Le maudit Mo D.

particulate matter

1) My mother called today to make sure that the construction guys put up plastic sheeting between the kitchen and the rest of the house. Mom fears things that magazines tell her to fear and recently she came across an article about how inhaling pulverized drywall can cause lung cancer, so she has made it very clear that I am not to breathe in my house for the duration of the remodel.

1a) Never mind that my mother has lived in California her whole life and has inhaled more than her fair share of polluted Cali air.

2) At the Ladycollege, they removed asbestos from my room while I was still living in it. I came back from spring break and the asbestos dudes had fucked with my shit. There was fine white powder everywhere. They couldn't wait two months until I had vacated that room. They had to do it then.

3) I also smoked clove cigarettes in college.

4) And again in grad school. Tasty!

5) Last time I had a clove cigarette was in London in 2004. That was not grad school.

6) I mostly do not freak my shit out when someone near me is smoking, nor do I leave an enclosed space when there is smoking.

7) Particulate matter is very scary.

yes, spammer, yes I do

I got a piece of spam asking me if I wanted a "profesional bowljob."

Yes. Yes I do. In fact, I need to schedule that. November is rapidly approaching.

black beans

As I was driving home from dinner with the fab archiviste J-Heck (lots of buttery butter!) I noticed that Taco Shack is "now serving black beans." So momentous is this addition to their menu that it is being trumpeted on their marquee so that all of Austin, so tired by single bean offerings at area taquerias, can make an informed choice about their preferred legume delivery method.

About two, maybe three, perhaps four years ago, Bob and I ventured into the Shack for lunch on a Saturday. Taco Shack is the local leader on breakfast taco sales and due to market forces, does not serve the lunch menu on weekends. Most Austinites, save Bob, crave A-town's interchangeable list of b-taco ingredients after a long work week and scoff at crispy shells, ground beef, and soup with little floaty chunks of avocado.

Bob is an avid hater of breakfast and was so incensed that he was denied the luxury of selecting his meal from the lunch menu that we left. This event was so damaging that to this day, Bob still brings up the time that Taco Shack ruined his life by denying him lunch that day so long ago. I can only wonder about what he felt that day. Rejection? Anger? Confusion? Humiliation? The fact that a successful taco business was not catering to his needs left an irreparable scar on his psyche and has cost TS hundreds of dollars in lost crispy beef taco revenue.

Taco Shack's feeble attempt at cornering the Bob market and seducing him back to a steady diet of Shack Tacos and Burnet Road Burritos via the addition of black beans will fail! He doesn't give a rodent's behind about beans, black or otherwise. Neither black beans nor blowjobs nor Benjamins will bring my husband back to the Shack. TS fucked up and I'm, to this day, still hearing about it. That time we went there and they wouldn't serve him lunch.

more from the american caucasian underclass

Part of the reason that I want to move back to ol' Noho, Mass is that I can be guaranteed never to run into the machinations of the American Caucasian Underclass during my daily affairs. A trip to the post office can be a Rockwellian exchange with a friendly postal worker instead of a place where one witnesses a fat, ugly troll of a woman slapping around an infant. I understand that at the rate we're going, that soon no place in the U.S. of A. will be free of the poorly-bred, even boutique college towns with large tax burdens.

Today at my local branch of the P.O., I was sending the autographed Southpaw CD that I procured for my mom (who is a huge Southpaw fan) off to the 'Mar, when I heard some slapping going on on the other side of the room. Assuming that this person was disciplining some rowdy children, I was aghast to turn to look that she was slapping A BABY. That's right: a baby. This poor baby girl couldn't have been more than nine months old and was already engaged in mano a mano combat.

I don't know what a baby could do that would cause even the most ignorant among us to resort to slapping, but this baby had somehow gotten into a fist fight with her trollish grandmother (I assumed that this woman, a haggard mess of jowls and Farrah Fawcett hair, with a heavy metal t-shirt tight across her giant tits, was the grandmother). "You do not slap me!" the troll yelled, visibly angered. This woman was very upset that her granddaughter was unable to recognize the hierarchical power dynamic that allows an adult to slap a baby (in whatever downmarket fetid trailer this bitch fell out of) but not a baby to give as good as she gets. Clearly, the baby is at a cognitive point where imitation is the way she learns about the world, so a slap garners a slap back, even though there is no way that she really understands what she's doing.

Trollish A.C.U. lady, however, had no concept of infant cognition and assumed that the little peanut was picking the kind of fight she'll no doubt be having in thirteen or so years in the parking lot of her alternative education center. So this woman was yelling for all to hear, "don't you slap me back!" between slaps. The baby slapped back. The troll slapped. Real nice family picture there. It's times like this that I regret not having children myself, as I can see that the future of this country is in dire need of some classing up.

She must have picked up on the fact that the other patrons were giving her the stink-eye, as she then qualified her yells with "I'm not even hitting you that hard." Oh, thank heavens for that, bitch! Swatting an infant and expecting her to understand that you're the hitter and she's got to take it because she can sit on your face and smother you with her fat ass before CPS can find your trailer is totally cool if the swats aren't that hard.

At any rate, sealing my beautiful mind off from brazen displays of ignorance sounds like one heck of a good deal, even if it means paying the Commonwealth 1% of my car's value once a year. Gentle rolling hills, sushi, and chubby-cheeked unslapped babies as far as the eye can see. It's a beautiful life.

best life

If I could be any other person, I would choose to be Neil Diamond.

I'm not going to say anything else on the topic. Just think about how amazing it must be to be Neil Diamond.

troubled

Since writing yesterday's post about Harold the camp counseling child molester, I've felt really awful about the fact that I unwittingly aided and abetted his actions by not properly alerting the adults. In our ten-year-old minds, it was really cool that Harold, in his early twenties, had a romantic interest in one of us. I didn't want to kiss him because I didn't think he was that cute and the girl whose vagina he was inappropriately touching had dibs on him. I also wasn't really interested in kissing at that point, either. But the truth is, none of us kids in the cabin understood the gravity of the situation or took steps to get his creepy child-molesting ass in trouble. A sort of bittersweet moment of innocence there. Regrettable, but what should we expect from a ten-year-old?

Harold's name doesn't come up on the California Sex Offender Registry, but a Google search uncovers that the Harold of today, now in his mid-40s, has some sort of race car avocation.

