to believably claim it was "for a friend."
It was all worth it for me, though, as I struggled to answer the question: how is Goldie not embarrassed about herself? For years I've wondered this. I see her on TV every now and then, saving elephants or telling us to recycle or talking about her screenplay in which a widow travels to India and is visited by the ghost of her dead husband. How can she not want to crawl into a hole in the ground? The sheer existence of Goldie in the world is a justification for hari kari.
And yet she continues. Nay, flourishes. I wanted to know her secret. Apparently it all boils down to being not all that bright. Still, I'm glad I read the book because she seems to be an incredibly loving person. (I thought that about Paula Abdul, too, because she was once nice to Wendy in line for the women's room at a restaurant -- and boy, was I wrong about her.) But Goldie (her actual, honest to gosh name) seems to be without snobbery or affectation.
She did have some cool things to say about success making you feel estranged from your family, and how success engenders jealousy and guilt -- all the stuff that people who change classes or cultures go through. Apparently nine years of analysis helped her deal. But besides that (not surprisingly, in retrospect) Goldie has very little to teach us.
Whatever, I still liked Foul Play.
my mom skipped 4th grade
Last month I induced Alice, the 13 -year old girl who owns Sequoia's sister, to tell me all about her chemistry class. Dragging "what did you learn in school today?" out of her and her older sister Rachel is -- I was about to say as difficult as gleaning FBI secrets, but that's a cinch compared to obtaining information from the Contopoulos girls. These girls don't leave laptops lying around.
Alice's explanation consisted of atoms walking down Telegraph Avenue and being spare-changed by other atoms who needed electrons. (How do they teach chemistry in other cities?) Then she started on covalent bonds and Group Zero and the second-to-last electron shell in transition metals until I was out of my depth.
I was freaking out that an 8th grader knew more chemistry than I did, until I remembered that my high school Science for Poets class focused on the metric system (all the vogue back then, when there still seemed to be a chance we'd convert) and the properties of light. In fact, my teacher was strongly against any attempt to memorize the Periodic table. I honestly think we would've been marked down for it.
Add to that that quarks weren't invented until I was seven, that I got my chem credits by reading Lavoisier at a liberal arts college, that I dropped out before I got to P Chem, and there you have it: an ignoramus. I suddenly had a magnitude more of sympathy for my mom, who never really learned division, decimals, or angles properly because she skipped fourth grade. When I was in high school she asked me what a 45-degree angle was. "People are always talking about it," she said. I used the kitchen clock to demonstrate, and she freaked out with excitement. 90 degrees! 60 degrees! Who knew?
Anyway, Alice has renewed my interest in basic chemistry. Which means I've been reading tons of crazy web explanations on the subject. Can I just say that I now have an inkling about why the U.S. lags in science? Even if I ignore the typos, I have to wade through incomprehensible grammar and meandering explanations.
Example: "When going about their natural lives, you will never (never say never because there may be an exception) find the inert gases bonded with other elements."
What the fuck does that mean? Is there a known exception or not? And since when is it okay to change the subject from "they" to "you" mid-sentence? Damn science geeks. And don't get me started on "Bronze was one of the first alloys crated by humans." Is anyone even proofreading?
But whatever, I'm fascinated by this whole carbon-14 thing. After I learn this stuff, I'm on to looking for a YouTube video of Nightmare on Puberty Street, which Rachel told me about in not at all enough detail.
Alice's explanation consisted of atoms walking down Telegraph Avenue and being spare-changed by other atoms who needed electrons. (How do they teach chemistry in other cities?) Then she started on covalent bonds and Group Zero and the second-to-last electron shell in transition metals until I was out of my depth.
I was freaking out that an 8th grader knew more chemistry than I did, until I remembered that my high school Science for Poets class focused on the metric system (all the vogue back then, when there still seemed to be a chance we'd convert) and the properties of light. In fact, my teacher was strongly against any attempt to memorize the Periodic table. I honestly think we would've been marked down for it.
Add to that that quarks weren't invented until I was seven, that I got my chem credits by reading Lavoisier at a liberal arts college, that I dropped out before I got to P Chem, and there you have it: an ignoramus. I suddenly had a magnitude more of sympathy for my mom, who never really learned division, decimals, or angles properly because she skipped fourth grade. When I was in high school she asked me what a 45-degree angle was. "People are always talking about it," she said. I used the kitchen clock to demonstrate, and she freaked out with excitement. 90 degrees! 60 degrees! Who knew?
