repetition compulsion

new blog-thing!

2008-01-01T23:37:00.001-05:00

2007-09-06T04:45:00.000-04:00

To the Editor of the New York Times:

2007-04-13T04:39:00.000-04:00

Re: The articles "Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Humans Seek the Keys to It" and "Pas de Deux of Sexuality is Written in the Genes" (Science Times; April 10, 2007).

As a PhD student focusing on literature and sexuality, I find it deeply distressing that a group of articles purporting to describe the newest developments in research on human sexuality manages, through its near-exclusive focus on evolutionary psychology/biology, to uphold the oldest of stereotypes about men and women (aggressive vs. passive, straightforward vs. capricious), heterosexuality and homosexuality - an aberration, "evolutionarily maladaptive", according to the latter article's cited "expert", Dr. J. Michael Bailey.

The alleged neutrality of such research is belied by the desperately convoluted arguments it puts forth to maintain its dubious paradigms - women's bodies have "adapted" to be constantly rape-able; gays are either the genetic residue of extra-fertile heterosexuals or the result of attacks in the womb from "anti-male antibodies". It quickly start to sound less like curious rationality than a fantasia of heterosexual-male lust and paranoia. And, ironically, quite resistant to any real evolution in approach or interpretation.

Minimal research reveals that this Dr. Bailey (whose claim that male bisexuality does not exist was given prominent, and much protested, coverage by the Times in 2005) is a very controversial figure within the scientific as well as the gay/trans communities; he and his circle of affiliates (several of whom, including Meredith Chivers and Ray Blanchard, also show up in these articles) are proponents of a set of highly contested - and, to many, erroneous and even dangerous - ideas about gender and sexuality. The Times consistently, unpardonably fails to mention any of this throughout its bizarrely obsessive coverage of evolutionary psychology; and likewise fails to attend to the many other approaches to the study sexuality in fields from literature to neurology, nearly all of them more supple and sustainable than this one.

[This is really fucked up. I've got lots more to say about it - but I'm saving it for the sensational exposé of the Times' longstanding affiliation with this group of supersketchy, quasi-eugenicist "scientists" that I plan to write next month...after I finish my oral exams, which are in...a week and a half (!!)]

latkes

2006-12-16T01:54:00.000-05:00

[-I’m thinking that maybe I’ll try making latkes.
-Well, that would be nice.
-I don’t know how though!
-It’s not very complicated, you can find a recipe on the internet.
-Yeah but Mom, I want them to taste like yours!
-Ok, well, let’s see. For how many people? Just the three of you?
-Yeah, I think. Maybe a few more.
-You don’t want to be doing this for a big group. You’ll be at the stove for hours.
-I know, it’s just a few.
-You’re going to smell like oil for days.]

4 potatoes
(carrot or sweet potato for color)
you don’t need to peel them if the skin is thin
onion
Cut the potatoes into small pieces
Shredder blade

[-Do you have a food processor? You don’t want to be grating all of those potatoes.
-Yeah, we do, remember my roommates got married?
-Right. That’s good. Some people say it’s better to grate them, but it’s not worth it.
-Do you grate them?
-No.]

Squeeze water out

[-I don’t understand how you would squeeze the water out.
-Well, you have to do it with your two hands. In handfuls.
-Won’t that take forever?
-You just have to do it. Otherwise they’ll be mushy. Just do it handful by handful.
-Ok.]

Add salt and pepper
Add 2 eggs
(Make sure you have enough salt)

[-I don’t know if I will be able to cook them right!
-Well, there are all kinds of ways to do it, some people like them thicker and some people like them thinner.
-Mom, you know I want them like yours!
-Well I’m not there!
-I know! But I want them thin and kind of crispy! Like yours!
-Well, ok, then, you have to flatten them in the pan.
-I hate it when they’re thick.
-No, it’s not as good.]

Frying pan with oil
heat on medium
Put in spoonfuls, flatten, brown on each side
(make sure to cook them long enough on each side)
Keep in oven

[-And apple sauce and sour cream. You need those. Do you have them?
-We’re going to get them.
-Well you have to have apple sauce and sour cream!
-I know!]

Apple sauce
Sour cream

[-I have to fry mine now. Good luck! I'm sure you'll be fine.]

thanks, mom.

this is the toast

2006-08-29T10:22:00.000-04:00

That I gave at my roommates' [C] and [T]'s wedding on Saturday night. There is much, much more to say about the beautiful, beautiful event; but for now, I will say, other than it was beautiful, that I was editin this toast up until about ten mintutes (maybe five) before I was supposed to give it, and that I was having an panic attack more intense than any I have experienced in recent memory. So much that we thought that [info]mikeynobody's usual symptoms had been transferred to me, and he did his best to treat them.

But it went really well. As everything did; as everything did, perfectly, as much as that is possible, really.

---

Because – fortunately! – [C] and [T] chose not to have a sit-down dinner, with seating assignments and placecards and all that awkward stuff, at their reception, I don’t know if any of you had the chance to see them eat their dinner. I’m lucky enough to have seen them eat dinner – and brunch and lunch and random 3pm and 3am snacks – many times, and each time I’m reminded what a wonderfully strange couple they are: because [C] and [T] have to eat exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. At a restaurant, they can never, ever, each order their own dishes, but rather have to choose two to share, and then eat precisely the same amount of each at precisely the same speed. And if there’s a bit of leftover cake in the fridge, they’ll spend all day debating when to take it out and share it, with one fork and equal bites. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I’m so happy to be here celebrating their marriage because they do things like that; and because they’ve let me into their lives to see it. There are so many people for whom being in a couple entails some kind of closing off from other people, other relationships; and I always imagined that watching a best friend – as [C] has truly become over the past two years or so that I’ve known her – get married would feel, though of course happy, also like something of a loss. But when [T] came into [C]’s life, I didn’t lose anything, but rather gained a new best friend; and now I’m not even losing a roommate, but instead getting a new one.

Their love, and this marriage, reaches outward; it’s open, and generous, and expansive; it takes in their families and their friends, the new friends they’ve made together and the old friends they’ve shared with each other.

Together, the three of us have stayed up late quietly reading or loudly debating literary and legal theory, and the inevitable conflicts between the two; we’ve cooked and consumed innumerable pounds of shrimp; we’ve run around this city, New York, that we’re all pretty new to and that they, with their boundless inclusiveness and kindness and enthusiasm, have made for into a place of both comfort and of endless exploration. They’ve dragged me to Queens for the best Thai food in the city, to Brooklyn for the best Afghani food in the city, to the boardwalk on Coney Island on Easter Sunday, to museums and galleries – always on the last day of any given exhibit, of course, like good New Yorkers. We’ve discussed the complexities and joys of family, friendship, and love – as well as where to get the best ice cream and fried chicken in Morningside Heights.

As Reverend [W] mentioned so eloquently in the lovely ceremony this evening, this is a particularly vexed and interesting and powerful moment at which to get married – when the right of some people to do so is an object of such struggle, when the denial of that right is being used by other people to such personally and politically violent ends. [C] and [T], as fully as I can imagine anyone doing, are getting married in the midst of all of this in a way that is both ethical and intimate, both thoughtful and joyous. I think that, just as they are made better and stronger and more beautiful by being married, and thus being a part of each other, marriage itself, as an institution, is made better and stronger, more just and more promising, by their being a part of it. I’m so grateful to have the chance to watch what they do with it, as they make it their own and do what they can to also make it that of anyone, of any gender or sexuality, who wants it or needs it.

To [C] and [T] --

2006-08-03T00:22:00.000-04:00

I just went out to get beer, and one of the regular homeless guys on my block stopped me and said, "Hey, miss, can you help me get some food? I haven't had anything to eat since 7:30!"

That has got to be the most ineffective appeal of all time. Who the fuck has eaten since 7:30??

I guess I shouldn't make fun of homeless people especially when it's five thousand degrees out...but it was funny.

everyone should watch

2006-07-30T12:46:00.000-04:00

the clip below from the Tyra Banks Show's episode "Women Who Love Gay Men." Well, at least everyone interested in pop culture, subcultures, gender and sexuality, supermodels, and any of the intersections between these things. Or just weird funny shit. Which is pretty much everyone, or at least everyone reading this blog, I would imagine, so yeah: everyone should watch this!

You should know that the two women Tyra is interviewing identify themselves, actually, not as "women who love gay men" or as "gay men trapped in women's bodies," but as "girlfags". One of the terms which, of course, they weren't allowed to say on the family-friendly network TV air. Girlfags are...; well, let's ask them:

Q: What is a girlfag?
A: A woman who is very attracted to gay/bi men. She may (or may not) also feel she is (fully or partly) a "gay man in a woman's body". Many girlfags consider themselves to be genderqueer. Girlfags may identify primarily as bi or straight or lesbian, and are often attracted to more types of people than just gay/bi men.

[Go "here" for more FAQs.]

Check out this clip on MedicineFilms.com!

Pretty amazing, right? Has anyone ever looked so utterly perplexed as Tyra Banks facing the idea that there are people - and people who might not look like supermodels but who are attractive and articulate and friendly and seem pretty damn "normal" - whose identities and desires exceed conventional categories; except maybe her studio audience?

I remember the first time I came across this "girlfags" thing: it was maybe three years ago, and I was having some kind of collegiate crisis of identification, immersed in my first round of introduction to queer theory, troubled - or exhilarated - by the fact that my relationship with my gay best friend was more intense, more emotionally absorbing, perhaps even more erotically charged, than my relationship with my boyfriend ever was (and it just so happened that my gay best friend was my [ex]-boyfriend's roommate, which added some peculiar convolution to the whole thing); troubled by my own apparent heterosexual orientation that seemed to clash irreducably with an incipient identification with "queerness"; spending a lot of time hanging out with gay boys and going to gay clubs but feeling alienated from and distressed by the limiting and unevocative label of "fag hag" - a label frequently attached to me by various acquaintances, some well-meaning and loving and some malicious and bitchy - because of all the profoundly unattractive qualities it almost
inevitably ascribes to gay men, straight women, and the relationships between them (is there anything more annoying than your mother, as well as innumerable magazines and other pop media outlets, saying, "Oh, a gay friend? that's great...it's so easy and fun!" and all that shit about shopping and gossiping and blah blah blah and "no sexual tension!!")...anyway. I did what anyone else would do when faced with such issues - I googled - and someone I ended up at the embarassingly oldschool and apparently defunct, yet nonetheless rather inspiring, girlfags.com, where I found that "A girlfag differs from a fag hag in that she doesn't want her relationship to be "safe"; she is interested in a romantic or sexual relationship with a gay or bi man...", and I thought, that kind of resonates...

So, if I were someone who was a little more into subcultural identifications, or maybe, if I had been a little younger at that point - or, let's be honest, if the girlfags I could find pictures of didn't all look kind of unattractive (I know, I'm a bitch) - I would probably have grabbed right onto that title and that little group, probably signed up for the listserv and started posting on the message boards and going to gatherings, if there were any. I didn't know...maybe, after all, it's just that I'm lazy. I always had the term there, though, sort of in the back of my mind, and once in a while remembered it more vividly and wondered if maybe after all it might not be the best way to describe something that, as time went by, I started to feel both more strongly and more complexly...and then I saw the Tyra show clip, and I gained not only a new expressive gesture to talk about gay dudes (if you missed the finger-snapping "that kind!" thing, go back and watch again, please) but a new appreciation for the self-identified girlfags, who I think are pretty cute and say some smart stuff and hold up pretty well under all of that shit that they're getting from Tyra and the audience; and they manage to make a few people, maybe, think about gender and sexuality in a less absurdly simplistic way than they might have otherwise, which is a project I deeply admire.

---

Then, I had sex with a gay guy. Last week. I don't mean a "straight" guy who all your friends say will probably be coming out by the end of the year. I don't even mean a guy who sleeps mostly with girls but fools around with guys sometimes if things go that way. I don't even mean - though I do like them very much - an openly bisexual or "heteroflexible" (that's what [B.] called himself the first time I met him, and I fell in love with him a little bit right then) guy who sleeps with boys and girls and/or people of any other gender. I mean a gay boy; a gay gay gay gay boy.
Like, a boy who came out in his sophomore year of college - nine years ago - and hasn't slept with a girl since then. A boy who very regularly has anal sex with other boys. A boy who has an unmissably and insistently "gay" affect and manner of dress and manner of speech; a boy who is six feet tall and 150lbs, with every square inch of his body tanned and toned to absolute golden perfection, and who could lift me up off the ground with one arm because.

He posted on craigslist: "I'm a gay guy who is curious to see if he'd be any good in bed with a woman. Hoping there's a straight or gay girl who wants to hang out." And I wrote back, thinking "pick me! pick me!", "hey, I'm a (mostly) straight girl who is really into gay/bi guys, sexually and just hanging out...sounds like we could have fun..." And I hoped and hoped that he'd write back, and that he was real - I forgot to mention, also, that he included, with his ad, two photos of him nude on the beach, looking glorious and much more like a gay porn star than like someone you could possibly meet on craiglist - because this was really, exactly what I had been hoping to come across ever since realizing, over the past few months and with especial force this last visit to SF, in June, just how focused my sexuality is, these days, on boys who like other boys.

Amazingly, sort of unbelievably, it worked out. He apparently, amazingly, thought that my photos were cute, too. So we met, on Friday night two weeks ago, at Duplex, a piano bar in the West Village - on Christopher Street - which was an interesting and delightful choice for this particular engagement, since it's one of the more gay of the possible meeting spots in NYC. I guess he didn't want there to be any doubt about the level of his gayness; towards the beginning of our date, when I said something about having been with bi guys, he intercepted, quickly, "Well, you really should know that bi is very different than gay." (Yes, I do know that, but thanks, I'll keep it in mind...)

I think - well, I know - that we were both more than a little nervous. We had fun, talking, nonetheless; and we drank enough vodka to, as he said the next morning, "drown the Russian army." He tried to explain what made him want to do this: "I've never been one of those gay guys who's disgusted by girls, and, you know, I think that I'm pretty good in bed with guys, and I guess I'd just been wondering if I'd be any good with a girl"; and I tried to explain what made me want to do this: "I don't know, I mean, I kind of can't stand most straight guys, and I also kind of can't stand identifying with a lot of the conventions of being a woman or whatever, but I'm not a lesbian, I really really like boys, so yeah, I guess I feel like my sexuality is really kind of directed towards gay guys." I realized, at some point, that someone like me - whose identification as a "woman" is tenuous and hostile at best, who doesn't have big boobs and long hair and who can't do things like give "instructions" - might not actually be what he had in mind; but at that point, it was too late, and he seemed, still, to think I was cute.

So we drank and we drank, and we listened to the bartenders, who are also all Broadway actors of one degree of success or another, sing their ballads and make gentle fun of the group of nice tourist girls from Chicago; and both of us kept saying that we couldn't quite figure out how to act - I kept screwing up, saying things about "dating," by which I didn't mean, like, dating, but he apparently thought that I did, and would rush in with, "Well, I'm not going to date you!", which was a little embarrassing - but we just drank and drakn some more until finally he said, "Let's go get naked." And we left.

