goals as a general rule don’t work for me. you don’t want to set them cuz if you don’t meet them, well, what then? but as long as i’m playing at being organized and managerial this semester, i may as well try a couple small goals. just to see what happens. my fairy godmothers dropped off a cup of my favorite cereal on my desk this morning; the world feels full of possibility.

so: goals:

— when i am alone in my room, i will not play ten successive games of freecell. rather i will at least strongly consider visiting others.

— i will not panic about my seminar. i came to college to take seminars. remember: if i didn’t like american social history i wouldn’t be majoring in it.

— if infuriated by newspaper piece, i will write a Letter to the Editor, because writing (and sending!) one to the washington post yesterday made me feel quite good.

— i will try not to be cowed by new people or large groups of people or people who are thinner/prettier/smarter/more talented/cooler than i am, because there’s no money in it. besides, *i* have a weblog.

— i will eat less sugar.

— as i declared at the comotion meeting last nite, swigging from the cheap bottle of french wine and crunching harry and david’s caramel-chocolate popcorn, there’re lots of reasons why this semester could be hard or upsetting but fuck it; i intend to have a good time regardless.

back. drinking the diet coke and eating the kugel my mother provided for me, wisely since the meal plan doesn’t kick in til this evening. yesterday ben ross and i managed with the dinner party o’ soup and bread taking place at a nearby offcampus house. there we met up with many people i don’t know and several i like quite well indeed, including ms(“i’m going to be apolitical this semester” “really? oh wait, you’re making fun of me”)kelly and the-recently-sri-becca. ben and i had the distinction of leaving a couple hours later because ben admitted he “had to work.” the words landed among these still vacationing folk like a large dead fish. in bewilderment, people stared, and ben and i shuffled out.

true enough, ben may be the only person in a 4 mile radius to whom those dreaded words apply. the rest of us have a day or two of denial left. but even without Work to do per se, i have enough Stuff to keep me busy. auditions for An Ideal Husband will begin saturday. i needs must create signup sheets and posters (go wilde!!). luckily sarah rose is around to keep me sane. oh but it’s strange: an unfamiliar soul is lodged in sorelle’s old room. stef and eliz are nowhere to be found, tho they left cheerful piles and an ancient typewriter on brig’s-and-my floor as remembrances.

and i’m still chewing the cud of my outrage at this style section article. in short it laments the “hook up culture” of contemporary young women. it outlines the problems as follows:

1) girls hook-up increasingly in high skool and college rather than dating or getting in formal relationships. hook-ups are characterized by sexual activity that ranges from kissing to oral sex, tho they usually stop there. rates of intercourse among high skoolers have actually decreased since this phenomenon, which occurs between mutually interested acquaintances, friends, or ex-lovers, began.

2) this means girls are more assertive, depend less on guys, have more interaction with guys, date less and thus aren’t prepared for marriage.

3) however girls who seem to desire this are just fronting, abetted by the dangerous combo of IM and emancipation:

… even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by leisurely strolls, candlelight dinners, small gifts and other gestures of courtship that were more common when their mothers were their age.

Could this explain the large amounts of alcohol some girls say they consume to make hooking up more palatable? So much has changed, so fast, as gender rules have collapsed.

Less than a half-century ago, girls hung out mostly with other girls, guys with other guys. A girl who was interested in a guy never came right out and told him. She’d tell a girlfriend, who would tell a male friend who would tell the guy in question. Then she’d wait for the phone call.

If the call came, the two then might phone each other every night, talking for hours before going out on their first date. The steps after that were understood: a guy would offer a girl his ring and the couple went steady. Maybe she got pinned or lavaliered, then engaged and so forth.

Today the distance between genders has virtually dissolved. Young women have taken PE with guys since elementary school and gone to movies with them since middle school. They compile coed Buddy Lists on their computer screens and think nothing of instant-messaging guys or calling them on the phone.

