We're Bringin' Sexy Back

My professor in my Oscar Wilde and Henry James class was talking about how in the Victorian era, England was disgusted with the "excesses" of the French revolution, symbolized by the bare-breasted Statue of Liberty.

Then he asked, just rhetorically, what the modern day equivalent of this would be. One of the women in my class said, "Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl."

Oh yes, it is SO good to be among my like kind.

Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!

First of all, I just have to admit that I simply don't have as much time as I used to to post on this blog, and I also don't have as much time to write good blog posts. I think that some of the posts I wrote when this blog was in its infancy, particularly the one about the theramin documentary and the other one about when I had my wisdom teeth taken out (see September and October of 2006) are of much higher quality. You would think that with all the reading and writing I do in my everyday life that I would have become a better writer. Alas, this is not the case. Perhaps I am better at analyzing the subtleties of Othello, but otherwise my skills are not very practical.

In my classes, I'm always amazed at how geeky, socially awkward folks may not be able to introduce themselves very well but have poignant analyses of A Christmas Carol. This is the joy of being an English major. I wonder if Computer Science majors have the same joy. I've heard that those folks are just annoying all the way around, but this is mere hearsay.

I did want to share this uncanny experience that happened to me last weekend. Since I'm horribly out of shape too, I decided to go on a long walk in my beautiful little town of Moss Beach. My landlord told me about a great walk along the crest of the hills that border the ocean. Here is a photograph:


So I walked and walked hoping to find a nice, dry place to sit down and read A Christmas Carol for my Victorian Afterlife class. Near the end of the trail, I saw this bench, which overlooked a beach where a few people who managed to teeter down the steep cliff were surfing.


Not a bad place to do some homework, eh? I decided I'd sit on the bench and read a few chapters about Ebeneezer Scrooge's transformation from a stingy, cold miser into a philanthropic, jolly, Christmas-ian with goose drippings on his chin. As you may remember, this change is engendered by his visits by three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. However, these ghosts are preceded by a visit from the grave from his old business partner, Jacob Marley.

So I went to sit down and this is what I saw:


Can you believe it?!?

(By the way, the title of this post is a quote from A Christmas Carol.)

O O O O that Shakespearian Rag!

Well well well.

My semester is officially finished. I just clicked "send" on the last of my papers. This last one was a doozy. At one point I compare Othello to a woman on her menstrual cycle. Oh, I'm not kidding. At least it was in the footnotes. Twenty-two pages of me trying to prove that Iago is the most honest character and Desdemona is a hussy.

Boy am I thirsty.

Hey, did you know that the term "the beast with two backs" is from Othello?

From My Favorite Online Comic Strip

Here's the link, cause it's kinda hard to read it this way:

http://www.catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=536

New Year's Resolutions

Good New Year's Resolutions are things you want to provide for yourself but need a little structure and discipline to do. I would never dream of making a New Year's Resolution that I wasn't excited about. Having once been an uber-ascetic Mormon, I'm over masochistically willing myself to do shit. I think if you really want to do something, it doesn't have to hurt.

My New Year's Resolutions for 2007 were:

1. Learn to play Leonard Cohen songs on the guitar
2. Save $1000
3. Study Korean or Spanish
4. Go to Hawaii

Here's how they panned out:

1. LC songs

After learning "Lady Midnight," "Famous Blue Raincoat," and "Take This Longing," I spent the rest of the year trying to train my left index finger to bar the F chord. What a bitch. I love Leonard Cohen and it's comforting to play these songs. It's especially nice to be able to play a song that's slightly more difficult than what I've been playing. I used to play everyday, but since I started grad school, I don't really have time to do that anymore. However, I did write two new songs this year, and I'm very happy about that. For about four years, I couldn't write a song and it was starting to drive me nuts.

2. Save $1000

For someone my age, $1000 isn't really enough savings. However, I'm notoriously terrible with money and I figured I'd start somewhere. I just wanted to have enough to be able to fix my car if something broke or pay my rent if I lost my job. I did save the money, but it about killed me. I kept it in an envelope on my desk (if it were in the bank, I'd spend it), and whenever I'd hit another hundred, I'd cross off another number. I kept having to take money out and put it back, whiting-out my progress and marking it up again. It really shouldn't have been so hard, because I was earning more than enough to live on.