(On the way out, he said, "I wasn't sure if it was ok to say that, you know, to a girl.."
And I said, "It's ok!"
And he said, "Good...of course I would have been much more direct with a guy."
"What would you say?"
"Let's go fuck."
"It's ok, you could say that to me!"
"Ok...let's go fuck!"
[LOL])

We jumped in a cab, and we went to Brooklyn, to his apartment - the first time I've been to Brooklyn in this sort of situation in quite a while - which turned out to be large and cool and decorously furnished with matching, minimalist one-step-up-from-Ikea stuff; black, and beige, with tiny framed artwork, and candles. There wasn't too much time from the moment we sat down on his couch to the moment he kissed me. (I felt bad, because I think that, in some sense, I was supposed to be the "aggressor" - I was supposed to be, like, showing him the way, giving directions, that kind of thing. The kind of thing of which I am utterly incapable. So I just didn't; I just let him do it; and he did it.)

We kissed, and then our shirts came off, and then we moved into the bedroom - the bed was big, and soft, with a fluffy white comforter and about two hundred pillow ("I'm a pillow whore," he said) - and he threw me down on it. He was really strong; and he was really all over me. If I had entered my own consciousness (does this make any sense?) at the moment at which he pulled off my jeans and started to, you know, do things, I never ever would have believed that this was a gaygaygay guy tentatively embarking on his first hookup with a female-anatomied person in almost ten years. He was eager, and confident, and way into it; and he was fucking skilled. I, too, was tremendously into it; I could hardly breathe. He pinned me down to the bed, all of those pillows falling all around my head, and he fucked me. He didn't seem freaked out, he didn't seem hesitant, he didn't seem repulsed. He was hard and he stayed hard; he was more sexually funtional, in both the most obvious and less obvious senses of that expression, than a whole lot of the ostensibly "straight" boys I've fucked in the past year.

([M.] and I have been talking, for the past few weeks, about how there seems to be an anti-oral-sex trend going on among the gays, as well as among the straights-who-are-kinda-gay - i.e. [B.], who forbids anyone's mouth to go anywhere near his dick. In case it's of any interest to any segment of the population, I'm happy to report that this trend seems to be maintained even among gays who decide to have sex with girls.)

So yes, we had sex. I couldn't quite ever believe it was really happening; I kept thinking about - he kept talking about - all of the boys that he had fucked, right there, in that bed - and that was hot. He said it felt good. I know it felt good. He came really quickly, so I guess it did feel good - or, he just wanted to get it over with - or both; who knows.

He said, "Wow, well, that was an experience!"
I said, "I hope you enjoyed it!"
"I hope you enjoyed it."
"Oh, yeah, I definitely did, don't worry about that!"
"Well good, I did too," he said, and rolled over and kissed me again and then before I knew it we were fucking again.

He said, "Can I come on you?"
I said, "Yes...come on me..."
He came; all over me. And said, and kissed me, "You'll be all sticky."
I laughed and I said, "It's ok, I love that. I love it when people come on my face."
He said, "Yeah, that's always hot."
"Except it can be kind of dangerous..."
"If they don't aim well."
"Yeah, you know, when it, like, gets in your eye. And you're like, that was hot, but then ten minutes later you realize you've been blinded."
"I know! And then you're frantically washing your eye out..."
"And it gets, like, all red and gross..."
"I got on a plane from San Franicsco to New York like that once."
We laughed; I loved it, having that conversation, about other boys ejaculating on us, with a boy who had just ejaculated all over me.

Then, after we had lain there happily (or I, at least, was happy; happy with that fleeting yet - truly - real satisfaction of a one-night stand) for a few minutes, he said, "You're welcome to stay, of course, but I do have get up at 10 am." (He was going to volunteer at the LGBT Center, of all things.) It took me a few minutes to figure out that he was probably hint, not even so subtly, that I should leave. But it was 4am, and I didn't feel like making my way back home - I was in fucking Brooklyn - so I elected not to take the hint.

In the morning, though, I got into trouble again, with the not taking hints. In the morning I realized, at some point, that there was a different code of speech and behavior and implication and assumption going on here that I didn't quite have a handle on. We woke up, and we had sex - I was shocked by that; we were, after all, sober - and then he said, "Well, I have to get up and shower, and leave soon," and I smiled, sleepy, satisfied, and rolled over and went back to sleep. And I realized when he woke me up again an hour later and said, again, "Well, I have to leave soon!" that probably I was supposed to get up and get out of there the first time. But even then I still didn't get it: I went out to the living room, and collected my clothes and put them on, and then sat down. And he said, "So you know how to get home?"

And - this is embarassing - I was about to say, "Well, you're going the same direction as me, right?" Because he was; and because I've been on so many dates were the boy has to be somewhere in the morning and we just leave together. Fortunately, I caught myself, and said, only a little awkwardly, "Well, you'r...yeah, I do." Now, I wouldn't say that this is some exclusively binaristic gay/straight kind of thing, that gays kick you out before they have to leave and straights leave with you, and I certainly wouldn't say that the latter is, like, nicer than the former, or anything like that. What I was thinking, as I left - left quite happily - was that there was a certain professionalism about this; a certain expected sequence. I was thinking that most of the "straight" boys at whose apartments I have ended up under these kind of conditions have always seemed sort of clueless, sort of surprised by it, sort of awkward and nervous and a little bit self-satisfied that I was there and a little bit angry that I was there. And what it all added up to was that, though they might have really, really wanted to (might even have tried to), there was no way they would have been able to tell me to leave so that they could get ready to go wherever they had to go in peace (which is, after all, I think what most of us want to do when we wake up and realize there's someone we don't really know in the bed). But with this guy, it was different; it was like there was a way things were supposed to go, and everyone knew it (or was supposed to know it; I apparently had forgotten), and that was all good. When I finally caught on and got out of there, we parted with a kiss, a "well thanks, I had fun!," a smile and a little giggle; no annoying pretense of "well, I'll call..." (yeah, right); it was friendly and honest, and it was kind of sweet, too.

The thing is, looking back on it, I should have known exactly how it would play; I should have been playing along with more skill. Throughout the whole date, actually, I had been thinking: "Am I acting like a gay boy would act? Am I flirting like [M.] would flirt?" And I had to admit that I wasn't, at all. And I wasn't sure why.

I wondered, as I left the building and headed to the subway and then decided to go get coffee and a muffin (I was starving) in one of those cute Brooklyn coffeeshops that they don't really have in Manhattan, how the night that I shared with this guy played out differently - and, of course, I don't just mean in terms of there being a some different anatomical arrangements involved; though that, too - than a night shared by him and another guy would be; and I wondered also what were the valences of difference between this interaction and those others that I've had with gay guys throughout my life, and if this one changed those at all.

Anyway, it was pretty exciting to think that I'd had sex with a gay guy - three time! and it was good!; and I wondered if maybe I shouldn't call up the Tyra Banks show and offer my input.

death to shamu

2006-07-15T19:57:00.000-04:00

Hello Friends,

I am sure that many of you are aware of the article "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," more frequently known as "that fucking Shamu thing," that has inexplicably been at the top of the New York Times most-emailed list for weeks now, disseminating its reductive and obnoxiously cutesy take on gender roles to untold thousands of computers. It's time for this to stop. Please help me in my mission to unseat Shamu by emailing "Married, But Certainly Not to Tradition" - the Sunday 7/16 Modern Love column, pretty much the only good thing ever published in that unforunate series, and also pretty much the only thing I have ever read that made me feel kind of positive towards religion - to as many people as you can, and tell them to do the same. If we work together, the iconoclastic gay Catholic marriage can win out against the heteronormative and extremely irritating Shamu marriage!

Thank you for your support,
Citizens Against the Gender Binary System and the Exploitation of Animal Metaphors

Some wonderful freak

2006-04-28T03:20:00.000-04:00

has done a great service to those of us with scholarly - and, um, other - interests in Victorian pornography by giving us a complete (eleven volumes! "Over 1-million words"!) and fully searchable online edition of My Secret Life.

I cannot even express how helpful this would have been for me when I was writing my senior thesis, a chapter of which was on this exorbitantly detailed, explicit, polymorphously perverse, and really fucking long anonymous 1880s-90s masterpiece.

I can't wait for the day when all nineteenth-century porn is online. Well, really, I can't wait for the day when all of everything ever published is online - but this in particular is my concern at the moment, because I'm trying to write a paper on a debate over beating children that turned the correspondance pages of the otherwise highly respectable Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine into quasi-pornography in the 1870s - so much so that these particular sections are classed in the "Private Case" at the British Library, where I came across them three or four years ago, and that they're basically impossible to find anywhere else.

So I'm kind of trying to write a paper without any sources, except the little bits of letters that I transcribed when I was in London doing thesis research, and the bits that a "confirmed spankophile" has very helpfully reproduced in his blog.

2006-04-16T04:32:00.000-04:00

I went home for Passover last Tuesday, to my parents' house near Boston, and stayed until this afternoon - a bit longer than planned, because despite all kinds of familial angst it felt kind of therapeutic to have my mom taking care of me, and because I kept thinking that I was going to get all kinds of work done, which never happened...but so it goes. Also because they have cable.

Anyway, in true suburban fashion, I went to the mall with my mom yesterday afternoon. Coming out of Macy's, we got accosted by this plump blonde girl working one of those little cart things that they have lining the hallways of the mall, selling stuff like mongrammed teddy bears and cell phone covers and pseudo-ethnic woven bags and shit. This one was devoted to pushing the Ella Cosmetics skin care line, imported from Israel, endowed with the apparently miraculous powers of Dead Sea salts. "Ladies, let me ask you, do you like to have nice skin?" the plump blonde girl called out to us, and I stopped, because I do like to have nice skin, and my mom stopped too but, blunt as usual, said, "Oh, this stuff. I got trapped into this here the other day. Let me warn you up front, I'm not going to buy anything."
"That's ok, that's ok, just five minutes, let me show you," said the commision-hungry and also very friendly salesgirl, who it turned out - my mom always manages to learn the life histories of anyone she interacts with for more than thirty seconds - had just come from Israel last week, to live with and work for her aunt, who was some kind of manager or something in this skin-care-booths-in-malls franchise. Anyway, despite mom's protests, she grabbed our hands and rubbed them down with Dead Sea Salts and extolled their newfound softness, and she asked if I was fifteen and said we looked like sisters, and then grabbed this pumice thing and headed for my nails. "You see this?" she said, "Three sides, you see?" It did, indeed, have three sides. Well, four actually, of course, but only three functional ones."You start with this one, the black side, see, you rub the nail very hard, you see this dead nail all coming off..." Little nail-flakes were flying everywhere.
"Ow!" I said, because it hurt. "Yes, it hurt a little, that is ok." Well, it wasn't really ok...but ok. "Ok," she said, "Then the white side, you rub it all over the nail, it stimulates this blood under the nail." I must have looked puzzled, or my mom maybe looked skeptical, because the girl paused. Clearly we needed further explanation. "You know Michael Jackson?" she said.
"Yes..." I said, because I do know Michael Jackson; though I didn't know what he could possibly have to do with this situation. He probably has nice nails, I thought very vaguely. (Or did, at least; he probably can't afford manicures all that often these days.)
"Yes, ok, Michael Jackson, you know him. This is like him." She held up the pumice, and sort of twirled it, pointing and explicating: "First he is black, then he is white..." - a final twirl - "and then after, he will be grey."

"Ah...huh..." I said, and stared down at my thumbnails, which really were in fact extremely shiny now, "their own natural oils, just trapped under all this dead dirt" apparently having been released.
I didn't realize until we were walking to the car (no Ella Cosmetics products, alas, in hand; my mom means it when she says she won't be buying) what a very, very, inexplicably weird line that Michael Jackson thing was. Is it, I wonder, in their employee training manual?

irony

2006-04-08T19:17:00.000-04:00

A month or two ago I got a message on flickr saying:

Dear Flickr Member:
We saw [this photo] of yours and really love it!
We selected your photo based on its quality and subject matter, which we believe is ideal for our project, "Picture a Healthy World."
On February 14, 2006, GE Healthcare will launch a worldwide initiative to encourage people to share photos and stories of how they stay healthy.
Go to www.ge.com/health and add your photo by February 10, 2006 so your image can be displayed in Times Square in celebration of World Health Day.
Thanks for your help!
The GE Healthcare Team

I was kind of confused because I didn't see how anyone could have possibly looked at any of my photos and thought, "yep, now that's healthy!" So I checked it out and found that the photo they wanted was in which [B] is giving [N] a massage on the massage table in the incredible penthouse apartment in Nob Hill - in the building where "Vertigo" was filmed - full of superexpensive furniture and art and a stunning view of the whole bay, where we somehow found ourselves, last January, thanks to the invitation of friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, partying with the San Francisco sex positive crowd. There were kama sutra books everything and futons in the bedrooms where people where practicing what they'd learned therein; there were bowls of little silver nitrous thingies (they were all empty, alas) and tons of booze and joints being passed all around and a consant stream of cokeheads in and out of the bathroom - and there was also an extravagantly tender hunk of roast beef (I heard it was delicious but didn't have much of an appetite myself); and there were people in masks and chaps and leather and lace and all that kind of stuff, and they were beating each other with whips in the hallway. So we were just standing there thinking, "how the fuck did we end up here?" and then we decided to take advantage of the massage table, at least, and I took this photo...and well, apparently it's "the picture of health."

I uploaded it as directed, and labelled it "massage at sex positive party." And a few weeks later I received an email saying that it was up on the website:

They had edited the caption to just: "massage." And written a little blurb about why massages are healthy. Not shocking, though sad, that they couldn't also have written also about why a sex positive attitude and lifestyle is healthy! (Not that I actually, in fact, think that, in this very subculturally specific sense of the term, it is**...but still, compared to the other attitudes about sex that are out there, I guess I have to sort of support it.)

And here's the funniest part...starting today, for a month, they're going to be broadcasting this and all the other photos on a 23-foot screen in Times Square. So if you happen to be there, look around for a few minutes; maybe you'll catch an erotically complicated image, captured by drug-addled me, of drug-addled [B] giving drug-addled [N] a massage in an obscenely expensive apartment in San Francisco in the midst of an orgiastic decadent druggy s/m freakshow spectacle (you have to image that part, but it's there)...glowing monstrously above Times Square on a billboard advertising a "healthy world" initiative sponsored by General Electric.

