This morning Selvi and I had a date to spend some quality time together at 7 AM. The quality time included 1-pound weights, a floor mat, and an elderly man walking on a treadmill with a cane. While we worked out, a segment on the Today Show grabbed our attention. A teenage girl was described as a “medical marvel” for surviving rabies without getting the vaccine. Rabies is supposed to be fatal in humans if you don’t get a shot within a few weeks of contracting the disease. However instead of being amazed by this girl’s genetic superiority, Selvi and I started shouting at the TV. What kind of person gets bitten by a BAT, does not seek medical attention for a MONTH, and then milks the publicity of emerging from a rabies-induced coma? Does her medical insurance cover something like that? And her case is written up in The New England Journal of Medicine! And she wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up! What if she has children someday? “It’s probably fine that you just swallowed a gallon of paint thinner, Jimmy Junior. Let’s just wait this one out and observe if there are any side effects in a month. Better safe than sorry.”
Books I’ve liked recently
E.M. Forster – Room with a View
Philip Roth – The Human Stain, The Ghost Writer
James Joyce – The Dead
Jared Diamond – Collapse, Guns Germs & Steel
Meg Wolitzer – The Wife
Neil Strauss – The Game
A.M. Homes – The Safety of Objects
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Martin Amis – The Information
Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Stacey Richter – My Date with Satan
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Deborah Eisenberg – Twilight of the Superheroes
Audrey Niffenegger – The Time Traveler’s Wife
J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Personal
We got back from our trip at 4AM. I drove the whole way from Brooklyn, fueled by dessicated chicken fingers, Diet Coke, chocolate chip cookies, and Necco wafers. The train ride from Montreal to Penn Station was beautiful – we saw the ruins of a Spanish castle on a Spanish castle-sized island in the Hudson River. We saw a drunk man stealing the seats of other passengers and then pretending not to speak English. We saw Poughkeepsie. We saw white sailboats moored beside motley trash barges.
After spending a few days in two big cities, I started having olfactory hallucinations. I smelled shit and feet everywhere. I started smelling it on me. I started smelling it inside my nose itself, trapped there like dust. Maybe I am a snob. Maybe I am a small-town girl. In the subway station we saw a man with his pants down sitting beside a garbage bag, and I thought he might be dead. Then a police officer put on black gloves before poking him with a stick, and the dead man started gathering his things. I am in a bad mood. Yesterday my mom told me that my grandmother has been in the hospital all weekend. She has a wound on her leg that won’t heal and on the train home I imagined I could smell it. Human infections have odors when the bandages come off. I saw her today and she is all right. She is propped up in bed drinking Boost and watching the US Open. Then my other grandmother came to the hospital for a visit. Both my grandmothers have their injured left legs wrapped up tight and they now share a doctor, who calls them the Profore Twins. We all sat in the hospital room and talked about the wonders of Montreal while they elevated their feet per the doctor’s orders. I have a friend who is convinced he smells like shit, even though no one else can smell it. He has been having this hallucination for a year. It gets so bad sometimes that he doesn’t want to leave the house. Recently I read a Martin Amis book that contained a character with the same problem. It turned out he was schizophrenic. Now that I am home, I don’t smell anything anymore. It is like a desert here. Now that the sickness I imagined is nearby, down the street instead of hundreds of miles away, the putrid odors have gone the way of the ghost.
My stomach is empty again. We might have people over for Labor Day hamburgers.
I am rambling and depressive. This is so you realize you didn’t miss me after all.
On my to-do list: sneak Dewar’s and dark chocolate into Martha Jefferson Hospital.