Anyway, Alice has renewed my interest in basic chemistry. Which means I've been reading tons of crazy web explanations on the subject. Can I just say that I now have an inkling about why the U.S. lags in science? Even if I ignore the typos, I have to wade through incomprehensible grammar and meandering explanations.
Example: "When going about their natural lives, you will never (never say never because there may be an exception) find the inert gases bonded with other elements."
What the fuck does that mean? Is there a known exception or not? And since when is it okay to change the subject from "they" to "you" mid-sentence? Damn science geeks. And don't get me started on "Bronze was one of the first alloys crated by humans." Is anyone even proofreading?
But whatever, I'm fascinated by this whole carbon-14 thing. After I learn this stuff, I'm on to looking for a YouTube video of Nightmare on Puberty Street, which Rachel told me about in not at all enough detail.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
email excerpts
I'm continually amazed by the stuff that gets delivered to my in box -- and I'm not even counting spam.
These excerpts are from this week only -- if I'd gone back two weeks, I'd have emails about hot naked handymen, webkinz hijinks, and God only knows what from Eve (whose coworker wears his 11 year old daughter's black velvet dress to work as a t-shirt).
Still, it's entertaining enough:
"I was thinking about installing an anchor in the ceiling, problem is, I'd need to take out the chandelier in the living room... I'm not sure it is really necessary, though. There are better environments for practicing this sort of stuff."
"i told you it's because the overall volume of oxygen exceeds that of hydrogen because the hydrogen molecules are a lot smaller than oxygen ones. are you bringing sequoia over on monday?"
"While in South Africa I re-outlined the serial killer story and I'm trying to complete it."
"Really, when you think about it, who has just one pair of shoes, or just one coat? And yet, we expect to get by on just one pair of glasses?"
"Another way to compute it is with the formula for the binomial coefficient of (7 choose 2) and then add 7. I probably shouldn't explain that formula in too much detail, but its the number of ways to choose K things from a set of N possibilities, without repeating any choice.
These excerpts are from this week only -- if I'd gone back two weeks, I'd have emails about hot naked handymen, webkinz hijinks, and God only knows what from Eve (whose coworker wears his 11 year old daughter's black velvet dress to work as a t-shirt).
Still, it's entertaining enough:
"I was thinking about installing an anchor in the ceiling, problem is, I'd need to take out the chandelier in the living room... I'm not sure it is really necessary, though. There are better environments for practicing this sort of stuff."
"i told you it's because the overall volume of oxygen exceeds that of hydrogen because the hydrogen molecules are a lot smaller than oxygen ones. are you bringing sequoia over on monday?"
"While in South Africa I re-outlined the serial killer story and I'm trying to complete it."
"Really, when you think about it, who has just one pair of shoes, or just one coat? And yet, we expect to get by on just one pair of glasses?"
"Another way to compute it is with the formula for the binomial coefficient of (7 choose 2) and then add 7. I probably shouldn't explain that formula in too much detail, but its the number of ways to choose K things from a set of N possibilities, without repeating any choice.
(7 choose 2) + 7 = 7! / (2! 5!) + 7 = (7*6*5*4*3*2*1) / ((2*1) * (5*4*3*2*1)) + 7 = (7*6) / 2 + 7 = 21 + 7 = 28"
"I put Clio’s pills in with the meat in 4 bags for 4 mornings."
"Python? Python is a mishmash of design features from other languages, crammed together and poorly thought out. The syntax is obnoxious. The best one can say is that it interacts with C libraries well."
"Tell me about Goldie Hawn!! Is it the face lift? ;-)"
"Hi Teresa,
I wanted to send you a synopsis of what we did on our trip to Costa Rica...
The deal is that the iBOL (International Barcode of Life) people (Dan Janzen and Paul Hebert) want to team up with Google to see what they can do together (just want that is is yet to be determined). For further info on the iBOL see: http://www.barcodinglife.org/views/login.php
Dan and Paul have the very ambitious goal of wanting to barcode (sequencing of the mitochondrial DNA) every living organism on Earth."
"that is the coolest game ever!!!! i loved it!!!!!!!!!! i got 42 elements, then i resorted to my science book. (hehehe! i'm a cheater!!!!!!) thanks for sending the awesome game. a."
"I'm sitting in the Lazy Daisy Cafe in Notting Hill - Ella Fitzgerald is playing - and you flashed through my mind. Maybe it's because the Lazy Daisy is about as close to an East Bay cafe as you get in London. Maybe it's because I'm looking for a distraction from writing. Regardless, there you are in my head."