--

**I know it sounds weird and absurd that I'd be annoyed by the Sex Positive (sub)culture/movement. Why would I have a problem with a movement that holds that everyone should be able to have sex with whomever they want but should do so ethically and safely, that people shouldn't be persecuted legally or socially for their sexualities, that knowledge and education should be accurate and available, that sex in all its different formations should be celebrated and enjoyed rather than shamed and judged and hidden? Well, the thing is, like the Sex Positives, I think safety and education and information are all good and important, and I believe (perhaps more strongly than I believe anything else), that everyone should be able to have sex however, whenever, with any and as many partners as they (all mutually, obviously) want, but I just can't deal with people being so fucking happy about it. I can't deal with the Sex Positive take on sadomasochism, for example, that s/m is all about being "safe, sane, and consensual," all about communication and respect and pleasure. And toys and costumes. And ugly people. [M] and I have talked about how we're going to start the Sex Negative movement - we'd have to reclaim the term from Sex Positive takes on the sex-negativity of mainstream culture - which doesn't escape or avoid, or let the Christians and Republicans coopt, the uses and importance to sex of shame, silence, self-destructiveness, pain, sadness, failure, degradation, dislike, etc. Leo Bersani would be our patron saint, for his eloquent defense of "the inestimable value of sex as - at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects - anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturning, antiloving." (That's from his essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" which should you be interested - which you should be, it's really good and important - you can find in this book.)

how I learned to drive

2006-04-08T15:21:00.000-04:00

In the very early morning hours of January 3rd, 2006 – two nights after a New Year’s Eve fueled by [B]’s famous “cokestasy,” a night that started at a party thrown by Juanita More(SF’s “premier drag persona”) and ended in the hazy surreality of a medical marijuana distribution (and use) center, a night during which I decided I wanted to hook up with him as I watched him whisk one cute gay boy after another off into the bathroom for a little quickie action; one night after we dropped a reluctant [M] at the airport and then, under the façade of drug acquisition and “O.C.” viewing, I ended up in [B]’s house, in his room, and finally (inevitably) in his bed – I had to get on an airplane to Edmonton, Alberta, way the fuck up north in Canada, for a two-night excursion to my cousin's wedding. [B], or more accurately [B]'s car, was assigned the task of getting me to the airport.

We planned, of course, not to sleep; who sleeps before a 6am flight? No one I know. But not sleeping, of course, requires stimulants - and we were all out, and his usual sources were not responding. I might have given up, napped a little or just lain around and made out, but [B]'s determination knows no bounds, and at 2am or thereabouts he proclaimed, "Ok. We're going to Palo Alto."
"What?"
"To [G]'s. To get coke from him."
"That's crazy. We have to go the airport!"
"We'll be fine. It's not very far. I drive fast." He does, infamously, drive fast. Too fast, it turned out: barely five minutes into the trip, we were accosted by sirens and flashing lights and - "Oh my God, is this really fucking happening?" I said - we were being pulled over. I sat in the car and waited, for what seemed like an hour, the scene unfolding behind me obscured by the searing lights of the police car, while [B] was interrogated by four large gruff cops. Later, he told me about the multiple sobriety tests, about them asking whether he had been using drugs - "No." "Really? You're shaking." "I'm just really hungry, sir." - about in the middle of all of this the cops asking one another about kitchen-remodeling plans ("Yep, seems we're going for the marble countertops after all"). I didn't know what to do and I was sure that disaster, real disaster, had struck; I called [N], who was supposed to be sleeping, and started crying, and she was freaking out too but she tried to calm me and promised to come help us if we got hauled off to jail. I hung up the phone and I waited and wanted to die and finally one of them came over and knocked on my window and I got out of the car.
"Can I see your license, ma'am?" I showed it to him. "Have you been drinking?"
"No." This wasn't entirely accurate - I had been drinking a few hours before - but I was quite sober, and he didn't investigate further. "Ok. Now, he's just over the limit. And we're going to cut him a break, he's very lucky tonight, we're going to let him off without the DUI, just a citation for speeding, because we don't want you to miss your flight."
"Thank you, I have to get to a family wedding, it's very important, I'm meeting my grandmother..." I did my best small/pretty/emotionally vulnerable/responsible/sweet/pitiable performative femininity routine.
"Right. We don't want to mess that up for you. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to drive the car to the airport. And then when you get there he's going to go in with you, get something to eat, wait for your flight, and by then he should have sobered up enough to drive home."
"Ok, thank you." He nodded and he walked over to the other cops, they were looking at papers or filling something out, and [B] and I looked at each other and he put his arms around me and I whispered in his ear, "I don't know how to drive stick!"
"What?"
"I don't know how! I've never driven stick!"
"Well, you're going to have to pretend."
"But..oh my god, what the fuck...we're only like five minutes from your house right? So we just need to get there and then I can call a shuttle to the airport or something." He nodded. The cops came back over to us. "You should feel very lucky," one of them said to him.
"I do, thank you, sir," he said.
"You need to get yourself a new liscense."
"Yes, I know, I'm sorry, my wallet got stolen recently in a bar."
"Hm. Well. Maybe you should stop going to bars." The cop seemed grimly pleased with his clever admonishment. [B] managed to laugh and also to nod, admonished, and to say, "Sir, I should tell you, she isn't very experienced with stick shift."
"That's fine. She just needs to drive the car." I still cannot imagine why this piece of information seemed totally irrelevant to these guys, but it did. I was so freaked out that walking in a straight line was difficult, probably much more so for me than for [B] but I did my best, and I got in the driver's seat and took a breath and I couldn't even figure out how to turn on the car. The cops were behind us, watching us, our car surrounded by the lights from theirs, and I tried to be calm: "I really, really don't know how to do this. You're going to have to explain it to me."
"Ok, put it into neutral..."
"I don't know what that means."
"Push in the clutch..."
"I don't know what that means."
"You really don't know how to do this, do you?"
"I told you! No!"
"Ok. The pedal to the far left? That's the clutch. Push it in, all the way. Now, put the stick..."
"You do that. You move that thing and just tell me what to do with the pedals." So somehow we managed, team-driving, the car clunking and wheezing, to make it out back onto the road, to turn around, to drive towards his house. Or so I thought until I somehow, despite my totally vague sense of directions and surroundings, realized that this was not the way we had come. "Wait, where are we going?"
"To Palo Alto."
"Wha..what the fuck! We're supposed to be going back to your house!"
"Yeah, well, we missed the turn...so we're just going. We really need that cocaine now."
"But..."
"Just drive."
"Jesus. This is fucking insane. I can't drive this thing!"
"You're doing fine. I'll help you. Go left here..."
And there was nothing I could do except follow the directions; it was 3:30am, and I was on the fucking freeway.

I drove. There were, fortunately, almost no other cars on the road, and I went (relatively) slowly and I managed more or less to stay in my lane. I am, you should understand, even when not dealing with a car I have no idea how to operate, a pathetic driver; in high school, when I was taking driver's ed, people I had never spoken to in my life would come up to me in the hallways and say, "Omigod, I heard that you totally can't stay on the road!" I was shaking, my heart was beating extraordinarily fast; it was hard to say whether from terror or exhiliration. Because even though I knew this was one of the stupider things I'd ever done - or because I knew that - it was pretty fucking exciting, too. [B] lit me one cigarette after another and we listened to Jeff Buckley; I sang along, loudly and off-key but not caring, to "Hallelujah." I made him call up [N], who was now half pissed off at our death-driving idiocy and half jealous she wasn't there, and he made her call up Air Canada and inquire about whether I could switch my ticket to a later flight; at this point, even if it was still possible to make it to the airport by 5am, I felt much too invested in the events of the night to leave them behind so soon, not to see things through to some kind of end. (I could, it turned out, very painlessly switch - O Canadians! and their blessedly accomodating tendencies - and I would make it to Edmonton, eventually, at 9pm the next night, twelve hours later than scheduled.)

I drove. [B] tried to get me to drive faster and I did my best. And then there were signs to Palo Alto and I turned off the freeway - he was still telling me, at every step, when to press and release the clutch, when to accelerate; and he was switching gears for me. Somehow, we didn't die. Somehow, we pulled up in front of [G]'s place and we parked the car and got out. I let out a breath - I don't know if I had been breathing at all - and I realized I was shaking so much I could hardly stand up, and I grabbed on to him and he caught me and kissed me and I said, "Wow, we fucking made it." And kissed him some more. And he said, "Let's have DUI sex!"

Which, eventually, is what we did. And did; and did; and I think will always, a little bit, as long as we - if we - continue to have sex at all, do.

(February 2006)

dear undergraduates

2006-04-04T15:27:00.000-04:00

at an elite university taking an upper-level class on literary criticism,

It's time for you all to learn that "literary cricitism," even in the narrowest, most Eurocentric sense of the term, does not mean "judging whether a book is good or bad" or "saying what is wrong with the literature." "Criticism" in an academic sense does not mean "criticizing" and it does not mean reviewing. Some literary critics might sometimes write book reviews, and some literary criticism performs valuations of various kinds...but literary criticism still does not mean criticizing literature. It just doesn't. The words "critic" and "criticism" have a different meaning in this context than in their more common usage. A literary critic is not to literature as a movie critic is to movies. So please don't center your arguments around the claim that "in this class we are trying to expand the definition of literary criticism beyond the negative sense of criticizing what is wrong with a work of literature" or that "some of these authors, unlike traditional literary critics, do more than evaluate whether a book should be successful or not."

thanks very much,
your TA

yellow plate series #2 (consumption)

2006-04-01T02:44:00.000-05:00

in case it wasn't apparent...

2006-03-21T00:29:00.000-05:00

this post was a parody: a parody of the endless, and endlessly infuriating, reports on studies that "prove" some claim about men and/or women based in totally unquestioned and unproblematized rhetorics of gender and sexuality - all of them, it seems to me, boiling down to a statement that goes something like, "(people categorized as) women are much more likely than (people categorized as ) men to behave according to normative conceptions of how women are."

Sunday's New York Times Book Review demonstrated, to my amusement and dismay, that my hyperbolic rendition of this kind of thing was even closer than I thought to reality. Harvey C. Mansfield, a viciously conservative and much-maligned professor at my own esteemed alma mater, has published his tract on Manliness, which claims, so dizzinglying uncritical as to be nearly non-sensical, such as: "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

Right. And that, right there, pretty much, is why I study what I study.

Are they celebrating April Fool's Day early

2006-03-17T00:00:00.001-05:00

at the New York Times Health Section? Because seriously, this article has to be a parody of itself.

March 14, 2006
Nasal Sprays Can Bring on Vicious Cycle
By RICHARD SALTUS

Very few drugs relieve a symptom as speedily as an over-the-counter decongestant nasal spray clears a stuffy nose.

A couple of squirts can shrink swollen tissues in seconds to minutes, letting in an exhilarating rush of fresh air. With some sprays, a single dose works for as long as 12 hours.

But relief provided by nasal spray decongestants like Afrin and Neo-Synephrine comes at a price: the risk of rebound congestion caused by overuse and, for some people, a vicious cycle of overuse and dependence that feels like an addiction.

"It works so well that you tend to keep using it," says Dr. David Vernick, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "You're used to breathing well with the spray, and when you stop it, you get congested. So you use it a little more frequently, yet the congestion doesn't clear up for long."

That's because after three or four days of continuous use, the sprays can cause the nasal linings to swell up again, even when the cold or attack of sinusitis or allergy that originally caused the problem has passed. If this pattern continues, a patient has a good chance of becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of overuse and dependence that can last for months or years.

Confessions of nasal spray addiction now crop up regularly on Internet discussion forums: one site, afrinaddiction.com, markets a book of tips for kicking the habit.

Clayton Traylor, who started the Web site in 2005, said he had used nasal spray "off and on" for chronic sinus trouble since he was a child.

"I got addicted many times, quit cold turkey and then started back again," said Mr. Traylor, who lives in Birmingham, Ala.

Whether a dependence on nasal sprays is a true addiction is arguable, but some doctors point out that, as with drugs of abuse, people who are hooked on nasal decongestants tend to use more and more and to suffer withdrawal symptoms if they try to stop.

"It's pretty common," says Dr. Neil Bhattacharyya, associate professor of otology and laryngology at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

He added: "I'd say that one out of every seven patients with sinus and nasal obstruction have abused nasal sprays. They say it's the only way they can sleep at night."

Doctors call nasal stuffiness and blockage that are caused more by the treatment than the original problem rhinitis medicamentosa, a term coined in 1946. The problem can easily fly under the radar of a standard medical exam, said Dr. Stanley Goldstein, an allergist in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

"Often the patient doesn't mention a nasal decongestant when listing his medications, because it's over-the-counter," Dr. Goldstein said. He says he diagnoses the disorder several times a month in his practice.

"You have to ask them," he said, "and ask how many bottles they have. They'll have them everywhere, in the house, in their car, in their briefcase, in their desk. They cannot function without the drug."

Dr. Goldstein recalled a patient who admitted going through the host's medicine cabinet at a party until she found a bottle.

Rebound congestion is a risk with decongestants that contain one of two compounds that shrink spongy, swollen nasal membranes by constricting the network of tiny blood vessels within them.

Phenylephrine, a short-acting vasoconstrictor, is the active ingredient in Neo-Synephrine, a medicine cabinet staple since it entered the market in 1940. A longer-acting compound — oxymetazoline and xylometazoline — appeared in the 1960's and is responsible for Afrin's advertised 12-hour relief. (There is also a formulation of Neo-Synephrine containing oxymetazoline.)

"Afrin is safe and effective when used for three days," said a spokeswoman for its maker, Schering-Plough. "We do not support extended use of this product."

Though it is not entirely clear why, the blood vessels in the nasal lining quickly become tolerant to the drugs' shrinking effects. With months of overuse, the sprays choke off blood flow to the nasal membranes and damage them. In some patients with severe cases, Dr. Bhattaharyya said, "the inside of their nose looks like a chemical burn."

Dr. Goldstein said he had seen patients with holes in the nasal septum — the structure that separates the two breathing passages — from abuse of the decongestants.

Decongestants do not solve the problem that prompts their use, except in the case of a transient cold. The drugs should not be used for chronic conditions like seasonal or persistent allergies, for breathing obstruction caused by a deviated septum or for a common syndrome called vasomotor rhinitis, an innate hypersensitivity to irritants like chemicals, pollutants or cold air.

These afflictions are better treated with nasal steroids, like Rhinocort or Flonase, which build up their action over time to control chronic stuffiness without the risk of rebound or significant side effects.

For more acute problems, oral decongestants like Sudafed that work over a period of hours are a good choice because they lack the potential for rebound congestion. External strips that hold the nostrils open can also help at night.

Many people say they have repeatedly tried to quit using Afrin or Neo-Synephrine without success. Some report that they have broken the habit by discontinuing the spray in one nostril at a time or by progressively diluting the product with saline solution.

Simply stopping cold turkey will usually defuse the rebound cycle in a week or two, Dr. Goldstein said, but a lot of patients cannot resist the urge to spray in the meantime.

"What I do in such cases," he said, "is insist that they stop the nasal spray and put them on a five-day course of an oral steroid like prednisone" that will usually relieve the stuffiness until the rebound is gone.

"I always tell them, 'Don't start the steroids if it's a work week,' " he said. " 'Give me a time when you can get by without getting much sleep' " because of the lingering congestion.

And, sounding like an addiction counselor, Dr. Goldstein adds, "Make sure you throw out every nasal spray decongestant you have, or you won't be able to stop using it."

