Wednesday, September 24, 2008

What the hell is wrong with you?

So, you may have noticed that my behavior has been, shall we say, erratic lately. Either I never call you or I call you all the time. I never eat. I eat constantly. I don't sleep at all. I sleep for 15 hours and then take a nap. Nothing is ever cleaned. Everything is clean. I drink too much. I stopped going to the gym. Somehow, I keep losing weight. I've gone from mercurial to wildly unpredictable.

My God, you say, why didn't I see it before? She's developed a serious drug problem! To which I say, have not. Yeah right, you say. And I say, no, really, this is what's happened:

1.) My livelihood and my cause are hanging in the balance in this election. Literally, if John McCain wins, I will be unemployed in 6 months to a year. Planned Parenthood will not be able to continue in its current incarnation. Big picture, millions of women will be left behind, without birth control, without basic health care, without access to abortion. It's that bad. It's that serious. I am terrified.
2.) On the topic of my job, I'm doing the work of 3 people and being paid the salary of of maybe one of them. Maybe. It's very frustrating, it's very difficult.
3.) All the plans I had for my future are gone. It's not anyone's fault, people change, blah blah blah fishcakes, but I am not handling it well. I had envisioned my life a certain way, with another person, and that's not happening. Again, no one's fault, it's probably a change for the best, but it's it sucks to deal with.
4.) It also sucks to deal with the transition from couple to not couple. You become really accustomed to having a partner, someone who can bail you out, hold your hand, someone you can count on to be there. My partner, my main support system, is gone, and I'm in a new house with new people. Not entirely new, of course, but I can't come home any more and lean on someone.
5.) My family is insane. Period.

So, this is me, trying to explain what's been going on. Things have been difficult. I'm trying to stack the blocks back up, get things back on track, but it's going to take a little while. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Hmmm...




You Are Courier New



You have a deep appreciation for tradition and history.

You don't eschew modernity, but you do have a deep reverence for the past.



You are very literate. It's likely you enjoy writing and reading.

Some people may feel you're a bit cold, but you just have high standards for who you hang out with.

Monday, July 28, 2008

And to think that I saw it on Delaware Avenue

Today between the hours of five and seven, the streets of Albany were filled with awesome. Whimsical awesome. Hilarious awesome. Great moments in Personal Cinematography awesome. Great Moments in Personal Cinematography is a game I used to play in New Orleans. Whenever I saw something that particularly wonderful, a moment or an image that was perfectly composed and lit and scripted and all that, and it didn't happen often, mind you, that was a Great Moment in Personal Cinematography. So far, counting today, I've had four. It's a hard game.

And, entirely because of all the awesome things in the streets of Albany between five and seven, today I had the best hour I've had in literally months. I was going to use this one word, "sad-sack bastard", to describe how I was no longer feeling because of the time I spent walking to the CVS and the bank, but the explanation of that got a little wordy and in fact became a separate, very silly post, so let us instead say that I had had a particularly grim and dispiriting day at work, and that it had been pretty much consistent with what I felt to be an unusually grim and dispiriting month, and I was kind of depressed and mostly feeling sorry for myself.

With those thoughts in mind, I got home from work, changed my shoes like Mr. Rogers and walked down Delaware Avenue to the CVS to drop off a prescription. I had some time, so I decided to take Holland down to New Scotland to go to the bank.

On the way, I saw a guy, who I think might have been on an airing from the local mental hospital (no joke, there is one), wearing a shirt with a life-size black and white portrait of Diana Rigg in her Mrs. Peel catsuit on it. I was so delighted by this that I started laughing out loud, prompting his also-potentially-on-an-airing-from the local mental hospital friend to tell me what a great night I was having. I courteously wished him the same, and walking away, heard him loudly tell his friend, "That was a beautiful girl!". His friend, a Diana Rigg fan, mind you, and therefore highly discerning judge of female attractiveness, albeit a possibly mental ill one, heartily agreed.

It might actually be an understatement to say I walked on air. If people knew the extraordinary impact of telling a strange girl she's beautiful and did it more often the world would be a much better place.

So, I went to the bank, and the ATM was broken, and while earlier I would have made this another mark on the grim and dispiriting tally sheet, I wasn't particularly upset, what with the air-walking and all. I walked back out, up the crappy part of New Scotland past the hospital, and everything was beautiful. Everything. The sun was shining, the grass was green, the air was as good as only air in upstate New York can be, and the street was full of interesting people doing interesting things. A dreadlocked guy dancing down the street to his iPod. Two pretty girls in coordinated outfits (pink shorts, black top and black shorts, pink top, respectively) jogging by the grinning salaryman in the perfectly matched lilac shirt and tie. The row of matching Tudor house on flawless green lawns that I had never noticed before. It seemed as though any moment the normally surly and unattractive people of the Capital Region where going to turn into animated doppelgangers of themselves and do a phenomenally choreographed, visually stunning CGI dance. A Pixar Oscar-clip type dance. A Great Moment in Personal Cinematography dance.