I suppose I should also feel bad about stoking the everlasting flame of dissent between fans of narrative improv vs. thematic/game-oriented improv. This is the only Holy War I hope to ever find myself embroiled in. We improvisers worship the same god, but show our fealty in different ways. Our passions run as hot as that flame. I personally like to be told a story with a beginning-middle-end and have some sort of emotional payoff with my laughs. I'm just really excited about the stuff we're doing in Pgraph's class, so comparing the Harold to Harold the Child Molester is a sort of mean-spirited way to do that, I guess.

ira, meet southpaw

Dear Ira Glass,

You don't know me, and truly I don't know you, but you may count me among your legions of college-educated thirtysomething female fans. Though you no longer dampen my panties the way you did back in the late-late-nineties, I do acknowledge you as one of this era's great arbiters of taste and culture and I do listen to TAL as a free podcast, as the Austin area's broadcast is early Sunday morning and as much as I love your show, I do not rise early on Sundays. You might remember me as the girl who asked the question that got you in trouble with the Western Mass NAACP at your public reading there in 1999. I was not trying to cause you any grief. In fact, at the time I was trying to win the heart of the short bald man who drove you to the airport the following day. He did not return my adorations (though he did get me your autograph that night), but honestly, you and your show were secondary to me that night. Unrequited love stories are very boring, so I will stop on that tangent, though I will say that I sort of doubt that the Western Mass NAACP has much in the way of public grievances, though it would be irresponsible of me to claim that I can confirm this. At any rate, I belatedly apologize for causing you unintended unpleasantness.

The reason I am writing you an open letter on my blog that you will probably never read that is actually intended for the entertainment of my friends and other readers, is that I think you should know about Austin-area singer-songwriter Southpaw Jones. He had a record release show tonight and he was wearing a suit. The suit was grayish/darkish and his tie was very conservative. In his suit, with his glasses and polite haircut and Sunday school manners, he sort of looked like you. Southpaw is a very talented musician and writes folk songs that blend the best parts of Dylan with the wittiest parts of TMBG.

I think you would like his songs very much and should not only purchase his latest album (for sale on his website) but also consider playing one of this songs on TAL. It would be nice for Southpaw to have some national exposure that might lead to more work for him. He has blessed Austin with his amazing songs and he should be able to bless the whole country with them, too.

He also does some bitchin' Springsteen covers.

If you have any questions about Southpaw, or about Austin music in general, I am probably not the best person to answer them but I will do my best or refer you to more appropriate parties.

Thank you for your time and for your contributions to the zeitgeist. I will mumble about you to a disinterested young person when I am old.

All best,
Mo D.

P.S. I also apologize for being a lazy contributor to my local public radio station.

just sayin'

Two things:

1) I love narrative improv. In my heart, soul, body, mind. Love it. It is where I want to be.
2) There was a counselor at my summer camp when I was ten named Harold and he made out with/touched the vagina of one of my ten-year-old bunkmates. She was actually very excited about this and being ten, we didn't really get so much that this was wrong. He tried to get me to kiss him but I told him no and he backed off and that was the closest I ever got to an oogy unwanted preteen sexual experience. He disappeared from camp midway through and we didn't know why and we were told not to talk about or ask about Harold. So we didn't. I told my mother when I got home and she declared him a child molester and hoped that he got much worse than just getting fired from his camp counselor job.

Just sayin'.

i talk to my food

As our kitchen has been decommissioned for the remodel, I must now take my meals outside the homestead at one of the many affordably-priced eateries near my home. This means I eat a lot of sandwiches, tacos, and rice bowls at Zen, aka Rice Dumpster (Bob's affectionate name for it). Today I decided to get my midday victuals at Thunderbutt Subs. Thunderbutt, (not the coffeehouse of a similar name) you might recall, has bread that I have compared unfavorably to paper towels. I decided that the heavenly pillow that is Schlotzsky's bread was not worth the 1.5 mile drive out of my way and zipped through the Thunderbutt drive-thru and ordered a veggie sub on wheat.

Wheat. "Wheat " is the color of unbleached paper towels and tastes about as good. I don't know how these people go out of their way to create bread that looks like and tastes like paper towels. You'd think that after years of dominating A-town's hippie sandwich market, they'd come up with something that tastes at least as decent as day-old Roman Meal. Some old hippie along the way must have accidentally eaten a paper towel whilst toking or tripping and returned to his job at the Thunderbutt bakery and said, "dudes, I made a sandwich on paper towels instead of bread and it was totally bitchin'!"

Still, I decided to get a sandwich there and eat it on my front stoop, waiting for my contractor to pull up in his shiny contractor truck. As I will be paying for his gas for that thing for the next three weeks, I don't want to waste any of his time.

Because I eat lunch alone a lot these days, I started talking to my sandwich. "Fuck, you taste like paper towels, stupid bread." The more I ate it, the more the brown loaf of "wheat" began to remind me of standard unbleached paper towel rolls, like the ones you find in public bathrooms nationwide. "What life choices led me to be sitting here on a stoop in the heat in Austin, eating a goddamn sandwich made of paper towel bread?"

I recently conceded that although I love New England something wicked, the food in Texas is way better than it is there. I like smoky things, spicy things, serrano/cascabel/Hatch/scotchbonnet/chipotle peppers, tortillas that don't suck, and even greasy, meaty Tex-Mex enchilada sauce, which one cannot get in my home state of California. Eating at a diner with the lovely K. Shea in Boston last May, I lamented that there were no Mexican flavored omelet offerings. I am a Southwest girl, really, as far as my taste buds are concerned.

But you know what? In my six years in the hallowed East, never once did I eat a sandwich made with bread that tasted like paper towels.

Fucking fuck paper towels fuckety fuck fuck.

And now I'm hungry again.

Mad Men OMG!

Being fond of skirts of a certain length and colleges that deny undergraduate admissions to people with dicks, I am also a gigantic fan of period dramas, so it was with great anticipation that I popped in my Season 1 DVD of Mad Men. Ad agency in 1960? Mindboggling sexism? OMG, bring it!

If you haven't seen this show, you really should, especially if you absolutely love 20th Century American cultural history. Assuming that everything I saw in these episodes was historically accurate, the viewer is treated to a radically different world than the one I happen to be used to. Everyone, even pregnant women, smokes and drinks, there are no seatbelts in cars, a child is allowed to run around with a plastic bag over her head, a stripper has a lush size-12 body, and black folks are treated like they're invisible.

And the sexism?

Watching this show made me really understand what The Feminine Mystique was REALLY about. I mean, I had to read it in Women's Studies class b.i.t.d. and yeah, I had a conceptual idea of how crappy it must have been to be a housewife in midcentury America. But there are just some things that you don't notice until you see it, and you notice it because it has never been a part of your daily reality.

