Personal Yak

Glee and I don’t agree on a whole lot, especially in the second season finale, but I did feel a bit of a spiritual connection to useless supporting character Sunshine Corazon, crumbling under the overbearing pressure of glee club competition. “I used to love singing. It was the only thing that relaxed me,” she said after puking. “Now I hate it.” Who wouldn’t, dealing with Vocal Adrenaline, apparently the doped-up stable of twelve-year-old Chinese cyber-gymnasts of high school show choir? Three weeks of twenty-four hour rehearsals on I.V. drips — Glee likes going to extremes, but then again, music competitions, and even musical showmanship, is its own brand of hysterics, just like sports except without the end satisfaction of winning and being able to say that you’re objectively better than the other guy.

I used to love love love being in my own school band. I played the piano and the saxophone for anyone who’d listen, although a lot of the time, that was just me and the after-school janitor cleaning the halls around the auditorium. Performing was okay, too — it was stuffier, since we weren’t going to have the timbre of a real pro wind ensemble, or the tonal consistency of one, or be in tune like one, we could at least have the pointless eighteenth-century formality of one. The concertmaster would play a high C on her flute and we’d all tune to its pitch, even though we already went through a real tuning with a fork and everything backstage, and besides, figuring out whether we were sharp or flat was basically a coin flip anyway. We played for friends and family, two perfunctory concerts a year that would last for-fucking-ever. The big prize was a road trip to Busch Gardens, all the way in Virginia, at the end of the year. One year we even made it to Disney World, getting to perform for unfortunate park patrons waiting in line to see Space Mountain.

I was jaded even then — I skipped out on watching my school’s shows; I even skipped out on one marching band performance that I was supposed to be in.

I joined the marching band because all my friends were doing it, and like any high school drug education program could tell you, “all my friends were doing it” is a great reason to do anything. Go, peer pressure! I always thought marching bands were kind of retarded, I always thought marching was kind of retarded. Band camp started up, we were all walking around our mock football field in the August heat, playing Copland and being the drum major’s trained monkeys. Our formations were shapes on the field: a triangle… a circle… a squiggle. One thing they don’t tell you is that you can’t actually see the show unless you’re in the bleachers, and if your sound gets lost to the open-air auditorium, your performance gets lost in this silly line drawing. Besides, playing the saxophone shouldn’t require a costume fitting.

I remember the exact moment that I turned on music, too. The music program at my school had a storied reputation, and maybe some talent, too — we were Vocal Adrenaline, or at least, we had been. There was a touch of hubris, some coasting on our name recognition. I picture our drum major queen sipping a margarita from her drum major perch, meanwhile the school’s territorial hornet population was chasing the rest of us around the field.

How do you even grade a marching band performance, or a glee club, or rep theater? Were they marching, yes or no? Were they playing music, yes or no? Did they form all the required shapes, the triangle, the square, the squiggle, yes or no? I couldn’t tell you what makes Vocal Adrenaline better than New Directions, or Aural Intensity, or the Warblers, or my new show choir, Eargasm. (I’m trademarking “Eargasm” by the way.) Glee certainly got the mercurial, arbitrary judging process down perfectly. I could maybe tell you the difference between an “excellent” performance and a “superior” performance, but first and second place. Welcome to the entertainment industry, I guess — Rachel and Finn’s mid-show kiss may have been “unprofessional” to the little snot Jesse St. James, as if stage performers never have to kiss each other, but they’re not professionals. It’s a silly little high school club whose real problem is that their original songs were asinine — they should’ve sung Brit-Brit’s “My Cup” — and their whole performance was a last-minute afterthought.

“There’s too many bees out here,” I forget who complained.

And our assistant director, who wasn’t an object of wasps’ curiosity, who wasn’t sweating or carrying a heavy instrument, who was standing in the shade waving his arms around like we’re actually following him and not the percussion section, replied, “I don’t care.”