I felt great. The Go! Team was on my headphones, I was imagining them accepting the Oscar for Best Original Song, and I planned to cap off my walk with a thrilling and indulgent Vitamin Water at CVS. And then. Oh, and then.

And then a small Asian child ran down the other side of the street without pants on. If I had to list my absolute favorite things in the entire world, small Asian children, children without pants, toddlers running, and wildly incongruous things would be pretty damn close to the top. Here was all four in one, on Delaware Avenue! Almost nothing in my list of my absolute favorite things in the entire world happens on Delaware Avenue, except the food at My Linh (a great Vietnamese restaurant with a great courtyard), and the time they showed The Life Aquatic at the Spectrum (the crayon-colored ponyfish is on the list). It is not an area of high absolute favorite thing concentration, making the simultaneous occurrence of four completely goddamn remarkable.

The pantsless child was being followed at about ten paces behind by a father/brother/uncle
type, himself interesting for being an extremely buff Asian guy wearing only red boxing shorts. It was like he and his child had split one outfit between them, as the child was impeccably dressed from the waist up and ankles down.

Clots of people were gathered on the street to offer comments, or maybe do something else less important than watching the pantsless child, and the whole block seemed entirely joyful. We the passersby and residents of Delaware Avenue had formed a small, closely knit community, The No-Pants Asian Toddler Watchers, the NPATW's, and we were a proud and graceful people. "It's a boy!", yelled some hipster guy, and we agreed. It was definitely a boy. "No shirt, no shoes, no service!", remarked one of the old guys on the corner, and we as a community were struck by his wit. "Hey, at least he's having a good time," I offered, and the NPATW's concurred with that as well. And it was then that I noticed that I was having a good time, too, and I wasn't comparing it to something that happened in New Orleans or in my own head, and that I didn't feel lonely any more. I had turned the corner, and right around it was the pantsless child, and Delaware Avenue, and Albany, and everything that I had going for me right here. I wasn't a sad-sack bastard, at least not right then, and I bought some 99 cent gummy bears and the Vitamin Water to celebrate, and I came home and fixed dinner and sat down to tell all this to you.

My contribution to the English language

(Author's note: This is indulgent and silly. But hey, I'm back in the saddle!)

The ancient Greeks used a literary device called an epithet, in which a hyphenated phrase is linked to a noun, with examples being "wine-dark sea", "rosy-fingered dawn", and my personal favorite, "ox-eyed Hera".

Inasmuch as my colleagues (read: Mark and my brother) and I have always tried to emulate the ancient Greeks (mostly in our fondness for spears), we came up with our own epithet, "sad-sack bastard". It's an incredibly useful and versatile epithet, and in the last few years we came up with many ways to work it into our daily conversations.

Unlike many other phrases in the English language, the epithet "sad-sack bastard" works equally well as several different parts of speech.

Noun -"Quit being a sad-sack bastard."
Proper noun - "Well, look, Mr. Sad-Sack Bastard decided to grace us with his presence"
Adjective - "That's a sad-sack bastard thing to say."
Verb - "Stop sad-sack bastarding around."
Interjection "Hey! Sad-sack bastard!"

A sad-sack bastard, if you couldn't pick it up with the context clues, is not a desirable thing. Depending on the situation, a sad-sack bastard can be found brooding in his or her (it's gender neutral, another plus) room, listening to depressing music or obsessively pursuing meaningless goals in video games, ignoring the well-meant and potentially correct advice of friends and family, and generally refusing to directly interact with his or her problems.

The sad-sack bastard is not depressed. They may, at one point, have been depressed, for completely valid reasons, but those reasons and that depression no longer excuse their behavior. Neither is the sad-sack bastard put-upon. Again, they may have been at one point, but now they are either exaggerating the situation or needlessly prolonging it through their own inaction. The sad-sack bastard, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is not to be pitied. They are playing up the unfortunate circumstances of the recent past to addressing the problems of the present or future.

The only way to stop the sad-sack bastard in your life, or yourself, if you happen to be in that unhappy situation, from sad-sack bastarding around, generally bringing the local populace down, is to force them to directly engage with the issues they or you have retreated from into the grim land of sad-sack bastard. I have always favored yelling as de-sad-sack bastarding tool, but other parties have also tried cuddling, reasoned discourse, lavish gifts, slapping, or the forced administration of alcohol. The important thing to provide enough of a shock, be it pleasant or not, to jolt the individual out of the ridiculous, self-pitying state of sad-sack bastardhood.

To sum up, my latest contribution to posterity, the epithet "sad-sack bastard", refers to a previously normal and effective person reduced to a state of brooding, whining uselessness by self-pity and inaction. The epithet itself is remarkably effective as a tool to pry the person to which it applies out his or her sad-sack bastardliness (see "Interjection") or as a cautionary device to ward off the unwary individual skirting dangerously close to its treacherous and rocky shores.

It's incredibly useful.