It is also a good idea to keep the nasal passages moisturized with saline sprays or nasal irrigation devices to help the tissues recover, experts say. Once the worst is over, the physician and the patient must turn their attention to treating the underlying problem, whether through different medications or with surgery to repair a structural abnormality in the nose.

The most obvious way to stay out of trouble is to take seriously the warning on the package label of most decongestants and limit use to three or four days. Some people may get away with using the sprays for a while, but eventually they may find themselves worse off when the rebound sets in.

Up next: the dark, hidden world of chapstick addiction!

This shit gets more and more unbelievable by the day...and I know I'm not the only one whose days are frequently disrupted by a call from Mom: "Hi, I read this article in the Times today..."
"Oh yeah? The Health section?"
"Yes. You don't know anyone who is into this nasal spray thing, do you?"
"Um, I don't think so, Mom..."
"Good. It's very dangerous. A lot of people are really getting addicted to this thing."
"Oh really?"
"I just want you to be careful."
"Mom, I don't use nasal spray."
"Ok, well, keep it that way."
"Ok, Mom. Bye." [Hang up; sigh; blow a line.]

Study: Women may be Feminine

2006-03-16T05:37:00.000-05:00

A landmark study conducted by researchers at the University of the United States has suggested that women may frequently exhibit characteristics and behaviors that are widely considered “feminine.” Researchers – and the general public – have long suspected a link between women and femininity, but the newly released results, to be published this month in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychobiology, make it more certain than ever that being a woman has dramatic effects on an individual’s likelihood to dress, speak, perform at school and at work, relate to friends and romantic partners, and think about sex and relationships, in ways conventionally associated with femininity.

“I think we’ve all been pretty sure, for a long time, that women are generally feminine,” said Dr. Rod Smith, one of the lead authors of the study. “But these results, and they were really much more dramatic than we even thought they would be when we started working on the research, really indicate, almost beyond doubt, I would say, that women display feminine characteristics in almost every area of their lives. You could almost say, I think, that women tend, in fact, to do things that are expected of women.”

Dr. Smith and Dr. Tiffany Brown, the other lead author, became interested in investigating this issue, which has been explored by numerous writers in both academic and popular books but has never before been the subject of a large and carefully controlled study, when they noticed that the female graduate students working in their lab tended, much more often than their male counterparts, demonstrate behaviors associated with femininity: for example, to wear high-heeled shoes and make-up to the lab, to exhibit a higher amount of uncertainty and self-doubt about their work, to form friendships with each other and talk with one another about the details of their romantic and family lives, and, in the cases of those with children, to express concern about balancing work and school with responsibilities at home.

“We’d notice, for example, that during lunch breaks, or even while going about their tasks, the men would not talk to each other all that much, or they would talk about sports, or headlines in the news, or things like that,” said Dr. Brown, who is herself a woman. “The women, on the other hand, we’d notice that they would bond with each other really quickly and quickly start revealing pretty intimate thing about their lives, you know, sharing things about the dates they went on last weekend, about fights with their mothers, things like that. Now, of course, liking to talk about this kind of thing with other women, having this kind of tendency to “chat” about personal matters, this is something that has for a long time been thought of as something that women do, as something that is much more feminine than masculine. So we started to ask, you know, might we be able to actually prove that women are more likely than men to behave in those ways?”

Ten thousand subjects, half of whom identified themselves as men and half as women, were selected to complete a survey designed by Dr. Smith and Brown and their team of researchers. All of the subjects were between the ages of 25 and 50, Caucasian, graduates of four-year colleges, and had a household income of at least $40,000 a year. There has been some criticism of the study’s inclusion only of white middle-class subjects, but Dr. Smith defended the team’s decision: “We all know that there are a lot of different factors that contribute to how people act, how people think, how people relate to their friends and their family members –– we know that the conditions you’re raised in, things like race and class, the kind of education you’ve received, not to mention, you know, all of these genetic factors, all of that, we know that it affects behavior, and, you know, science is just starting to work out where one thing stops and another thing starts. So what seemed most useful, in the case of our particular work here, was to control for as many of what we call variables as possible, to look at people who are similar in a lot of ways in terms of background, so that we could look more clearly at the question we were interested in, which is whether women are more likely to behave in these ways.”

The survey’s one hundred and fifty questions – the same for both men and women - asked subjects determine how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements designed to illustrate an attitude or behavior typically regarded as feminine, in areas such as childhood and education, body and appearance, romance and sexuality, self-image, family, and work. Sample questions included: “I tended not to speak up frequently in the classroom,” “I often worry that I’m too fat,” “I do the majority of the cleaning in my household,” “I enjoy romantic comedies and ‘chick flicks,’” “I expect my date to pay for dinner,” “I worry more about breast cancer than about heart disease,” “I find it difficult to orgasm during vaginal intercourse,” “I believe that sex is more fulfilling in the context of a monogamous long-term relationship.” “I date or dated with the goal of finding a spouse,” “Looking my best at work is important to me,” “I have, or have considered, quitting my job to stay home with my children.”

Though the researchers predicted that the female subjects would be more likely to respond positively to the survey’s statements, the results were even more dramatic than expected: women proved to be eighty percent more likely than men to “agree” with any given question. “It wasn’t surprising to us that women would consider themselves, more than men, to consider themselves as corresponding these various positions,” Dr. Brown commented, “but the consistency of these results, I would say, was really striking. These results, I think, are so important because they really demonstrate to us the remarkable correspondence between being a woman and feeling, you might say, that you really relate to these opinions, to these attitudes, that we think of as feminine. We would say, I think, that to us there’s really no doubt at this point that women, essentially are what we’re calling feminine, that for example women are, and we now have this scientific evidence, much more likely to be concerned about their appearance in the workplace, things like that.”

Or, as Dr. Smith put it, succinctly, “In light of these results, I’d state that women do, in fact, behave like women.” Reflecting on the directions in which his team, or other researchers, might continue to investigate these issues, he said, “What we’re eager to explore, now, is whether we will be able – and I would predict that this would be the case – to actually prove that there is association between certain biological features of women, maybe certain chemicals released the vagina, that in fact program them to take on these characteristics that we’re looking at here.”

Susie Morgan, a former elementary school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, asked her thoughts on the study while watching her three children at a playground, said, "When I got married and had kids, I had this sort of problem with giving up my job, you know, to take care of the kids, I thought maybe I could keep working part-time and my husband [Bob, a construction worker] could work part-time too, but what happened was that my husband thought that he should work and I should be the one who took care of all of this kids and house stuff." Mrs. Moran saw her three-year-old-son, Ross, fall off of a swing and ran over to comfort him, and after putting a bandage on his bleeding head and sending off to play again with his brothers, she said, "I'm glad to see this kind of thing...it makes me realize, I guess, that being a woman, it's just what needs to happen that I do these things, and my husband does these other things, and that's just the way that it is."

boys and girls in bed

2006-03-04T23:58:00.000-05:00

An email that [R] got from some party promotion list thing that she's on was, a bit surprisingly, sufficient motivation to get her and [C] and [T] and myself dressed up (kind of), out of our apartments, into the cold, and down to one the most terrifying blocks in Manhattan - 27th between 10th and 11th, the heart of Chelsea clubland - last night to go to BED. (Yes, LOL, it sounds like you're saying you're going to bed, so you can say, "Want to go to Bed with me?" and it sounds like a come-on, and that's kind of funny, and yes, I know they said it on Sex and the City.) I've been on a few trips to neighboring clubs in the past few months and they invariably end in some kind of disaster: once [A]'s ex said that we could all get in to a party that FHM, where she works, was hosting for Jenny McCarthy but when we got there at 10pm the "party was over," or at least that's what the 6-foot ice queen at the door said, and continued to say despite [A]'s various appeals to her (invisible) senses of pity and justice and humor and ethics so we went and took refuge in a bottle of Prosecco at the wine bar down the street. And once [K] told [C] and [N] and me to meet him inside, that he was on the guestlist and had a table and shit - sometimes these things are true with him - and we stood outside in the freezing cold for half an hour while the bouncer denied that anyone named [K] was in there that night and that no, we couldn't go in and look for him, and finally it turned out that he wasn't there yet - often things are not true with him - and when he met us at the same wine bar down the street he told us that the bouncer had said to him that we were too short and too un-sluttily dressed to get in by ourselves. Too short. We decided that we should open a club called Short and only let in people under 5'6", and then we drank another bottle of Prosecco and went home.

So I pretty much hate those clubs, because they're mean, and because even if they let you in, the drinks are overpriced and it's too crowded and the people are gross and and there's always a long line in the bathroom so it's hard to do coke; and also I pretty much hate dancing. So I assumed that, once again, we'd end up at that wine bar - it's called , I highly recommend it if you find yourselves cast out onto 27th Street - Naima - because we'd be too considered too degraded in one way or another to go to BED with the pretty people. (ROTFL!)

But [R] has a incandescent smile, and also Bed is I think not that hot anymore, because even after [C] had blunderingly, adorably, said to the guy at the door, (cue overexaggerated Southern accent) "We signed up on the internet...", he send us inside and up six flights and into BED. But not actually into a bed; that's, of course, the gimmick here, and I have to say it's actually a pretty awesome one - they have beds instead of tables, mattresses with sheets and pillows and stuff, and if you pay enough or you whore yourself enough to someone who has paid enough, you get to lounge on one of them in these little slipper things they give you, and they bring you drinks on a tray, and then you can make out or whatever or just watch everyone dance and look at you enviously because they would really rather be in bed too. Which is of course exactly what I was doing, because I get tired of standing up pretty quickly, and even more so on a dancefloor surrounded by guys whom I almost without exception find so deeply unattractive that the thought of one of them merely talking to me is quite paralyzing.

But after a little bit we made our way up to the rooftop level, where we were happily surprised to find a smaller, markedly more attractive, and I think one might say "chiller" crowd, and a gorgeous view of the skyline - [C] couldn't stop staring starry-eyed at the Empire State Building - and white lanterns and draped fabric everywhere, and drummers and a saxophonist, and unprohibited smoking (yay!), and more beds. Many of which were unoccupied. In line for the bathroom - not even that long a line! - I said to the bathroom attendant girl, with whom I'd bonded with mutual eye-rolling at the drunk dudes falling all over each other trying to go into the stalls - "So how much do you have to pay to get one of these beds?" and she said, "Well, you have to buy a bottle, but I think tonight you can just sit down." "Really?" "I think..." I took that for a yes, and ran back over to my friends and told them and we pulled off our shoes and jumped onto a big, pillowed, canopied mattress in the corner. And I looked around, laughing and lounging between [C] and [T] while [R] danced next to a girl who appeared from the back entirely shirtless, and realized that this was actually one of the more sublime nightlife spaces in which I had ever found myself: hot or not, it was beautiful and populated but not packed and I was not only drinking and smoking simultaneously, which is pretty rare these days, but doing so in a fucking bed. Who could, really, ask for anything more?

So things were pretty sublime, and I felt like the social anxieties I'd been feeling in recent weeks were sort of evaporating, that some little ruptures or fears thereof in my wonderful but complicated group of friends were silently mending themselves, and I was high and happy.

Until - I went and got us drinks (ok, I'm probably lying, I probably went to the bathroom to do a bump again, but that's kind of shameful so we'll pretend otherwise) and when I came back over to our bed [C] whispered to me, "We have a belligerent visitor." He was a stocky 30-something red-faced blond guy in the inevitable collared shirt with the top buttons undone. Apparently he was a lawyer visiting from St. Louis. Apparently he had paid for this bed. Apparently he didn't mind us being there as long as we talked to him; and by "us" I mean those of us whom he regarded as objects of his heterosexual interest. Which, when [C] and [R] got up to dance (and escape), suddenly meant just me. I found myself found myself between [T] and Mr. St. Louis, the latter's arm around me uninvited, the former's hand on my leg in a protective gesture (also uninvited, but appreciated). Mr. St. Louis said to me, "Don't worry, I won't hurt you" (creepy!!) and then, to [T], "So how many girls are you here with?"
"Uh, a couple."
"A couple? Two?"
"Yeah, two." It wasn't clear to me, nor I think to our new friend, which two out of the three of us [T] was talking about, but I figured one of them was probably me given that I was sitting there with him and his hand was on my leg. So that made it pretty weird when Mr. St. Louis continued the conversation with [T], talking - apparently about me - right over my head and in the fucking third person:
"Do they both know?"
"Do they both know what?"
"That they're sharing you with the other one."
"Yeah, they both know."
"Are they ok with that?"
"Yes, they are." [T], brilliantly, was playing it totally cool and assured and with the slightest hint of indignance that was balancing right on the edge of anger.
"Huh. They don't look happy about it." The dude was totally drunk. And this made no sense, because whatever combination of me and [C] and [R] he was thinking of, there would be no evidence of anyone not being happy with anyone else.
"Hey man," said [T], "this is Manhattan."

I had wanted, through all this, to say something clever and snarky - I should have said something clever and snarky - but instead I just gave the guy a dirty look and laughed sort of disbelievingly, and said to [T] that we should probably get up and dance with the others. So we got out of bed and put our shoes on and I guess then Mr. St. Louis realized that it wasn't going to happen: [T] wasn't going to say, "you know, dude, you're right...I don't need all of them. Why don't you take this one?" and I wasn't going to giggle and blush and make out with him. And realizing that he reconstituted his fractured masculinity in, I guess, the best manner he could think of: put out his hand in (what it took [T] a moment to realize was) a guy-to-guy fist-bumping kind of thing and said something along the lines of, "yo, man, nice work."

I didn't know whether I wanted to laugh or to cry or to scream or to grab [C] and [T] and start making out with both of them at once just to emphasize the fact that sometimes happiness can exist in numbers greater than two; an idea that, apparently, was utterly beyond the reaches of Mr. St. Louis's imagination. Because to him - and, alas, to many many others - a person who can be categorized as "woman" can be in one of two positions: either already claimed by another person categorized as "man," or available and very likely willing to be claimed by him. Because, of course, in a club and maybe in the world in general, everyone is heterosexual, and everyone either has or is looking for a partner; and the uncoupled girls are there for the picking. And [T], and all of us, then, were breaking the unspoken, rules. What the fuck. Beyond the obvious, infuriating misogyny, what really baffles me, enrages me, about this kind of thing is the obscenely limited way in which it views not only sexuality but relationality in general. What I mean is, you don't have to be willing to recognize any radical erotic configurations - you don't even have to recognize any sexualities other than hetero! - to be able to realize that, maybe, things might be, even in very simple ways, more complicated: that, maybe, we're all just friends having some platonic fun; or that, maybe, someone has a boyfriend who isn't there; or that, maybe, someone is someone else's cousin or sister or brother. Or, maybe, possibly, that someone might not be fucking interested.