I never learned how to study, and I never learned how to practice. My piano instructor tried to teach me how to practice. I had this book of complicated fingering exercises, and she wrote on the cover: 2 octaves, 5x each. She could’ve given me a book of John Cage random musical scribble for all I could comprehend of this thing. “It’s not really a tune, so why would I play it?” I never said it out loud. It’s years and years later when I realized that’s what professional musicians do, going over and over and over and over and over the basics. Playing the same tricky ten-note passage again and again for an hour. That’s why their fingers aren’t slipping on a wrong note every couple of measures.

…That sounds tedious. It sounds like not fun. It sounds like work.

Our marching band didn’t need to work. Just being in the wind ensemble was an optional burden, and the marching band was an optional burden on top of that, and they were at least trying to not overtly antagonize anyone. I marched for another week or so, now pretty aware that I’m not getting a goddamn hornet injury for this. I’m sweating, I’m tired, I’m pissing away my last days of summer for what, exactly? A trophy? We’re not even going to win. The bandleaders would win the trophy — the snotty, arm-waving, not even marching bandleaders.

It’s a band. I had a few solos, but I always realized that its sound was a mixture of overtones and consonances and dissonances, my alto sax layered above a tenor sax, layered above a trombone, with percussion keeping us all together. But this was the first time I actually just felt like a cog, no longer playing for myself and whatever poor audience happened to be listening. I was playing for the saxophone section leader, who was trying to please the drum major, who wanted to impress the director, who was sucking up to fucking Rod Remington of WTKA, central New Jersey’s News Leader.

I quit wind ensemble the next year, although I’d completely stopped caring three months earlier. I didn’t have any solos that year, and that made it easy to come in late, or leave early, or just play hooky all together.

They advertised dirt cheap airfare to London, so I set my heart on the British Isles. Whether dirt cheap airfare included the arbitrary taxes and fees airlines throw onto their tickets didn’t matter; I was going.

I made a pact with myself after wasting too much precious travel time once at a bunch of attractions only notable in their non-necessity: the Museum of Sex Machines, the Museum of Medieval Torture. I hoped I’d get a good story out of them to impress my hipster friends with some vicarious coolness, which is the best reason to spend thousands of dollars on a vacation and find yourself a quarter of a planet away from home. My new rule is that under no circumstances will I travel ironically, no matter what camp, cheeseball tourist trap sneaks up on me. I could go home and watch The Soup if I needed to feel better than something. It’s not necessarily easy — just try finding an Irish souvenir without a stupid leprechaun on it — but there’s an entire country of people who actually live there, non-ironically, every single day.

Scotland and Ireland were exactly what I wanted in a vacation, a chance to join another culture, even just briefly. They have bagpipes over there, and they double or even triple distill their whisk(e)y, and everyone sings along to the folk songs in the pubs. The Chinese buffet in Northern Ireland is more foreign than Northern Ireland, but the area has an identity, the community working to distinguish itself, even if what that means is feeding your tourists spiced sheep guts for breakfast and writing all your street signs in English and in the otherwise dying language that English is subsuming.

I can’t say the same for England, where they may call them “crisps” and a “lift” and the “loo” but nevertheless has the same white-bread middle America blandness that pervades my podunk suburbs here at home. London felt like Old New York, except that no one would shut the fuck up about this upcoming wedding that the whole world apparently had to close down for. I’m sure the couple must do some truly important, spectacular things for their wedding to generate this much excitement among people who’ve never even met them! Like, I bet he’s a fire fighter who rescues puppies and kittens from burning buildings, and she’s probably a doctor who performs life saving surgery on orphans. Orphans with diseases.

Oh, they live off the British taxpayer — not to mention the tourist who didn’t bother to reclaim his VAT — and do jack squat.

England has more than a thousand years’ worth of history and culture, and an amazingly misguided, Disney-fied sense of what tourists are looking for, although I had no idea how absurd it is till I got to the London Bridge and its depressing tenant, the London Dungeon. And I just gave up and thought, “Really? I’m trying to broaden my horizons. Fuck this place.”