"81% in Poll Say Nation is Headed on the Wrong Track"
"Hi, Janet, So sorry, that last email should have been addressed to you and not Teresa!"
"On the train I mostly read a book about the Lindsay administration in New York, in part used as a lens with which to investigate the crisis of liberalism that occurred in the seventies and eighties. The raw details of the history were excellent, but the analysis was kind of moronic."
"I'm smiling, too. People at work think I have indigestion."
"given the following function, tell me what it does and how someone is supposed to use it:
def mystery_function(self, text1, text2):
pointermin = 0
pointermax = min(len(text1), len(text2))
pointermid = pointermax
pointerstart = 0
while pointermin
pointermin = pointermid
pointerstart = pointermin
else:
pointermax = pointermid
pointermid = int((pointermax - pointermin) / 2 + pointermin)
return pointermid"
"THANK GOD David Slimy Head Cook allowed them to take a scissors to that awful comb over. Thank you Jesus."
"Hilariously, this was forwarded by my brother from his friend Alex (closet cases) and was sent as a video attachment you must download and then view. I went to You Tube and did a search: Japanese two-second t-shirt folding
And speaking of efficient women vs not-so-much men, listen to this guy's tortuous explanation of the two-second method. Remind me, why are they still in charge of everything?
two-second t-shirt fold demonstrated thoroughly, slowly, and painfully in English"
Last but not least...
"You're perfectly normal, eh? Tell them to check the scans again."
"I put Clio’s pills in with the meat in 4 bags for 4 mornings."
"Python? Python is a mishmash of design features from other languages, crammed together and poorly thought out. The syntax is obnoxious. The best one can say is that it interacts with C libraries well."
"Tell me about Goldie Hawn!! Is it the face lift? ;-)"
"Hi Teresa,
I wanted to send you a synopsis of what we did on our trip to Costa Rica...
The deal is that the iBOL (International Barcode of Life) people (Dan Janzen and Paul Hebert) want to team up with Google to see what they can do together (just want that is is yet to be determined). For further info on the iBOL see: http://www.barcodinglife.org/views/login.php
Dan and Paul have the very ambitious goal of wanting to barcode (sequencing of the mitochondrial DNA) every living organism on Earth."
"that is the coolest game ever!!!! i loved it!!!!!!!!!! i got 42 elements, then i resorted to my science book. (hehehe! i'm a cheater!!!!!!) thanks for sending the awesome game. a."
"I'm sitting in the Lazy Daisy Cafe in Notting Hill - Ella Fitzgerald is playing - and you flashed through my mind. Maybe it's because the Lazy Daisy is about as close to an East Bay cafe as you get in London. Maybe it's because I'm looking for a distraction from writing. Regardless, there you are in my head."
"81% in Poll Say Nation is Headed on the Wrong Track"
"Hi, Janet, So sorry, that last email should have been addressed to you and not Teresa!"
"On the train I mostly read a book about the Lindsay administration in New York, in part used as a lens with which to investigate the crisis of liberalism that occurred in the seventies and eighties. The raw details of the history were excellent, but the analysis was kind of moronic."
"I'm smiling, too. People at work think I have indigestion."
"given the following function, tell me what it does and how someone is supposed to use it:
def mystery_function(self, text1, text2):
pointermin = 0
pointermax = min(len(text1), len(text2))
pointermid = pointermax
pointerstart = 0
while pointermin
pointermin = pointermid
pointerstart = pointermin
else:
pointermax = pointermid
pointermid = int((pointermax - pointermin) / 2 + pointermin)
return pointermid"
"THANK GOD David Slimy Head Cook allowed them to take a scissors to that awful comb over. Thank you Jesus."
"Hilariously, this was forwarded by my brother from his friend Alex (closet cases) and was sent as a video attachment you must download and then view. I went to You Tube and did a search: Japanese two-second t-shirt folding
And speaking of efficient women vs not-so-much men, listen to this guy's tortuous explanation of the two-second method. Remind me, why are they still in charge of everything?
two-second t-shirt fold demonstrated thoroughly, slowly, and painfully in English"
Last but not least...
"You're perfectly normal, eh? Tell them to check the scans again."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
pas de perdue
When I visit Bake, I involuntarily play a game in my head. Informally called, "How could I live here without Lithium," the game usually starts by noticing something that's "not that bad" or "semi-pleasant." Like the balmy evenings, the huge, huge sky, the quiet night, or a backyard with a swimming pool.