Monday, June 30, 2008

On learning, bats, and my explosive potential

Things I have learned in the last month:

1.) I have the hearing of a bat. A bat prodigy. An insomniac bat prodigy with an extraordinary gift for identifying sounds through a ceiling. If there is ever a game show wherein you win large sums of money by being able to recognize the sound of a laptop opening fourteen feet above your head, I am going to make that Jeopardy guy look like a punk.

2.) "Laptop" is a cruel misnomer. I have not yet found a comfortable desk-free position for my ancient laptop that does not involve either: a.) the laptop's burning hot cancer-causing hot spot burning my leg, b.) several creatively placed pillows which get rid of the hot spot but unfortunately make me look as though I've built a fort around my midsection, which I have, c.) my arm/leg/ass falling asleep and not being able to type because I'm lying on my side on the bed like internet Cleopatra, or d.) all of the above, in the same twenty minute span.

3.) Saying, oh, I can't leave my job because I'm so committed to our mission is a lot easier that actually not leaving your job because you're so committed to the mission, even though you might do more damage to the mission yourself when you finally go critical and blow the building up with your own mind.

4.) Despite it being my fondest wish for the last two years, cable is actually pretty lame most of the time. Unless, I suppose, you either have seven or more children, a billion dollars and a fierce need for home remodelling, or you're ten. Then it's probably really awesome most of the time, and only lame when I want to watch something

5.) I refuse to accept that anyone is my friend unless they take me firmly by the shoulders, look me directly in the eye, and say, in a loud, clear voice, "Emily. I like you. I'm not joking." Until this takes place I am convinced they hate me. This has proved inconvenient.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Summer of Gorge

Another twelve to fifteen months, another new apartment. Tempting as it is to make another lengthy list of my many inexplicable possessions (Twenty pairs of shoes! Three kinds of electric mixer! How?) or my many, many moves past (15) or even the new mixes I made for my car trips (They're really good, though.), I thought maybe I should celebrate Move 15 with some actual content.

Actual content. I have a new couch, my phone only works on speaker, I don't sleep much, I still enjoy showering, I thought about violently beating four out of six members of our management team with a spiky club yesterday and I'm designing my own tarot deck. I'm worried about our Title X funding, I'm embarrassed to say that I quite like Scarlett Johansson's new Tom Waits album, I've started training to become a rape crisis counselor, and I need to buy some new picture frames.

I've come up with all these conversations I could have with people; what I think about the Narnia books, the stories about the objects in my room, my new plan to rip off High Fidelity and organize my books autobiographically, but when I open my mouth the only thing I can think of is "I always said that if Mark ever left me, I'd start driving south that day. And here I still am." and pushing that away seems to take the air out of anything else I was interested in saying.

I suppose this is a grown-up life. I have my job here, I have family close by, I have friends. I've lived here for almost three years. And I don't really want to go back to New Orleans.

But my life for the last three years has been a binary system. If not this, then of course only that. Not here, New Orleans. Only black, or only white. And suddenly everything fades to gray.

Most of this is just middle of the night thinking. I'm sleeping alone, I can't use my phone, and I feel like a freshman in college. Everyone keeps talking to me about big plans for the summer, how this summer is going to be one of the big summers, that this will happen, or might happen, or how I could do any of these things. Right, I keep saying, I could, and I think about my car keys.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 13: Robert Lowell - "Man and Wife"

Sometimes I wonder how someone with as great a talent and as privileged a life as Robert Lowell could be so unhappy. Sometimes I walk around New England on particularly bright days in February when everything is covered with sand and think about how I didn't do well in a class in college or how I'm worried about a family member or why I'm not where I want to be, sometimes, and I want to throw myself under a bus. I think if I could translate that under-the-bus feeling into words they would belong to Robert Lowell.

This merits a second paragraph, because I didn't pick this poem because the under-the-bus feeling; it's a lovely day here in New England. My loving, rapid, merciless old-fashioned tirade, and I couldn't have come up with a better way to describe the words that come out of my mouth, has gone on too long for some, and in a staggeringly boring response I've gone home to my mom's to drink gin and write stupid crap on the internet. Robert Lowell, everyone!

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade--
loving, rapid, merciless--
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 9: Frank O'Hara - "Poem (Hate is Only One of Many Responses)

Quit pointing out my failures as a blogger, National Poetry Month! To make up for missing a couple of days, I give you Frank O'Hara, one of the cooler poets I like. I picked this one at random out of one of his anthologies, and then was struck by how true it was, at least to me. Stupid sneaky poetry.

Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don't be shy of unkindness, either
it's cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don't have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you're not too scared

an ounce of prevention's
enough to poison the heart
don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern

Saturday, April 5, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 5: "I Live in the Twentieth Century"

This poet has the distinction of being one of the very few that my mother actually likes. Needless to say, I like him quite a bit as well. He writes what I think are some of the best poems about sex in the twentieth century, and the stuff he has to say about relationships is pretty spot on too. He's also got a lot of stuff about the Grateful Dead and living in San Francisco and hallucinating, but I like the mushy stuff better.