"Let's get out of here," said [R], "I think it's over." I looked around and noticed that there were only a few little groups of people left and that the musicians had stopped playing and it looked less and less likely that Mr. St. Louis would find a girl to share his bed that night and he was staring at us in something between confusion and jealousy and lust - and still I was a little bit sad to leave because, despite all of that, despite my intensely inflamed frustration with the profound narrowness of the dominant culture's imagination of gender and sexuality and relationality, it was so lovely up there, and I could have smoked three more cigarettes and looked at the glittering skyscapers out the window. But obviously [R] was right, and so we left.

freud lite

2006-02-02T18:53:00.000-05:00

I was just IMing with my friend [A] about his consumating date tomorrow night (I've recently convinced him to enter the treacherous world of internet dating).

him: so it looks like i have a date with that girl tomorrow
me: excellent
him: i imagine this one will go better than the other one
him: she seems nice
me: i think so
him: plus, she drinks
him: we're 'meeting for drinks'
him: which makes the whole thing a little easier
me: thats sexxelent

Sexxelent. I typed that totally by accident. Which is pretty awesome. [A] said that I "have a very clever unconscious."

Loves it.

2006-01-30T07:52:00.000-05:00

We had a birthday party for [C] on Saturday night, and her friend [K] brought one of the best presents ever:

[K]'s friend works at FAO Schwartz, and she managed some afterhours manipulation of the store's design-a-bear (or whatever it's called) system, bypassing the censors who are supposed to prevent precisely this kind of perversion of the Teddy Bear and everything it represents.

It's pretty much the only teddy bear ever towards which I have not had a strongly aversive reaction. And as for [C], she's already figured out how she'll tailor the neck of the sweater to fit over the head of her firstborn child.

Thames Whale Does Not Survive Rescue Attempt

2006-01-22T07:07:00.000-05:00

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, Jan. 21 - Despite an all-out rescue effort, a 17-foot-long northern bottlenose whale that had strayed into the Thames in central London died Saturday, the rescue team said.

The whale, from a deep-water species usually found in the northern Atlantic, had been in the river since Thursday, drawing thousands of onlookers as it swam past the Houses of Parliament on Friday.

It died as marine specialists escorted it on a barge down the Thames toward the sea, the British Divers Marine Life Rescue group said Saturday night.

Overnight, rescuers from whale and dolphin conservation groups said there had been reports that the whale had moved back out to sea. But by late morning Saturday, it was still in a stretch of river near the city's tourist attractions like the London Eye Ferris wheel.

Rescuers first maneuvered the mammal - the only whale documented to have made such a visit in the Thames since records began in 1913 - into shallow water and slid yellow, inflatable pontoons under its belly to help keep it afloat.

Police and port authority crews then sandwiched the whale in its cradle of pontoons between two rigid-hulled inflatable boats and began moving it downstream to a barge equipped with a crane to lift it on board for the 40-mile trip to the sea.

Thousands of people lined the banks of the Thames to watch the rescue attempt, which was carried live on 24-hour news channels, and cheered as the whale was lifted onto the barge, normally used for river cleaning.

Rescuers initially planned to release the whale into the open sea, but had warned that its health was uncertain and it might attempt to beach itself even if set free.

Hours later, rescuers said, the animal died aboard the barge after its breathing became erratic.

[via The New York Times]

This strikes me as something out of Ben Jonson's crazy bloated London. And also it brings to mind the opening of Dickens's Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

(My copy of Bleak House is material evidence of my scholarly delinquency: the first three quarters of the binding are creased and whitened, because I've been assigned this novel three or four times, and the last fourth is absolutely unblemished - because I've never finished it. I have to read it again for a seminar this semester, and my goal is to read the whole whole thing. Or at least to start in the middle and get to the end. Or, then again, maybe just to watch the new acclaimed Masterpiece Theater miniseries - starts tomorrow night on PBS!)

Last night,

2006-01-22T02:34:00.000-05:00

[C] and I, sort of uncharacteristically because we don't very often go to things, decided to get dressed up and go to a Punk vs. Disco party at a Lower East Side bar - she was disco, in shimmery silver and white that she declared represented a bag of cocaine, and I tried my best to be punk, but despite my fierce boots and fishnets and eyeliner all I could think of was my mom saying, when I put on a similar outfit for some reason when I was sixteen, "You can wear whatever you want, but you'll never look like anything except a sweet little blond girl." Nevertheless, we looked hot, and we made some new friends, and we were told by more than one of them that we had to go to Burning Man next year - we were probably the only people there who hadn't been to Burning Man - and I was grateful for the mild spurt of obsession with reading about Burning Man that [N] and I went through when I was in SF last August, because I sounded like I had some idea what I was talking about. Burning Man 2006 starts two days after [C] and [T]'s wedding, and, she was passionatedly informed several times, it would make an amazing honeymoon.

[C] is the best person in the world to go out with, because she'll do almost anything and be totally gleeful and adorable and excited about it. A photographer wants to snap a series of close-ups of her (very nice) ass? She holds up her skirt for her him! A freakishly tall guy in freakishly small sunglasses wants her to rub ice cubes on the nipples of his bondaged-up friend? She does it for five minutes, and licks them, too. I tell her that she should find someone to make out with? She makes out with two girls at once, and then - in the final round of what she accurately described as an end-of-the-night "land grab," all of these various coupled and uncoupled people standing in a corner involved in tortuous negotiations of who would go home with whom - got herself taken home by a couple who were not only cute but also sweet, funny, friendly, and socially conscious.

We all got in a cab, to drop them off first near Union Square and then me way further uptown. They guy asked our driver, a little bespectacled Pakistani man, who I learned later, was a mathematician by training, how his night had been - and then so quickly that neither [C] nor I can remember how it started, the standard taxi smalltalk took a turn for the totally surreal. "I pick up so many crazy people down here!" he was suddenly exclaiming, gesticulating. "Crazy! You know, these girls, these crazy young girls, they get into my cab, and they just start, you know, they are kissing each other! All over the cab!"
"In the back seat?" someone asked.
"In the back, in the front, all over the cab, crazy! These girls, they are very young, they press up their breasts against this window!" He turned his head and looked at [C] and the girl and I in the back seat, a little bit accusingly, as if sure we were doing something like that, and maybe a little bit surprised that we weren't. "While I am driving! It makes me crazy!"
"Do you tell them to stop?" the guy asked.
"No, well, I do not tell them stop, they are paying...I do not mind so much, if they do not make a mess."
"Doesn't it distract you?"
"Yes, it makes me crazy! Sometimes they are up here in the front seat with me, I say go to the back, but these girls say no, they want to be up here with me!"
"Well, that must make things more interesting, anyway," [C] said. None of us could stop laughing.
"Yes! They are crazy!"

At some point around then we got to 14th Street, and my three companions hopped out of the cab and ran off to start a new adventure. I, however, was lucky enough to get to continue this one.

"So what is this?" he said to me. "Why are you all alone?"
"Well, I have to do a lot of work tomorrow. So I'm going to go to bed and they are going to keep partying." I couldn't quite bring myself to explain the whole situation.
"That is a boy and two girls!"
"Yes, it is."
"Miss, you do not mind if I ask you some questions? I am sorry, I just like to talk so much."
"No, it's ok."
"You have boy?"
"Umm...well not really."
"You ever have boyfriend?"
"Yeah, I did three years ago."
"But for three years, no boyfriend??"
"Nope."
"It is better that way, I think, it is more fun for you."
"I think so."
"Going out, with whoever, it is more fun...Miss, do you like girls?"
"Um...not usually."
"You like the boys more?"
"Yeah, I like boys more."
"But sometimes, you go with girls?"
"Well, you know, it's happened."
"Miss, you are very shy. You do not answer."
"I'm answering!"
"Can I ask you, do you like the gay people?"
"I do like gay people."
"Aha. The boys and the girls?"
"Yep."
"You know, in the Village, there are lots of gay people."
"That's true."
"Can you tell me, miss, why is it that some of the girls like to go with other girls?"
"Umm, well, I don't know, I think that's a very complicated question."
"You think, they just cannot find a boy?"
"Well, no, I think that probably is not the reason in most cases..."
"Miss, can you tell me what these girls do with other girls?"
"Umm...no, I can't, really. I think people do all kinds of different things."
"I am sorry, miss, I talk too much...but can you tell me, where can I find these lesbians?"
"What?"
"In the Village, there are many gay people, but it is mostly the boys. You know, I like these lesbians so much, I want to talk to them, but I do not know where to find them."
"Hmmm. Don't they sometimes get in your cab?"
"Sometimes, sometimes yes, but it is very hard, you know."
"I'm sure."
"You cannot tell me where I can find them?"
"Well, you might want to try Brooklyn." And we pulled up to my street.
"Ok miss, thank you, goodnight."
"Goodnight."
He watched me walk down the block in my very short skirt and very high boots, teetering a little, smoking, and I hope - I think he must have - thought, "Crazy!"

I went to San Francisco

2006-01-16T21:10:00.000-05:00

and I met a boy I like a lot, a lot more than I really thought it was possible to like someone in less than two weeks. There is much to say about it and I might say some of it here...but for now, here's what my mom had to say:

Mom: So tell me more about him! What shared interests do you have?
Me: Uh... [Trying to think of something that doesn't involve the consumption of inordinate amounts of drugs.]
Mom: Other than sex.
Me: Mom!
Mom: Well, you're 23 years old! I would hope that that's a big one!
Me: Right...umm...well, I don't know, we're into, like, intellectual pursuits...you know, like talking about things, and going out and meeting weird people...
Mom: Ok...
Me: Well, I don't know, Mom, what's an interest? Like, we both really like Diesel Jeans? [Which is true.]
Mom: Well, for example, you have a very strong interest in gay culture. You have been interested in that for a number of years.
Me: Well, he likes to sleep with boys sometimes.
Mom: Ok, well, there you go!

I forgot to tell her, we also both really like The O.C.. This is us watching it.

Four

2005-12-28T05:58:00.000-05:00

...jobs you've had in your life:
-bookstore salesperson
-summer camp counselor
-travel guide editor
-receptionist

Four movies you could watch over and over:
-Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
-Rosemary's Baby
-Gone with the Wind
-My Fair Lady

Four places you've lived:
-Wellesley, MA
-Cambridge, MA
-Somerville, MA
-New York City, NY

Four TV shows you love to watch:
-Nip/Tuck
-The OC
-Entourage
-Law and Order: SVU

Four places you've been on vacation:
-Buenos Aires, Argentina
-Lake Bled, Slovenia
-Dubrovnik, Croatia
-Barcelona, Spain

Four websites you visit daily:
-New York Times
-Livejournal
-Gawker
-Gothamist

Four of your favorite foods:
-dumplings
-grapefruit
-Kashi Go Lean
-seaweed salad

Four places you'd rather be:
-Paris
-that alternate universe where Bush didn't steal the 2000 and 2004 elections
-a tumultuous English department at the height of the culture wars
-where I was one month ago so that I could redo my final papers without fucking up

weekend

2005-12-24T21:42:00.000-05:00

or sex, drugs, and the sandwich

(a small gesture in the direction of Art)

of all the terrifying evidence

2005-12-21T14:51:00.000-05:00

I've seen in the past few days of this country's gradual devolution into a police state, nothing has hit me as forcefully as this article about a UMass undergraduate who visited by two FBI agents. For requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. From Interlibrary Loan. Because he was writing a paper for a class on communism and was being a diligent student and looking at original sources!

And a close runner up is this one: a gay advocacy group at NYU put on "potentially violent" watch for activities like a (doubless extremely violent) Kiss-In.

Is this shit really happening?

There are like five copies of that book - from the 1960s, in Chinese - in my parents' house. My dad studies Chinese politics and has spent thousands of dollars buying Mao memorabilia on eBay. My mom lived in China for two years in the early 1970s and though she claims to have renounced her Communist fervor, she has been a Resident Alien for twenty-five years because she refuses to pledge her allegiance in order to become a US citizen. A few years ago I stole, to hang up on a my own walls, a few specimens from their extensive collection of Maoist and Leninst propaganda posters. My sister has been trekking around South America for two years and is planning to settle down in Colombia. As for me, well, in addition to my strong support of the Colombian economy, I run around town with a vintage Maoist bookbag and I've been known to associate with Stalinist artists who work in a gay idiom. And I was once an active participant in a Kiss-In, where I made out with a girl who know lives in a radical punk anarchist collective in Berlin.

So yeah, I have little doubt that my entire fucking family is on the List. My dad was already on one back in the 60s, so I imagine that he'll be the first to go.

I have a bit of a problem

2005-12-15T11:36:00.000-05:00

with writing sentences that are way too long. Now, I like long sentences; I think they can be beautiful, and I hope to never abandon them. But...sometimes I read over what I've written - especially what I've written late at night, over many speedy hours, without pause to edit or really even to think - and I can't believe my own absurdity.

This time, I think I might have set a record. And produced a better parody of myself than I possibly could have if I had been trying. The following, believe it or not, is (and will remain for the next three minutes until I overhaul it) one sentence:

The Exposition Universelle of 1900, then, represents a sort of spectacular premier of this “myth of modern fashion,” building off of the economic and cultural energies which had in the prior half-century increasingly coalesced around new urban spaces for the exhibition and observation of fashion - department stores, Parisian grands boulevards, designer’s salons, electrically-lit cafés and theaters; spaces which all themselves became coded as “fashionable” – and around the men and women (but especially women) who populated these spaces, off of the undeniably vibrant – though also, undeniably, deeply oppressive – appropriation of raw material and aesthetic inspiration from the colonized “Orient” by French designers and the ideal of international cultural exchange – as well as the reality of nationalistic competition - exemplified by the International Exhibitions/Expositions Universelles/World’s Fairs that were at their height of prominence and popularity in the late nineteenth century, off of the innovations in technology and labor (the sewing machine, for only one example) that enabled the dramatic growth of fashion as an industry – and instigating or anticipating the twentieth-century cults of haute couture, of the celebrity couturier, of Paris fashion, of fashion as spectacle: in 1900, the statue of La Parisienne in her Pacquin-designed gown was surrounded by friezes depicting the laborers and craftsmen involved in the production of such gowns, and the display of the couturiers’ mannequins was intended as the culmination of the “leçon de choses en action” which traced the multiple steps and diverse participants (human and machine) in the transformation of raw materials into fashionable ensembles – but, symbolically at least, all of this diverse activity was overshadowed by the names – Worth, Pacqin – and by the spectacular glamour of their finished products on display, available for the possession of a few and the desire of thousands.

yikes. now don't you just wish you could be in my freshman writing class next year??

[karl lagerfeld is just so pleased that he and his models get to be talked about in my masterful work of cultural criticism. also that i bought two of his h&m designs on the sale rack last year for like $9.99. but he's pissed that stella mccartney's were so much more of a hit.]

nyc snow, for real this time

2005-12-13T17:43:00.000-05:00

An alumna of the illustrious Harvard Advocate design board has graciously volunteered her wizardrous photoshopping skills to make my dream a (virtual) reality, transforming this

into this:

It's a perfect stocking stuffer for all of your cokehead friends!