I bet it’s like one of those talking head documentaries on the History Channel, about the Tudor succession to the throne. With one of those elevator drop carnival ride things, and apparently there’s someone on the ride who’s dressed in period clothing for some reason. Meanwhile, there’s the actual Tower of London maybe a mile down the road, where the Beefeater guide-guards tell the story of the prison and its place in English history, but without the amusement park spectacle. The London Dungeon sort of depressed me, like paying fifteen bucks to see a mock-up S&M dungeon at the Museum of Sex Machines, but I didn’t really think “Fuck this place” until I saw ads for the nearby London Bridge Experience, a London Dungeon knockoff that bills itself as London’s number one Halloween attraction, even though the United Kingdom doesn’t even celebrate Halloween.

It’s all artifice, and not even the Grand Guignol artifice for the sake of artifice. It’s artifice for the sake of marketing, capturing and expanding American commercialized buzzwords. Did you like Avatar in 3-D? Then try the all-new London Eye 4-D Experience! The London Dungeon is in heart-stopping 5-D! That’s a whole two extra D’s! They’re like boobs — more D’s are better, but there’s a point where it gets absurd.

I talked to a few people who actually took time out of their London vacation to escape the vile embrace of the most pestilent pus ridden disease in history, to survive the tunnels of terrifying torment at Bedlam, and enjoy other alliterative gore-fests, and they said the London Dungeon was pretty good. Maybe it is, at least for the perverse history lesson that it tries to be. Britain is littered with the detritus of campy pseudo-historical hell houses, ghost walks, re-creations, and other fodder for shitty Showtime programming. I went on a ghost tour in York — to me, the tour was mostly a narrative experience with the added atmospheric benefit of taking place in a number of old, cramped, poorly-lit alleyways, and I thought it was very well told nonsense. It was entertaining. Some of the other people on the tour took it the same way middle-class white people take Death Wish 5: Don’t go over there, or some uncontrollable horrifying evil will murder you and laugh about it.

But at no point on my ghost tour was there a suggestion that anyone would be burned at the stake, cause that just sounds fucking awful and the only imaginative distance the narration left between you and the wandering undead was whatever tools you came with to deconstruct the stories. The London Dungeon comes from Merlin Entertainments, the same people who keep the world forever sated in new incarnations of Madame Tussaud’s wax museums, a corporation betting that tourists will spend twenty bucks to have their pictures taken with a lipid pile that looks kind of like Kim Kardashian, so I doubt that irony is in their vocabulary, and good for them. There’s clearly a market of creepy people out there: “Where the rotting corpses of the dead fester? Fuck yeah!” And I know there’s a secondary hipster market, too: “As opposed to the rotting corpses of the living? Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha!”

I’m sick and tired of having to cover my ears when the people around me start talking about Inception, so, picking up a trend about six months after it’s died down, I watched — and dare I say, understood — it last night. It’s not perfect, and since I already took a philosophy class in college, it didn’t make me question the nature of reality, posit a Malicious Demon, or do brain-in-a-vat thought experiments. But it was certainly entertaining, and I understand what all the crowing was about. Here’s my Flixster review:

I went into “Inception” with relative ignorance. I read Roger Ebert’s less-than-useful review and a couple of vague, spoiler-free pieces on the AV Club, and I saw the surreal trailer. But while I stayed away from them, I couldn’t help but be aware of the pages and pages of online commentary, explaining the ending, explaining the characters, explaining the philosophical underpinnings. The biggest problem with “Inception” is that it came laden with so, so many expectations that it had to be a let down — especially since the audience imposed a lot of those expectations on the film, and Christopher Nolan had no interest in meeting them. But I still really like “Inception,” whether it’s metaphysically reductive or emotionally stultified or whatever, it hit enough of the right buttons to entertain me for two and a half hours and leave me disappointed in the critics rather than the film.