I live in the Twentieth Century
and you lie here beside me. You
were unhappy when you fell asleep.
There was nothing I could do about
it. I felt hopeless. Your face
is so beautiful that I cannot stop
to describe it, and there's nothing
I can do to make you happy while
you sleep.

Friday, April 4, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 4: "Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil" - Gerald Manley Hopkins

Gerald Manley Hopkins is a poet that I've been promising myself to make time for years now, and I would literally have to schedule out something like a weekend for it, because all of his poems are extremely complicated and also have to be read out loud to get the full impact. So it would have to be weekend where I was alone in the house or with someone who likes to hear me say words different ways over and over again. This is one of his shorter, simpler poems, I really like it, and I keep trying and failing to put it in a play, because it sounds so great read aloud.

    I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 3: "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" - W.H. Auden

I really struggled with which Auden poem to post; this one is neither my favorite ("Edward Lear") nor is it his most popular ("Funeral Blues" was in Four Weddings and a Funeral, "Musee des Beaux Art" is beloved by scholars), but it has two great things to recommend it: 1.) It's completely badass. It's gorgeous, virtuoso, balls to the wall work. 2.) It's an incredibly moving tribute, and the sheer volume of the emotion that this one amazing poet feels at the death of his hero, perhaps the most amazing poet of the 20th century, is really something to behold.

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 2: "Insomnia" - Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the first poets I found on my own, instead of via a teacher or a project. She's also the first female poet I really got into, and this was the first of her poems that I found really moving. I used to pull all-nighters in my studio apartment and read this on breaks and brood about how true it was, and how awesome I was for appreciating it. Later I found that every other young female English major did the exact same thing.

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Monday, March 31, 2008

National Poetry Month, Day 1: "Song" - John Donne

 

This was my second favorite poem. I found it when I was fourteen in an
anthology on the bookshelf of my English classroom. I liked it so much that I asked for the
same anthology for my birthday, and started teaching myself to read poems that were too
old for me, like this one, which is not as much about mermaids as it is about the
inevitability of infidelity. I still like it enormously, as do a lot of other people,
as it's been continuously in print for four hundred years.

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet:
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.





Thursday, March 20, 2008

ITunes Oracle II: Oracle Redux

In times like these, I find that I get the best advice from the device closest to my heart, my faithful IPod. (In case you want to play along at home, you ask the IPod a question, hit shuffle, and do your best to interpret the results.)

1.) How will the election turn out?

John Lennon - Woman is the Nigger of the World

We're completely and totally fucked.

2.) What do my friends really think of me?

Handsome Boy Modeling School (feat. Cat Power) - I've Been Thinking

Well, they apparently do think about me a lot, and they can put down some pretty sick beats, which is a nice quality in a friend.

3.) How will I handle being single?

Salt N' Pepa - Let's Talk About Sex.

I swear to God, sometimes I think the damn thing is laughing at me.

4.) Do I really need all these books?

Beck - The New Pollution

Don't throw them out and start the new pollution? The books are the new pollution? Sometimes the oracle isn't entirely clear.

5.) Am I a good sister?

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Madeline-Mary

Like now, for example. I think this song is about a woman who drowns sailors.

6.) What's the meaning of life?

Led Zeppelin - Tangerine

Love? Regret? Remembering people?

7.) Will I ever have children?

Alice in Chains - Rooster

Yes, and they will be exactly like David Sedaris' brother. Don't fuck with the Rooster!

8.) How is my career going?

Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

According to the song, I know I won't be leaving here, which is pretty much true. Also, I think I might hate this song and I'm taking it off my IPod.

9.) Should I stay in Albany?

The Beatles - And I Love Her

She gives me everything, and tenderly. And the kiss that she brings? She brings to me. I am totally gay for Albany.

10.) What should I wear to JazzFest?

Cypress Hill - Roll It Up, Light It Up, Smoke It Up

It doesn't matter, I will be high.

11.) Do boys like me?

Beastie Boys - So What'cha Want

I don't goddamn know. I think I'm losing my mind this time, this time, I think I'm losing my mind.

12.) Have we reached peak oil? (Yes, I genuinely worry about this.)

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up

No! Of course not! There is nothing wrong with our American way of life!

13.) Should I keep writing?

The Band - Long Black Veil

This song is about a man who lets himself be hung for a crime he didn't commit in order to hide the fact that he had an affair with his best friend's wife, who then visits his grave in the titular long black veil. I could write a damn book on the different ways to take this, so I'm going to assume it's a yes.

14.) How can I maximize my pleasure during sex?

Los Lobos - Shakin' Shakin' Shakes

Clearly, the answer is vibrators.

15.) Am I an effective activist?

Eric Johnson - Cliffs of Dover

Either I'm a badass virtuoso activist, or I should throw myself off a cliff.

18.) Will I ever get married?

David Bowie - Eight Line Poem

David Bowie thinks that all the cacti need homes. Following the thought through to its logical conclusion, um, yes, and I will also keep a shop.