(Whom you're pretty much guaranteed to see, probably approximately ten minutes after they receive it, tearing the thing apart and extracting the baggie and desperately, compulsively turning it inside out and licking it until every last speck of white stuff is gone - even though you tell them it's fake; as if you would waste your real coke on this! - ...and then most likely slipping into a further psychosis and trying to snort the little snowflakes even though you tell them that that's really really not actually cocaine...well, that'll make the family dinner more exciting, anyway.)

(p.s. did I just make up the word "wizardrous"? I don't know if it exists. But if not then I think that it should.)

the latest reason to love [M]

2005-12-13T11:48:00.000-05:00

12:20am, on IM

me: uhh i really want to see brokeback mountain
me: i cant stand not having seen it
[M]: i know
[M]: it makes me want to die
me: yeah every minute that im not seeing that movie is full of loss and anger
me: can we please go see it sometime this week?
[M]: ive been trying to figure out a way to do that but im not sure if its possilb
me: hmm
[M]: maybe thursday night
me: what are you doing all weekend?
me: you need to come in here to get adderall anyway i assume
[M]: yeah, my exam is early next week
[M]: so thursday night would be good but it woudl be sortof late
me: hmm
me: interesting
[M]: i was responding to your question about "the week"
me: right

5 minute pause

me: i think theres some freakshow with [W] and [T] and [C] happening thurs
[M]: oh isee
me: though you should comejoin that, obviously
[M]: will you be participating in that all weekend?
me: no
me: i dont have time for that
[M]: what about friday afternoon?
me: sure
[M]: although then the movie will be widely released, which will de-eroticize the experience
me: eww
me: that is very true

5 minute pause

me: thats one of the best points you've ever made
[M]: thank you
[M]: what is to be done
me: i do not know
me: do you have class until like 9 on thurs again?
[M]: till 730
me: hm well we'd better go see it then, i want my viewing experience to be fully eroticized
[M]: yeah thats reasonable
[M]: i will be in a nice starvation state too, which will certainly augment the erotics
me: hah
me: sure

5 minute pause

[M]: yikes i almsot went to bed without drinking
[M]: that wouldve been stupid

nyc snow

2005-12-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

Someone - someone with more ability and more capacity than me to actually follow through with things - really needs to deconstruct this special NYC snowglobe currently being sold by the New York Public Library and being snarked at by the New York blogosphere

and replace that lame plastic bag with one like this:

Because that is the kind of snowfall that we heart in NYC.

[Ed: It's been brought to my attention that the original snowglobe is the work of artist Andrew Coates and had been sold for a while at the Cooper Hewitt Museum giftshop, and that the NYPL shouldn't get all the credit.]

words that don't exist on the internet

2005-12-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

This is something by which I've recently become intrigued: phrases - not random groupings of words, but phrases that have some sense to them and, preferably, that exist together already in the world - that do not exist on the internet.

The other day [T] was showing us a sample exam for one of his classes, and there was a question on it that involved discussing a quotation about the legislation of gay/lesbian rights, and I was trying to figure out if the quotation was taken from somewhere or just made up by the professor, so I started googling around with it...

and I discovered that the phrase: "constitutionalizing the closet" does not exist on the internet.

Nor does: "abraham the very first jew god wants to have a talk with you" (From the lyrics of a Jewish kids' song; for some reason I remember the first two verses but have been trying to figure out all week if there are more - if you, unlike google, happen to recognize that line, please tell me!)

Nor does: "queer reading of paradise lost" ([T] was wondering last night if there were any...)

Nor does: "black rock-and-roll chick" (Which might be the strangest of all, especially given that [C] saw this phrase on a t-shirt sold at this band's concert, and also, I mean, wtf? how can not one person anywhere, anywhere in all of cyberspace - or all of it at least that google can catch - not have put those words together? And yes, I've tried every possible spelling of "rock-and-roll".)

So, I'm starting a collection. If you come across one let me know - the rule is that you can't just sit around thinking of combinations of words that might not exist, you have to discover it organically. Also it has to be spelled correctly.

Also I guess that as soon as I publish this post, these phrases will exist on the internet! yay!

oh canada...

2005-12-08T11:23:00.000-05:00

I've been examining the traffic statistics of this blog...thanks to Sitemeter, I can see not only how many visits I get, but where the visitors - that would be, I guess, you - are located...it even plots it on a map...it's very cool. Ok also a little creepy, but cool.

Anyway...the majority are from Massachusetts, New York, and California. Which is, for various reasons, not at all surprising. Then there are some randoms thrown in there from Colorado, Oregon, Kansas, North Carolina, etc...to be expected. But then, there's like a hugely disproportionate number of visitors from Canada. Mostly from Ontario - some Toronto, some Ottawa, and then a bunch of random Ontario towns. And British Columbia has some representation also.

So, what's going on with this? I mean, it makes me deeply happy, being half Canadian - my mom grew up in Ontario, has lived in the US for 25 years but refuses to get her citizenship, she raised me into a sense of intense identification with Canadians and also somehow passed on to me her subtle but detectable Canadian accent (ask me to pronounce the word "known" sometime) - and all I have to do to get my Canadian citizenship is get some unusually-sized passport photo taken and then mail a piece of paper. (That's harder than it sounds, since I have some kind of pathological inability to accomplish little day-to-day tasks like mailing stuff, but I have until I'm 25 so it should be ok.) Anyway, so, I love Canada, I love Canadians, I start to cry when I hear "Oh Canada" in a way that I never ever ever do with the American one, and I love you Canadian readers...but I am still baffled by this.

So please: if you read my blog and you're in Canada, please leave a comment explaining how you got here, and whether it has anything to do with your or my Canadianness.

And if you're American and you want to marry me to get my citizenship, you can get in line, it's already rather long.

And with utmost love and admiration, my favorite Canada joke:

Q. How do you get twenty drunk Canadians out of a pool?
A. Say, "Get out of the pool."

Buenos Aires commemorates World AIDS Day

2005-12-07T21:59:00.000-05:00

...by putting a gigantic pink condom on its obelisk:

I love this - official recognition, and both funny and potentially very positive use, of the fact that these obelisks that European and wannabe-European cities have been obsessed with planting in prominent public positions over the past century or two are huge monumental phalluses.

I love Buenos Aires.

One of the things I loved about it, actually, when I spent a month there last summer, was their nonchalance about the defacement of their public monuments. I don't know if it's because they are invested in the democratic usage of public space, or don't have enough money to clean these things up - given that the government is kind of fascist and that they're in economic turmoil, I guess it's likely the latter - but it's cool. The Christopher Columbus statue was spattered with red paint, like blood, quite an incisive image - and it had probably been that way for years:

And as for that obelisk, which sits at, I think, the intersection of Corrientes and 9 de Julio (cue the Lloyd Webber tune...) - well, it's a particularly lame representation of the genre, and when I was there it was totally covered in grafitti.
Now it's covered in a condom, which is much better.

et aussi

2005-12-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

Another object retrieved from my parents' house - I can't believe I forgot this one, it's the best:

A French sex ed book that I picked up in Paris several years ago, called Le Guide du Zizi Sexuel. ("Zizi" is slang for penis, so literally it's like The Guide to the Sexual Dick, but I think that the sense is something more like "guide to the sexual development and use of the dick." Insight on this question from anyone whose French is better than mine would be extremely welcome.)

It features the French cartoon character "Titeuf," and it's like The What's Happening to My Body Book for Boys, except...really really French...in the way that it approaches sex as something that's simultaneously funny and profoundly important, that people should be able to do whenever and however they want but that requires highly instructive and normative explanation.

Some sample questions and answers:

On kissing:

Comment on embrasse sur la bouche?
D'abord, il faut poser sa bouche sur celle de la personne qu'on veut embrasser. Ensuite on ouvre la bouche (la personne qu'on embrasse ourvre aussi la sienne sinon ça peut pas marcher) et on entre la langue dans la bouche de l'autre. Le but est de caresser la langue de l'autre avec sa langue. Et puis on enroule les langues dans un sens ou dans l'autre. En fait les deux langues s'amusent entre elles. Après, on improvise.

(How do you kiss on the mouth?
First, you have to put your mouth on that of the person you want to kiss. Then you open your mouth (the person you're kissing opens her mouth too, otherwise it doesn't work) and you put your toungue into the other person's mouth. The goal is to caress her tongue with your tongue. And then you roll your tongues around in one way or another. In fact the two tongues have fun with each other. After, you improvise.)

Est-ce qu'on peut embrasser sans la langue?
Les Anglais ne s'embrassent presque comme ça. On se fait des basiers sur la bouche, on se suce les lèvres, bref on peut inventer plein des trucs.

(Can you kiss without tongue?
The English almost always kiss like this. You can kiss on the mouth, you can suck on the lips, in short you can invent all kinds of things.)

On homosexuality:

Est-ce qu'un garçon peu avoir du désir pour un autre garçon?
Pafois certains garçons désirent les garçons et en grandissant ils se mettent à préférer les filles. Et puis parfois, certains garçons préfèrent les filles et en grandissant ils préfèrent les garçons.

(Can a boy desire another boy?
Sometimes cetain boys desire boys, and when they grow up they come to prefer girls. And then someimtes, certain boys prefer girls and when they grow up they prefer boys.)

Est-ce que c'est normal?
Tout le monde se pose ces questions et avec le temps on trouve la réponse: si on laisse parler son coeur, on finit tourjours par découvrir si on est hétérosexuel ou homosexuel.

(Is this normal?
Eveyone asks themselves these questions and with time they find the answer: if you let your heart speak, you will always end up discovering whether you are heterosexual or homosexual.)

On having sex:

Pourquoi on fait l'amour?
Quand on aime quelqu'un, on a envie de le lui dire. En grandissant, on a aussi envie de lui faire des câlins et un jour, quand les mots et les baisers ne suffisent plus, on a envie de fair l'amour pour lui dire encore plus fort qu'on le désire.

(Why do people make love?
When you love someone, you want to tell them. As you grow up, you also want to be physically affectionate, and one day, when words and kisses are no longer enough, you want to make love to express your desire even more strongly.)

Que'est-ce qu'il ne faut pas faire?
D'abord, il ne faut pas faire l'amour si l'on n'en a pas envie...Et si on le fait, le plus important est de prendre son temps pour laisser monter le désir sexuel. Parfois, le garçon veut tellement faire l'amour avec la fille, qu'il pénètre un peu trop vite ou trop fort dans le sexe de son amoureuse. C'est très désagréable pour les filles. Plus on est doux et tendre, plus c'est agréable.

(What should you not do?
First, you shouldn't have sex if you don't want to...And if you do it, the most important thing is to take your time to let the sexual desire build. Sometimes, the boy wants to make love with the girl so badly that he penetrates too fast or hard into his lover's vagina. This is very disagreeable for girls. The more soft and tender you are, the most agreeable it is.)

And then the very best part, the book's climactic moment, the section called "Faire L'Amour: Comment Ça Marche?" - there's a hole in the page, and you're instructed to put your finger in it, and you turn the page and...

oh là là!!!

If this thing was published in the US, I bet the the author would get charged with child pornography or something...I mean wtf, it's literarlly incorporating the kid's body - he's instructed to "faire le zizi de monsieur," to make the guy's dick, with his finger - into the textual representation of the sex act...it's crazy. It's amazing.

I showed it to [C] and [T] the other night, when we got home from a party at a classmates' apartment where we met a lot of angry hot little lesbians and drank a lot of red wine, and they were so excited about it that they pulled me into their bedroom, tied me to the bed, and fucked me.

[btw my French really blows these days so I apologize for the translations.]

spoils

2005-12-02T02:06:00.000-05:00

I was feeling a little guilty, last night, about stealing all of that Vicodin from my dad's pill bottles when I was home from Thanksgiving. I mean, I didn't take it all, but...if he were to realize that I took them, he would probably be sad on several levels. Like, a) his daughter is a drug abuser, and b) his drugs that he wanted to abuse are gone. So I felt bad. But [M] reassured me: "you're not a terrible person. 24-year-old professionals are supposed to go home and take prescription drugs from their mentally ill parents." Of course I am neither, yet, 24 nor a professional (I will be the former far, far before the latter) but...yeah. It is true that a number of people to whom I mentioned my acquistions said things like, "oh thanks for reminding me, I have to raid my parents' stash!"

I am rather entranced by this image: the city's post-collegiate population scattering throughout the country for the holiday, returning to their little apartments from their childhood homes full of pies and pills, leaving in their wake an epidemic of significantly depleted suburban medicine cabinets.

(And the other things I brought back with me from home:

* A vintage black fur (rabbit maybe? I have no idea, it's very soft) jacket - short, high shoulders, fancy buttons, purchased long ago from a long-gone furrier in Cambridge MA - that my mom bought me a few years ago, and gave to me very excitedly, but at that point for some reason it looked vaguely ridiculous to me and I never wore it; I think I associated it with my mom's persistent perception of me as an "old-fashioned" little girl who wears long braids and long dresses. But I rediscovered it in my closet and tried it on and it's totally awesome: my new favorite object.

* An artfully distressed bright pink t-shirt that has a picture of a shrimp and says "I'm a little shrimp." That I couldn't resist, for some reason.

* A vague, unexpected, disconcerting homesickness that I haven't felt in a very long time. I dunno...I kind of miss my mom. Weird, isn't it?

* A plastic container of homemade delicious pesto, frozen. mmmm.)

interior decorating

2005-11-23T02:23:00.000-05:00

[C] and [T] bought an enormous plant today. A palm-ish thing that is probably six feet tall and four feet across at its most gleefully expansive. It's fucking awesome...I have always wanted an enormous plant. In college I had one that was probably a third of this size and it was cool but this one is much cooler - and also that one died, and hopefully this one won't.

[C] called me and said: "Should we buy a really big...tree...from a sketchy guy on the street?"
"Um...what?"
"Should we buy a really huge tree? It's $20. It's probably stolen."
"A tree? What? Is this some kind of new drug code?" I really couldn't figure out what she was talking about.
"No, you know, like a plant. For the apartment."
"Ohhh. Yeah, definitely!"
"I would just ask you about drugs directly."
"Right."
"Also why would I buy them from a sketchy guy on the street?"
"Right." I wasn't entirely sure why she would buy a really big plant from a sketchy guy on the street either, but whatever.

They came home half an hour later, [T] in his trenchcoat staggering under the weight of this gigantic green thing that he had valiantly carried certainly more blocks than was comfortable. "He's my hero!" said [C] and gave him a kiss. He collapsed.

We put the plant in a little alcove that was obviously created just for it. I am in love with it.