However, when I realized I might be able to move to the ocean, I got my ass in gear and kept track of every penny I spent for an entire month. I realized that almost a fourth of my income was going to taking other people out to eat. I curbed that I re-budgeted and managed to save a bit more. This money came in handy when my Dad died. I had enough money to cover my plane ticket and the income lost when I didn't work.

3. Study Korean or Spanish

I ended up devoting the summer to studying Korean. I was working at the Korean center and everyday during lunch I would sit next to someone and ask them questions. I also had two private Korean students, so before and after our lessons, I'd ask them questions. I didn't learn basic stuff; I still can't say "I'm hungry" or even have a basic conversation. However, I can pretty much read the language out loud (though I don't know what I'm reading) and I can write too. When I lived in Oakland, I lived near the Korean section, and I spent a large portion of the summer walking around. I'd try to read out the Korean signs. One day I realized that one of the signs I saw everyday said "Karaoke." That was pretty cool.

I thought I might go teach English in Korea this Summer to help pay off part of my student loans. Also, as a part of earning a PhD, you have to study two other languages. I thought it'd be pretty cool to study Korean, since I love what little I know of the culture so much. However, I talked with some professors about this, and although apparently there are a lot of Korean scholars who write about modernism, ultimately romance languages are the way to go. So next semester I'm doing an advanced Spanish grammar review and I think I'm going to go to Chile this summer to teach English.

4. Go to Hawaii

Well I saved up enough money to go (in a separate envelope from my basic savings). I researched the trip and budgeted it and everything. I knew I wouldn't be able to go in 2007, but I was pretty sure I could swing it during the winter break in January. Then my Dad died and everything went all to hell. I deposited the last of that money in the ATM yesterday to pay my January rent. Even though I didn't get to go to Hawaii, I'm very glad I had saved that money.

However, I did get a fortune cookie last week that I shared with my grandmother, Nanny. It said "You will be crossing warm waters soon for a fun vacation." And there's a likely possibility that I'll be going on a road trip in the next few weeks down South of the border and swimming at Rosarita beach. We'll see.

So not bad for these New Year's Resolutions. There were other things I wanted to get done this year, like quitting smoking and making straight A's, but I didn't make them into New Year's Resolutions because I don't like being an over-controlling bitch with myself. I figured they'd be extras. I did manage to quit smoking and it was for good, but I claimed at the time "I quit, and I've really quit, but I just know that if something bad happened to someone in my family, I'd start again." When my Dad went into the ICU, I went to the corner store. Smoking is retarded, but for some reason it's one of the only ways I know how to get through difficult times.

I had to take an incomplete in one of my classes, but I did make A's in the other two. Not A minuses, A's, and I'm beaming.

My New Year's Resolutions for 2008:

1. Write an individual letter to 50 different people I don't see enough
2. Go kayaking (preferably in the SF Bay at night)
3. Go teach English someplace awesome this Summer
4. Scatter my Dad's ashes into the Pacific Ocean off the old helicopter landing pad in the Marin Headlands

There are other things I would like to do too, like figure out how to do yoga and be a grad student, make straight A's, and yes, quit smoking, but we'll just have to see how that all pans out.

2007 was equally as good as it was shitty. I'm too shy to tell you ALL of the good and bad things that happened to me, but life is certainly dramatically different than it was a year ago. And for some strange reason, It's so much easier just to wake up and move through life than it ever has been. I'm constantly grateful for that.

A Holiday Query

You know the turducken? It's a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey? A beautiful example of how American excess can lead to art. I would definitely want to sample it, though I want to apologize in advance to my animal friends. I wish they could make a vegetarian version.

But if a tofu turkey is called a Tofurkey, what would a tofu turducken be called?