16.) Should I do more for my family?

Janet Jackson (feat. Q-Tip) - Got Till It's Gone

Not really what I wanted to hear, IPod. Not really what I wanted to hear at all.

17.) How about the blog? Keep it up?

The Grey Album - Allure

Oh, totally.

19.) Am I trying too hard?

B.W. Stevenson - My Maria

No, I'm not. I'm a "gypsy lady" and a "miracle worker".

20.) What do you really think of me, ITunes?

The Commitments - I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)

Damn straight.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

On Love Songs and Sharpies

There was a lengthy period of my life (read: age eighteen to present) when I felt that I could perfectly encapsulate any given moment, relationship or person in a list of songs that I wrote in fine-point sharpie in my journal. Some of them were pretty apt, as there is an pretty wide swath of common ground between a white middle-class former college student singing mopey acoustic songs and a white middle class college student listening to them, and some of them were outright ridiculous, as I am not now, nor have I ever been, born to run.
Most of the songs I put on these lists were love songs, because most of the time if I was taking the time to make lists about you in my journal, I pretty sure I was in love with you. I was almost invariably wrong, but it never seemed to slow down the lists. Some songs showed up on a lot of different lists, and some songs only showed up once. To celebrate this most...celebrated of days, I carefully assessed the lists and came up with Emily's Top Eight (Sort Of) Love Songs.

1.) A Case of You - Joni Mitchell.

I goddamn love this song. I have loved this song since I was ten, and see no reason why I will not continue to love it for the rest of my life. Her voice is perfect, the lyrics are perfect (Where's that at? If you want me, I'll be in a bar.) and I cannot imagine a more graceful, nuanced depiction of what it's like to love someone a lot and regret it sometimes.

2.) All My Little Words - Magnetic Fields.

This one was a frequent star on my journal lists, telling as it does the story of a broody, boy-obsessed malcontent who couldn't make boys like him by writing a lot. It also mentions North Carolina, a favorite state of mine.

3.) What a Good Girl - Barenaked Ladies.

Once upon a time, I was seventeen years old and I lived in a small town in Rhode Island and I thought this band was speaking with the VOICE OF MY SOUL. I have since gotten older and become intensely embarrassed about this period in my life, but the fact remains that once I was much younger and this perfectly nice song about nice kids feeling pressured to succeed at school and really, really loving each other in a guilty kind of way was pretty true to my life. Let us speak of this no more.

4.) Sleepwalking - Modest Mouse

This is my "music video" song, where it plays in the background of all of my memories of one summer, some of which I did spend raiding liquor cabinets and walking by the riverside. Now I find it a little too indie-hipster cool, but I feel the same way about the guy I spend the summer with, so it works itself out in the end.

5.) Always See Your Face - Love

When I have major decisions to make I will sometimes say a question out loud and punch the shuffle button on my iPod, with the idea being that the next song will provide the solution to my problem. This song has come up every time I've hit that button for the last three years, so take from that what you will.

6.) Sally Go Round the Roses - The Jaynettes

Not technically speaking a love song, actually more along the lines of an excellent song to do the pony to, but there was one summer that I spent a lot of time walking around the Quarter listening to this on headphones and thinking, wow, yeah, the saddest thing in the whole wide world is to see your baby with another girl. And then I'd do the pony.

7.) Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You - Bob Dylan

There were a lot of contenders for the Bob Dylan spot on this list, but this track of of Nashville Skyline won. Why? It's simple, it's pretty as hell, and it's a great song to listen to if you happen to be traveling to see your long-distance partner.

8.) You Were Always on My Mind - Willie Nelson

This song could also go on the short list of "Songs that make me weep like an infant". This song vaults out the realm of love songs and straight into something closely resembling emotional pornography. One time a friend told me that this was her favorite song, and I was absolutely stunned that anyone could stand to listen to it more than once every six months.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

I'm not sure this is true.

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you lovable - even if you don't love them!

You are usually feeling: Logical - you rarely let your emotions rule you

You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil

How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Bang, meet your replacement, Whimper

I've come to the conclusion that there are some key ingredients that that the average every-single-day blogger has that I do not. I've done some research (read: "didn't have anything to do today at work") and I need to acquire one or more of the following:

- A baby, either in or out of utero
- The belief that everyone on the internet is interested in the progress I am making on my novel
- The time and ability to distill the random items I find on the internet into a cohesive, entertaining whole.
- An unnervingly intense passion for a book or television show and a passionate devotion to the fan-media generated thereby.
- A complicated and rapidly dissolving relationship and absolutely no respect for the privacy of my partner in said relationship
- A paycheck.

Since none of these items seems to immediate forthcoming, I'm reassessing the idea of posting every day, which I obviously have failed at doing. There is a lot to be said for only speaking when you have something to say.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

On Spider-Man and the future of American Democracy

This really seems like the worst presidential election ever. The endless empty posturing. The completely inane if not actually obviously biased news coverage. The fact that the United States of America is teetering on the jagged edge of what feels like complete and total collapse and responsible, voting citizens still care about the cost of a haircut. I can't tell if I've just gotten older and more cynical, or if the entire country has taken crazy pills and is just spiraling directly down the craphole to oblivion.

