Teenage FBI

So last night I'm strolling through Hypernova with a few crowns to burn, picking up groceries here and there, and all of a sudden I spot a bottle of Jim Beam. On sale! Score!

I grab it and head to the register.

"blah blah blah too many consonants" says the cashier lady. Me: deer-in-the-headlights.

"Uh...um...ješt' jedno, prosim," I finally manage. (once more, please)

"blah blah blah osmnact let blah," she says. Osmnact...ehh...eighteen. Why is she...holy shit. She actually wants to know if I'm over eighteen so I can buy this whiskey. The fuck? They never ask you that here.

"Uhh...ano, dvacet dva!" (yes, twenty-two). I realize now that it might have been more convincing if I'd remembered the complete expression for "I am 22." Shut up, it's harder than you'd think: Je mi dvacet dva let, which is literally There are for me twenty two of years. Crazy language.

"blah blah blah obcansky prukaze blah blah." (citizen's pass...I didn't write it down right, but I can recognize it when I hear it.) Whoa. The woman wants to see ID. What am I, fourteen? This isn't America, dude -- learn the rules!

Luckily, I had a copy of my passport in my coat, and was able to point out where it said "1982", i.e. been legal for four fucking years, ma'am. So off I went with my whiskey, marveling.

I was mildly astounded by this incident for several reasons. First of all, I got carded. In the Czech Republic. This is completely unheard-of. Second, the lady thought I could conceivably be under 18. Which is...nice...I guess. Oh come on, no it's not. I'm not jailbait, dammit.

Well, ok. I was wearing ratty jeans, a t-shirt that could be kindly described as "vintage" and truthfully described as "old", and a parka that has seen better days. And a backpack. Granted, everyone wears backpacks here because they use public trans, but yeah...my general appearance did sort of scream "I'm 16, and I'm gonna drink this here Jim Beam out back behind the dumpsters! With boys who objectify me! While smoking CIGARETTES!"

Hey, fuck it. I'll dress like a gutter punk if I want to. I got my whiskey, and that's what counts.

Bitchcakes

In my family, losing is by far the most effective form of winning.

No, seriously. The loser gets to be the one that gives in, the one that's a Christian Martyr of Fortitude about the whole thing. The one that gets to sulk in a perceptible yet plausibly deniable manner. The one that gets to lay the guilt trips for weeks afterwards. And let me tell you, laying guilt trips is our favorite thing ever.

My, um, aunt is the reigning world champion of the winning-by-losing thing. She's got it down to a fine art...it's almost worth the psychological scarring to watch her in action.

In fact, she's actually taken it to a whole new level: she can actually win by losing while winning. Here's how it works: you have a dispute. She wins the dispute. Then (and this is the part that nearly caused me to put a fist through the wall several times during high school), then, you know what she does? She turns around and makes you feel guilty for making her feel down because you're feeling down about having lost. So not only did you fucking lose the argument, you get to feel bad for making her feel bad that you feel bad about motherfucking giving in to her. You don't even get to mourn your loss without undergoing the Guilt Trip of Doom. And yes, I realize that's too many italics for one paragraph, but tough shit. It's that annoying.
See what I mean:
"Do this! Do this!"
"But I don't..."
"NOW! Lest I unleash the Hounds of Guilt!"
"Ohhhh okay, if that's how it has to be."
"Why are you sad about it?! You know it makes me sad when you're sad! Why would you want to make your aunt sad? Whyyy??"
"ehn...ehn...ehn..." [pounds head against wall]




Note: I'm not talking shit here. I'm in awe of her mad skillz, in fact.

I will go where I will go,
And I will jettison all dead weight,
and I will use these words for kindling,
and I will sleep by the garden gate.

--The Mountain Goats, "Island Garden Song"

The Church of England: the triumph of aesthetics over substance, yes, but those were some fine aesthetics

One of these days when I'm in confession and the priest tells me to say my Act of Contrition, I'm gonna bust out with this shit:

ALMIGHTY God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Tell it, brother. Thomas Cranmer was a whoreson rebel, no doubt about it, but holy shit that man could write an English sentence.

The quote is from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

This post brought to you courtesy of me reminiscing about my Anglican days.

And bathed every veyne in swich licuor...

...of which vertu engendred is the flour.

Holy shit, it's spring. There's still three feet of snow on the ground, but it's been sunny and 60 degrees for the last two days. Depressed Michael swears it's just temporary and that winter's not done with us yet, but I have trouble believing him. The birds are singing again, something that I didn't know I had missed until I heard it again. It gets light crazy early now, by which I mean ASS EARLY IN THE MORNING CONSIDERING IT WAS ST. PATRICK'S DAY YESTERDAY. Ow. Anyways.

So the spring is making me happy even though I wasn't nearly tired of winter yet. It's true, there's something in the air...I loved winter so much, snow and ice and all that shit, but still, this spring feeling is good.