For starters, the women on the show are treated like their either stupid or sluts, or both. Infantilization of women, tacitly or overtly, is the rhetorical norm here and having known nothing else, the women are complicit, especially in those master/servant/boss/secretary dyads in which the secretaries aren't even called secretaries. They're called "girls." There are a few rare female characters who hold positions of authority, but even they are condescended to, with even more contempt. The ladies get no respect and are either whores, the help, or nattering nitpicking wives to be cheated on.

Then, the women treat other women like total shit! When a divorcée moves to the suburban neighborhood with her kids, the neighborhood wives talk serious smack about her behind the back without even getting to know her, all because she's (gasp!) divorced. No one on the street wanted to befriend her and when she is finally invited to a party, the women gather in the kitchen to rip her apart and then play nice to her face. So much for the sisterhood! As a child of the '80s, shit, EVERYONE, including my parents, got divorced, and no one really iced you out for it, so it was a surprise that divorced women were treated like shit by other women. Damn!

The divorced woman character reveals herself to be a Mount Holyoke grad, and then you find out the protagonist's wife went to Bryn Mawr, and then I recalled the utter frustration that college women of that era struggled with: get an education and then cram it up your ass and make your husband a martini. There were plenty of women who bucked that, joined the workforce, had fab careers, but you kind of get the feeling that they were roundly crapped on for that, dismissed as unattractive grinds, constantly asked when they were going to leave to get married.

I do envy a bit the way the men got to behave. Like kings with servants! Sit with your knees far apart because you own the whole freakin' world! A home-cooked meal awaits you when you get home from your day smoking and drinking with the boys at the office! And you can smack your secretary's ass and fuck her because all women (at least the ones you find attractive) are sexually available to you (no sexual harassment laws, and if a woman tried to report it, uh...good luck! Everyone thinks you're a stupid child or a whore!) You have to hand the feminist movement credit for undoing that bullshit! Thank you, Bettye Goldstein Friedan '42 and every other woman who helped pave the way for less assholish men, better treatment for women, and sexual harassment laws! Thank you!

Mad Men: compelling as hell, a social history education in every episode. Viva.

fiction meme

Overscope, aka my Dear Husband, has, of all things, a fiction rant on his blog! He's cheesed about a list on one of his favorite blogs of books in which most Americans have only read 6 or 7. Well, here's my contribution. Keep in mind that I, unlike Bob, have been a fiction fiend since age 8, which may contribute slightly to my outcome. I'll put a star next to the books I read for school and not of my own volition.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (just the first one)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte*

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (I loved Tess in high school)

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller*

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck*

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding*

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens*

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White*

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad* (hate this book, but had to read it in both h.s. and college)

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So that's thirty. Really random list, with some modern works (like The Time-Traveler's Wife--that's one of my favorite books ever!) tossed in with some classics tossed in with some blockbusters.

I'd also like to throw in that germinal is one of the French Republican Calendar months. Oh, how I love silly Napoleon trying to redesign the calendar! That only lasted about thirty years, but when I worked at Harry's we had some Napoleon-era French documents that were dated with a FRC date: 28 Germinal 8 (Napoleon also gave JC the big middle finger and restarted the calendar at 1) But that's a big nerdy tangent for another day.

thank you, pgraph

I'm taking an improv class with 3/4 of the A-town improv power troupe P-graph. The theme is "meaningful moments," i.e. creating emotionally honest, powerful scenes and not necessarily trying to go for the rapid laugh. Last class, we were instructed to do "boring scenes," which are not boring at all! Without trying to predetermine some wacky relationship or goofy persona and just being a regular person, the slow burn of emotional honesty guides the scene into something wicked compelling that may or may not produce laughs but will pique audience interest and make them care about the characters and what happens to them.

This is a wonderful lesson not only for me as an improviser (I've inferred of late that my 'prov chops are starting to stink like last week's meatloaf) but as a novelist, too. Successful novels require emotional honesty and a love for characters that will sustain a reader through 289 pages.

(Oh my gosh, did I mention I wrote a novel? A whole novel?!? Whew! I just impressed myself a little with good ol' number 289.)

Plus, it impresses the hell out of audience members.

Anyway, thank you P-graph for helping me on my creative paths. I heart you all.

vermont!

I got an e-mail from VSC and, like, wept with joy. This kitchen remodel has me missing eating at home. Our kitchen still has usable appliances, but its in disarray and is a huge mess, so F that. I then remembered that my VSC scholarship requires me to work in the kitchen 10 hours a week. I'm really happy about that. I think manual labor complements writing very well and love cooking in big, industrial kitchens.

Seattle is on, even though it means missing key events like Dr. Dre's going away party and Roy's BoS show. Poopers on that front, but I haven't gotten to hang with the Swilkes and the D-Moe since my wedding and that didn't count, which means we haven't REALLY hung out together at once since 2001. Too long. EDIT: My memory serves me badly. We hung out in April '07 in DC. DUH.

A can of pineapple rings exploded in my pantry at some point over the last year or so, causing its innards to rot. I didn't realize the can was open, so when I went to pull it out of its dark corner, stank, rotten pineapple juice splashed all over the floor and my legs and the other cans I was removing from the pantry in preparation for the kitchen remodel. The smell was nauseating and I was already keyed up and tired from hauling shit out to the storage container, so that made me even more angry.

I am sorry for the people of South Texas but I'm really excited about the rain Austin is going to get. Does that make me a bad person?

space boat

I had a dream that Bob rented a Space Boat. The Space Boat was shaped like a spaceship and sailed out to the middle of the ocean, where it's dark, so you could pretend like you're in space. Admission to the Space Boat cost $160 and water bottles were $10 and ice cream cones were $12. I suppose the day will come in my life when water bottles and ice cream cones will cost just that. Everyone's shoes got stolen on the boat. And I didn't want to pay $160 but I did anyway since everyone else was super-enthusiastic about the Space Boat.

Just in time to rescue me from a ho-hum, craptacular summer in which all the self-esteem building that was done in my childhood is being undone on the daily, a trip to the Pacific Northwest w/Swilkes and Dyna is now on the horizon! I've been lamenting the low number of close ladyfriends in my life, esp. how I've floated away from a lot of my college-era ladypals. Forch, Swilkes and Dyna and I still rock the same page lo these many years hence. Some of the most fun moments of my life have been with Swilkes in her hometown of Seattle. AND BONUS: Average temperatures of 60 degrees.

I am of the opinion that if one complains loudly and consistently enough about one thing, then if they don't change it in their lives, they are asinine. I complain loudly and consistently about the weather and yet I don't endeavor to summer elsewhere so much (all my travel monies are spent on Vermont from here on out). However, next summer I am making like a tree and leaving. No more hot hot heat in my life. Hopefully my scheme will work...

do me, dolly!