With those concepts in mind, I made a list of the candidates and compared them to popular comic book characters. Harmless parody, you say? No. From now on I am going to attempt to hypnotize myself into believing that this list is trenchant political commentary and this race is really between Thor and Captain Marvel and therefore isn't really goddamn happening.

Let's start with Hillary "Her vagina makes her weak, unless it's got teeth, in which case I'm terrified that it will bite off America's penis" Clinton. Of course she's Wonder Woman. They're both women, right? They're totally like sisters! Let's talk at length about their emotions and their periods and their hair and totally ignore the fact that one's a divinely powered lesbian warrior and one's as smart as all goddamn hell and has live, breathed, and fucked politics for the last thirty years of her life. Quick, someone write an opinion piece in Time about their panties.


Like Spider-Man, Barack Obama is beloved by many. He's a smart, talented, caring guy with everybody's best interest at heart, whether it's pulling the troops out of Iraq or hitting Doctor Octopus in the head with mailbox. Also like Spider-Man, Obama really isn't all that impressive. Sure, he moves us, but he's only served one Senate term and he can't even fly. When the shit really hits the fan in the Marvel universe, you want one of the cosmically-powered heavy hitters standing between you and total, mind-blowing peril, not some kid from Queens (or a junior senator).





I'm sure that Rudy Giuliani did many incredibly worthwhile things during his tenure as mayor of New York, things that completely offset the fact that he paid for his girlfriend's apartment with city funds, crippled the emergency response network, and fired the best chief of police that New York ever had because he was getting too much attention. I also understand that the Kingpin gave generously to many charities, and never actually killed Daredevil. Anyway, they're both from New York and they both suck.



Do you see that lightening? Do you see it? You better take a good long look at it, because come January 2009 Mike Huckabee is going to use it to smite the living crap out of all our unrighteous asses and then lead the worthy on the goddamn jihad. I don't have a problem with being Christian. I also don't have a problem with Odin. What I do have a problem with is the power of the gods being used to influence public policy, be it the decision to ban abortion or the decision to hammer the living bagoogoo out of Doctor Doom. Separation of church and state, people.




Man, Jessica Jones was an awesome character in a great book that not enough people read. Man, Dennis Kucinich is an awesome senator with a great message that not enough people care about. The similarities pretty much end there, as she's an sexy, ass-kicking drunk and he's a weeny-tiny post-hippie peacenik, but the whole flawed situation really speaks to the need to think outside the box, whether comic book or ballot, because one day all the alternatives are going to vanish completely because of lack of attention and we're going to be left all alone with the fucker who's coming up next.



Wasn't it enough that you were a billionaire industrialist, Iron Man? Did you really have to build yourself an invulnerable suit and go out and fight crime? Couldn't you just have used your vast fortune to effect social change and nip those super-criminals in their childhood buds? And now you're the head of S.H.I.E.L.D, too. Wasn't the massive fortune enough for you? Do you really, absolutely have to a phenomenal level of power as well? Power you don't really deserve?
And, in addition to his staggering similarities to Tony "Kind of a Douche, Really" Stark, Mitt Romney hates gay people and presided over the Big Dig.


There's nothing wrong with Captain Marvel. He's got all kinds of nifty powers, a long, impressive resume of winning bouts with nasty bad guys, an outfit with a lightning bolt on it, even, but for some reason he's just not bringing the people in the door. John Edwards has had a distinguished Senate career, he's a Southern Democrat, and he's got a lovely wife and some hot daughters. Still, somehow, he can't get them in the door. Which is too bad, really, because I'd much rather have a magical flying uber-man between me and the space monsters than that punk kid from the Daily Bugle.


Who the hell is Ron Paul? What does he believe in? Is he really a fascist? Does he actually have a plan for abolishing income tax? Where did his vast fortune come from, and how come I've never heard of him? Why is he the king of the internet? Am I really seeing my hands melt, or could that be from his awesome powers of illusion? Is that a fishbowl, or the physical manifestation of his unbreakable Libertarian philosophy? Why is it so easy to compare a presidential candidate with a genuine shot at winning to a B-list Spider-Man villain? There are no answers. There is only Ronsterio.


