holy mackerel! what happened?

as some of you may have noticed, i changed the layout a little bit. the intent is to increase the resemblance of my words to the words of that inimitable document, the Constitution. cuz maybe there’s a treasure map on the back that i can read with the aid of a hairdryer and some lemon juice! you never know.

who can tell me the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence anyway? i doodled through american history in high skool. my majoring in it in college didn’t help, since in college they don’t so much teach you history as teach you why the history you learned in high skool was racist, sexist, classist, and so not as cool as the postmodern theory they’re about to replace it with. i accepted that all previous history i’d learned was fatally flawed — easy enough since i doodled instead of learning it in the first place — but i started doodling again at the mention of theory. it’s lucky i didn’t actually have to demonstrate any knowledge to get that diploma.

wait, that’s not true: i had to pass a written and an oral honors exam with an expert in the field. i did pass, too, as i recall. huh. how about that.

one anecdote: this afternoon at the health food store, the painfully-indie-and-cute young woman working the register SHAMED me out of buying a luna bar. she said, and i quote, “that has sugar in it,” as though that meant “vampire spit and elephant feces and the blood of your children.” i was about to tell her to mind her own insulin and just take my money, but starry-eyed ben had already leapt over the counter and started making out with her. over their slurping, i apologized for even thinking of eating a luna bar and to redeem myself packed handfulls of raw quinoa into my mouth.

national treasure

guys, i don’t know if you read the comments. sometimes they’re priceless. i just discovered this nugget from a post earlier this month that attracted comments almost a week after it was posted. in that post, i called the blue states “bluer than blue” because i & they were & are morose. in response, a fella calling himself a conservative webzine tore me a new one:

National Journal @ 4:40PM | Nov 11th 2004|

Actually, the blue states aren’t “bluer than blue.” All the heavily Dem states, like Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, even Mass to a lesser extent, swung significantly to Bush since 2000.

In fact, Bush lost ground in not a single blue state this time around. He increased his share of the popular vote by up to 6-7 points in each one. Gore won Jersey by 16; Kerry took it by only 6.

Let’s stick to facts next time, shall we?

thank god i had a southern belle to come to my defense:

Angela @ 5:20PM | Nov 11th 2004| permalink

She meant people in blue states are SAD, stupid. Besides, can’t you just appreciate the charming turn of phrase?

ps. Sorry, Ester, for rushing to defend your blog’s honor . By the way, your last LJ entry excited me (was that man really wearing a bowtie?).

but national journal wouldn’t die quietly:

NJ @ 5:41PM | Nov 11th 2004| permalink

There goes the condescending elitism again.

Since when did the phrase “bluer than blue” become some sort of literary ingenuity?

Stupider than Stupid (apparently),

NJ

sometimes, i earnestly, passionately, and truly love the internets.

navel gazing

i wrote a story about a freshman at college, back when i was a freshman in college, whose dashboard, washboard, blackboard stomach started growing for no conceivable reason. nothing else about her increased and she wasn’t pregnant; indeed, she could find no explanation. although i never finished the story, i envisioned it as a kind of a nod to kipling. her stomach was a punishment, like the camel’s hump, visited upon her for her indolence, passivity, and general bad temper.

body as punishment. why did i give an otherwise thin girl a belly to teach her a lesson? it seems interesting to me now but i didn’t think about it overmuch then. i still had a belly fixation left over from high skool, when it honestly seemed like self-worth could be measured in waist inches. that was reason enough.

did anyone else catch the mannequin article in saturday’s nyt? it mentions that mannequin manufacturers are responding to a more diverse and heavier female population in making new “goddess” mannequins. now, color me skeptical of anything, except mists of avalon, that references “goddess.” but curvier mannequins sound like they couldn’t miss.

one designer (male) disagrees with me & goddess manufacturers: “There’s a difference between what people look like and what they want to look like,” he said. “They want to see what they’re trying to look like.” to which i reply, bullshit. i’m tired of seeing what i want to look like. tired and even bored. give me a sense in your store windows of how your clothes will actually look on a real person.

another designer (male) disagrees with the fact that the new mannequins have more of an jennifer lopez inspired ass: “It’s a little sexist,” he said. “It’s not creating an image of a woman as an elegant creature. It’s a little bit down and dirty, a little crass.” isn’t that AMAZING? creating a model of women more as they actually are makes them no longer “elegant.” it’s “crass.” it’s THE 21ST CENTURY, people! is elegant and miles above “down and dirty” still what we think the idea woman must be?