4) this is rock bottom for women. we are throwing away our only leverage to rope in young men: Oh, but there is something left to lose, what dramatist Ben Jonson 400 years ago called the “coupling of two souls.” Young women talk about this, too. If romance is reserved for the truly serious, what guy will choose serious when he can get the other stuff without committing more than a few hours of his time? and morally, we’re going down the toilet: But when will they learn that just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should? Who will teach them that there is power in holding back?

isn’t this precisely what the bush administration wants? more and more women are abstinent! that’s the distinguishing characteristic of this “culture.” free love in the past has included women having sex without love, sex with friends, sex without guilt. nowadays according to this it’s just oral sex substituted for intercourse. why should that make a difference, unless it speaks to a greater canniness on the part of females to keep themselves safe (from pregnancy, at least). so what if we date less in college? we intend to marry later, as a few individuals in the article note. we can date in our twenties or thirties and prepare for marriage — if that’s really what it takes — then.

the subtext of this article may well be, strangely, that if women engaged in intercourse their men would stick around and relationships would form. that flies in the face of not only centuries of experience but a poster i saw at barnard when i spent a summer there: it advised, straightforwardly, and resonately, “sex won’t make him love you and a baby won’t make him stay.”

whew am i scared of this semester! sure i’m always scared of what hasn’t happened yet, but this semester is especially chock full of Things That Could Go Wrong, New and Public Ways I Could Fail, and Potential Miseries. this is why i can only think as far ahead as tomorrow. tomorrow my brother will drive ross, who should be arriving momentarily, and me back to swarthmore. soon after tomorrow — preparations for auditions for an ideal husband, auditions, the meeting with marge where my class from last semester goes over our projects, meeting with marge about my grant proposal, finishing my grant proposal, submitting my grant proposal, rehearsals, having to pull off seeming to be a competent director, taking my first seminar ever, being graded on my first seminar ever, exposing my play to the lofty criticism of swarthmore students, watching people important to me graduate — that’s when the tough stuff starts.

overdramatizing? me?

to compensate in advance for the over-intellectualism i will be resubmerging myself in starting tomorrow, last night i watched both straight episodes of joe millionaire. so what if the show’s built on, and glorifies, lies? so what if the 21 — 22 if you could the french chateau’s bewilderingly australian butler — don’t have as many IQ points among them as a big mac has calories? it raises interesting sociological questions, like, can you believe he dumped that chick, you know, the classy one with the earrings? take that, heidi, you over-confident snob! and go allison. she’s definitely my pick.

though it’s only 11:30 i feel totally wiped out. appropriate for the end of an urban evening. my friend marc from skool is in town staying w/ his brother in dupont circle. we met at 5:30, dined at a thai restaurant to the accompaniment of two cosmopolitans (that’s the 2nd time in a row i haven’t been carded. do i look older or in this wintry economic climate does nobody care?) i enjoyed a introductory meeting with marc’s brother. in the midst of siblingish bickering, he looked up at me and said, “you have terrific hair. i’ll bet you get that all the time. have you seen yentl? you know what they’re trying to do w/ amy irving’s hair and it doesn’t quite work? they’re trying to make hers yours.”

after that bit of careless flattery, he headed out w/ his friends to mothertongue, the monthly open-mike poetry reading. marc and i tripped over to the studio theater where a friend of his had promised him two comp tickets to runaway home. an all-black ensemble performing for an predominantly white, older audience — for some reason i find that unsettling. the staging and pacing of the play, and even to an extent the script and the acting, seemed like it would lend itself better to tv than the stage. we enjoyed, tho we weren’t compelled to stay after intermission. instead we moved on to kramerbooks & afterwords for coffee/dessert. they, as you might know, are the geniuses behind the Trent Lotte: separate but equal parts coffee and milk, to be integrated as you see fit.