In conclusion, I'm moving to Canada and I'm taking the X-Men with me. Good night.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Thirty Five

I work for Planned Parenthood. I work to raise money to fund reproductive health services and education for the counties we serve, and to fund the advocacy that protects our right to provide those services. One of the services we provide is first term abortion, a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy in its first three months. My work is incredibly important to me, but most of the the time I try not to talk about it too much. Now is not going to be one of those times.
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that protects a woman's right to choose. Its author, Justice Harry Blackman, wrote the decision six months after helping his twenty year-old daughter find an illegal abortion.
This case is at the center of all the work I do, and it's weak. It's easy to knock holes in Roe, and it's easy to put limitations on it. The only thing that keeps it standing is the grassroots movement that I am proud to belong to, and the power that individual men and women can exert when they raise their voices in support of what they believe in. In the end, that's probably all that can keep anything standing.
Roe vs. Wade is about life and death. Both its supporters and its detractors can agree on that. They say we're ending innocent lives. They say we're killing babies. We say something different. We say that Roe saves lives.
Banning abortions won't stop women from having them. It will stop poor women, young women, minority women, rural women, and abused women from having them safely. They will go back to back alleys and coat hangers, while women with resources will find private doctors or fly to other countries in secret. We know this is what will happen, because it happened before. Ten thousand women died from botched abortions the year before Roe passed, and thousands more were scarred, mutilated, or left sterile. Without the protection of this case, women would die in the thousands again.
So many people believe what we do is wrong, that our doctors are murderers, that we're liars and child-haters, that we protect rapists and pedophiles, that we brainwash women who would otherwise be good and loving mothers. Strangers scream at me on the street when I walk into my office and harass our patients with bloody portraits of crying infants. I don't blame them. If I believed, truly believed, that there was a building in my neighborhood where they killed infants and lied to their mothers, I would be out of the street screaming with them.
I don't believe that. I do not believe that a ball of cells smaller than a quarter is a viable human life. I've seen literally hundreds of women walk through our doors, and they don't believe it either. The mothers and fathers who are our doctors and nurses don't believe it. But none of that belief means anything. All that matters is the law that says that it is your right as a human being and as a patient to decide the outcome of your pregnancy with your doctor. As long as that stays on the books, they can scream and wave their signs and call us killers from dawn til dusk, and they can't stop us. It's the law, and its on our side.
I don't want anyone to have to have an abortion. They're very painful and deeply upsetting and they force you to make a choice that you wish to hell you'd never even had to consider. I want every child in this world to be conceived and born with love into a world where they are cherished and wanted. I want women to understand their bodies and know the right time to become sexually active, and choose when the right time is to become mothers. I want us to be an educated, caring society that puts its children first.
We're not living in the world I want. We live in a country where we tell students nothing about their bodies or their sexuality, where women and men have no access to contraception, where there is incest and rape and plain goddamn bad luck and bad planning. We live in a country where we need Roe vs. Wade. I wish we didn't, but until we don't, I'm going to do everything I can to keep it standing. Here's to another 35 years, Roe. I hope to God that we don't need them.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

On Accomplishment, Bleach, and Nude Self-Portraits

I am a domestic powerhouse. I am a household goddess. South Asian families should put statues of me over the stove, such are the scope and majesty of my house-cleaning, errand-running, laundry-doing, grocery-shopping skills. I will put it to you thusly: In the past 24 hours, I have ironed ten shirts, washed, dried, and folded three loads of laundry, grocery shopped with both thrift and verve at two entirely separate stores, got the oil changed in my car, got the rust stains out of my favorite skirt, planned meals for the week, and bought a copy of Jaws. Ha.

I was going to follow this up a sort of guilty rumination on my basically acquisitive nature (IKEA calls me Customer Zero) and how I feel that I should be devoting my time to hipper and more meaningful pursuits than buying sesame oil and bleaching shirts, like creating a one-woman show (not bloody likely) or taking ironic nude photos of myself by the dishwasher (almost unbelievably not bloody likely), but then, in the course of this incredibly long sentence, I decided that the sense of pride I get from efficiently, creatively, and attractively accomplishing the tasks that keep Mark and I functioning as responsible Western-world adults isn't anything that I needed to beat myself up about. Pillars of the avant-garde like throw pillows and clean pants too.

Next entry: Comic books and movies that aren't about abortion.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Correspondence

Dear New Year's Resolution,

Shut up, I can still make 365 posts. I'm just going to double up on some days. It's going to be awesome.

Guiltily,
Emily

Dear gigantic fucking bastard who broke into our apartment and stole all of Mark's stuff while we were goddamn in Hawaii, you fucking massive yeti bastard,

It was so considerate of you to keep your gloves and not get your dirty fingerprints all over the apartment. Likewise, it was enormously thoughtful of you to leave your gigantic footprint on our couch so we would have something to remember you by. I hope you enjoy the XBOX 360 and the games; we had had it for about three months, and you must have assumed we were getting bored with it. Mark is touched that you took the time to rummage through all of his possessions; he's been collecting those video games since he was about twenty, and I know he wanted them to have a good home. Of course, without the fifty or so games you took the PlayStation 2 was useless, so it was really very considerate for you to take it with you and save us the trouble of finding a place for it in the closet, which, by the way, looks so much better now that you've taken everything out of it and stacked it on the floor. The one downside is that your new laptop needs to go to the shop for repairs, but I'm sure the trip there will pass really quickly while you're listening to your new iPod with your new headphones, playing your lovingly maintained new GameBoy Advance. Mark will be happy to recommed some songs for you, if you're a little lost. Oh, and what really touched me? The way that, after you rummaged through my nightstand, you carefully placed my vibrator on the bed, just to prove that you'd touched it. If you happen to stop by again, be sure and take that with you. I'm done with it. Good luck at the pawn shops, and I hope that you can score yourself some really nice crack, you know, the good stuff, the kind your Mom used to cook down.