on the other hand, let’s not get carried away by how revolutionary the goddess is. she’s “still a discreet 34B-25-35 1/2. “It’ll remind you of the sexiness,” he said, if not actually show it in its full glory, but it is still bigger than his standard Size 4/6 model’s 32A-23-33.” holy shit. if 34-25-35.5 is crass, inelegant, and down-and-dirty, then what am i? what’s the average woman?

eve ensler, the v-chip queen herself, has moved up a few inches to belly territory. a new battlefield but i wouldn’t say a much safer one. i’m curious what she’ll do with it.

just kidding! leave the south alone

sometimes, when i was kid, a bus ride alone could make me nauseous. the lower skool nurse knew me well: i practically had a bed, not to mention kneeling space in her bathroom, reserved for when i arrived in her office at 8:05. sometimes i wouldn’t make it to her office. i recall vomiting miserably onto the shaky ground between my feet. i remember vomiting into one of those hardy skool hallway trash cans.

it was part motion sickness & part stress because yes, even as a nine year old i had the ability to work myself into a panic over the fact that i didn’t know what was going to happen over the course of the day. regardless, on the occasions when i did indeed throw up, my dad would pick me up and take me home, and nothing soothed me like marx brothers movies. we would watch them together and i laughed when he laughed until i no longer needed to take cues from him.

when i was in sixth grade and my first boyfriend told me he thought he might like someone else, i cried a little. then i watched the simpsons and forgot all about it.

in high skool, sometimes i had shooting pains in my stomach that i didn’t want to tell anyone about — god knows everyone already considered me fragile enough. jack nicholson movies worked better than pepto bismol. terms of endearment and chinatown were my belly’s personal favorites.

at swarthmore, when i didn’t want to think about swarthmore, it was sex and the city.

media is my pacifier. i can’t tell you how many books i’ve curled up in when i can’t stand what’s happening outside my window, or, worse, the thought of what might happen outside it tomorrow. lately i’ve found solace in massive doses of the west wing. this past thursday, when i had a Moment on my way to work, a Moment that connected my stomach, my throat, and the West 4th street subway station, i knew i had to get out into the open air, preferably Washington Sq. park; i knew i needed to calm down, clear my head, stop driving myself crazy worrying about all the stuff i was worrying about; and i knew that, once i walked home, west wing would be waiting for me to make it all okay.

also, i finished jonathan strange and mr. norrell, and it was marvellous. consider this yet another plug for escapist art. it’s the sort of thing that works particularly well & is particularly important when so many of the people you love, who you’re accustomed to being surrounded by, are so irretrievably far away.

forget movies …

actually, go ahead, foam at the mouth for a few minutes. it’s good for you.

escapism

i can’t think of anything i would like better than to discover that karl rove and karen hughes organized a subtle but monumental takeover of our electoral system and stole the election for bush, only to be discovered and disgraced in the aftermath. at the same time, i can’t hope for it, even as people continue offering evidence. what i can do? movies.

saved! left me a little disappointed this weekend. sure, it brought the funny, particularly in the first third. but the movie sets up this connundrum — christ-loving good girl gets pregnant trying to convince her christ-loving, good, and gay-inclined boyfriend to be straight — that it doesn’t do anything with. first it tries to pretend she didn’t know she could get preggers from sex simply cuz her skool had no sex ed. bullshit. then it pretends she could be in denial of her condition to such an extent that even when she has supportive friends and, ultimately, family, there’s never a conversation about options. okay, no abortion: fine. why is adoption never even discussed?

of course i liked its message. be tolerant! jesus loves freaks & of course we’re all freaks, even — especially — mandy moore. but i wish in the end it had been more citizen ruth and less full house.

this weekend was my grandfather’s unveiling. nothing could match the pathos of the funeral, but it was a uniquely striking experience to see the stone. afterwards the usual suspects regrouped at my house for falafel and politics. i’m better now. maybe everything will get better now.

can i get an AMEN?

how glad are we all that this week is over? jeezy creezy.

overheard on the E train:

WOMAN WITH BRITISH ACCENT: i made myself breakfast for the first time today.

MAN WITH HARD-TO-PLACE ACCENT: oh really?

