i should be writing my movie review IF NOT starting on all that homework i need to get done this week. but having just watched five episodes of season II sex and the city — the fetish one, the pastry chef one, the jon bon jovi one … why do i have friends who encourage me in these fixations? — i’m more in the mood to post. again. besides, it’s shira’s birthday. when i’m 77, sedate in my vibrating sharper image rocking chair, i will retain a fuzzy recollection that shira was born on 11/11. shira, my most neurotic friend, and one of the people in my past who most shaped my personality.

she introduced me to the girls who became indispensible friends. but she also encouraged me to sing at the top of my voice, think i was pretty, try out for shows, not take rejection to heart, and write. while the other kids we knew in sixth grade were busy being sixth graders, shira thought of herself as perennially thirty. then, in seventh grade, while the other kids started playing around with relationships, she and i contented ourselves being obsessed with each other. we bickered, we compromised, we played basketball and walked an invisible dog, just like a couple. our parents even hated each other.

then, just like that, it ended. she fell in love with a guy who could do everything for her that i could and be someone whose fingers she could suck in public. i was devastated. she broke my heart as much as any stupid middle skool boy could have, and besides, i didn’t have a stupid middle skool boy to distract me. that was when i got bitter about love. of course, my bitterness was compounded when the next best friend i had did the exact same thing, only with a boy that we both had a crush on.

it worked out all right. i developed a healthy thin-layer of cynicism, and she ended up changing skools — cuz by the time she looked up from her consuming relationship shira realized she hadn’t just lost me but everyone. in fact, we all learned something from shira: as kahlil gibran advises, we have relationships now with spaces in our togetherness. she goes to columbia now and is dating (i hear) some guy who’s attending penn law in the fall.

Full of controversy until I retire my jersey, till the fire inside dies and expires at thirty — eminem

i saw his movie yesterday in philly, and by “his” i mean nominally curtis “L.A. Confidential; Wonder Boys” hanson’s: 8 Mile. for the first time i understood his appeal. it’s not just that he’s hot, in that pouting, Raphael-cherub, boiling-beneath-the-surface way; or that he’s talented (he wrote the raps and they’re pretty impressive). he’s compelling, like james dean is compelling, because like ol’ jd, you half expect him to explode while you’re watching. he seems to expect no less of himself.

the film reminded me a lot of saturday night fever — the working-class kid who’s set just a little apart from his friends, who has a special talent that’s going to boost him seriously above them and the rest of his violent world any day now. snf made travolta a star; this starts with one pre-assembled. and the fact that 8 mile may be a glorified version of the adolescence of a particularly angsty homophobic misogynist makes this even more of a draw. people like me, who have never listened to hip hop in their lives, are streaming into these theater to see whether their and the media’s judgements of eminem are justified, rationalized, or dismissed.

political baggage aside, 8 mile is a good film. it’s well-directed, well-scripted, self-aware, gritty and grim. it elicits a serious respect for its central medium, not just as performed by our generation’s elvis, and some for our generation’s elvis, too. if nothing else, he can rhyme and he can perform.

on an entirely different note, co|motion met our girls yesterday for the last time until january. i went straight from quilt-making with them (each square a representation or homage to an admired woman) to presenting, with sarah, our proposed production of an ideal husband to the drama board. it’s possible that she and i will be putting on the main stage production of the spring. our actors will need to insult each other wittily and confidently too. i guess that’s a respected skill that never goes out of style.

after one final swandive yesterday, my emotions seem to have leveled out. a week of ups-and-downs isn’t too awful, especially when you consider that this is apparently a seasonal pattern of mine. i celebrated my rediscovered chillness by watching an inordinate number of SATC episodes and the always-wonderful empire records, and then drinking wine and playing Taboo with an eclectic group of people in kross’s room.

this has been the strangest season for bunnying. who would expect all that bleakness to be conducive to all this love?

i can’t stand either of these men and they’re both coming to campus. bizarrely and tiresomely, both are jewish and both of the students quoted as bringing them — one ultra-left the other ultra-right — are jewish too, so the entire article centers around jewish infighting.

we’re not the only minority group clawing each others’ eyes out via the phoenix either. last week’s “coming out issue,” including an interview with a friend of mine, sparked a furious response among people in his community. even people i thought he was friends with hit the high-ground running. i’ve never even heard the word “integrationist” before: what does it even mean and why is it so bad? so what if some queer folks are also mainstream in other respects? i understand that for some, not making waves would be a denial of identity. but why should that be mandated for everyone?

moreover, i think, someone’s vision of “a straight couple and a queer couple sharing a white picket fence” isn’t meant to be taken literally. it’s a reference to MLK’s oft-quoted speech about little black children and little white children; it’s also a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “american dream”. what it means is that someone visualizes a state of normalcy between people of different orientations. i don’t think the person who voices that vision deserves being called “racist, classist, transphobic, and ablist, to name a few.” some people in the world are meant to be radicals, “anti-integrationists” and whatever other labels they choose. but to vilify others who don’t make that choice, especially in such a public space — and especially when you know from experience that the person in question is very much none of the above — , seems short-sighted, sanctimonious, and cruel.