I want that Tropical Storm to fucking rain the shit out of this dry, hot town. I want T-storms, I want a saturated driveway, I want the temperature to drop and all the little plants to get soaked.

In other words, I want to be in Seattle. Or anywhere but here, really.

les garçons d'été

Tonight is the 2nd installment of Boys of Summer III and the first one that I'll be in.
Tonight's boy is someone I've never played with and have only spoken to maybe twice. But he's cool! He wrote the Venus Zine article about us.

Someone "heard a rumor" that we're now "letting boys into the troupe." I can't remember who told me that.

Also, another male improviser told me "if we want a man, not a boy," he's available. Noted.

BOS 3.2
featuring Erik Adams of Skipfield
TONIGHT!
8pm
The Hideout
617 Congress
Next door to PITA PIT.
Snarf microwaved falafel and then come see us.

open your heart to my liberal art

This morning, I was in the shower, scrubbing myself clean. I've had to concede that natural deodorant does not provide the odor-fighting protection I need during a hot, humid Austin summer, and that I smell like a plate of Armenian cured meats if I don't use the toxic stuff. Although I had the water running and was focused on stripping my body of funky smells, I could still hear Bob in the other room laughing his ass off.

"You've got to read this online comic!" he exclaimed. His enthusiasm indicated that staggering brilliance awaited me at xkcd dot com, and that my life would be irrevocably altered by the myriad blessings I would receive via this masterful work of comic art that Bob had unearthed and deigned to share with me.

So I wrapped myself in a towel and sat down at my computer, first checking nytimes.com to see if any interesting celebrities had died in the last hour.

"Have you looked at it yet?" Bob prodded. I was placing unnecessary minutes between me and this unparalleled genius! I clicked over to xkcd.

I did not laugh. I guess if you were a science major in college and still enjoy feeling smug and superior to those of us who chose liberal arts degrees, this comic is pants-shittingly hilarious. But if you, like me, were and are forever a liberal arts person, its just tired and played. Clearly, the joke is on me, paying all that money for a degree that doesn't parlay itself nicely to a 9-5 job. While I'm the first to admit that writing novels all day is not as beneficial to humanity as, say, nursing or police work, and is indeed selfishly motivated and provides negative financial remuneration for my trouble, I do not concede that doing what makes me happy is so completely worthless as to deserve mockery.

If Bob had taken more literature and history courses during his college days, he would know that American colleges were not intended to provide job training for middle-class workers. It was intended to educate clergy and the sons (and later daughters, thank you Mary L./Sophia S./Matthew V./Henry F.D.) of elite families who would go on to work in professions such as law, academia, medicine, government, and yes, the sciences. A hundred years ago, you didn't get into Harvard based on merit. You got in because your father went there, or your father's boss wrote you a recommendation, or or because your family could pay full freight and could make generous donations to its capital fund. This still happens to a certain extent (just take a look at the POTUS). Certainly I am not advocating that higher education remain available only to the upper classes; however, when I was told that the type of college education I had chosen was not designed to put my butt in a specific professional seat, I accepted that and knew that with the Ladycollege's unparalleled bad-ass alumnae network, I would never be completely unemployable.

I thought about putting an ad up on Craigslist to find fellow liberal artistes who want to sit around drinking coffee having wanky conversations about literary criticism, particularly about Infinite Jest, since that IJ reading group never really got off the ground and I feel that in order to earn my stripes as a modern literature wankster, I need to complete this tome tout de suite. However, my motivations for doing such a thing felt like cheating, for some reason, if seeking what you lack in your marriage outside the marriage is indeed cheating, even if no sex is involved.

Also, I must say that I will never join TX Exes or give the school one thin dime based on UT's culturally-motivated avoidance of the word alumni. Latin is too fancy for these people? Okay, fine, I'm keeping my fancy money for myself then, thanks.

new people to hate

So today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Sixteenth. Half my life has been spent without this man, and the way I carry on, you'd think it happened yesterday. I must have had some extreme psychic bond with this man who sired me at age 65, died in his armchair at age 81, and left behind a teenage daughter who had spent every waking moment of her childhood scared to death that each day would be THE DAY, the day that daddy, an old man, would inevitably die.

That day was July 17, 1992.

I wasn't going to write anything about this, because I've already said all that needs to be said about it. I'm even getting tired of the whole dead father trope of my life. But in yesterday's Statesman, a story about a 59-year-old woman in our area who gave birth last month predictably stuck in my craw.

First of all, fuck the Statesman for failing to report that this woman had to have taken every fertility treatment known to man to get pregnant. Fifty-nine year old women don't get oops preggers ever, unless they have been chosen by God to birth the Messiah. This "oh, well, this little miracle just snuck up on us!" tone of the first paragraph is total bullshit, and the fact that they had lost a child made it even more apparent to me that someone was doing a little in vitro behind their grown children's backs.

The big bullshit is, of course, the last part of the article, the part where they concede that at their age, they may not be around to see their baby through to adulthood. Such light is made of this. Hey, their grown kids will undoubtedly step up and finish raising the kid! No sweat there! Forget the trauma that a child with old parents goes through every day! I promise you that kid is going to be clinging to his mother's leg crying hysterically when the time comes for him to go to school. At age 65.

Some shithead kid is going to get up in his face and tell him that his parents are going to die soon and that's going to be it for him.

I fucking hate these misguided, selfish people.

special welcome

Um, "a special welcome for admitted students of color"? What? It reads like they just this year updated the letter, last year it said "a separate colored mixer". Come on! 1994? Yikes.

To answer LaSuprema's comment (LaSuprema is one of those cool lifelong Austinites who was here when all the cool shit was happening before Californians like me came and fucked everything up), the special welcome for students of color was actually a very early '90s thing. The Ladycollege, like other private liberal arts schools, was very much at the forefront of the PC movement (if you could call it a movement). African-American students of the day reported they didn't feel very integrated, and there had been a few racial incidents on campus (I think on the level of "dumbass bitch wrote the N word on a black student's dry-erase board," not all-out riots). The LC is a very white place in the middle of a very white community, so the college has to do what it can to make urban-raised ladies-of-color want to spend four years at Barbara Bush's alma mater. So as a way to recruit students of color, they'd have recruitment weekends specifically tailored for them. I never went to one, so I don't know if they were patronizing bullshit or what. In 1995, the Ladycollege inaugurated its first President-of-Color, so I'm guessing it was not patronizing. But I can't say.