They Say One Was a Sailor

So my brother posted on his blog today that Dan Fogelberg died. He was one year younger than my Dad. My brother posted the lyrics to his favorite Dan Fogelberg song, "Forefathers." Just click here real quick and check it out.

Um, why did this post make me cry? It's Dan Fogelberg.

It reminds me of my Mom listening to this song in her car late at night driving back from the grocery store when she was super into genealogy.

Forefathers belong in faded black and white pictures. They have big beards and nobody except old people knew them. I don't want my Dad to be a forefather. I just want him to still be my regular old father.



I remember thinking that that song was off because those of us who don't have children don't become forefathers. I was wrong, though, because I'm Marley and Jack's Aunt Susanna. And my spinster Aunt Madge, my grandmother's sister, whom I would consider believing in an afterlife for just so I could ask her if she ever had sex, is certainly one of my forefathers.

I doubt I will be a spinster though, and if I end up with someone who is neither selfish, lazy, nor sexist, I might even consider popping one or two out. Consider. I do have excellent, sexy genes.

Now that I'm part of the dead-parent club (we have patches), I hear that many people, especially those who don't believe in harps and bubblegum clouds, find comfort in feeling their parent's presence in themselves. "Though the generations wander, the lineage survives."

I am quoting "forefathers" to prove a point. I have become a monster.

***

Study Break, Wait, Where's my Cardigan?

I finished my Freud class yesterday. Now I can go back to using psycho-babble without fear of infamy. I can throw around fetish, projection, resistance, and sublimation just like I used to when I didn't know what the hell they really meant. My Freud class was alright, but we never really questioned his the authority of his giant phallus. I think I sub-consciously resisted this throughout the semester by drawing curve after french curve in the margins of my paper. Freud isn't what you think his is, though. He's not an asshole, just a pessimist. My main beef with him was that he admitted he wasn't trying to make people happy; he just wanted them to be normally unhappy like everyone else. That's so black-turtleneck-coffee-shop. I like kittens and rainbows.

I celebrated last night by watching a few episodes of the American version of the Office and eating too many cookies and an entire chocolate bar. I can tell I'm stressed out when I eat too many cookies, can't sleep even though I'm tired, and buy $50 Betsey Johnson cashmere tights that I can't afford because they have hearts on them(!).

I had a dream last night that I worked in an office and it was just me and bunch of men. We were doing some sort of team building exercise that required us to be wearing work out clothes. One of the guys was wearing a Hooters shirt. I told my boss very forthrightly, "This is discrimination. It's sexual harassment. I will not tolerate it, and I think to make it up to me all of the men should take off their shirts and serve me."

12 pages down, 40 to go! Onward Ho!

I hereby do solemnly swear:

Today I have made a solemn promise to myself and to my fellow human beings. As my friends, family, and sympathetic subjects, I ask you to support me as I stalwartly uphold this solemn promise for the rest of my life. Should I deviate from this oath, I ask you to hold me accountable and take punitive action, including possible physical punishment, as recourse. If a person's word is meaningless, where lies the fabric of our great society? What can we rely on if not the solemn vows of a strong-hearted woman with sturdy hips?

I solemnly swear that I will NEVER EVER EVER title anything I ever write, including books, short stories, journal articles, crappily written term papers, even blog posts, with ANYTHING in half parentheses signifying double meaning. You will never see any "'World and Time': On the (De)Construction of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'" or "Feminist Rewritings of Early Modern Message Books: The (R)evolution of Desire" or "'What Dreams Are Made Of': Problems with Miranda and Caliban's (In)Equality in Shakespeare's The Tempest" or "'Met Him Pike Hoses': (Trans)Migration in Early Twentieth Century Ireland."

I also pledge that, no more than 5 times in my entire academic career will I identify an absence-presence myself, unless I am citing another author.

This I do solemnly swear, on the 6th of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, in the ninth hour and fifty-seventh minute, Pacific Standard time. Amen.