Here is the plant, next to the weird chair that I found on craigslist...according to the German artist dude who sold it to me, the face on it was painted by Neal Cassady. I suppose that this is likely apocryphal, but who knows...stranger things than that have been true:

And continuing the tour of our funny living room, here is the art that [T] installed on the wall behind the (amazing orange 1950s) couch, using the framed mirror that [C] bought in Mexico but that shatttered before she could ever hang it up in its original state, and red nail polish. It's called "Jesus Hates the Hummingbirds" and if anyone cuts themself on it - as I did once, and am always convinced that anyone who sits down on the couch and is about to do (I suggested to [T] that he move it up a bit but he indignantly refused to compromise the integrity of the piece) - they have to contribute their blood to the two pieces on the bottom right.

~~~~~

Speaking of craigslist,

(1) If you have a large wood kitchen/dining room table that you want to sell, please let me know...our kitchen - miraculously, thrillingly - has space for one and I spend way too much time looking for one in the furniture listings but have had no luck yet - and the rather large collection of random chairs that I've accumulated from sidewalk-looting adventures looks kind of tragic without a table.

(2) My friend [A] posted this brilliant ad last night in casual encounters, inspired by a suggestion from [C]:

looking for someone to fetishize me. my feet, maybe, my hair, my teeth, the bags under my eyes. if you like to stroke a gal's hair--i'm your gal. if you like to lick eyeballs, i'm your gal. if you like to bite toenails off, or just pick the toejamb out with your teeth, i'm your gal. collarbone fetishists, I'm your gal; urine fetishists, i'm your gal; furries, i'm your gal; bibliophiles, necrophiles, russiphiles, paleophiles, philophiles, petrophiles, francophiles, genophiles, genitophiles, lineophiles, tropolophiles--i'm your gal. if your sick, i'm your gal; if your desire is what we might call a non-functional displacement of the proper sex act--i'm your gal. I'll fetish your fetish. i'm your fetish market.

****please respond with pic and description of fetish***no fetish, no reply, no exceptions*****

He has received, predictably, many responses from highly eager gentlemen.

"However,

2005-11-22T02:31:00.000-05:00

I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large. And there is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose; men don't like them."

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

This made me laugh. It also reminded me of a fight I once had with [J], my ex-...somthing (people tend to refer to him as ex-boyfriend, and I did date him for five months last winter/spring, so I guess that is kind of justified, but I don't really want to give him the credit of being a "boyfriend"), when he refused to admit that I have kind of a big nose.
"Look, I have kind of a big Jewish nose. You have kind of a big Jewish nose too."
"You don't have a big nose!"
"Yes I do. I'm not saying it's enormous. I'm not saying it's some kind of monstrosity. But it is not a small nose. As noses go it is a big nose. Why can I say that you have a big Jewish nose, and that it really cute, but you have to pretend that I don't?"
"Because you don't!"
"I do!"
Anyway, obviously, it's a stupid gender thing, and after that we probably started arguing about gender, because he is a fucking hardcore unrepentant gender essentialist, which always really pissed me off. He probably told me that "there was a study" (ugh!) that proved that female monkeys are attracted to male monkeys with big noses, or something.

I spent a lot of years angsting about my big nose, and for a while senior year [N] and [M] and I - they also having noses of the kind-of-big Jewish variety - got obsessed with the idea of nose jobs, and wasted many hours reading plastic surgery discussions online, and photoshopping smaller noses for ourselves. But then somehow my nose stopped being a location of body-anxiety (I mean, I'm anxious these days about it collapsing or exploding, but that's another story, sort of), and I found myself - uncharacteristically - so ok with it that I even pierced it, which I had always feared that its size precluded me from doing.

I guess I might have to reconsider this position sometime in the future, though, if Oscar is right; if I find myself someday yearning for marriage I will either have to go for the plastic surgery or lay off the high intellectual pressure.

~~~~~~~

And vaguely relatedly, an IM snippet:

me: i found the lost bag!
[n]: the chanel?
me: no the cocaine
me: lol
[n]: oh
[n]: haha
[n]: same thing

speaking of nostalgia, and recently outdated technologies...

2005-11-21T17:27:00.000-05:00

(please excuse all of this rhetoric, I'm gearing up for paper-writing season)

...the party that [N] and I hosted in my apartment last Saturday night was one of the stranger social events that I can remember.

As a kind of prelude, on Saturday afternoon, I dropped off at the one-hour photo place down the street three disposable cameras that I had found buried in some drawer during my recent move - three disposable cameras full of photos taken during my sophomore and junior years of college, never developed, that I vaguely remembered existed but could never remember to deal with...[N]'s visit, and the impending arrival of all sorts of characters whom I hadn't seen since college graduation or before, were enough impetus for me to finally get these things printed. I take only digital photos now, and I never get them made into prints although probably I should, and unless I get really into photography someday these are probably the last non-digital photos I will ever take, perhaps the last set of actual material photos that I will ever possess...ok that's likely not true, I'm sure that future events like weddings and babies and all of that will require the production of photos that can be viewed and displayed elsewhere than on my computer screen or flickr, but still. It was strange.

And what a strange set of photographs. [N] and I set ourselves up on the couch with the alcohol that would obviously be necessary, and looked through them. Photos of parties in our junior year suite, of dinners and gatherings with our theater groups, of the one football game that we ever attended and this totally anomalous hiking expedition that we went on. [N] and [M] and my ex-boyfriend [D] and I cheerful and rosy-cheeked, wrapped up in red scarves and hats, at the tailgate..."Oh my god we were so collegiate!" I exclaimed.
"Yeah, that one day," said [N]. But what a weird thing to suddenly have brought back into our joint consciousness. We couldn't get over how young we looked; and I know that sounds absurd, given that we're only talking about three or so years ago, but it's true. There are all these photos of me with my arms around my boyfriend, smiling hugely, my hair much longer, my face rounder (or maybe that's just a hopeful delusion), glowing with unchemically-produced pleasure...well, except that I am really drunk in most of them. Nonetheless things look somehow extremely innocent...an utterly retrospective construct, of course, but that's how these things work.

Anyway, [N] had utilized the facebook to invite all of our various friends and acquaintances in the area to this party. (Talk about the weird gaps created by emerging technologies...one of [T]'s friends, [I], thirty years old and a bit of an anachronist, could absolutely not comprehend what we were talking about with this "facebook" thing..."Hold on, so you just put an invitation out there on the internet?" he said, bewildered, "And people that you know just happened to get it and show up?") A totally unexpected and dissonant group of people gathered in my apartment throughout the evening: a few of [N]'s friends from high school, some of our very best friends from college (with significant absences there...[M] was deeply missed...), some people that we hung out with peripherally in college but never talk to anymore and (in a few cases) never really liked that much, a lot of people associated with the college theater scene from which I feel at this point utterly distanced, and then several of my grad school friends and some random friends-of-those-friends.

It was all a lot of fun. A huge amount of alcohol was consumed...I swear, cleaning up, there was at least one empty bottle of wine for each guest, plus not a small number of beer bottles, and significant dents in our vodka stash. Everyone got pretty fucking trashed. [N] got pretty fucking trashed and profusely abused, and then profusely apologized to, a sweet quiet lawyer friend of [T]'s (he found it charming in the end I think); and then flirted on the fire-escape with my grad-school friend [A]. I certainly got pretty fucking trashed, which either enhanced or dulled - I'm not sure - the sense of surreality that I couldn't escape all night, as I floated around from one group of people to another, listening to and occasionally interrupting into one conversation after another: [A] and college-friend [J] in the kitchen accusing one another of fascism (or something, I kind of refused to encounter that whole thing), [E] and [N] and a whole crew of college-theater-people in the living room talking about old scandals and circulating new gossip, [C] and [T] and the lawyer in my bedroom analyzing Greek mythology, [R] by the window trying to explain gender essentialism to [I] the anachronistic southern Slavicist. And various people looking at, or refusing to look at, that pile of old photographs that was sitting there on the coffee table.

I felt sort of unable to process all of it, this congruence of very different people from very different places in my life. I was happy to see everyone and I couldn't really talk to anyone. I was glad that there was enough space that people could create their own little subgatherings, glad that the plate of cocaine was in my bedroom, available (I hoped) to whoever wanted it but not (I hoped) disturbing anyone who might be disturbed; but I was concerned that there was some weird sense of exclusivity emerging, my little grad-school cohort huddled behind the closed bedroom door with the drugs, and maybe people thinking that that door couldn't be freely opened.

And I was pretty confident that my new jeans made my ass look small, but distressed at the thought that my new haircut made me look like a little boy. This occurred to me after [J] said, with obscure intent and implication, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you'd make a great drag king. And if you were a drag king I would fuck your brains out." Umm, thanks, I guess...

Things went on pretty late but eventually people started to filter out, until at 5:30am it was only me and [N] and [C] and [I, whom I was vaguely considering trying to hook up with despite having sworn off the remaining members of [T]'s social circle. But any glimmer of erotic possibility that there might have been, or that I might have imagined (more likely), disappeared, and the night ended as the sun came up with [I], chain-smoking, his dark eyes and laconic drawl admitting not the slightest trace of irony, telling [N] and me stories of his haunted house in Savannah:
"I leave the ghost's bedroom empty, I leave her alone...she's a female ghost...she tries to come into my bedroom sometimes, at night, she tries to come in and I have to keep her out. I say, 'Look, you leave me alone, you have your bedroom and I have mine and you have to stay out.' But she bothers me anyway sometimes...she's a restless ghost..."
"Does anyone ever sleep in her room?" I asked.
"Sure...[C] and [T] slept there when they came to visit...she didn't seem to bother them..."
"They probably had a threesome with her!" suggested [N], and [C] surely would have laughed at that, but she was totally passed out on the couch.

diaries

2005-11-21T04:14:00.000-05:00

[C] is writing in her diary. She is not blogging, she is not livejournaling, she is not even typing - she is writing, with a pen, on paper, in an attractive little hardcover journal. She has been doing this for a few hours. She is hunched over her diary on the couch, writing intently and intensely, words in a flowing script that fill up page after page after page.

I realize at some point, watching her do this while doing my reading, that I am feeling extremely anxious. Worried. That I am, somewhat subconsciously, expecting to see her silently crying; and preparing to ask her whether she is ok, what is wrong. When this occurrs to me I don't ask her that directly, but say, "For some reason seeing someone write in a diary always make me worried that there is something horribly wrong."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Like you think I'm about to slit my wrists or something?"
"I guess..."
She laughs. She is not crying at all. "That's funny. No, I'm fine, I'm just trying to document the last three months of my life!"

Apparently I have an extremely strong and previously unacknowledged association between watching someone else write in a paper diary - not doing so myself, really, because I haven't done it at all in a very long time - and situations of extreme emotional distress. One night in the middle of our spring break trip to Amsterdam junior year, when [M] and our friend [A] and I came back to our hotel after a disastrous night full of anxiety and frayed patience and failure brought on by destabilized seratonin and too much alcohol and some awful "herbal Ecstasy" pills that we had taken in desperate compensation after being unable to acquire the real thing, I lay awake listening to [A] whimper and sigh and scratch out angry words in the diary that she'd brought on the trip but hadn't opened until things turned bad; and once they turned good again, as fortunately they did the next day, she didn't open it again. Probably when we got home at the end of the week she spent hours writing about the whole thing in that diary - but I only saw her writing in it as an outlet for her angst, angst that I had had at least a role in generating but in whose textual expiation I was only a silent worried witness, not a participant nor a confidante nor a responder nor a reader. Not ever a reader, not possibly, not even in some vague theoretical way, as I might have thought of myself had she been typing instead of writing. Writing in a diary appears to me as an agonizingly private act, the words that are written in it as ragged and volatile and suffused with unmediated emotion; and watching someone - a friend - write in a diary arouses, for me, unspecified but intense sensations of guilt and anxiety and helplessness and empathetic distress.

I don't really know what this is about but I find it extremely interesting. I'm wondering about the emotions and meanings that we associate (consciously or not) with specific modes, technologies, of writing about ourselves - and in particular the ones that are just barely or not quite outdated, the ones that exist in some peculiar liminal space between current and archaic. Diaries, letters in envelopes, notebooks, those lined yellow pads...I'm sure there are more. I can only speculate because it hasn't happened in so long, but I think that receiving a handwritten letter in a handwritten envelope - not a postcard or an invitation, because those are still in common circulation - would provoke the same weird sense of anxiety as watching [C] scribble in her diary, the same vague feeling that something is very wrong and that I am probably somehow (maybe in the case of the letter more directly) involved in that wrongness.

Do people only utilize these particular writing technologies in situations that for some reason require a kind of conceptual removal from the always-implied possibilities of replication/circulation/publicity that are attached to cybertexts? In situations that call for or are enhanced by the aura of nostalgia, irrationality, melancholy, intimacy that has perhaps accumulated around the handwritten page? Obviously I know that this is not really the case; but apparently I feel like it is.

I've had probably more than my share of experience with emotional and social traumas being created, recreated, circulated, complicated, expanded, heightened, etc., etc., through blogs and emails. But blogging, or watching someone else blog, or checking my email - these are not, and probably will not become, sites (sights?) of writing/communication that trigger for me this kind of immediate, associative reaction. This strange and unjustified but totally inescapable anxiety.

[C] looks focused and thoughtful, but calm and untroubled, as she writes; and yet I'm still sitting here anticipating some kind of disaster. Every time she raises her head and starts to say something I am sure that it will be something painful.
But all she says is: "Does 'happened' have one 'n' or two?"
I start to answer but then am suddenly unsure of myself, so I type the word out into my document on my computer, I see it take definite shape in black twelve-point Times New Roman letters, and it no longer looks at all strange and uncertain and fragile, and I can be sure: "One."
She nods and looks back down at her diary: "I'm spelling it all kinds of different ways in here!"

i heart wikipedia

2005-11-20T01:12:00.000-05:00

(and crazy drug addicts on the internet).

I was perusing the wikipedia entry on "cocaine" and came across this delightful bit:

Prior to inhalation, cocaine powder must be divided into very fine particles. This is often not possible if cocaine has low purity(cut usually does not turn to powder, no matter how hard you work it/hope it) Cocaine of high purity, breaks into smallest dust very easily, except when it's moist(not well stored) and forms “chunks”, which reduce the efficiency of nasal absorption. The stereotype is that the users prepare their dose by putting some cocaine powder on a flat, hard surface such as a mirror, using a razor blade or credit card to finely chop the powder, and a rolled-up banknote, preferably of a high denomination, to snort it. Hollowed out pens and cut straws are often used to snort coke as well. Such devices are often referred to as 'tooters' by users. This is sometimes followed by users placing a small quantity of cocaine on their finger (traditionally the little finger) and rubbing it into their gums, to achieve numbness in the area. The reasons for doing this include being an effective way to consume traces of the powder left on the cutting surface and/or subjectively enhancing the cocaine experience.

Can you spot the contributions of a coke-addled freak, typing too fast with shaky fingers to observe the rules of spacing and punctuation, inserting his or her subjective and very personal observations into what is ostensibly an informational document?

This is often not possible if cocaine has low purity(cut usually does not turn to powder, no matter how hard you work it/hope it)...