So although it sounds like they're segregating, they're actually trying, in their adorable little early-nineties way, to integrate.

They also forced incoming students of all colors (esp. white ones) to sit through six hours of "diversity training," which amounted to having to listen to a couple of overbearing, self-righteous upperclasswomen tell all the white straight students that we were racist and homophobic and then have the non-white and/or queer students get up and tell a story about how they were oppressed in high school and, with any luck, start crying. I got the feeling that the facilitators weren't happy unless they got at least one person to turn on the water works. I wasn't cool enough to skip it or, in the style of the great M. A. Brooks, get up and completely fuck with the facilitators. I'm cool enough now, but at eighteen I was still in obedience mode.

I can tell you that diversity training was not responsible for preventing me from committing a hate crime during those four years. I don't know why I never did, but something inside me just didn't want to hate a bitch for the color of her skin or the rainbow rings around her neck. I accredit that to common sense, a decent upbringing, C-Juana High, and not being a douchebag.

So that's the long answer to that.

october regret

I knew when I signed on for four weeks in beeeeyootiful Vermont this fall that some amazing thing would get scheduled here in Austin that month and that I'd have to miss out. So it came as no surprise that the Magnetic Fields are playing here in October and not any other month that I might be around. I am sad about this, but am still going to Vermont, damnit. Maple syrup and foliage trump Stephin M. any day.

Swilkes should note that they are playing at her institution of higher education on 10/26. Very convenient.

more fun from the maudit archives

College acceptance letters! I don't even know if colleges mail these via post anymore. I got my grad school acceptance via e-mail, and that was in 2000.

Can you believe how dated that font looks? And note they have their Telex number printed on the letterhead. Go MoHo!

Ah yes, the one that actually did welcome me in the fall! Smith's acceptance came in a deceptively thin envelope. I had gotten Mount Holyoke's thick one the day before and had set my mind to going there when I saw the thin envelope in the mailbox. But no! I've really never given any thought to what my life would have been like had I chose MoHo over Smith. I suppose I would have had an uglier dorm room and more sugar in my diet and that's about it.

All I know is, I question every day how much that "heightened expectation of success" has really served me in the long run.

Humboldt was my safety. I had a very nice phone chat with an English professor from Humboldt who tried to reel me into his department. I had no intention of going there, but for tuition purposes, my California residency would have saved me quite a bit of money.

the two old men

That's my maternal grandfather (1922-2003) on the left and my father (1910-1992) on the right.

Are little girls supposed to have dads who are older than their grandfathers? Probably not. Such was my family.

Are little girls with moms on public assistance supposed to have grandparents with millions?

Are sixteen-year-olds supposed to bury their 81-year-old dads? (it's deathaversary week here in Mo-land)

Were these two men supposed to be friends? Remember, the one on the right married the one on the left's daughter, very much against his will. They ultimately enjoyed a very cordial relationship, but there is one fun family story in which fisticuffs almost broke out. My dad was more of a code duello guy. Grandpa, for all his money and prestige, was more of a barroom brawler.

Both men, you will note, are wearing cardigans. Both men were born in New England. Dad's cardigan is a bit more boaty than grandpa's, but it was the '70s. I guess this was taken on Christmas, since I'm wearing a red dress and it was taken at my grandparents house.

postcards from the top 1%

Today, my mom's cleaning lady folded the dirty panties I had left on the floor of my bedroom and set them nicely on the bed. I felt really bad about this. She was in no way required or asked to fold my dirty panties, plus I heard my mom tell her she could skip my room today, but she did it anyway. Folded all the dirty clothes I left on the floor, panties included.

I feel badly about this.

Now I am at the local coffeehouse, the one that is about the same walking distance from my mom's house as T-bird is to mine. T-bird is cool and P-kin is decidedly not cool, but it is convenient and they sell sparkling apple juice. I am sitting across from a table of septuagenarian men. Everyone here is either a high school student or someone's parent or a senior citizen. This is because there is no class diversity in my mom's 'hood. Everyone's rich, beyotch.

I must have been giving a dirty look to this blonde woman with a very obvious boob job who was ordering skinny mocha lattes for her pre-teen daughters ahead of me in line. It is a rare event when I am literally face-to-face with fake tits, but the dirty look was more about what I perceived as oblivious entitlement at the expense of my writing time. I make immediate enemies with women whose main endeavors in life are to look good so as to maintain their marriages to doubtlessly wealthy men and raise their daughters to do the same. I hold grudges because these people can afford to buy books but rarely pick up anything but blockbusters. The other barista practically leaped over to me from across the counter to ask me what I wanted.

I suppose there is an art to this appearance thing but it all seems to be a game played in the man's favor. Eat nothing, exercise furiously, paint your face, undergo the scalpel for a pair of freshly-baked muffin boobs, all so you can stay married to a man who might dump you if you were to eat a brownie, watch soaps, go without makeup, and have a flat chest? What kind of marriage is that?

I have it all figured out, of course.

THE PLAN:

1) Don't live in California.
2) Get rid of those fucking hot pink fake nails.
3) Stomach chub is the key to liberation. If your husband is looking askance at your muffin top (esp. if you've given birth to his babies), he doesn't love you for your sparkling wit and intelligence.
4) No plastic surgery. Proof: I rock the honker nose and Bob married me anyway. Without any physical flaws, you'll never know if your relationship is for real.
5) If your wealthy husband is cheating (not if, when), demand to know if she's the babysitter or his secretary. If he's bonking a woman who is "beneath him," then you know he's a steamy turd and you're better off without him.
6) Don't bother with a divorce. Just withdraw all the money from the joint account and hit the road.
7) Improv classes will save you from evil forces. Sign up immediately.

Maybe women are happy doing this? I don't know. I was too busy being impatient to actually ask her if she was happy.

oh, the glory (hole) of it all

In my mother's life, I am often the bearer of bad news (and in the tony 'Mar, their idea of live music is a bunch of middle-aged white dudes playing Marley covers on a steel drum--def. not the live music capital of the world here). Last night, I learned that in my mom's 60 years on this planet, never once had she heard the term "glory hole." This came about during the following exchange

LILBRO: Bla bla something about how he needs lots of clothes because he hates all the clothes he has bla bla.
MOM: I don't understand why this child is such a clotheshorse!
MO: I do. It's because he's a big homo faggot fashion slutboy. Hey, at least it's just clothes he's into and not patronizing every glory hole in San Diego County.

