The Lost Boy

I was going to begin my review of men with my first serious boyfriend, but my cousin noted that it would be remiss of me to forget my first "love," Chas. Chas, also known to us as El Hijo con los Ojos Azules, had straight blond hair long enough to fall into his blue-green cat eyes, and a sly smile.

Chas was the first authentically cute boy to have a crush on me, skinny bones jones that I was. He liked me enough to come uninvited to my batmitzvah and grin at me while I carried the Torah through the sanctuary. He brought me a rose on my 14th birthday that died in his locker. He gave me my first french kiss during a game of truth or dare that, to be honest, I accepted with a mixture of disgust and relief. (I was relieved to be kissed; rather disgusted by what it entailed.) He sent me letters when I lived in Spain. The following summer Chas would be the first boy to really kiss me during an evening picnic. It didn't matter that he went on to kiss several of my girlfriends, each one with a incrementally larger bosom and proclivity for drug use. I was the first, and that carried some weight. Maybe I didn't fit his teenage beauty ideal, and I was the queen of Just Say No (I actually joined SADD in middle school), but Chas always liked me just a little bit.

The sad news is that Chas disappeared, and I'm pretty sure he's had problems with drug or alcohol addiction. I don't know if he went to college, and a Google search pulls up nothing, which is quite unusual today.

I don't think about Chas that often, certainly not like I think about the college years, which hardened my heart against hipsters and sensitive male singers. But unlike the later boys, Chas is still a kid in my head, and as such he elicits a sympathy and worry that originates deep in my gut. I want him to be okay, and to be alive, and to be happy.

For this reason I'm using his real nickname. It may trace a more definable path to my identity, but I kind of doubt it. Even less likely, but more importantly, if he ever stumbles across my blog, he can leave a message. This post is a little blinking light out at sea. A mooring for a man whose boyhood I hold dear.

The Ever Plant Yielding Seed

Behold, sayeth the Lord, I have given you ever plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth (Gen 1:29).

Party on, spoketh my student, who made the claim in his homework assignment today that laws against marijuana segregate people just as harmfully as racial segregation once did, and who used the above biblical quote to back his claim, just like MLK in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

On the one hand, I have to give him props for recognizing a successful rhetorical strategy and mimicking it in his own argument.

On the other hand, WHAT???

When I stop laughing over the phrase, "It fits right in when how segregation is unholy," and cease imagining ascetic potheads taking to the desert with only a bong and some Cheetos to protest their adherence to the five-fingered leaf god, I will find something pithy to say about the fact that my student compared access to drugs with a law that limited black people's access to human rights.

LOOK OUT: Now that my nuptials are really drawing nigh, I think it's time to revisit the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past. Coming soon, the Sensitive Ghoul of the Nascent Indie Rock Scene. He came, he sang, he...well you'll just have to read it now, won't you?

Gotham's Dark Nights

We saw The Dark Knight this weekend (by "we" I mean T and myself, not myself as Queen). Wow. Really, wow. I like superhero movies in general, and I've always liked the Batman concept of billionaire playboy by day, slightly irredeemable crime fighter by night, but Dark Knight unquestionably moves the genre into "real film" status. (I have to admit that I've heard a similar claim for Sin City, which I haven't seen.) Christopher Nolan's take on Batman is particularly interesting, because his superhero is a little unlikeable and spoiled. Also, Christian Bale's Batman voice is hilarious and pathetic. I think this is purposeful--it shows the artifice, the construction and vulnerability of Bruce Wayne's disguise. Batman is brave and high tech, but he's also a little ridiculous. His batman outfit and husky delivery and underground lair are not wildly less weird than the Joker's face paint, which is not entirely out of place in angular, shadow-filled, no place Gotham. The whole world of the film, while mirroring the random violence and shifty politics of our world, is an unmoored dreamscape where the scariness of what is not normative--clowns, superheroism, violent crime--is amplified by the fact that it's not balanced by the presence of normal people and places. Nothing is quite right in Gotham. The streets are all alleyways, and everyone knows who the district attorney is. It's a demented, enclosed space of nightmare.