I wanted a massively convoluted plot to untangle, like “Memento.” I wanted a surreal love story. I wanted a Metaphysics 101 seminar. I could care less for a bunch of action set pieces, but I’m not aesthetically opposed to them or anything. And while they’re all parts of “Inception,” I guess I was led to believe they’d be there in different proportions, along with the heavy expositional glue that binds the whole mess together.

What really surprised me was how straightforward “Inception” is, given the buzz, given its never-logical settings, given the “Primer”-like temporal simultaneity the characters are trapped in. There’s not a lot of subtext, honestly not a lot of ambiguity — or at least not a lot of ambiguity that matters. I kept processing till the last few minutes, fully expecting that odious climax with all the flashbacks, putting all those supposedly extraneous scenes into context, or re-context, or whatever M. Night Shamalyan calls it. But there’s none of that nonsense, and I think the clarity of DiCaprio’s narrative journey is well-served by the fact that the movie traces a coherent plot. It turned out I was wasting energy making sure Nolan wasn’t misleading me while his real goal is to hand the audience responsibility for engaging the broad, yet very genuine relationship between DiCaprio and his sort of Schrodinger’s Cat wife.

That relationship grounds the story — DiCaprio is the only character with any real emotional heft — but it also makes the film easier to consume. There’s the requisite film shorthand of DiCaprio’s estranged kids appearing incongruously in, where else, his dreams. The scenes of domestic bliss preceding questions of DiCaprio’s degree of culpability in the dissolution of his marriage (although that’s handled in an interesting, subtle way). The relationship, and its effects on DiCaprio, present a quiet malevolence hanging over most of the movie, but its only real presence occurs over a few hollow scenes — oddly the most intellectualized parts of the movie, several bizarre dreams within dreams with bits of reality that the audience is left to pick through.

In practical terms, though, “Inception” is an action movie with lots more room for gratuitous fighting and gunplay than pathos. Which is why I’m finding all the criticism, especially the reading of “Was it all just a dream?” so frustrating, because ultimately that’s the one question that absolutely doesn’t matter. Fine, the final shot is one of those cut-to-black right before a big reveal may or may not be revealed, and it gets mentioned in the same breath as “The Sopranos” final shot, but “Inception” is so much cleaner, where the thematically appropriate ending matches the meta-textually appropriate ending. I feel like questioning the ending, and implicitly the reality of certain other events, almost diminishes the film’s fragile but honest emotional underpinnings, as if the catharsis isn’t nearly as important as the question of whether we should even be feeling that catharsis in the first place. Coming to a full understanding of the nature of reality is a job for the philosophers — the movie-goers should understand that it’s fiction anyway, it comes directly from someone’s imagination and really exists only in the viewer’s mind.

I’m not exactly a paragon of self-discipline and willpower, he says after finishing a five-minute game of “Angry Birds” that he began over an hour ago. Social science — not to mention coaches in training montages from eighties’ movies — sees a negative predictor here, those of us who are flighty-minded, who like the rush of immediate gratification and blowing our paychecks all at once instead of saving some up for a rainy day tend to do more poorly on standardized tests, earn less and have more health problems than the steely-resolved do. NPR’s Radiolab put out a podcast on the science of willpower and an experiment that the psychologist Walter Mischel began in the sixties, assessing the self-restraint of a few hundred four-year-olds and then following those test subjects through the present day.

At around age four, children — some children — develop the mental capacity to delay gratification. I’m not sure what hypothesis Mischel was testing, he put a kid in a room, put a cookie in front of him, and left him alone with a choice: either eat the cookie, or wait for the experimenter to come back into the room and be rewarded with two cookies. Some kids hold out, others can’t. Mischel’s analysis is pretty definitive: compared to the children who demonstrated self-restraint, the latter group underperformed in every metric he and his team measured over the years and decades. Lower SAT scores, worse grades. Less likely to attend college, less likely to get a good job.