I got herbs and spices in my stomach

I love Vic Chesnutt. He's one of the best song writers. Sometimes the bands he plays with are a little annoying, but usually if its just him, all is well. He's just so damn witty in the way that Southern folks are best at. And like a good Southerner, he can rhyme "epoch" with "got" and almost any vowel together. Mr. Chesnutt's been in a wheelchair since he was 18 and he writes songs making fun of people who patronize him for being so brave. And also like a good Southerner, the song isn't angry; it just makes them look like idiots. Chesnutt has a song about a eunuch who isn't one and who takes advantage of his job position to the delight of a whole harem. He has a song with the lyric "cotton briefs between her cheeks." One of my favorites is a song about how he should have died when he got into a terrible car accident when he was 18 that put him in the wheelchair he's in now. Part of the lyrics are:

"I should have been buried long ago
But they electric shocked me though
I oughta be pushing up the pine straw
But people can't die anymore

I'm embalmed
I'm a mummy
I got herbs and spices in my stomach
And I should be a dirty piece of solid red ground
But because of some cure they found
I'm still around
In amongst the millions
Cause people can't die anymore"



The song below is my little theme song for the next three weeks. I have a two presentations, two 20 page papers, and a 10 page paper due. Happy Christmas. God bless us all, everyone. Bring me some figgy pudding.


Deadline, it ain't moving
Deadline, stiff as a board
Deadline, end is ensuing
But I gotta get something done done done, done done done soon.

Deadline, under pressure
Deadline, it's gonna snap
Deadline, serious semester
And I gotta get something done done done, done done done soon.

Deadline, down to the wire
Deadline, it's bumming me out
Deadline, I'm already tired
But I gotta get something done done done, done done done soon.

Listen to it here:

http://www.rhapsody.com/vicchesnutt/10683059_lefttohisowndevices/deadline/lyrics.html

Gone Daddy Gone

My father died. A week ago I flew home to Georgia and my family and I honored his wishes by taking him off life support. He ended up having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurological disorder that attacks your brain tissue; my Dad had every symptom. First you have insomnia, then psychosis. Eventually you can't see and you can't walk, you startle easily and your eyes track over empty space like you are watching a bird fly over your head. Finally, you can't breathe. There is no cure.

He died at 3:33 pm on Tuesday October 30th. Three three three. I'm 27.

My entire life I have always had a visual picture of my heart. The first time I ever fell in love, I saw my heart pierced with a needle, being sewn ever so slowly to him. When it ended, I saw the strings cut and slowly fall out. I've felt my heart swollen and pumping outside of my chest. I've felt it sick and black. I've felt a double ended arrow lodged in it. When I am in intense emotional pain, I often imagine something piercing the left side.

Right now I feel like someone has held a shotgun and blown out the left side of my chest. Or like there's some sort of ethereal mimicry of my real heart floating in an empty space.

Yes, I'm being dramatic, but for god's sake my father just died. This IS fucking dramatic. I don't know who I am writing this too, and I feel strange to be so personal, and there's a very real chance that I'll be misunderstood and people will think I am fucked up (which I'm not), but I just need to say some things and I don't want to write to myself or to one person.

I want to crawl up inside my father's chest and coil myself around his spine. I see him wherever I go; he's sitting across from me in class, he's on the other side of the student center, he's walking up the stairs from the bookstore. I think about him constantly. I want his body full of fat and organs and blood to sit in his chair and get up and walk across the room. I want his eyes to open and his arms to move. I want him to wear out his shoes and put something in his mouth and chew it. He used to hear me and write me emails and sleep. Now he is literally a pile of dust. I was with him when he died. My hand was on his forehead. Moments later, I looked at him and thought, "that's not my Dad." I don't believe in souls, but I do believe in life. My Dad's body was not him, but it was evidence that he existed. There was comfort knowing that his body existed.

My Dad was a star who held me in the sky like the earth and the sun hold the moon. Everything is different now.

I've faced difficult, heartbreaking shit at least a few times before. I know how to get through this, and I will. There are fires that refine you. This is an awful, beautiful, terrible, awesome beginning of the rest of my life. I have never loved my father as much as I do now. That is precious.