Mom thought that "glory hole" meant "sphincter," and when I corrected her she literally shrieked as if a rat had just crawled up her skirt. "I can't believe people actually do that!" she hollered for the neighbors to hear. She had me explain the concept to her very carefully and she didn't want to believe me. I then produced the wikipedia page for "glory hole (sexual)", which had a link to a photo of an actual glory hole, some ghetto punched-out, duct-taped-for-the-suckee's-comfort hole probably in the men's room at a Wal-Mart or something. Mom, not usually one to moralize, then turned to her tender, impressionable teenage son and beseeched him to never utilize a glory hole because it was, to her, the most despicable, deplorable, disgusting delivery method of gay sex and that he would be joining the disgusting, dirty subgroup of fags that she prays nightly her son will not become. She ordered me to get rid of the glory hole picture on my computer, actually yelling "get rid of that hole!" Then she told me she was upset that I had forced this knowledge upon her.

Mom then upped the ante of this already uncomfortable exchange by suggesting masturbation as a healthy alternative to sticking your weiner in a hole in the wall for the joys of anonymous head. I stopped her, explaining that the last thing anyone wants to hear is a pro-masturbation rant from their mother. Mom never had a mom of her own so we deal with murky boundaries here on the daily. She got that point, though, and stopped. I think Little Bro is sufficiently traumatized so that if he ever sees a glory hole, he'll remember this particular episode and resist the urge to use it.

Now, if I want my mom to scream or freak out, all I have to do is say "glory hole."

As I write, I'm down the street from the office of one of the agents who hasn't offered a yea or nay on seeing a full of my manuscript. The 'Mar has a small enclave of agencies and one of the agents was at the conference a few weeks ago. It's weird to think that my first fifty pages are sitting in an envelope just up the street. I hope they're okay.

perfect weather

OMG
73
73
73
73
with lows of
67

in the 'Mar
until
7.15

cool ocean breezes
encroaching wildfires
and
shopping!

rules of the sky

I admit, I like my airlines to feel free to show their dominatrix side. Flying is serious business, and if you can't toe the line in terms of proper comportment, manners, and behavior, or if you're actions bespeak the possibility of going kookoobananas at 35,000 feet, then I feel good about the airline having the legal authority to pull your ass off the flight for the safety and convenience of those passengers who behave like ladies and gentlemen at all times. And that goes for kids. Rarely have I been on a flight where I have seen truly mismanaged kids that were allowed to run roughshod over the plane, and never to the point where safety and comfort were compromised. (Contrary to what others may think of me, I am able to overlook crying babies and whiny toddlers)

This is why I fully applaud my favorite airline, Southwest, for refusing to allow this American detritus sideshow family to board their connecting flight after these adults allowed the children to behave in an unruly fashion on the plane, even after the flight crew demanded they be better controlled. I understand there are a lot of factors here and the fact that these folks look to be uneducated white trash* and that Ma's obesity prevented her from chasing after the unruly spawn down the narrow aisle, contributed to the airline's animosity towards these people. Also, these kids weren't little--they were elementary school age and should have known better, but probably didn't due to lax discipline.

Though it is not the duty of an airline to discipline its passengers, in this case Southwest made the right choice to ground this family for terrorizing nice people who didn't pay good money to be captive to a pack of circus animals.

*Is it impolitic to call them white trash? Because the lack of control over kids + crying and demanding compensation, to me at least, demonstrates unpleasant comportment one associates with the American Caucasian Underclass whose cultural hallmarks include lack of nutrition and education, dependence on government/charity resources, large numbers of children of varied paternity, consumption of cigarettes while pregnant, and ostentatious squabblings with the authorities such as those seen on "Cops" where they bust the meth lab and the scantily-clad pregnant woman is crying and demanding compensation. On a regular day in my life, if something goes wrong, the po-po don't roll over to my house and I don't demand that I receive a cash settlement. I'm not talking about poverty here--these people obviously could afford plane tickets, and plenty of our nation's poor know how to behave in public. I think its the distinct lack of comportment we're seeing here that leads the populace to designate these folks as "white trash."
Inaction + playing the victim card = Debris Blanc.

Comportment. What a great word. Thank you, Emily Post.

ANOTHER THING: things in this country have changed. Airlines can deny you boarding for any reason they want, so if you're not acting like a compliant and sedate beef cow the whole time you're flying, the airline might decide you are a potential threat. When Bob and I were flying home from Chicago a few years ago, SW denied boarding to a pissed-off woman who threw her boarding pass at the gate agent and tried to board the plane after the agent told her that she had to wait with the rest of the C group to board. Gate agent very firmly told her to stop or she would be calling security. At that point the woman complied but SW wouldn't let the woman get on the plane. DO WHAT THEY SAY OR DON'T FLY!!

ankles unbitten

I have taken to starting my day at the Northwest Municipal Pool, where I swim laps until I am tired and breathless and then I climb out of the pool and drive home. The entire process takes less than 30 minutes. I prefer to go in the morning, before the chunky and unsavory kids from the church daycare center show up to maraud and make the water unnecessarily choppy.

The charge for entrance to this pool is $3 and I believe this is money well-spent. The pool is clean and clear and the city's special blend of chlorines and disinfectants isn't terribly noxious. One can open their eyes underwater and not feel their retinas sizzle.

Today was the first time I entered the pool area to pay my $3 when the cashier, a girl my brother's age, looked at me and then tiptoed herself up so that she could get a good look at my ankles. "So it's just you?"

Ah yes. Woman in her thirties + 11am on a Monday = MOTHER. The complicated equation of woman in her thirties + connective tissue disorder + technically unemployed = PERSON WHO WANTS TO GET SOME EXERCISE did not occur to her. Where were my squeebs? Squeebs cost $1 a head and she was making sure I wasn't smuggling in the kinder without paying.

This little exchange drove home to me that I must look old to young people, i.e. the teen/early 20s crowd. I've crossed over into Mom Territory, with or without a child. I've never thought of myself as being especially young-looking, although I'm sure in ten years I'll look back at photos taken of me in my twenties and see a fresh-skinned innocent baby.

***

Last night was the first-ever Geegster rehearsal where I questioned the validity of our females-only rule. Our first Boy of Summer for the 2008 season, Mr. J.T. Maxwell, was such a musical-improv natural, with a big, hearty baritone that sounded positively magical against our spectrum of girly-voices, that I concurred when it was suggested that J.T.M. remove his penis in order to gain full membership.