Fake nail etiquette
When you are at a lovely dinner party, do not interject during dessert – “Oh shit my pinkie nail just popped off.” I didn’t know this would be such a big deal, but Selvi explained to me that people still have a hard time distinguishing acrylic nails from real nails. They don’t want any kind of fingernails getting mixed up with their food. This reminded me of a story my mom told me once about a hair salad, but I’m going to save that for a book. Anyway, after my big announcement about my pinkie nail, I sheepishly went to the bathroom to recover from the faux pas, and somehow I lost track of the nail after I placed it on the counter beside the sink. These bits of French-manicured plastic are really light. A small gust of wind (ahem) could have blown my nail to the floor. I searched around for a while, but then I started missing Selvi, who I could hear telling a story about the tallest building in the world (or maybe just in Canada), so I returned to the table. Our dinner hostess was not just satisfied waiting on us hand and foot with extraordinarily good food and five kinds of dessert, she also insisted we take some food home with us. She is the kind of selfless hostess who will only be happy if you empty the contents of her fridge into shopping bags and a cooler on your way out the door. So we said goodbye, my pocketbook stuffed with Texas chews, and then Selvi and I walked to her house. On the way I felt an irritant in the bottom of my sandal. I reached down and pulled out my pinkie nail.
Tada! Story comes full circle. The most important part of this story is that Darren and I leave for New York City and Montreal today. If you happen to be in either of those places, or even on the railroad route, give me a call. We can wave at you from the train while we sip mimosas and read great literature.
I am a real woman now
For the past three years, my fingernails have been a popular topic of conversation in my household. My fingernails: Are they in my mouth again? Are they being shredded by my cuticle nippers? Will they ever look normal? Can you please stop gnawing at them – I’m trying to watch TV without getting grossed out. (Answers: Yes. Yes. No. No.) Last night, after much struggle, I finally put on the fake acrylic nails that I bought last week in order to look pretty for vacation.
D: Are you going to put the nails on tonight?
W: Yes. Yes I am. Just give me time to adjust to the idea and say goodbye.
D: That’s been your excuse for a week.
W: I don’t think you realize the intensity of this emotional attachment.
…Two hours later…
D: Are you going to put the nails on?
W: Yes, I just need a few last bites.
Much hand-washing, sighing, and guilt-tripping ensues.
W: The chemicals in this nail glue are probably going to give me cancer.
At bedtime…
W: I can’t take my contacts out with these stupid nails. Can you fix the sheets? I can’t fix them with these godforsaken nails. I feel completely ineffectual. I feel like you forced me to get a lobotomy. I feel abandoned by my best friends. Today I wore my hair all wispy around my face the way you like it and I put on the nails. I am basically your slave.
D: I have lost my sense of humor about this.
Everyday objects made religious
toilet = Taolet
tuba = tubbha
Hey Rolling Stone Magazine
I know you’re ultra liberal and in touch with the youth and irreverent and everything, but make up your mind whether you want to try for a serious piece of journalism, or use blow job metaphors and the word “fuck” in your political articles. Rolling Stone writing is the equivalent of your precocious 12-year-old cousin’s conversation – the cousin that peppers all his sentences with swear words so you’ll think he’s cool and give him one of your Heinekens. The first (web) page of this piece, The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury, is almost comically “Rolling Stone“/Hunter S. Thompson. It’s written in the second person and contains the following editorial:
This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
But eventually the writer settles down and produces a decent, if sickening, piece on military capitalism and profiteering. Read at your own risk.
Rolling Stone writer: I have this terrific story that’s going to blow the lid off Iraqi War spending. This piece is important. It’ll put your magazine in the atlas of serious journalism again.
Rolling Stone editor: Okay, but can you spice it up a bit by dropping in a couple hooker and BJ metaphors? And remember I pay triple for the word “fuck-up,” both as a noun and a verb.
Signs of a Small Town
You have seen all the local vanity license plates three or four times.
Haven’t heard from Duane for a while
Here is a Bodo’s bagel for him:
____________
Top half bagel
_____________
Smoked turkey
_____________
Lettuce
____________
Tomato
_____________
Mayonnaise
____________
Bacon (to fatten him up)
_____________
Bottom half bagel