WOMAN: yes. just toast. but i was very proud of myself.

i love the subway. sure, i’m a big fan of the red line in dc. less close to home, i’ve enjoyed the never-ending, impossibly-steep moscow subway escalators that feel like they’re taking you to hell and the budapest subway platforms where peasants hawk live fowl and yummy mushroom pastry. i’ve been delighted by the honor system in dutch and danish public transportation and, importantly, found both easy to navigate when less than sober. but the new york subway wins all the points. allow me to sing its praises.

first, everyone reads. not just the new york post. i’ve seen shakespeare and ann patchet, goethe and nietzsche, the wall street journal and mother jones. more people read on the trains in new york on a daily basis than in the entire state of mississippi.

second, it’s ideal fashion-watching time. it’s like flipping through a catelogue without having to waste energy turning pages.

third, priceless eavesdropping opportunities. see above.

i’m near giddy that the week is over. the farther we get away from this election the better. the sooner people stop debating whether or not john kerry was the right candidate, why “america hates us,” what a mandate means (WHITEmandate, is how i like to think of it), and what’s going to happen next, the for-damn-sure better. also, i think the phrases “red states” and “blue states” should be stricken from the record. it’s frighteningly simplistic and basically dismisses the existence of significant minorities. the last thing that democrats in arkansas or utah want, i imagine, is to be even more marginalized than they are.

yom huledet

the country celebrated my older brother’s very first entrance into this world on November 4, 1980 by electing a B-list actor with a beaming smile. it hasn’t gotten much better since.

november 4 is a very difficult birthday to have, especially if you’re a political person. my brother is. my whole family is, in fact. so every four years, right around his birthday, my family gets very excited before becoming thrilled or crushed. last presidential term, my brother got a reprieve, as the election results didn’t trickle in with finality until thanksgiving. this time, he wasn’t so lucky.

my brother emerged from college with one goal: find his way onto an election campaign and keep the elephants from trampling on yet another birthday. in his first goal, he succeeded beyond imagination. for over a year now, he’s been traveling around the country, living in and gaining appreciation for states i’ve never visited. one winter’s day in iowa, he found that his car had been sabotaged. another morning, in an exhausted haze, he drove to work leaving half of his belongings on the sidewalk, including the inflatable mattress he’d been using as a bed. a woman living nearby contacted him later to tell him that she’d rescued everything and kept it safe.

despite his best efforts and the best efforts of his candidate and coworkers, the blue states are bluer than blue. but we were electrified for a while there, and that won’t go away. it was a great year for politics and he got to be a part of it.

happy birthday, adam. however it worked out, at least you got your wish.

me? i’m mending. already i feel mostly back to normal. sleep helped. the world really isn’t that different than it was three days ago, only the excitement’s gone. like everyone else, i believe firmly that we can’t give up. also, and seriously, i think it’s important than the 49% not vilify the 51%. there are extremists (yes, some would say, on both sides) but the majority of us — imagine a venn diagram with me now — would agree on many things. certainly that nothing will be gained from alienating ourselves from each other.

i look, though not exclusively, to barack obama to help us heal this breach. he is one sign of hope.

hope is a thing with wings — and off it flies

i know i should feel angry, or up in arms like the kossacks. mostly i just feel like some kicked me in the face, pulled my guts out, and spat on me. sure, it’s not ME they’re against, it’s my sushi-eating, volvo-driving, latte-drinking, vegetarian values. but in the haze of depression, the subtle distinctions are difficult to make out.

i don’t think we did anything wrong in this election. honestly. the pundits will go over it with a magnifying glass, searching for turning points. should kerry have picked a different running mate? should it not have been kerry at all? maybe they’ll blame it on the gays, because those initiatives banning gay marriage really brought out the evangelical voters. people are surprised that the initiatives lost. are they kidding? the only thing that could have lost by a greater margin would have been an initiative that pledged every first born male child to a satanic, vermont-based cult.

but if folks do blame the gays for seeking civil rights in the first place, thus prompting the backlash, i’ll feel even more morose than i do. (um, if you couldn’t tell, that’s pretty fucking morose.) despair, catholics say, is the unforgivable sin to god. well, god, to me, the unforgivable sin is your turning your back on the world you created while letting the fools run amok in it, unchecked, thinking they’re doing your work.

i can’t blame myself for letting hope in. it seemed promising — damn it, it did. people were riled up, they cared, they worked for it. people! not just swatties! in the end, it simply wasn’t enough. (speaking of “simply,” here’s slate’s interesting take.) maybe diebold delivered ohio to the president; thanks to its paper-less trail, we’ll never know. in the end, i don’t think it would have made enough of a difference anyway. people didn’t want to change commanders in the midst of a war, no matter how wrong-headed and mismanaged a war it was.

the night before the election, i dreamt i was mugged. now i feel like i was. but i’ll soldier on, as will you, until we find a silver lining we can cling to. we’ll make it through the next four years. we may be in the minority, but we’re far from alone.

broken.

my heart hurts. so much for … for everything. & there’s no one for me to hold.