I remember Christmas mornings, back in my three-foot-tall days, waking my parents up at the crack of dawn to open Santa’s gifts, and I clearly remember one Christmas, sitting on our living room couch waiting for Dad to come downstairs and I can snap my fingers and call back my anxiousness growing like a fidgety fungus every single second I had to pull myself back from tearing open wrapping paper. This year, last year, the year before, present time’s been pushed back later and later and I couldn’t care less. I’m not sure what happened to me, but I guess it bodes well for my future SAT scores.

There’s a lot more to delayed gratification than this rational economic binary choice. You’re in this room, there’s a cookie in front of you, and the experimenter walks out. You have this cookie, right now, and an uncertain future. That experimenter might come back in the room after the longest minute ever, or the longest five minutes, or the longest hour. By the time he gets back, I might not even want that cookie any more. He might never come back, and I could spend the rest of my life in this room, staring rapaciously at the cookie. Who knows? Delayed gratification requires some faith, not to mention some calculation about the value of having one cookie versus the value of having two cookies later. When they do these kinds of experiments with capuchin monkeys, they need to condition the monkeys so they’ll expect a reward for waiting, so I’m curious about two variations to the experiment. What happens if you demonstrate for the kids that waiting earns them a reward — make it a concrete experience instead of just telling them in the abstract what will happen? And what happens if you put a timer in the room so the kid knows exactly how long he’ll be waiting for the cookie?

Mischel’s analysis sounds like the subjects’ entire lifetime is somehow related to this behavior from their post-toddler days, a behavior that seems largely autonomous. It would be straightforward until Mischel points out that the children who held out demonstrated “bridging” behaviors, ways to distract themselves from temptation. Kids would sing a song or turn their back to the cookie or whatever, and that’s something that can be taught.

My interest is kind of parallel: as a lazy-ass fatalist, my struggle is in finding the willpower to take action towards something onerous, not inaction from something pleasurable. I can’t think of what the parallel to bridging behaviors would be, something distracting but goading. If there were only a clock, something I could watch and count down till the payoff. I spent several years on a fairly regular gym schedule, assuming that if I did for long enough, I’d feel healthier, I’d look better, the energy and effort would finally pay off. Maybe it would’ve, maybe my timeframe was still too short, but I didn’t have the willpower to find out, and I didn’t want to spend the next fifty years of my life exercising and then realizing I was just spinning my wheels all that time. But you beat a level in “Angry Birds” and it’s not a massive endorphin rush or anything, but at least there’s a quick tickle of gratification, and I don’t head off drenched and sticky in sweat.

NY Daily News, 2010 Dec 2

Here’s the cover of today’s NY Daily News, one of our cheerfully editorializing local tabloids — the one that isn’t controlled by right-wing fundies. It’s the first media outlet, or at least the first one that’s an not a guy plus a blog, that’s translated the Republican euphemisms about “reducing the deficit” and continuing the Bush-era billionaire tax subsidies into language the average Tea Partier will appreciate. Or at least the ones who can read.

I still believe that Obama, if not the chief muckety-mucks in his administration, more or less supports the same agenda that I do — fuck the rich and give their money to the rest of us. Maybe he’s not as strident about it as I am, but then again, I’m paying for his health insurance and not the other way around. But when it’s time to stick up for those of us who don’t have our own newspapers, who can’t afford cable air time, who don’t have lobbyists, Obama pussies out faster than a litter of anemic kittens.