i am a sucker for this stuff. the buildup of excitement excessively beforehand is my version of the christmas shop’n’sing season. who’ll get snubbed? who’s getting noticed? if you read a few pages in you’ll notice that they answer a question i posed a couple days ago: yes, apparently once before two actors each got two nods. in 1994, holly hunter and emma thompson shared the honor. that was another excellent year for films (pulp fiction, shawshank redemption, red, forrest gump — well some people liked it –, ditto the piano, and clerks.)

but since 1997 was the first year i paid attention, it retains a special place in my heart.

an op-ed explaining why class-based campaigns don’t work in america. we’re all “pre-rich” here, cooling our heels as we wait for our lucky/worked-and-fought-for break. a funny way of thinking about it that actually rings true. i’ve never experienced much class resentment; i figured that’s cause i’ve never spent extended periods of time with underprivileged people. but if even the bulk of lower-income men can’t be persuaded to vote against the interests of the rich, there’s little hope for a serious grassroots revolutionary spirit. unless i guess it comes from the nonwhite sectors, people who still feel that the system is biased against them.

yesterday when searching for one thing i uncovered a twelve year old capital steps album, “sheik rattle and roll.” yelping with glee at the good timing of it, i brought a tape player into the kitchen and my father, my brother and i sat there listening to the whole album. some parallels are eerie — the looming iraq war, of course, being the paramount example, but also the deficiencies of the democrats, their inability to come up with a coherent, consistent, meaningful message, and the crookedness of the rich.

other songs were evocative just for the part they played in my growing-up. they certainly got my family through the first gulf war. they may have been my primary source of information, especially since, at the age of 9, i was bound to better absorb and understand anything sung than said. you can’t go wrong with rhymes.

overall it was quite a trip (down memory lane). remember those days of S&Ls?? i don’t!, but i sure do remember the songs.

over fine southern dining at georgia brown’s last nite, in honor of my parents turning 26, my brother told two jokes:

1) in england during the war it was common practice for enlisted soldiers to spend weekends, get meals and some hospitality, with british families. one woman requested, “please, no jews or blacks.” that friday, she opened her door to five african-american men. “there must be some mistake,” said she. “no ma’am,” said one of the men. “general cohen, he doesn’t make mistakes.”

2) one new leader of his country found on his desk two letters from his predecessor, numbered 1 and 2 and to be opened in the case of the first emergency (1) and the second (2). well, the first emergency happened. the new leader opened the first envelope and the letter said, “blame me.” he did; his people bought it. life went on. a year later another emergency hit. he opened the second envelope and the letter said, “now sit down and write two letters.”

my grandfather told a story:

stationed in england during the second WW, he developed the habit of walking with his head down (stupid british weather) and his hands in his pockets. a superior officer was heading his way and he weighed exposing his hand to the cold against exposing himself to the officer’s wrath. he decided to take his chances and not salute, hoping the officer would ignore him. five steps past each other, the officer barked, “sargeant!” my grandfather froze and turned around. “don’t you remember me?” said the officer. “it’s morris — we went to hebrew skool together …”

and i saw the hours. gorgeous film. meryl streep is all you could ask for in an actress (i ask you: in that first scene, when she goes into the bathroom and there’s a beautiful white orchid next to the sink — is that a coincidence?) nicole kidman manages to disappear into the role. those shapeless dresses help, as does phillip glass’s constant evocative mood-setting score, but she gives an honest performance, one i believed. julianne moore had arguably the most difficult task. that section of the book occurs almost entirely in her head. that she manages to convey as much as she does without speaking, voice-over, or narration is remarkable.

(conceivably both streep and moore could be nominated for two films. i wonder if that would be a first.)

read the novel, if you haven’t. the film does it justice, and, as it’s one of my favorites, that’s saying something.

so: tho i still haven’t seen talk to her, here’s my top ten for 2002:

1) adaptation. only if you’re willing to work with it. complicated, layered, completely original. real in a way that films almost never are and unreal in the way great films should be.

2) the hours. “someone has to die so the rest of us can value life more.” have a life-affirming cookie afterwards.

3) chicago. the most enjoyable film of the year — cocky, ironic, exciting, it seems to like itself quite as much as you do.