The college didn't have spring. I mean, sure, it had the Ugly Dry Time and the two months of Very Green Time, but it was more like the annular fusion cycles in Infinite Jest than what you'd actually call Spring. This has been said before, I know, but seriously: it's so damn good to live in a place that has seasons. I have a lot of trouble separating my hatred of all things SoCal from my hatred for life at the college, but I'm pretty sure I would have hated the area regardless. I'm the girl with the un-California soul, to paraphrase the artist formerly known as sinnerman.

A side note on St. Patricks day: went out last night with two hundred crowns ($8) in my pocket, woke up this morning with three hundred. Score! Ok, I know what you're thinking, but I swear: I did not 'earn' that money.

Update: Quite a few people asked to hear the absolute rock-bottom foulest thing I've ever heard. Out of charity I will not list their names here. And you know what? The almost universal response was, "Oh come on, I've totally heard worse than that." But the anecdote in question squicked me right the fuck out! I swear! I'm starting to question my own earthiness*.

Then again, maybe it was the fact that I heard the anecdote in person, and I know both of the people involved. Ohhh Lordy. The guy who told it to me actually apologized for saying it a couple of days later, which I thought was gentlemanly of him.

* If that's the word I'm searching for here. Just to clarify, I mean the quality of thinking that butts are inherently funny, not the quality of making your own granola and knowing way more than anyone should about the Miracle of Birth.

Keep your fingers away from the Cuisinart of Crazy

Ok, I haven't posted in a while, but it's not because there's nothing going on here...oh no. There is currently so much shit swirling around our tiny community that I can't even begin to keep up with it.

The good news is, it turns out that there could be another explanation for this shit that does not lie in the fact that I am a retard. And that explanation is, perhaps the other party involved is a complete raging psycho. It's not me, sir. It's you.

The bad news is, I have to lock my door at night now. We're talking batshit craziness.

Way Censored

Ok, y'all, last night someone told me the absolute rock-bottom foulest thing I've ever heard spoken out loud. I thought my ears were going to start bleeding. It's officially Too Wrong For My Blog, which is not something I thought I'd ever see.

But it was, um, kind of hilarious at the same time. So email me, and you too can share the pain.

My Emotions Ride the Short Bus

I was pondering the Text Message Fiasco, and I think I've figured something out: I am emotionally retarded.

It's not that I don't have emotions: I have lots in fact, annoying ones that won't go away. But it's like there's a disconnect between my heart and my head. There's a major lag between the point when I start feeling something, and the point when I gain any sort of rational grasp on what the feeling might be called, what might be causing it, or what I should maybe, like, DO about it. This condition has caused me much trauma over the years. It's also caused me to miss some golden opportunities: on at least one occasion I would have been completely justified in delivering a full-on Victorian-style bitch slap to a particular dude, which would have been deeply satisfying. Sadly, I only realized this a week later, when the nagging feeling of "Hm...what he just said made me feel funny" finally crystalized into "Holy shit, did he actually say that to me?"

I think this condition of being astronomically out of touch with your emotions is also known as "having a male brain," which would fit with my severe case of Male Answer Syndrome. But frankly my feminine pride has taken enough hits this weekend, so fuck that shit.

The term 'emotionally retarded' fits well, I think, because I'm slow at this stuff. It's so maddening: words are my mode of being. My interior life is almost entirely verbal: I think in words, with only an occasional picture. And not just in words, but in conversations, people in my head speaking to each other and I to them. Explaining things is what I do best: break a concept down in my head, and as I speak watch it be created again in the air in front of me. And yet when I have to put words to my own emotions, when I have to tell someone what I feel, I'm completely mute. I speak in halting sentences that don't say what I mean, and I can feel them not saying what I mean but I can't do anything about it. It's like all of a sudden becoming autistic. My words are what I live by, and when they betray me it's the worst feeling in the world.

This is why relationship talks are disastrous for me. I've never once had a good relationship talk...well, I haven't really had a good relationship, either, which is depressing as hell but beside the point. Basically, when you have a What's Going On With Us talk, it occurs in real-time, face-to-face, right? Which means that I have to figure out (a) what I'm feeling in real-time and (b) what a completely different person from me is also feeling. In real-time. And as we've noted, I process my emotions with all the speed of a 486 computer trying to run Morrowind. So every fucking time, I walk away from the talk going, well, that didn't go so badly. And when it turns out that, yes, it did go badly, in the way that the Challenger lift-off "went badly," I'm kind of bloody mystified until gradually the light dawns on all the things I should have noticed, and all the things I should have said, and dear Lord all the things I should not have said.

This is why I find writing so cathartic. I can sit down and think about stuff that's happened, let the emotions process, and arrange them on the page so they make sense. Or at least more sense. Sometimes.

It's so strange. It's like I only really feel something after it happens, later on when I'm writing it down, when I can finally translate the interior event into words.

I am a fucking moron

Ok, people, a little tip: text messaging is a gift from God. It is endlessly convenient and useful. What it is not, however, is an appropriate venue for clearing up relationship ambiguities. Not at all.
I proved this in a big way last night, when I attempted to clarify some relationshit (sic...sorry) by means of MOTHERFUCKING TEXT MESSAGES. I mean seriously, WHO DOES THAT? The results of this attempt were completely predictable, I suppose, but nonetheless depressing.