I don't believe in God. It's not my fault. If you do, pray for my mother who put her father in the hospital today, who has to go back to the hospital after she was there every day for six weeks. Pray for my brother who is trying his best to be a good father. Pray for my father's mother and father who buried their son.

If you own a copy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, put on track 5, the funeral procession, and think about how there's an uncanny feeling of freedom when the absolute worst thing happens.
I don't understand that. Let track 5 flow into this:

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she's a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun
All sing to say my dream has come

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And now we ride the circus wheel
With your dark brother wrapped in white
Says it was good to be alive
But now he rides a comet's flame
And won't be coming back again
The Earth looks better from a star
That's right above from where you are
He didn't mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

***
If you'd like more details, including my Dad's obituary and eulogy, go to my brother Mac's blog.

My Angel is a Centerfold

So, in case you've been in a coma (oh how darkly funny), I am obsessed with www.icanhascheezburger.com. This is a website for people who like cats; if you don't like cats, I'm sorry that life has proved so bitter and unfortunate for you. This is a website for people who like cats talking in bad grammar. It's Cute Overload mixed with Engrish. I kind of have a problem with this website: it's slightly less addicting than cocaine. How many brilliant essays on T.S. Eliot's Buddhist influence haven't I read because I have been reading "just one more page" of this:





I start to worry that Theo, my beloved cat, is getting jealous of me looking at other cats online. I tell him, "Baby, they mean nothing to me" and "They're just pictures" and "But you're real!" but he'll have none of it. I even made this piece of art to convey my utter devotion:



I mean, it's not like he doesn't rub up on other girls' legs. Sometimes he leaves and he goes out all night and doesn't come home until 2 in the morning. What am I supposed to do? Isn't it all just animal nature?

So I bought Theo a collar and a tag so that if he runs away, he'll find his way back home. Since he is originally from Alameda, and thus a sailor, I bought a nautical themed "beastie band" foam collar. The tag was a red heart, like my passionate, burning one for him. I put it on him one morning and he freaked out. He hid in the closet most of the day (which he never does) and cried ALL FUCKING NIGHT. It was like when your hijackers deprive you of sleep before they brainwash you. Finally, after several hours of epileptic spasms he managed to get it off, and I gave in. He wins. He can run around naked at the risk of getting lost and never being returned to me if it means he's happy.

I told my Mom this story and she jokingly suggested I get him an implant. I was like, "that's a good idea." They have those, you know. I came home tonight to this supreme manifestation of a mother's love:


That's Theo! And icanhascheezburger together! It's like when your wife takes sexy pictures of herself! Yay!

Stella Cathleen

Last night I had a dream about my Dad. I dreamed that my mother was telling me over the phone that something bad had happened to him and something else about what my oldest cousin Cathy was doing. I was in a house with clear glass tea cups and pink carpet. There were a few people I didn't know in the house with me: an old woman with a camping hat on and a tall, naked grad student girl. In my dream, my Mom told me that Cathy and Hannah, her daughter, (not the people in the house I was in!) had bought The Lake House (the house I grew up in, that my Dad and his Dad built when my Dad was a teenager, the house my Mom and Dad still live in) from Nanny and Papa, my Dad's parents. I was overwhelmed with sadness. I couldn't control my crying; I was moaning with grief. I was trying not to cry in front of the naked grad student girl and the lady with the camping hat, but I couldn't stop. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to ever go home.

The Lake House:

(Look Mac, the elevator is still off the porch!)

***
A few days ago, my Dad was transferred to Emory hospital in the psychiatric unit. The specialists there quickly realized that he had been having a gnarly reaction to the head drugs he had been prescribed initially. This was good news, because it meant that firstly, they knew what was wrong, and secondly, given time, he would recover.

This whole shenanigans has been going on for about six weeks now. I've been doing just fine with all of this. I'm doing my homework and I'm paying my rent and I'm not upset. To be honest, it doesn't quite seem real to me.

But life is mysterious and things are at work that we don't understand. For example, this.

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in the Buddhist principle that everything is interconnected. Literally, everything is made out of the same stuff. I am a collection of matter. I'm a wave in a body of water. Oh, don't roll your eyes; it's not a good time to be judgmental.