Then it goes on to where I'd live (in one of the Craftsman houses downtown, of course, where all the old trees are). Then where I'd hang out (the library, my computer, Tahiti on vacation with all the money I saved in mortgage payments). Then it starts to unravel...no place to buy organic produce, no place within walking or even biking distance, no moisture in the air, no restaurants that don't slather mayonnaise or beef broth on everything...and hardest to describe: no fucking scenery to look at.
The flatness and dullness of my hometown cannot be emphasized enough. In the part of town where my mom lives, all the housing developments are surrounded by beige brick walls. Driving to the store requires a vast trek down deserted, walled-off six-lane streets. The buildings are all one-story, and walking anywhere requires pretending you're playing a kid's game and taking giant steps. From most parts of town, you can see only the horizon's vanishing point (a feature I pondered over frequently as a child). From a few parts, you can glimpse mountains in the distance, but those only serve to remind you of the barrier between you and the outside world.
Inevitably, I lose the Lithium game. I once went to a carnival in France that had signs posted everywhere: "pas de perdue." No way to lose. The friend I was with didn't want to play any of the carnival games, so I kept pointing to the signs and pleading, "Pas de perdue!" The look on her face clearly said, "Don't you have carnival swindles in America?" or "How stupid are you?"
She patiently tried to explain that the signs meant the exact opposite of what they said, but by that time I had usually finished playing and was receiving my consolation "prize" of a plastic dinner ring or temporary tattoo. Anyway, the Lithium game is very pas de perdue. It morphs into, "How did I survive through high school without killing myself?" (Answer: sheer accident.) And then morphs again to "How can anyone stand to live here?" (Answer: to be discovered after they calculate the last digit of pi.)
I finally end up with the consolation prize of having left at age 18. But it costs way too many Euros.
Then it goes on to where I'd live (in one of the Craftsman houses downtown, of course, where all the old trees are). Then where I'd hang out (the library, my computer, Tahiti on vacation with all the money I saved in mortgage payments). Then it starts to unravel...no place to buy organic produce, no place within walking or even biking distance, no moisture in the air, no restaurants that don't slather mayonnaise or beef broth on everything...and hardest to describe: no fucking scenery to look at.
The flatness and dullness of my hometown cannot be emphasized enough. In the part of town where my mom lives, all the housing developments are surrounded by beige brick walls. Driving to the store requires a vast trek down deserted, walled-off six-lane streets. The buildings are all one-story, and walking anywhere requires pretending you're playing a kid's game and taking giant steps. From most parts of town, you can see only the horizon's vanishing point (a feature I pondered over frequently as a child). From a few parts, you can glimpse mountains in the distance, but those only serve to remind you of the barrier between you and the outside world.
Inevitably, I lose the Lithium game. I once went to a carnival in France that had signs posted everywhere: "pas de perdue." No way to lose. The friend I was with didn't want to play any of the carnival games, so I kept pointing to the signs and pleading, "Pas de perdue!" The look on her face clearly said, "Don't you have carnival swindles in America?" or "How stupid are you?"
She patiently tried to explain that the signs meant the exact opposite of what they said, but by that time I had usually finished playing and was receiving my consolation "prize" of a plastic dinner ring or temporary tattoo. Anyway, the Lithium game is very pas de perdue. It morphs into, "How did I survive through high school without killing myself?" (Answer: sheer accident.) And then morphs again to "How can anyone stand to live here?" (Answer: to be discovered after they calculate the last digit of pi.)
I finally end up with the consolation prize of having left at age 18. But it costs way too many Euros.
sex ed
Tonight I watched The Education of Shelby Knox, a great documentary about a teenage girl who tried to get sex education taught at her Lubbock, Texas high school.
The footage of Lubbock zoomed me back through a wormhole to Bakersfield, which I recently read described as "a dirty, flat town." Those places have so much empty and deserted space. Very metaphoric, that. Anyway, as I was experiencing that mindtrip into the vortex, I was also feeling the creeping realization that this girl, Shelby, was freaking out in an extremely familiar way.
Shelby was raised by religious Christian conservative Republicans. Who totally supported her work to get sex ed taught in the schools. But scene after scene, Shelby is asking her parents, her pastor, and the TV audience, "Am I still a good person?" "Would I be a better person if I were a Republican?" "How can I be a Christian and disagree with my pastor?" Then she routinely collapsed into tears.
Taking me straight back to being seventeen in the Andre's drive-in parking lot, discussing Bertrand Russell with my Jewish boyfriend, to whom I give all the credit for successfully deprogramming me.