so much drama on campus. tonite’s also the showing of bamboozled, advertised widely as the antidote to the dangerously naive action perpertrated by billy craig. he’s become the fall guy for the flaws in everyone’s racial consciousness. if i knew him personally, at this point i might feel sorry for him too. maybe i’m just growing conservative and soft in my old age.

i know it’s arbitrary and abstract, fleeting and meaningless; that its importance is time-specific and by the time i’m 70 i’ll have forgotten 70 times over; that it pales seriously in comparison to the republicans taking over the senate; that its ability to determine my intelligence, let alone my destiny, is dubious — but it still feels so damn good to get an A.

also, to shake us out of our melancholy, sarah c. and i have decided to put on a production of an ideal husband. i’ll direct, she’ll stage manage, we’ll co-produce. together we’ll draw wit like blood from the turnip that is a swarthmore winter.

support

from my mother’s email, re: my previous entry:

“November can be difficult. Peek around corners until you find a prompt. Alternatively, a good movie, a good haircut, a pretty walk through the fall

leaves (if you’re warmly dressed) or just a good cry can be very cleansing. I hope things pick up soon, tho. You’re young and beautiful and healthy and

the world is your oyster, even if you don’t feel that way at the moment. 🙂 Love. Mom.”

and from an old friend’s:

“oh honey,

1. stop being ross with the quotes.”

i wish i weren’t so damn sad. it seems ridiculous: this is still the best semester i’ve had so far, even if my interest in my classes is waning. i love living where i do, among people. something’s always happening — granted, often behind a closed door and not something you want to walk in on, but it’s college: it’s wonderful. it’s just sadly also november, when it really hits home that it won’t be warm again for six months; that you can’t frolic so you should probably work though you don’t want to, you slacker; that, aside from holidays, there isn’t much to look forward to. i would do something spectacular if i could only think of what, and if everyone around me weren’t as mopey as i am. (or lovestruck, but if you’re mopey, that can be worse.)

happy birthday to my brother who turned 22 in new orleans. where better? i hear the weather’s lovely there during the winter. maybe i should pack everything and go. who needs a Watson to see the world?

everybody wants a little sweetness, and nothing wrong, nothing wrong, nothing wrong …

when did i get so competitive? rockstar matt rubin made a face at me at sharples today: “you didn’t go somewhere you would have otherwise gone cuz you were afraid your ass might have been grabbed?” sadly it’s true. for the same reason i skipped two classes over the course of the week, spent a ridiculous number of evenings in my dorm and the bulk of two consecutive days in the city. not that i didn’t have fun both times. yesterday stef-eliz and i met up w/ ben and ran into brian, my favorite sophomo, and we hung out at millenium queer coffee, shopped buffalo exchange, ate vegan pizza and bantered. a super nice swat van driver took us home, chatting cheerfully the whole time about his nuclear family and how he and his wife got together in high skool and have stayed in swarthmore their entire lives and spend their free time together. “it’s almost like we’re best friends, not husband and wife.”

then, as we deboarded, a figure draped in scarves threw herself at me, grabbed my ass, and then chased down elizabeth and after a much more extended struggle killed her too. that was it. total anticlimax — i didn’t even get those fightin’ endorphins to soothe me. instead ben took me to his art building and sketched my feet. i didn’t want to get up this morning and have to face a day without the distraction of competition but he made me.

darling liz offers comfort:

Lizplus: i think of it this way, you have to be rejected 42 times before you can win

ishtar42: really?

Lizplus: that is what im going for

ishtar42: huh.

Lizplus: yeah i think so

ishtar42: interesting

Lizplus: i mean if you won right off the bat then you wouldnt appreciate it was much

ishtar42: maybe not

Lizplus: so i dont get upset when i get rejected i just think of it as getting closer to my quota

wisdom. meanwhile i think i’ll get some videos from the library i no longer have to be scared to walk to and wallow.

all i want to do is sing the saddest song, and if you would sing along, i will be happy …

on campus is scary. i escaped yesterday into the city for bowling for columbine and lovely msbecca. we filled our stomachs with indian food, then carried them over to cosi and essentially paid for warmth. once i made it back to my room, i didn’t leave again, opting instead for hanging with eliz-and-stef, in matching pastel pjs. the ASSmaster emailed all of us to declare the five finalists, of which eliz and i are two. but now the rules are different. now dorms are no longer safe spaces. lock that door!

darling kross, in apology for setting me up to be killed, made me a construction-paper cd carrying case with burned copies of belle&sebastian, billy bragg, beth orton, eliott smith, and the hedwig soundtrack. it will stand even if nothing else good comes out of this crazy game.

the phoenix this week bordered on ridiculous. two articles on a spread read “beer healthier than milk, PETA says” (featuring an actual scientist verbally hitting his head against a wall) and “sperm is an anti-depressant.” the second, which argues that women who have unsafe sex are happier than their more cautious counterparts, was an import from a new york paper. while i couldn’t track down the original article, i did find an intelligent, amusing reaction to it. the idea that women, after reading the phoenix, will throw all their condoms in the trash, shout “happiness over health!” and embrace their new protection-free, giddy lifestyle, would infuriate me — except that i’m so damn well-skooled in the ideas of natural selection.

happy halloween, folks. and if you happen to be someone i care about, please, choose milk.