Things ARE at work that we don't understand. Remember my dream? Well, last night my Dad had an emergency and was put back into the ICU; not to be all melodramatic, but he could have died. Let's cut the shit: he stopped breathing; it's fucked up. And my cousin Cathy, who hasn't been to The Lake House in maybe a decade and lives two hours away, stopped by the house because her husband was buying some tires from some guy nearby. I see Cathy maybe once a year; I'm not even sure if her name is spelled with a "C" or a "K."

More than thirty years ago, my Dad woke up one night and smelled smoke. My Mom and he searched their apartment and, finding nothing, went back to bed. That night his sister's house burned down. She, her husband, and her two young children were unharmed. Cathy was one of those children. This story doesn't make sense, but I have to tell it.

This is a picture Stella Cathleen holding my brother:


Cathy went to see my Dad at the hospital. She's a nurse. She told my Mom that she feels my Dad is going to come out of this okay. How could I not believe?

I really have no control at this point

Just Look At His Eyes!

...Mkay?

My Dad is really, really, really sick. He's been in the ICU for at least 10 days now, in a half-catatonic state. One of his best friends came to see him and my Dad didn't even recognize him.

About a month ago, he started acting really weird. He was super anxious, paranoid, and kind of crazy. He stopped sleeping. He got so bad that he let my mom take him to a psychiatrist. My Dad is a Republican, Vietnam veteran, ex-football playing, Patton-loving, commie-hater. When we were kids, he would yell "front and center" to call us. He's practically an archetype. He's not the kind of man who goes to see a psychiatrist.

So the doctor diagnosed him as bipolar, in the midst of an "acute manic episode" and loaded him with drugs. Sleeping pills and some other stuff that's supposed to "level things off." He got worse and worse. At one point my brother and I thought he was faking because he was acting so absurd. I talked to him on the phone and he acted like someone who was very, very drunk and silly. He was concerned with how nicely the window of the car rolled up. I was pissed off.

Then he got worse. He started falling down, so they took him to the hospital and that's where he is now. They don't know what is wrong with him. They've done MRIs and tested him for everything except pregnancy. He's been looked at by a neurologist who told my mother he has no idea what is wrong with him. He told my Mom that maybe it was the drugs. My Mom said, "did they like fry his brain?" and the neurologist said "that's not the term we use."

Now I'm really pissed off. Most of my anger is blind and reactionary; I'm completely powerless and frustrated. But another chunk of it is directed at how doctors jack people full of drugs when they are mentally ill. I'm so fucking sick of it.

We all know that head drugs (and that should be their medical term) are helpful for a smidgen of the population. I have at least two friends who have been helped by them. I have countless other friends, however, who have been prescribed Prozac or Celexa or that other one because they were going through a normal, early-to-mid twenties existential crisis.

The Summer after I left the church I moved home and lived with my parents. I got into a funk, which is to be expected seeing as how I had just made a huge, life-altering decision. There were other factors, too, which I'm not going to go into, that contributed to me being depressed. I talked to my family doctor and she gave me a two month supply of Celexa samples she'd surely gotten from some pharmaceutical sales rep, a six-month prescription, and the name of a therapist. I never called the therapist and I never saw the doctor again.

I took it on and off for maybe two years. I don't know whether or not it helped; nobody ever really knows what works or doesn't. I do know that after two years, right after I finished school, I started feeling really, really, really fucked up. Crazy awful terrible bad. I really wanted to die, like every minute of every day for months. I went to New York for a weekend (tickets were cheap; it was November 2001) and sat for hours and watched these kids play soccer in Central Park and I couldn't understand how they could just laugh and be happy. I got to this point where I decided that if I were going to die, I would want to do it sober, so I stopped taking the medicine. And to my surprise, a fog lifted off of me. I remember sitting in my grandpa's living room and thinking about how much my family loves him and how valuable his life is to all of us and how that must also be true for me.