The real problem, though, is the media — the right-wing media parroting random lies they overheard from the demon unicorns in some mental patient’s head, and the left-wing media insisting on civility in discourse, which is like waiting at the station for a train that stopped running in 1998. Even as the NBC affiliates’ local news stations run story after story about the latest hidden danger in your kitchen that’ll kill your kids and rape your grandparents, MSNBC has never gone after the idiot viewer’s lizard brain and its fear response, or its segregation response — these Wall Street bankers, these bigshot senators, these lobbyists and CEO’s, they are not like you and me. They are not us. They are for everything that we’re against. Their only value is destroying everything that we value. They must be stopped, because it’s not like the banks aren’t stealing our economy, and it’s not like the people who want to bomb Iran or build a two-thousand mile border-fence aren’t horrible racists who already blithely oversaw the deaths of 4,000 American troops and over 100,000 Iraqis and Afghanis.

(Soon-to-be) former Florida representative Alan Grayson, who needs to run for president in 2012, got in heaps of trouble for a blunt honest description of the Republicans’ health care plan back in the summer: “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.” That’s the truth — health insurance companies want their customers to never get sick, then be hit by a bus and die immediately. That’s how they make money.

And the 24-hour news makes money by convincing all of America they’ll die if they don’t tune in for the next however many hours until the world is a safe place once again and everyone has their very own pet unicorn, so I don’t understand the cowardice around reporting our fatcats’ attitudes towards their fellow non-fatcat citizens. I hope that this headline proves lucrative, maybe we’ll see fewer blinders in the future.

I interviewed at Google today for a software engineer position, and it was a big deal. Back when I was job hunting from college, it was Microsoft that all the cool tech geeks were shooting for, and the laws of supply and demand meant that Bill Gates could basically put applicants through an all-day oral exam, or make them run laps or eat those giant hissing Madagascar cockroaches, and you’d do it, like pledging the world’s nerdiest fraternity. But six years, and countless Internet Explorer bugs and blue screens of death later, those Microsoft stock options aren’t worth quite as much and now Google’s where it’s at.

That doesn’t mean the Google interview is free of hoop-jumping; there’s a phone-screen pre-interview, and a pre-phone-screen pre-interview interview, and the on-site interview is a good five to six hours of scrawling for and while loops on a whiteboard in handwriting that quickly turns illegible. I interviewed for a “front-end” software engineering position — the “front-end” being the part of the Google web enterprise that everyday users see — and the whole process isn’t necessarily formal, but it’s very formalized, like they’ve got the routine nailed after interviewing who knows how many thousands of applicants. The post-phone-screen interview pre-on-site interview sub-interview comes with a fairly hefty syllabus (I go into more detail on it here) encompassing most of my second-year comp sci at Columbia. I haven’t had to write any of that code since my second-year comp sci at Columbia, and I’m fairly confident that the same is true for most developers at Google — engineers are encouraged to recycle each other’s work, so we all pretty much share the same sorting algorithms and search algorithms, for instance. No sense in re-inventing the wheel.

And it turned out that none of the second-year comp sci stuff came up in the interview. Not that I’m complaining — in the flurry of coding low-level mathematical abstractions of different types of data relationships, I did stumble upon more than a couple of ideas that significantly reduced the cerebral intensity of ad lib coding with someone watching over your shoulder.

I can easily say that the Google interview — maybe it wasn’t my best interview ever, but it was definitely the best interview I’ve ever had. I had pre-conceptions. Like the Microsoft interviews, which are heavy on open-ended brain teasers like, “How many windows are there in New York City?” (which I was asked interviewing for an online game company) or “How would you move Mount Fuji?” (My non-brain teaser experience at Google might have been anomalous.)

I met with five engineers and dealt with five long-form questions, writing full of implementations for applications that I bet every software engineer has crossed in their life and, even with the procedures and subroutines part of the brain on its lowest settings, has seen the vague outline of an program structure. “Hey, I bet I could get a computer to do that,” but I just haven’t gotten around to trying yet — or in a couple of cases, my own working code is on my computer, and I was a little miffed that I couldn’t show it off for the interviewers.

On the other hand, a big deal interview seems like a perfect time for Murphy and his law to stick out their slimy little heads, so maybe it worked out for the best.