You can almost hear that credit card cutting desperately and ineffectually into this dude's pile of chunky powder.

man I really love hypertexts and their schizophrenic reconfiguration of the boundaries of authorship, authority, and the production/dissemination of knowledge...

pornotopia

2005-11-15T07:53:00.000-05:00

Earlier tonight [N] and I were standing out on the fire escape, smoking. We were looking at the windows of the building across the street, but most of them were dark and the ones that were lit were obscured by blinds. "Isn't there a hot boy that you spy on?" she asked me.
"Yeah...I don't know where he is."
"I don't even care if it's a hot boy, I would just like there to be something to look at!"
"Everyone is hiding." But I was feeling very sullen and didn't really care.

I spent the rest of the night, after everyone else went to bed, and will spend the rest of the morning, reading late Victorian pornographic periodicals (The Pearl and The Boudoir); trying to pull together a presentation on these publications and their relevance to Oscar Wilde, for my seminar tomorrow. I should have perhaps started working on this weeks ago, but of course I didn't, because who does that? And I really should have - I would have - started working on this days ago, but I didn't because I was spending all my time working on my Forster lecture (which I gave today and I fucked it up, spent too long on the introductory stuff and ran out of time and got lost and panicked, and I ended up not saying the most important things I had to say and sweating and feeling like I was about to faint and dissolving into total incoherency in the last few minutes - so it was a disaster and I'm not happy at that at all). So anyhow I started working on this thing at 7pm and I have to present it at 2pm, and I have to have 10 pages of notes and some smart stuff to say because this professor is my main advisor and she is really hardcore. These are my things - I said to [C] earlier, and meant it, "If I cannot write a great presentation on Oscar Wilde and Victorian porn, then I will fail at my only reason for being allowed to exist, and I should be removed from the earth" - but I am not excited about them. I have been feeling deeply displeased sitting here making my way through 700 pages of cunts and pricks and fucking and sucking and flagellating. Pissed off and bored and about as far from even vaguely interested, not to mention turned on, as someone reading porn all night could be.

But just now, 7:50am, after no sleep and a lot of speed, I went out onto the firescape for a goodmorning cigarette...and I looked across the street and up at one of the windows and I realized with a shock that I was staring straight at a naked male torso. A totally naked boy standing in front of a totally open window and framed by it so that all I could see was from the top of his neck to the top of his penis. And in between, his smooth and superbly shaped arms and chest and stomach and hips. I couldn't believe that he was actually there. I thought that this had to be an amphetamine-and-pornography-induced hallucination. I looked away and looked back and he was still there. Now I could see that he was talking on the phone. I didn't know if he could see me. He just stood there, looking gorgeous and postured as if he knew it, his dick basically hanging out the window. And I kept going back and forth between staring at him in amazement - and despite myself a little bit of pleasure - and looking the other way in shame. As I finished my cigarette he turned around and walked away from the window, leaving me in full view of an extremely striking ass, and still half convinced that I must be delusional.

Delusion or not, it was kind of exactly what I needed. Reading through one pornographic spectacle after another is a little bit more bearable now that I have had one of my very own.

ewww

2005-11-11T18:02:00.000-05:00

I was finally thinking that I was almost rid of last weekend's facial pathology...a patch of dry dead brown flaking skin, the result of a misalliance of some kind between my skin and [W]'s facial hair, or maybe cologne (that was Dr. [M]'s suggestion), or something, that made me quite dramatically unsightly for several days...

when, just in time for this weekend, a new facial pathology erupted: another fucking nose-pierce infection, a little blister or blob of something nasty inside my nose, and on the outside, around the stud, a region of blaring painful redness. I don't even know what's causing this one; it's usually the cocaine, but it's been days (days!) since there was any of that...

and thus, plans to look hot and maybe get laid are squelched for another weekend.

And while we're on the subject of gross things that I'm sure you were really dying to here about - the other day, I noticed a weird smell in the living room, and [T] confirmed that it wasn't a delusion. At first I thought it was rotting food, but there wasn't any in the living room (amazingly!), and t hen [T] sensibly concluded that it was musty fabric...which we traced, or so we thought, to the bottom of the old painted chair (painted, according to legend, by Neil Cassidy) that I bought on craigslist a few weeks ago. But I sprayed it with some spraystuff, and then moved it around, and the next day the smell was still there, worse, emanating from the same corner...and [C] did some investigation and arrived at the horrifying thesis that there is, in fact, something dead - a mouse? a rat? a baby? a hooker? - inside our wall. So there is that to deal with, or let the super deal with, which seems impossible and terrifying; will they have to tear the walls down?

Who knows. Anyway given all of this, I and my apartment are in no condition to be hosting a party on Saturday night - given also the fact that I have more work to get done before Tuesday that I've perhaps had all semester - but that's happening anyway, because my beloved friend and former roommate [N] is coming from San Francisco, and she deserves a party.

wow

2005-11-10T00:32:00.000-05:00

I really really do not know how to write a lecture. This should be an interesting expedition into failure.

"joy that held the seeds of its own decay"

2005-11-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

I'm reading A Passage to India, E.M. Forster's 1924 novel about a British woman's calamitous accusation of rape in a cave against an Indian doctor, and reading it with special attention because I'm giving a lecture on it to the British Lit class for which I'm a TA next week...one of the more exciting projects I've been faced with recently and also, certainly, the most terrifying. I mean, it takes me all night (at least) to write a ten-minute seminar presentation...and here I have to talk for an hour and twenty minutes, and I have to make it all somehow cohesive and compelling to fifty apathetic undergraduates.

I don't have any idea yet what I'm going to talk about - beyond the obvious "colonial desire...huh...sure is complicated and problematic!" - but I am finding Forster's writing to be totally astounding. He has this way of narrating a way of dissecting the subtle, strange intricacies of thoughts and glances and touches and conversation so that the tiniest moments reveal infinite meaning...it's the kind of thing I'm most interested in thinking about in the books I study, and it's also what I most would like to be able to begin to approach in my own writing.

Like this:

Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers' quarrel. Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable. And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars.

Or this...

Mrs Moore shivered, "A ghost!" But the idea of a ghost scarcely passed he lips. The young people did nto take it up, being occupied with their own outlooks, and deprived of support it perished, or was reabsorbed into the part of the mind that seldom speaks.

Or this...

Like most Orientals, [Dr. Aziz] overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession...These two had strange and beautiful effects on him - they were his friends, his for ever, and he theirs forever; he loved them so much that giving and receiving became one...Their images remained somewhere in his soul up to his dying day, permament additions. He looked at her now as she sat on a deckchair, sipping his tea, and had for a moment a joy that held the seeds of its own decay, for it would lead him to think, "Oh, what more can I do for her?" and so back to the dull round of hospitality.

Or this...

Tangles like this still interrupted their intercourse. A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry. Fielding had been startled, not shocked, but how convey the difference? There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment, always mutual resentment and surprise, even when the two people are of the same race.

Leaving aside for the moment the extremely problematic imperial/racial discourses ("Like most Orientals...") - not that that isn't interesting and central to the text - but right now I'm just thinking about how gorgeously he captures these fluctuating, contradictory dynamics of desire that make relationality both possible and kind of impossible. Which is all so extremely reflective of how it feels to interact with other people in the world - or so it seems to me anyway, at 4:30am on the couch in my apartment feeling still destabilized from a weekend full of hyperintensified relationality of all sorts.

It started on Friday afternoon with me, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors and a frantic weirdly disembodied impulse towards self-mutilation, cutting off my hair; empty - and thinking how strange that emptiness was - of thought about either why I was doing it or how I was doing it. There was no plan and it got harder and harder to stop. It was addictive, watching the scissors excise my bright blonde curls, watching the the remnants of five-month-old highlights flutter down onto the sink or the floor while the hair on my head got shorter and darker and choppier; and it assuaged whatever kind of hangover or craving I was in (I can't remember) and it assuaged the nervous energy I was flooded with due to the imminent arrival of a large crazy group of boys, my roommate's fiance's college friends, among them one with whom I had slept with for two nights last summer on a trip to Coney Island with [C] and [T]. And whom I was excited to see but also terrified because I had a premonition of something unpleasant. (Because there's this structure I fall into all the time, over and over again - or so it seems at least - sleeping with a boy a few times and thinking that it's all cool and then having him with no explanation or a long perplexing explanation tell me that we can't have sex again; and then because I'm uncontrolled and stupid I try to force him to change his mind.) "I just...cut all my hair off..." I said in a bit of a daze to my roommate [C] when she walked in, and she looked over at in horror - "What?!" - that quickly became relief and then admiration: "It actually looks really good!" And amazingly, somehow - it did.

It ended Monday evening with me sitting on the couch in a kind of stupor with my friend [A]. I was fixating on why this guy, after two nights of flirting and sex and fun, had suddenly decided on Sunday night to pretend that I didn't exist and refuse to sleep with me or even really to say goodbye; and I was not yet realizing that it wasn't about me but was rather (or so I'm deciding to think) about the unbearable melancholy of loving friends and losing the past (and too much to drink). I looked at [A] from a certain angle and saw with gasp of dismay, after months of nodding absently when he said that he needed a haircut, that he had the beginnings of a rat tail and earlocks on his shaggy head. I jumped up, the amphetamines I'd been taking all day resurging a little in my brain, and grabbed my scissors, and dragged him (confused but not particularly unwilling) into the kitchen. I sat him down and I started chopping away viciously while [C] and [T] watched, amused, a little bit scared..."I'm fucking crazy you guys," I said, flailing the scissors about, "I need to be fucking institutionalized." [A] sat patiently in his chair and looked miraculously unafraid while I kept circling his head, cutting his hair shorter and shorter until finally he looked less like a schizophrenic Orthodox bum and more like, well, a graduate student - one with hair a little bit crooked and a little bit too feathery in the back, but a vast improvement, everyone agreed, nonetheless. "It's ok," I said, "Just go to Supercuts tomorrow and tell them that your speedfreak sexually-frustrated friend gave you a haircut and you need it fixed up. They'll understand." [A] nodded and he thanked me, with genuine pleasure and gratitude. He has this way of seeming somehow always so surprised when anyone takes the time to see that he is there in the world.

In between there were all of these moments - all overstimulated by drugs and alcohol and grotesque amounts of food (much of it uneaten), by the simulaneity of old and new and very close friendships, by sex in the present and the past, by familial interceptions, by gender performativity alternately exaggerated and diminished, by various twosomes and threesomes and fivesomes, by diamonds and vomit and tears, by secrets and stories and toasts - during which very small steps or missteps could veer everything from beautiful (so beautiful that I wanted to cry) to sort of monstrous way too quickly...moments of the sharp and twisted intersection of friendship and sex that are the kind of thing I love the most in the world but also the kind of thing that, after three days, can leave me a crying crazy overwrought mess.

Anyway. One more from Forster, another one that resonates rather deeply:

She felt increasingly (vision or nightmare?) that, though people are important, the relations between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man. And to-day she felt this with such force that it seemed itself a relationship, itself a person who was trying to take hold of her hand.

I could keep going but I should get back to actually reading the book, and in fact you should also. And one of these days I really have to read his (rather overtly I believe) gay novel, Maurice. I have a suspicion that I will be dissertating on that one somewhere in the future.

(Is there any joy I wonder that doesn't hold the seeds of its own decay?)

compulsion, repetition: introduction

2005-11-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

These are my new favorite images: pulpy cover art from a short-lived 1955 comic series which told the thrilling "stories of people searching for peace of mind through the modern science of psychoanalysis."

Who would ever have thought that such a thing existed? It's so awesome. Someone should write a paper about it. Not me...someone who knows and cares about comics. I actually kind of detest them.

Here is another of my favorite things, Sigmund Freud introducing his theory of the "compulsion to repeat" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):

Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly...None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure to-day if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences...They are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion.

What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impresion they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power...We have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protegés;...or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend....; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This 'perpetual recurrence of the same thing' causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behavior...We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whome fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds...

Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat - something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides. But if a compulsion to repeat does does operate in the mind, we should be glad to know something about it, to learn what function it corresponds to, under what conditions it can emerge and what its relation is to the pleasure principle - to which, after all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the processes of excitation in mental life.

This is one thing that I repeat, compulsively, though I know it is likely to be unpleasurable: typing out extremely too long block quotations and including them in extremely too long blog entries because I'm unable to cut anything, my own text or other texts.

These are some others:
-Making references to psychoanalytic theory.
-Writing papers about the same things, over and over: gender, desire, "subversion."
-Snorting drugs into my pierced left nostril even though I know that every single time it leaves me with a sore piercing.
-Snorting drugs, in general.
-Getting sexually involved with boys who after a short time tell me that they don't want to have sex with me anymore, and then begging them to change their minds, which is gross and unattractive and of course has precisely the opposite effect.
-Arriving at seminar ten minutes late.
-Arriving at everything ten minutes late, at least.
-Staying up all night to "work" and then realizing at 8am that I've spent most of the hours fucking around online.

But, well, everyone I know is a neurotic of one kind or another and I'm sure all of you are also, and we all do it. The repetition compulsion might override the pleasure principle - but, also, repetition is pleasurable, and pleasure is repetitive. Or at least that's what I say in my papers.

My eyes hurt; I always forget to take out my contacts.

this is me

2005-11-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

It's an uncannily mimetic representation: I have blonde hair, short and curly; my wardrobe is almost entirely black and red (dark red) and teal; I wear little jackets a lot and boots and scarves (not rainbow ones, ever, actually, but I do really love gay stuff, so that can represent that); I smoke too much (I'm quitting when I turn 25!); and I usually look a little bit unhappy. Often I am a little bit unhappy but even when I'm just fine - even great - people ask me what's wrong, people tell me to smile. I fucking hate it when strangers I pass on the street tell me to smile.

I'm not made of plastic but sometimes I wish that I was.

an alaskan tale

2005-11-06T19:09:00.000-05:00

I spent yesterday afternoon with my roommate C. and her fiance T. and his cadre of crazy college friends languishing in the sauna and the steam room and the roof deck, and, most memorably, on a wooden bench in the "Radiant Heat Russian Room" where I was given a "platza" massage - essentially a gentle, pleasurably painful beating with a bouquet of birch leaves - by a muscular swarthly fellow named Alex. This is a story related up on the roof over Russian beers by one of the boys, D.:

So I was in Alaska, at a bar, this real divey place where the pipelines workers hang out. And I was drinking beers and talking to this guy, who looks like your typical Alaskan pipline worker, you know, big beard, flannel shirt, burly...and we started talking about, uh, sexual experieneces in foreign countries. He was, you know, talking about fucking hookers in different countries, saying things like, "I love African titties." Then he says, "I was in Estonia, at this bar. And this guy looks at me and I look at him and gestures to me to follow. So I follow him, and we start going at it. Then all of a sudden he stops and says, 'Wait, you're not a fucking Jew, are you?"
And I say, 'You're goddamn right I'm a fucking Jew!"
And he says, "I would never fuck a fucking Jew!" And he starts smashing my head against the toilet with his dick still in my ass!"

This story was then told and retold about seventeen times over the course of last night and today. About all of which I will relate more soon.

2005-11-04T03:25:00.000-05:00

well, hello.