I am beyond bummed that I'll be out of town for his show this coming Saturday. Little Bro has a learner's permit in his hot little hand and I am making good on my promise to give the kid free amateur driving instruction behind the wheel of my old purple Saturn. So homeward I shall go, but for all of you who are in Austin this Saturday, please consider attending this very special installment of the B of S!

our rivals

Yesterday at Costco, I saw a novel written by a woman I vaguely knew at the Ladycollege. She was actually one of the people who treated me the way we treat people with no talent who try to integrate themselves with the improv community. That "I will be nice to you but since you suck there will be a limit to how nice I'll be" thing that we're all guilty of. Actually, she was a little ruder than that.

The story:

During my first month or two at the Ladycollege, I attempted to join the staff of the humor magazine. Looking back, the humor mag wasn't that humorous, but I wanted to make friends with other ladies who fancied themselves funny, and so I responded to their ad for the first meeting of the year. I attended, and met the staff, who discussed the inner workings of the mag, who was an editor, what they were looking for, blah blah blah. I must have said something that they either didn't find funny or rubbed them the wrong way. Or they really weren't looking for new members, but had to pretend like they were in order to get funding from the college. Either way, they didn't want me around and had to think of a nice, passive-aggressive way to get rid of me.

This was their Mo Elimination Plan: I knew that the weekly meetings happened at a certain time and place, and even though my e-mails and phone calls to the editors had gone unanswered that week, I ventured to the Quad to this woman's house and rang the bell. She answered the door in anticipation of the other members arrivals and when she saw me, her face fell. I said I was there for the meeting, and she started hemming and hawing and decided to tell me that they had changed the time of the meeting, but wouldn't tell me to what time it was changed. Tired of my questions, she then slammed the door in my face! WTF, I thought! I turned around and saw her fellow editors coming up the walk to the door that had just been slammed at me. They averted their eyes and went in, making sure I didn't run up behind them to ingratiate my unfunny ass into their unfunny mag staff.

Another blow to my self-esteem.

Anyway, the leader of this pack of hos who didn't want me around is now a published novelist herself. Ordinarily, I am a great back-haver of every Ladycollegian there is. I even lamented to Bob recently that I was sad that we couldn't afford to get IceStone kitchen countertops since a Smithie owns the IceStone company and I like to support my bitches. I am especially curious about and interested in networking with other Ladycollegians of Fiction. But because this woman slammed a door in the face of a bright and hopeful first-year who just happened to be me, I don't want to lay down any cash for her book, much less read it, because OMG she was, like SO MEAN TO ME BITD! That really hurt me and did some damage!

Anyway, I know we're all guilty of pulling mean stunts like this. Hell, Bob and I are still making fun of the low-IQ-ed improv wannabe from four or so years ago who managed to crap up Micetro repeatedly until he went back to Hays County with his gun and his sixer of Natty Light. But I certainly don't expect this dude to ever buy my book, not only because I doubt he can read, but because why should he? I wasn't very nice to him. And it's a novel about not-very-nice people. (Clearly, I am not very nice too.)

Should I rise above and forget that really awful episode, in which I spent my entire college career not doing anything remoted artsy or creative, save my radio show, because I got the message early on that my brand of creativity was not up to community standards? The fact that I really have a hard time with that either means NO, I can't rise above because I have a thin skin, or that maybe she should have let me down a little easier (I'm not shitting you--she slammed the door in my face. And as I recall, it was a door with a bunch of glass panes in it, so I could totally see her on the other side) in order to earn my future readership.

That shit really hurt my feelings.

my latest obsessions

1) SCHLOTZSKY'S BREAD. For the uninitiated, locally-based sandwich chain Schlotzsky's serves sandwiches on round rolls with a unique texture--sort of like a big, squishy English muffin, with nooks 'n crannies, and with a soft middle and a crunchy outside. The bread is their claim to fame and customer loyalty. I was thinking about sandwiches this evening. The obvious go-to sammich shop in my 'hood (other than neighborhood institution Little Deli) is Thundercloud. "Thundercloud's bread is ass," I thought to myself. That shit tastes like wadded-up paper towels. Bob and I still go there--I like the veggie sandwich but the bread is dry and crunchy in a bad way. And cold! I think they freeze the bread and defrost it before it gets to its final destination, which is your mouth.

I informed Bob for the first time in our five years together that we simply HAD to go to Schlotzsky's and so we did. The bread was heavenly. Soft, comforting, a little crisp around the edges. I saw bags of it behind the counter. I thought about asking for a bun to take home and then figured I should lay off the leavened goods for the sake of my hindquarters and abdomen. But still: S-sky's bread is an event. It is the flavor equivalent of fireworks on the anniversary of our nation.

2) THE SEASON 1 FINALE OF DEXTER. As a huge wannabe novelist who is on the low end of the personal esteem scales this week due to a pair of agent rejections (I know, they're CRA-ZEE and rejections are par for the course, but my little ego still has an owwy), the plotting and emotional elements of the first season of Showtime's DEXTER are so impeccably drawn, I must set down my pen and salute these writers on an amazing job. DEXTER is based on (surprise!) a series of crime novels by a chap named Jeff Lindsey. The first season of the TV series is based on the first novel, and indeed, each episode reads like a couple of chapters, with plot lines building, relentless tension, new reveals about characters, and my favorite, the likable bad-guy hero, a la Humbert Humbert, who does something morally reprehensible but you love him anyway.

I won't say anymore for fear of spoilers, but the story is water-tight and a model of excellent writing, to be sure.

3) FINDING A NICE JOBBY-JOB. I give up. Full-time novelizing is making me nuts and even though I'm thankful as hell that I've had this time to realize my dream, the fact of the matter is, I miss being part of the working world and I look forward to my return. Of course, the economy is in the toilet, the jobs I want don't exist in Austin, someone refuses to move, and I have my Vermont residency and the long-delayed, none-too-thrilling bowl-paving surgery standing between me and a shiny new desk. So the soonest I could go back to work is February. Gotta finish novel #2, and then my triumphant return to normalcy, banality, alarm clocks, and water coolers shall happen. I hope.

not kidding

Every once in a while, when I tell people that Bob and I do not plan to have children, they don't believe me. When these self-appointed representatives for species renewal learn that I have made this decision for myself, I often get asked, then pressed harder, and find that no matter what compelling reasons I have for this decision that we decided on years ago, they remain unbelievable to certain well-meaning people. I would think that that people who have known me for years and who are aware of certain invasive medical procedures might assume that this matter is settled, but every once and again, I get the whole, "are you sure?" routine. So in the interest of defending my right to not procreate, here are some of my personal reasons why there will be no junior Mos and Bobs:

1) CHEST HOLE. As the daughter of a woman whose mother died when she was a baby and a person who has lost a parent herself, the very idea that I should risk death to bring another person into the world who I may or may not live to raise is a recipe for adding another sad, fucked-up person to the planet. I can barely breathe as it is and my aorta is already enlarged and compromised. Even if I didn't die, I'd end up in the hospital for most of the third trimester and who knows what kind of shape I'd be in after. My body is not equipped to handle childbirth. I accept this. But it is almost insulting to be questioned about it, like I don't know my own body or that childbirth is such a transcendent experience it would be worth dying for or creating an orphan.