Everybody at Google was exceedingly chill, which you’d sort of expect from someone working in an office with, for reals, a ball pit, just like at those kiddie McDonald’s playgrounds. Most of these software house offices are just table after table of multi-monitor computers, a zoo for code monkeys tethered to their interactive development environments. Come to think of it, I didn’t see any Googlers at desks — anyone doing any work had a Macbook and a claim to a common-area couch — so I guess it’s more like the fancy zoo, the one where the monkey house has a replicate jungle environment and a ball pit.

I feel like it went pretty well, certainly not worth the tons and tons of worry and anxiety I put into it for the two week lead-up. I’d love to work there: Google seems like it’s full of really smart people who really enjoy coding, and from the five hours or so that I spent scribbling out sample code in Interview Room #5, I think I’d fit in well. I’ll be hearing back from their recruiter in about two weeks, so updates to come. Keeping my fingers crossed.

What is a name? In a sense, it’s a shorthand for everything that makes you you: your ideas, your dreams, your metabolism both physical and spiritual. You can be called from the crowd — your name makes you a unique individual apart from the millions of other ants in the nest. The act of naming something, deciding what, in a single word, that something is: it’s a powerful act. God granted Adam dominion over the animals and had Adam name each one, in succession.

That’s why I want to draw your attention to this paint color sample card that I picked up at Benjamin Moore and in particular, the sample on the far right:

Paint Color Card, also makes a good bookmark

Not to second guess the Benjamin Moore name-picking monkey or anything, but “Innocence” is the title of a Danielle Steele novel, not a wavelength of light. I realize that they have several zillion indistinguishable variations on pale blue that all need names, but “innocence” is so pretentious I’m almost starting to resent the color.

"How To Read A Person Like A Book", front cover

Digging through all the crap in my room, I found a copy of this book, which promised near-telepathy for only $1.50. It looks like the book is a product of the 1970′s, and a peek at the back cover reveals the noble purposes towards which the reader should put his newly-discovered superpowers:

"How To Read A Person Like A Book", back cover

Look at that coy “is she turned off?” body language, as if anyone needs to spend $1.50 to read that. It’s like the reader’s a dog who just shit on her green shag carpet, and she’s pissed but he’s got those big puppy eyes and she just can’t stay mad at that for long. He promises it’ll never happen again, if she just takes him back his one time, and that pointed smile she can’t repress says everything about how this story will end. Women! Am I right, fellas?

But the real relic from a more misogynistic age is this other book that my parents loaned me — and God only knows what they were doing with it — ostensibly on reading body language. The details on the front cover reveal a more direct motivation:

"Body Language", front cover

I don’t know if you can read the captions surrounding this cipher lady, but these are the questions that this “runaway best seller” promises to answer, again for only $1.50.

1. Does her body say that she’s a loose woman?
2. Does her body say that she’s a phoney?
3. Does her body say that she’s a manipulator?
4. Does her body say that she’s lonely?

Also, in the upper-left corner, you’ll note that this is “a human potential book.”

I haven’t actually read this Body Language (or How To Read A Person Like A Book) because, ick, but I believe we have here two-hundred pages on how to determine exactly what species of harpy the woman across the room is before you waste your time hitting on her. I’ve written before about Love Tactics, my copy of which is now in the bottom of a box labeled “Books to Burn,” and it’s a horrible, horrible book by two horrible, horrible people, but at least it has no pretensions that it’s anything more than a guide to emotionally manipulating “the one you love” and whose feeling you have zero regard for into fucking. How noble — picking up and reacting to her cues, the ones she’s thinking but she’s too polite to say —  but anyone reading these books without needing a long shower afterward sees them as nothing more than road maps to a one-way relationship, although I’m sure somewhere there’s a complimentary book for detecting that.