About six months after that, I was reading and expose of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in Adbusters magazine. One of the side effects that the makers of Prozac (and other SSI inhibitors) have successfully played down is akathisia, or the sudden unexplained desire to die. This quote is from wikipedia:

Ironically antipsychotic drugs are many times prescribed as “mood stabilizers” but then have the opposite intended effect, which often leads to increased doses further escalating the symptoms when the intent was to ameliorate the symptoms.

Akathisia affects up to 10% of people who take Prozac (and presumably, other SSI inhibiting drugs). That's one in every ten. After reading this article, I realized that that was probably what had happened to me. It was healing to know that I was not innately crazy and fucked up, but it also pissed me off.

My Mom was given head drugs for a short period of time in the mid-80s. The doctor didn't tell her that they were addictive and she went through hellacious withdrawal symptoms. My mother's mother's personality changed completely when she started taking Lithium in the mid 60's. As a part of Kaiser's stop-smoking program, I took anti-anxiety head drugs a few years ago and also had a bad experience with them (mainly just a lot of crying).

I'm not crazy. My mother isn't crazy. My grandmother, both of them, aren't crazy. My friends aren't crazy (even the ones who think they are). None of us are fucking crazy. We're human beings who, as we move through life, experience inexplicable ups and downs. We are irrational, sensitive, quirky people who are artists and writers and musicians and cupcake bakers who have problems adapting to a world that wants us to iron and check our voice mail and have perky tits.

If someone lives in a cold damp house and smokes Marlboro Reds and doesn't wear a scarf
and eats frozen pizza and drinks too much and doesn't sleep, she is going to have a cold all the time. And if she goes the doctor, the doctor will give her antibiotics or tell her to get some Robitussin. And if she's really sick, she might really actually need antibiotics or Robitussin. But she also needs to take care of the situation that caused the cold in the first place.

So my Dad is really really sick, but I have no idea what he needs to get better. Obviously, drugs aren't the solution. This sucks.

Men Whose Heads Grow Beneath Their Shoulders

Disclaimer: This post is not for those who are sensitive to sickly-sweet-goody-goody-girl-sickness. If you become nauseous, click here

So, I have a whole new look, check it out:


I just have to say that I *love* grad school so much. I *love* all the work I have to do. I *love* that I have to read things that are almost too hard to understand. I *love* all the underlining and little stars in the margins. I *love* finishing my homework. I *love* it when my Freud class, my T.S. Eliot class, and my Colonialism class all allude to The Tempest and I had read three acts of it the night before. I *love* spending hours and hours reading everyday for days at a time.

I feel like those new mothers who go back to work and everyone tells them how it must be so nice to be out of the house and among and the living and they're all "I JUST WANT TO STAY HOME WITH MY BABY." I feel like that about T.S. Eliot.

I mean, I get to study weird pictures from the 15th Century from some book that some guy wrote who travelled god knows where and came back and told everybody that people out there looked like this:

I mean, what the fuck!?!

It should be easy for a man who's strong. . .

My friend Audrey is a bitchin' photographer and she took these pictures of me in my old kitchen the day before I moved. These are taken on REAL FILM like the dinosaurs used to use! You can tell because, in the second photo just like Cindy Crawford my beauty mark is on the other side. Unlike Cindy Crawford, I had mine put into my face by 400-pound sadist at Mom's Body Shop on Haight street.

Her web address is: http://www.audreyjones.net (the hyperlink thing isn't working, sorry)





If you get the allusion in the title of this post, post it in the comments and I'll mail you something cool.

Hypocrite Lecteur! --mon semblable,--mon frére!

So my brother, whose blog I'm copying, really, posted today about right-wingers who are afraid of all the "godless pinko commies" in higher education. The post is here: http://wuapinmon.blogspot.com/2007/09/liberal-bias-in-higher-education.html

My brother just finished his doctorate in Spanish Literature and right now he's scraping out a living as an Assistant Professor in some god-forsaken (or infested, depending on how you look at it) town in rural South Carolina where you have to drive 17 miles to go to a Shoney's. His male students are athletes and his female students were heavily influenced by the Spice Girls and Paris Hilton...and not ironically ("Whaaat?"). Let's generalize, shall we?