4) y tu mama tambien. the beautifully photographed, smart-ass, wake-up-call coming-of-age you never had.

5) the pianist. haunting, unrelenting, like, you have to imagine, the memories of warsaw in the 40s must be.

6) far from heaven. the first film i’ve seen to capture the spirit of the 50s earnestly, without disdain or melodrama.

7) monsoon wedding. more colorful, more subtle, and more joyous than the big fat greek one.

8) punch drunk love. who knew an adam sandler flick could leave you grinning at the credits? bizarre, imperfect, but captivating.

9) catch me if you can. winning, diverting, easy on the eyes. the best spielberg film i’ve seen in ages.

10 ) secretary. a deviant, risky romantic comedy that gets points for originality and excellent performances.

runners up: about schmidt, which i’m still on the fence about, and bowling for columbine.

my oldest friend turns 21 today. hip hip hoorah! even tho she’s too far away to hear. in my own small way i celebrated by drinking bourbon with my father and playing a cut-throat game of scrabble, my first in a while. i was taking it too seriously; i needed a break. really, this was no holds barred and the way we bluffed as much poker as scrabble. he played “nonquam” on a double, i countered with “zoom” on a triple. he put down “toxic” — an hour later i made it into “toxicity” for another triple. i won by about 50. the sole accomplishment of an otherwise lazy day. that “toxicity” made me mighty pleased. i debased myself to every deity i could think of for that “ity”. anyway, the point is, happy birthday, liz.

hey, my people. just in time for shabbes.

my brother looks more manicured every time he leaves the house. he’s going job hunting, on the hill of course, dc’s nerve center. it’s frightening to hear this kid, who til now has spent his vacations waking at noon to play video games til midnite, musing to himself whether he’ll have enough money next year to keep his cell phone. society inflicts these various arbitrary-ish deadlines on adolescents: be economically independent of your parents by 21 or else. but it’s certainly gotten my brother moving.

glimpse-into-the-future-wise, last night i ran into a mournful-eyed boy who just started penn law. not good?, i asked. he shook his head. his girlfriend jumped in: it gets better after first semester. right? her boyfriend didn’t look convinced. just tired.

that after i sat through the palme d’or winning the pianist starring an even more mournful-eyed adrien brody as a jew in warsaw during those 6 midcentury years where it was frankly unwise to attempt such a thing. get out!, you wanted to scream at poor adrien brody, poor beautiful talented adrien brody; take your eyes and run while you can! of course he doesn’t. the fool has character and optomism: in true catch-22 fashion that probably accounts for his naifish beauty.

the 2.5 hour film contains some of the most wrenching, unsentimentalized portrayals of cruelty i’ve seen on narrative film. the contortions it put both me and my various organs in were impressive even by my standards. then, of course, i can only cry for so long before i get angry. at extreme temperatures sorrow turns to rage and my head filled with the kind of bitter, redundant expletives that would have made adrien brody blush. if someone had handed me a trigger i would have pulled it, and halfway across the world, poland would have gone poof.

the pianist lightens up a bit during its last 20 minutes — thankfully, cuz otherwise i would have left that theater prowling for just such a trigger. i got home and slept til noon, my night midsectioned by a horrific 5 a.m. dream in which three men with boards were attacking me and i could only beg, “please.” better this morning — er, afternoon — i still am in no condition to see the hours, as planned. i need some recovery time.

on a more cheerful front, i spent a terrific $20 on: two paperbacks (barth’s chimera, and the fermata), one mint sondheim recording of the frogs and evening primrose, and a screenplay of casablanca illustrated with still photographs. since yesterday marked 26 years of my parents staying together, my dad and i shopped cashmere sweaters for my mom at saks and found a lovely one. good shopping experiences are very satisfying, she said banally. but all happiness is banal, right? as well as all un-. there’s nothing to be done except to wade through whatever’s in front of you and put as unique a spin on it as you can.