I was thoroughly distracted from the film's subject matter by her struggle with the logical paradox: how can I disagree and still be right? None of this was coming from her parents, it was all her. Shelby's repeated nervous breakdowns was the best illustration I've seen of how painful it is to disassociate yourself from fundamentalist Christianity. Nothing to do with the people around you; everything to do with how it makes your brain implode.
This girl had been taught all her life that there is only one truth, one way, one right. How can there be more than one right answer? Her self-doubt had a gentleness and grace, though, a purity and sweetness, that I've never seen.
In one conversation with her pastor, she tells him she wants to reconcile her Christian beliefs with her convictions about birth control education. "Because some people are telling me that I'm going to hell." She's clearly uneasy, but he's at a loss to allay her fears. She says, "You'd think we would all agree." That when he says disingenuously, "Christianity is the most intolerant religion in the world." She softly says, "Yes. I can believe that." He goes on to say that sometimes, when he hears her speak, he hears tolerance. This worries him.
I was reminded of a book that came out about ten years ago, Hitler's Willing Executioners. It was a history of anti-semitism in pre-war Germany, and it described a period in which Jews were granted more civil rights and were invited into Christian society. The idea behind those reforms was that, if given the opportunity, Jews would renounce their religion and find Christ. When that didn't happen, Christian Germans got angry enough to participate in one of the world's largest genocides. Maybe that's an oversimplification, but the book was the only one I'd read on Nazi Germany that put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Christian intolerance -- which is where I had always thought it belonged. Hatred is in the fabric of fundamentalism, impossible to unweave.
Anyway, Shelby fails to get the school board to change its sex ed policy from "abstinence only," despite the fact that her small town has twice the national average of teen pregnancies and STDs. In an interesting twist, the head of the school board was later fired for sending emails (on company time) offering an employee $500 to have sex with him in his office during work hours.
God bless America.
The footage of Lubbock zoomed me back through a wormhole to Bakersfield, which I recently read described as "a dirty, flat town." Those places have so much empty and deserted space. Very metaphoric, that. Anyway, as I was experiencing that mindtrip into the vortex, I was also feeling the creeping realization that this girl, Shelby, was freaking out in an extremely familiar way.
Shelby was raised by religious Christian conservative Republicans. Who totally supported her work to get sex ed taught in the schools. But scene after scene, Shelby is asking her parents, her pastor, and the TV audience, "Am I still a good person?" "Would I be a better person if I were a Republican?" "How can I be a Christian and disagree with my pastor?" Then she routinely collapsed into tears.
Taking me straight back to being seventeen in the Andre's drive-in parking lot, discussing Bertrand Russell with my Jewish boyfriend, to whom I give all the credit for successfully deprogramming me.
I was thoroughly distracted from the film's subject matter by her struggle with the logical paradox: how can I disagree and still be right? None of this was coming from her parents, it was all her. Shelby's repeated nervous breakdowns was the best illustration I've seen of how painful it is to disassociate yourself from fundamentalist Christianity. Nothing to do with the people around you; everything to do with how it makes your brain implode.
This girl had been taught all her life that there is only one truth, one way, one right. How can there be more than one right answer? Her self-doubt had a gentleness and grace, though, a purity and sweetness, that I've never seen.
In one conversation with her pastor, she tells him she wants to reconcile her Christian beliefs with her convictions about birth control education. "Because some people are telling me that I'm going to hell." She's clearly uneasy, but he's at a loss to allay her fears. She says, "You'd think we would all agree." That when he says disingenuously, "Christianity is the most intolerant religion in the world." She softly says, "Yes. I can believe that." He goes on to say that sometimes, when he hears her speak, he hears tolerance. This worries him.
I was reminded of a book that came out about ten years ago, Hitler's Willing Executioners. It was a history of anti-semitism in pre-war Germany, and it described a period in which Jews were granted more civil rights and were invited into Christian society. The idea behind those reforms was that, if given the opportunity, Jews would renounce their religion and find Christ. When that didn't happen, Christian Germans got angry enough to participate in one of the world's largest genocides. Maybe that's an oversimplification, but the book was the only one I'd read on Nazi Germany that put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Christian intolerance -- which is where I had always thought it belonged. Hatred is in the fabric of fundamentalism, impossible to unweave.
Anyway, Shelby fails to get the school board to change its sex ed policy from "abstinence only," despite the fact that her small town has twice the national average of teen pregnancies and STDs. In an interesting twist, the head of the school board was later fired for sending emails (on company time) offering an employee $500 to have sex with him in his office during work hours.
God bless America.
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