For those of you who just landed, I used to be Mormon. My brother, despite his high level of intelligence, still is (comments are welcome!). Unlike me, my brother was not the hairshirt-wearing-fascist-masochist-type Mormon that I was [see footnote 1]. He swore, he watched rated "R" movies, he skipped church sometimes, and he didn't tape moments of silence over the swear words in his Pearl Jam records. This, and the inherent patriarchy of the church (really, comments are welcome!) are, in my opinion, why he's still Elder Williams and I'm drinking coffee and beer MIXED TOGETHER. [Please see footnote 2].

Mac's post is interesting because he describes the epiphany he had on his mission where he realized that, although he thought he wasn't judging people, he was, and that there are a variety of ways to be ethical and moral in the world. One testament to his character and his intelligence (take note, there are only about four) is that, on his mission, he questioned whether or not the way he had chosen was best. That's pretty damn brave of him.

The point of his post is that if one has a set of values, or teaches one's children a set of values, those values are weak if one cannot participate in the world. In other words, conservative Christians who seek to isolate their children because they're afraid of the "bad" influence of society are really insecure about their values to begin with. I agree...BUT if I had a daughter reared on Our Bodies, Ourselves and whole grains, I'd fear for her safety if I put her in public school in Cherokee County, Georgia.

Our Mom and Dad (or Mama and Daddy, depending on how much I miss them) were big into values and ethics and morals. If our domestic scene were a play, the overall tone would be "self-righteous." And this was the case even before we converted. I believe part of the reason my Dad took so well to Mormonism [see footnote 3] was because of the impeccable moral structure [see footnote 4] and clear, well-defined codes of what is right and wrong. It's like the Jenny Craig diet where they give you all the food and help you along and, like the Jenny Craig diet, IT WORKS! I'm not being a sarcastic asshole here; if one wants to "get religion" (i.e. find purpose in one's life) and, especially, if one wants to orient one's life around the family, the Mormon church is excellent.

I agree with my brother. I agree that there are a variety of ways to live morally in the world. One of these, as shown especially well by my brother, is the Mormon church. Another one is showing kindness toward your friends by following this recipe:

* One pint Guinness Lager
* One shot espresso
* One scoop chocolate ice cream

Blend. Pour into a pint glass. Serve on tray with a Nat Sherman and a copy of The Delta of Venus. It takes all kinds.

* * *

[Footnote 1] Hairshirt: "A garment of rough cloth made from goats' hair and worn in the form of a shirt or as a girdle around the loins, by way of mortification and penance."

[Footnote 2] I should say here that our family converted to the church, staggeringly, between 1990-1994. I hold that those who were raised Mormon have different reasons for staying/leaving (such as, oh, belief). If you don't think I respect that, please reread this post.

[Footnote 3] I'm writing for the non-LDS person here. Mormons don't call themselves "Mormons." They call themselves "LDS," which is short for "Latter-day Saint" which comes from the name of the church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[Footnote 4] A definite case can be made against an "impeccable moral structure" in the church if one looks at the church's historical relationship (as opposed to its present-day one) with African-Americans. Also, one could argue that the church privileges men. However, one can also argue that church doctrine itself (as opposed to the people in the church) is not sexist and, in fact, privileges women. I'm on the slightly-disturbed-about-everything-concerning-Brigham-Young bandwagon (comments welcome!). Also, several people I know would never call anyone who knocks at their door wanting to convert them "moral." I don't agree or disagree.

Top Ten Ways to Avoid Doing Homework

1. Blog-posting
2. Taking really long showers (exfoliating, deep-conditioning, etc.)
3. Staring at the ocean and trying to count how many baby seals are in the water
4. Daydreaming about the raccoon that got into my apartment and how Theo defended us
5. Daydreaming about all the witty things I could say in class
6. Daydreaming about how someone would look with a pompadour
7. www.icanhascheezburger.com
8. Calling my grandpa or my Mama
9. Walking to the post office and listening to the one Neil Young song I own
10. Vacuuming in between the tiles with the hand-vacuum