And the movie is genuinely that complex. That's why it's such a triumph. Yes, it's filled with action sequences and batman gadgetry, and some of the metalanguage (Joker to Batman: You complete me) is at once sarcastic and symbolically sophomoric. But in the Joker's leaking, painted leer and random violence, and in Bruce Wayne's unheroic responses to the Joker's devastation, there is a corollary to our own ethical position in history. The movie raises a provocative question about the role of heroes in a world bent on meaningless self-destruction. Or, put another way, it asks whether or not heroism and its attendant virtues--honor, truth, freedom, sacrifice--are any way to fight a dirty war.

Words, words, words

Shout out to Anonymous: I liked the George Saunders quote. I'm not sure I'll be turning any of my characters into milkshake slurping chimpanzees with marital problems (and to be honest, I prefer the realistic description, "Lisa sat at a black table," to "Lisa languished in an obsidian abyss"), but I adored the comment. I have half a mind to think that you're my mom commenting anonymously, but Saunders isn't her style. You're too pretentious and self-reflectively clever to be my mother. I wish I knew your identity. Anonymous.

Well, I was going to title this blog post "Bringing Up Baby" and discuss my flickering yen for an infant, but the literary comment put me in a different mind frame. I've been trying the writing thing, but I'm not sure I like it. I have fun for a while typing away at a short story, but when I read it the next day I think, yeesh. I have very high standards and a good eye for talent, which is why I'm a good literary critic. But, these same high standards and instinct for artistry leave me with no option but to chuck my stories in the trash. I think nonfiction is more my forte, and I'm just not sure yet whether that nonfiction has to be critical or theoretical to be decent. I hope not, because I kind of kicked that career to the curb by leaving graduate school to live in Portland with T-money, but I have to admit that the best writing I do is the dramaturgical stuff for the theatre. So...we'll see.

Perhaps Lisa will be in that obsidian abyss before long.

I'm a Little Surprised

It seems the fates are conspiring, because several miscellaneous individuals in the last few days have told me to become a writer. (Yeah, I know how revoltingly hubristic that sounds coming from a mediocre blogger. No need to comment.) It's actually a little weird. T's uncle, his dad, my parents, T himself...perhaps I should be made skeptical by the fact that the only people encouraging my writing are relatives who are kind of forced by filial ties to think I'm a genius. My father even told me that I'm very funny, albeit he thinks often unintentionally. Uh huh.

The thing is I think being a writer sounds perfect. Getting to work from home, rising each day early enough to water my plants and drink some strong coffee, and then settling down to write. That's my favorite way to work; as much as I hated the stress of having to produce original scholarship every 11 weeks, I really enjoyed the finals week schedule during graduate school. You think and write furiously for maybe 8 hours, and then enjoy life. Watch a movie, read a novel, go to the gym. I kind of do that now, except that I spend 8 hours a day performing menial tasks in a house of cards attempt to climb the corporate ladder, and then spend several additional hours catering to my students' needs. It's a funny life, I guess, but funny stupid. Funny pointless. Funny turning me into a cynical bookselling soul-sick pawn to the Man who has actually started fantasizing about the life of a stay at home mom funny. It's just so worthless!


And just to confirm my suspicions that a monkey could do my day job, nepotism has landed a really dimwitted 17-year old in our department for the summer. Really not good for office morale.



The real problem--and this is a doozy--is that I have no idea what on earth I would write about. I'm in the process of writing a short story, but I'm keeping it under wraps in the off chance that it's terrible. So aside from my story, and my blog (which is grossly inconsistent and only has two readers anyway), what do I have to share with the world that might also be lucrative? And don't suggest a fictionalized account of my travails as a lowly bookstore clerk come college professor, because that's what my story is about, not that I'm saying anything about it because it's so totally under wraps.

So, dear readers. Suggestions?

Theorizing Thin

I know that no one has sympathy for the skinny girl. American culture has taught us from an early age that skinnyness is a physical attribute both to aspire to and to despise; like anything we desperately want, our feelings for it are a contradictory mix of lust for and repulsion of the desired object(ive). It is not us, so we want it. It is not us, so we distrust and mock it with humanity's unique xenophobic psychology. In most people's troubled attempts to become united with their potentially thin selves, they realize the inevitability of imperfection and so begin to loathe skinny. Call it superficial Lacanianism. Or the Freudian haute couture.