So it's official, then: No one will ever love me again. In fact, even that "again" shit needs to be taken pretty loosely. Time to get tanked.

I can't write poetry. I don't mean I write bad poetry, I mean I can't. I've tried, occasionally, but it's like a physical inability: I try to form the words that way, and it feels like trying to levitate...it's not that it's a clumsy or unsuccessful attempt, it's that it's so far from succeeding that it doesn't even seem to be an attempt. Sometimes this makes me sad, when I read a verse that makes the hair stand up on my neck...it must be a good feeling to be able to do that, even badly.

But it could be worse. I am able to love poetry, to read it and feel it flowing through my soul. Like Salieri in Amadeus, I have the gift of recognizing art when I see it, even though I can't produce it.

Some people can't even do that, which...must be like being born without part of your body. A few years ago, I remember sitting on the smoker's patio as a very intelligent acquaintance explained, with pride, that poetry held no appeal for him -- in his opinion, the syllogism was infinitely more beautiful. Those of us listening were silent, ashamed for him; it was like hearing a blind man explain how he had never been fooled by all this color shit. Your heart feels sorry for someone like that...to be born unable to perceive that kind of beauty is one tragedy; to be unable even to perceive one's disability seems like a greater one.

On the other hand, I can write a damn good prose sentence on occasion, and that makes me happy. What I aspire to is to write prose that rises to the level of poetry, like Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe. There are passages in Look Homeward, Angel that are as beautiful as anything I've ever read. They have the same kind of electrifying effect as poetry, where the sound of the words touches the soul as much as the images they represent. 'O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.'

Needless to say, I've got a ways to go. But it's good to have goals.

The Lemonheads - Style

You know it's a damn good song when you hear it for the first time and you've started singing along by the 30 second mark.

A bleak realization

You love him and he doesn't love you? It's not so bad. You'll survive.

He loves you and you don't love him? This is worse, oddly enough, but still...you'll get over it eventually.

You love him, he loves you, and you both know it? Oh, you are so fucked: Not once, your whole life long, will you think of it without pain.

There is an actual point, but you're going to have to wade through some reminiscing first

Many times during my youth, I used the print version for a similar purpose, during hours spent in the opthalmologist's waiting room.

During the course of my youth, I spent a lot of time in the waiting rooms of various medical professionals, in the down time before our appointments. The doctor's, dentist's, and orthodontist's waiting rooms were pretty much a cultural wasteland: the dentist was a sweet Baptist man who liked marathon running, so the reading material ran the gamut from the latest Dr. Dobson tome to Runner's World--in other words, from all the way from scary-and-boring to holy-shit-this-is-boring. The doctor and the orthodontist were both pediatric oriented, so the waiting room material consisted solely of slobbered-on copies of Highlights, a children's magazine written by people who've clearly never met a child who actually likes to read, and Parenting Today, a magazine about which the less said the better.

But the opthalmologist's waiting room was cool...or if not cool, at least somewhere near bearable, which was a good thing given the fact that most of the members of my family are not only both near-sighted and far-sighted, but also astigmatic. His clientele was mostly old people with glaucoma and shit, so he had an extensive collection of the New Yorker placed around the room. The fact that most of the issues were, like, way out of date didn't bother me at all...I was an eleven-year-old in suburban Atlanta, it wasn't like I'd have gone to those gallery openings anyway. Mostly I just circled the room, during our semi-annual "The question is not whether we need stronger prescriptions; the question is how much stronger" summit; I'd find an issue, flip to the Fiction section, devour it, and then move on. Great fun, and also sort of educational, given the slightly risqué nature of some of the stories. It was during these expeditions that I gained the conviction that your average modern short story is pretentious and also depressing, but that didn't put me off it. Hell, you should have seen some the shite I was writing at that time--I mean, depressing is said in many ways.

So that was my first exposure to the quintessentially genteel New Yorker. I picked the habit back up when I had my Pointless But Highly-Paid Internship the summer before senior year. At that job, I had literally nothing to do but sit in a tiny office with no windows and painted steel walls, which...damn. I earned that money the taxpayers of the state of Georgia so kindly gave me. I did have an Internet connection, but I was very soon reduced to staring at the screen, grunting Homer-Simpson-like, "Stupid internet! Be...more...funny!"

Until I discovered the online version of the New Yorker. And not just the regular online version, which only gives you this week, but the secret l33t w4rez HaX0R way to read all the back issues.

Which I present here, without fear of legal ramifications, because for fuck's sake it's on the bleeding internet if you know where to look. Which is here: paste this address: www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?020128fi_fiction into the address bar. You'll get to a mildly awesome story which you should read. The key to the rest of the archives lies in the six digits towards the end of the address: they are YYMMDD, so paste in the date of any Monday back to i-don't-know-when and you should get a fine piece of post-modernish fiction for your viewing pleasure. I particularly recommend all the ones by George Saunders; they rock.

N.B.: I'd just like to point out here that in one of the above sentences, I managed to shoehorn four separate dependent clauses into a single appositive. Yeah, bitches.