Hoping you get raped in prison,

Emily

Dear Island of Maui,

Wow, that sure was fun. You'll have to tell me where you got your breathtaking tropical beauty, because I'd love to pick some up for the apartment. We have a little extra room now, and I think a black sand beace would look great in the office. iI loved what you did with the verdant, mist-shrouded mountains, and the miles and miles of perfect beaches and sparkling oceans were a really inspired touch. Initially I wasn't quite sure about all those twisty mountain roads you sent me down, and those one lane hairpin turns definitely gave me pause, but really, the heart-stoppingly lovely views and the awesome volcanic crater more than made up for it. (Mark especially enjoyed the parts where it looked we were going to plummet to our deaths. Kudos!) Tell the whales that how happy we were that they decided to swing by; all that leaping has really paid off, their flukes look great. (Oh, and just a quick aside to that fish I met snorkelling: Call me. We can make it work.)

Thanks for a great time,
Emily

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

On Ambition, Reader Response, and the Flawed Western Calendar

My beloved readers have already pointed out some flaws in my ambitious blogging plan. One, from my cherished boyfriend, is that this is a leap year and there will be 366 days of Emily, not 365. The other, from a foreign correspondent, is that while keeping a blog is all well and good, the minutae of my existence as a non-profit employee/resident of upstate New York might not be the stuff of which great and epic tales are spun. My initial response was going to be, hey, fuck you, which is my initial response to most things, but then I actually took stock of my day so far.
Here's what I've done:

Woke up late.
Lost keys.
Went to work.
Did boring non-profit stuff.
Thought about lunch.

Clearly, I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake. While there are the occasional moments of wild excitement (I throw small change at Mark's head, something breaks at work, there's a lot of snow), if I had to look back at 2008 and realize my most thrilling moment was when, say, I paid off my credit card bill, I'd probably shoot myself My foreign correspondent suggested that a more interesting blog would the adventures of Remy LeBouef, Rock Detective, as he solves the great mysteries of Rock, which is completely true, it would be way more interesting. It would also require an enormous amount of creative effort on my part, moreover a lot of discliplined creative effort, which I've failed notably at in the past, and so I've decided to take him at his word and do it. In addition to this one. I've always been interested in the idea of keeping a diary as a completely different person, and I think that I'm going to start one, in which Remy will be making cameo appearances.

But Emily, you say, aren't there people who do things like that online already, except they're pretending to be Eowyn of Rohan's twin sister or Han Solo's clone or something? Aren't they sort of terrifying and lame and don't you make fun of them at any available opportunity? Are you also going to start dressing up as anime characters on the weekend? And what makes you think you're going to be able to sustain an interesting narrative over the course of an entire leap year and still keep up with this original, boring blog? And can I read it?

And the answers are, yes, of course they are and of course I do, fuck you, I have no idea at all, and no, not until I've done a couple and it doesn't suck, or at lease, sucks interestingly. I'm not getting any younger, and if I don't start pushing myself as a writer now I'll wake up one morning a deeply depressed forty-something with five 10 year-old unfinished plays.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

On Resolutions and the Nightmare of History

Blogging with Emily: A History

2001: Motivated almost exclusively by peer pressure and the desire to impress Brian Hitselberger (?!?) Emily starts her first blog over at Diaryland. There are a few a shining moments of pith and wit, but she unfortunately abandons it to focus her energies more completely on smoking pot in cars and freaking out about her studies, thereby depriving herself of what could have been a highly lucrative career as an internet superstar.

2003-4: In a fit of emo passion, Emily starts another blog over at Livejournal. She manages to update it regularly for approximately one month, but then chooses to devote herself instead to ill-advised romantic relationships, which she tragically does not write about.

2005: After moving back home to Rhode Island, Emily decides to launch herself back into creative writing by starting yet another blog at Livejournal. She manages to post one sentence, once, and spends the rest of the year gaining weight and temping.

2008: Emily shakes off the blogging failures of her past and starts afresh, this time at Blogspot.

And this time, there's a goal. My New Year's resolution is 365 posts in 365 days. This time I think it will actually work, based on the following reasons:

1.) I have a job which requires me to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a days, 5 days a week, and an extraordinary capacity for procrastination.

2.) I have honed my ability to make myself feel guilty to a razor-like edge - see: going to the gym.

3.) I'm linking this to Facebook, so maybe someone will actually read my brilliant and sparkling posts, and maybe the fear of public shame will keep me from making an ass out of myself. (Not that this has ever worked before.)

4.) I'm...more mature and self-discliplined???