The construction workers will be tearing down my bedroom walls in the next few weeks, so I’m packing up pretty much everything I’ve ever owned. Everything I’ve ever owned turns out to be a whole ton of crap, an assembly line of enigmas: “Why the hell did I buy this?” or “Why the hell did I keep this?” There’s the first place soccer trophy our team won when I was nine — the year the coach didn’t put me in a single game, which probably had something to do with the team taking first place. An eleventh-grade physics test, which I guess I brought home and dropped on top of a tenth-grade chemistry test, which I left on top of a ninth-grade permission slip — my academic history in a pile that’s been collecting dust since graduation. Something called “Wildlife Fact File,” an animal-info card of the month club, that spanned over three-hundred cards before I decided I’d spent enough allowance money on it. I suppose it’s always nice to have the breeding habits of the North American Sea Anemone right at my fingertips, but honestly, I’ve never looked twice at the stupid thing.

I meant to put most of it up on Ebay, the detritus of my former lives, but I never did. And I still intend to auction my giant pile of useless crap off —

• Glass Bottle w/ Tiers of Colored Sand: $1.99
• Retainer — slightly used: $4.95
• gym locker padlock, combination unknown: $.99

— but if I haven’t dumped them by now, the chances I’ll sell them any time in the next decade seem slim to none.

What’s most poignant to pack up are the dusty books redolent of not just the past but of past communities long since fractured in maturity — I mean, our middle school yearbook, with full-color photos of everybody in their awkward larval years. Self-published class projects which are embarrassing by being both insipid and the apparent product of a manic typographer exploring every single illegible font in Print Shop Pro. I am truly ashamed to say I picked out my own fourth-grade writing style immediately — I’d describe it gently as “baroque” — and kind of wish someone had slowed me down a bit. If there’s a theme, it’s our kiddie selves’ utter openness, the sense that whatever pointless, irrelevant thought we got down on paper, it was appreciated. There’s a creative writing assignment in one of the books — I guess we had to write our own myths — and I-forget-who devoted half their little essay to his favorite X-Men, the way Pynchon might randomly digress into a chapter on medieval alchemy and we’re supposed to be impressed that he knows so damn much.

I envy ten-year-old us. Maybe that’s why these spiral-bound books lived so long in a treasured spot on my bookshelf, even while more immediate texts went homeless and peripatetic. It’s taking forever to pack them up since I just have to peruse each one first, then let the rational side of me come out and say, “You’ll never look at these again, you really should just throw them out,” then lay it gently in the box so the pages don’t get ruffled.

What happens next: the books go into boxes, the boxes go into piles, and the piles go into storage while my walls come down. New walls go up, we consider getting the piles out of storage — but, you know, our dolly has a flat tire so that needs to be fixed first. And where do you go to get a dolly tire re-inflated? Probably better to just buy a new one, and I guess sooner or later, we’ll get to Home Depot. Bring the new dolly home in the station wagon, but it’s kind of a pain to get out of the trunk, so it’ll sit there for a while. Meanwhile, new photos get posted on Facebook, new insipid essays get posted on the blog, turn, turn, turn.

The year is 7010 and archaeologists dig up the book on Victorian England that Mrs. Matthew’s eighth-grade English class put together, and maybe recall their own school projects, probably still floating around Twitter somewhere.

You know how it goes. You make this long-term plan, you have every intention of following through. Something like, “I’m making a commitment, an hour at the gym four times a week.” Or, “I swear, I’m going to finish reading that book by the end of the month.” I was going to keep a blog, share my spontaneous, interesting thoughts with the world. Whether I ever accomplished that second part is still under debate, but against every fiber of my nature, my old blog lasted about four years, eight-hundred posts, many of which don’t embarrass me.

It died a quick death, despite a few half-assed resuscitation attempts. Not even the blog so much, but the ideas that sustained it sputtered out into the daily grind.

That might not bode so well for my triumphant return to blogging in obscurity, and my goal of discovering more interesting things to write about might end up no more vivacious than the last times. Something unnatural can always happen.