Also, as a Marfan patient, I'm not really scheduled to live much past my 50s. I could live longer--who knows? But as I still, daily, wrestle emotionally with my father's death 16 years after the fact, the idea of dying before my child was grown is too much for me to risk or bear. So I won't do it.

2) NO ADOPTION. "But what about adoption?" How about I don't want to raise a child? How about I've seen what a fucking boring, exhausting enterprise it is and I don't wanna? I feel a tiny little bit guilt over this, as I have the time and means to give a little person a nice life. But I'm not much for self-sacrifice, I never want to set foot in a Toys R Us, and I know it would break my heart to hear a child that I raised and sacrificed for throw "you're not my real mom" in my face. This may be considered selfish, but I understand my limitations. Also, there are certain facts about me and Bob that makes us unattractive potential adoptees to certain persons who believe that people who believe in invisible sky gods make better parents than folks who don't.

3) SO I SHOULD GET A DIVORCE? Bob is one of those dudes that so did not want kids that he got a vasectomy to prevent any oopsidental children from coming into the world. Now, getting a vasectomy without having any kids is sort of like converting to Judaism. You go to the doctor, state your case, and they tell you no. Then you have to go back two or three times and ask again and convince the doctor that you really, really want to do this. Then they make you wait. Then you have to sign something that says you won't sue the doctor if you change your mind. This level of determination and a preference to let a surgeon cut your balls open* rather than sire a child should indicate a level of seriousness about not having kids. In the event that I should have a massive change of heart on this, I've been told that I can take a hike.

3a) NO SINGLE MOTHERHOOD. I grew up without a dad. The idea of not having a willing, enthusiastic partner in child-rearing is not one I'm okay with. Knowing that nothing in life is permanent, and that any mother is a potential single mother, I cannot in good conscience become a mother who may in fact face single motherhood. And, oh yeah: I don't want kids.

4) THAT HIGH IQ THING. I really can't deal with anyone who doesn't speak the King's English and cannot be reasoned with. I'm pretty much incapable of dumbing down for anyone. That said, anything kid-oriented (entertainment especially) I loathe deeply. Having to shell out for some dumb plastic Disney shit and then sit through some awful cheeseball animated movie for my kids makes me want to scream. I'd rather die alone. Seriously.

5) MY FAMILY SUCKS. One thing I've noticed about the gung-ho procreators is that many of them come from nice, supportive nuclear families and were nurtured and loved and had happy childhoods. I had no such experience and am well-aware that in the present, I lack the infrastructure to provide such an environment for my child. My own mother has told me that if I choose to have a child, she will be nothing more than grandma in name and checkbook only and that I should not expect for her to sacrifice a moment of her time for my kid. So with that, I'm supposed to raise a kid with no help? A kid with crazy alcoholics/murderers/personality disordered persons in her genetic line? What?

6) STEPPARENTING MUST FOREVER REMAIN SOMETHING THAT OTHER PEOPLE DO WHILE I STAY HOME AND FEEL SMUG ABOUT WHAT A BULLSHIT ENTERPRISE IT IS. I have a hard time with the idea that stepfamilies can be happy and loving and am unwilling to ever give that a try. I had such a shitty experience with that that if I am ever single and I start dating a guy with kids, he's going to know from the get-go that we can have dinner and fuck, but I want nothing to do with his kids, ever, and there will be no marriage or cohabitation until they're out of college. This would probably kill that relationship, but I'd have to be fine with that. I especially do not wish to be expected to use my money to make some dude's child support payments. Fuck. That.

7) MATERNAL WHAT? When my BFF had a miscarriage, she cried for months. When she found out she couldn't have a second child, she was inconsolable and still is. She has always had a visceral, hard-core desire to be a mother, such that she cannot imagine life without a child and has suffered greatly when things have not gone her way with all of that. The fact that I have never so much shed a tear over any of this is an indicator to me that whatever biological imperatives I may have had are broken.

8) PLEASE JUDGE ME. Wow. Even though I know this manifesto is going to get me some swift judgment from certain parties, I can only imagine the type of judgment that is saved for mothers. There's always some asshat who likes to interfere and let women know when they feel their parenting skills are suboptimal. One false move and the accusations of being a shitty mother start flying.

Seriously, I get a lot of shit/rejection from being a writer, but a weak passage in a novel is nothing compared to the insinuation that I'm fucking up a child or putting one in harm's way. This is a feminist issue, this idea that one can tell a mother what she's doing wrong to her face with impunity. I really hate that.

9) I KNOW I'M MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING and I feel bad that I'm not contributing to the future of liberal/educated/awesome society (I have plenty of friends who are doing this important work and I salute them) but the fact that I'm in ill health, married to a man who chose the scalpel, don't really like kids, and come from a family of raving assholes whose lineage needs to die for the sake of humanity, I know I'm making the right decision here.

*It's actually a pretty low-pain procedure. Bob reported sore nuts for about five days and then he felt fine after that.

question for future historians

I just want to know why, in the years following 9/11, the Bush administration has done little to nothing to capture, arrest, convict, and execute Osama bin Laden. I just really want to know why. You know, if Poppy Bush and Osama were drinking buddies or if there was some intelligence that if the US went after bin Laden, World War III would break out or if this is some weird Jesus thing that only evangelicals who are praying for the Rapture really understand. I just really want to know, because after five years in Iraq and $144/barrel oil, that dude is still drawing breaths.

What a horrible decade this has been.

stomachache

I feel like I ate dirty carpet samples for dinner instead of a tasty homemade tuna melt. Onset of #3 came after drinking a soy-based chai at the coffeehouse where I regularly order soy-based chais.

You're welcome for sharing.

rejectionland

Dear Monique,

Dear Monique:
Thanks for sending along the opening pages of Peace on Earth. Truth be told, though, I'm afraid they didn't draw me in as much as I had hoped. I'm pressed for time these days and, what with my reservations about the project, I suspect I wouldn't be the best fit. Thanks so much for contacting me, though, and for giving me this opportunity. It's much appreciated, and I'm sorry to be passing. I wish you the very best of luck in your search for representation.
Best,
Another Agent Who Is "Cra-Zee"