The thing is, being skinny has a few marked disadvantages. I'm starting to experience these disadvantages more frequently as I get older, because clothing is designed for women with at least a modicum of curvaceousness. In my current search for clothing that doesn't look like it spends 8 hours a day in a book warehouse, particularly a few pretty pre-wedding pieces, I've spent hours trying on dresses in stores that range from the nice to the Forever 21 to no avail. Either they sag in the front, or they droop in the back, or they make me look like an underdeveloped whore. I'm beginning to think that I either need to learn to alter clothing or start stalking fashionable Japanese exchange students.

What skinny seekers don't realize is that it's as depressing for a woman as tiny as myself to shop as it is for someone who's a little overweight; both of us leave stores feeling a little less feminine than when we went in, a little less pretty and alluring.

A Clinton supporter would point out right about now that it is foolish for women to pin some fraction of our self-worth on appearance, but I believe that doing so is hard-wired. Before women were social beings we were biological beings, and being attractive aids survival. You don't see any Neanderthal ladies prancing around, do you?

Okay, poor, anachronistic, and pseudo-scientific reasoning. Nevertheless, I think I'm correct to suggest that superficial qualities impact the way we feel about ourselves and the ways that others view us. As a result, when nothing fits I feel un-gendered and ill at ease. There are women all around me with boobs and hips, and men with penises, and then there's me: skinny bones jones with no easy physical allocation in the world.

Am I exaggerating? Well, yes. Theorizing about something always imbues it with more dire significance and bullshit than it deserves. There are good things about being skinny, too. For instance, I can fit into my fiance's grandmother's wedding suit, and a lot of other cool vintage items. I can squeeze past slowpokes on the sidewalk without appearing brusque. I can eat dessert twice a day and tell myself that it is all part of the the great Breast Cake Plan. I am sleek and muscular and lithe like the Arctic fox.

It may sound trite and impossibly difficult, but it is genuinely best to feel comfortable in your own skin and to love your body. I find this easier to do when I don't go shopping, which goes a long way toward explaining my wardrobe. Do I wish I had a bosom that required a bra and hips and that made my 24-inch waist look impressive? Yes. Do I have a pang of jealousy when my voluptuous goddess of a best friend shows up looking like the Marilyn Monroe to my prepubescent Gabbie Hoffman? Yes. But I try to desire the things and experiences that I am capable of attaining without plastic surgery.

Besides, no one likes a whiner. Especially a skinny one.

F is for Fabulous

This should be brief, because it's past my bedtime and I haven't yet undergone my extensive preparing for bed routine. I assume most women have such a routine: wash the face, apply toner and any special creams; brush and floss; remove contact lenses; pluck errant hairs; contemplate one's image for a moment; moisturize hands; fold and put away clothes; crawl into bed to read for a bit. It's markedly different from the male routine, which is oblivious to facial and dental hygiene. T-money is of the opinion that "sleep happens" without needing to ready oneself for it; while he is logically in the right, I maintain that this phrase was funny four years ago and its humor is now long past its expiration date. Besides, I have minty fresh breath and a clean visage when I slide into bed. He doesn't have to kiss the evening's enchiladas goodnight.

Old enchiladas aside, I'm a bit bummed out on the teacher front tonight. It looks like 3-4 students from my morning class are going to fail, just for lack of trying, and about half of my evening class, for lack of showing up. I ran into a past student at the bookstore today, who reassured me (without prompting--art students are really weirdly attuned to professorial ego) that I'm a good teacher and my students are to blame. Ah, who knows. I appreciated the sweet words coming from his bepierced lips. I've just never failed so many students. Not even the quasi-illiterate Samoan football player, who I passed out of pity for his sports scholarship (I know, I know. These kinds of favors to athletes are unethical and are leading to the dissolution of higher education. But you look a giant boy-man in the eyes and tell him his dreams of going pro are about to be dashed by his poor understanding of pronouns.). It's disheartening. To paraphrase one of my best friends (and loyal blog reader), if everyone just did what I told them to do when I told them to do it, the world would be a better place. Certainly the writing classroom would be!

I'm going to have to lay the smack down in my summer course. No late work! No emailed papers! No sob stories about cats falling from third-story balconies! No being a punk ass pain in my butt.

The butt that now is going to pack herself off to bed. After a 20-minute cleansing, of course.