Lately I’ve been thinking about what will happen to my blog and my Facebook account after I die, so this CNN article, “New services promise online life after death,” is timely. Maybe I will create a cyber will. I hereby bequeath my Twitter status updates to my husband. I hereby bequeath my Bookreads account to my sister. I hereby bequeath my porn bookmarks to my brothers. Just kidding. That would be weird. Stacey Richter, it is okay with me if you want to post on One Star Watt when I’m dead. The same goes for Zadie Smith. I mean after you’re both done crying over me. Mom and Dad, you get nothing. I just don’t trust you with the technology.
George Saunders makes me want to be a better woman
I’m more of an Esquire girl myself, but last night I read George Saunders’ 2007 GQ travelogue about visiting the Dominican Republic and Africa with Bill Clinton, and I was shaken in my boots. I’d read some of Saunders’ fiction, but not his essays, and this one reminded me of a less tangential David Foster Wallace, like a pared down version of the latter’s Straight Talk Express McCain chronicle from 2000 (unabridged in Consider the Lobster as “Up, Simba”), which I also loved. Unfortunately Saunders’ “Bill Clinton, Public Citizen” is not available online (I found it in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008), but you can read the accompanying interview here. I mean, I didn’t, but you can.
The “Public Citizen” piece is nominally about Bill Clinton, ostensibly about the good works of the Clinton Foundation, and essentially about what individual human beings are capable of accomplishing through empathy and diligence. At the end of the essay, Saunders is flying on a private jet back to the States, luxuriously bypassing customs and long lines and bland airplane food. He contemplates his “undeserved good luck.” He writes:
A friend’s grandmother, on her deathbed, said: I should have forgiven more.
What I’m afraid I’ll say on my deathbed is: I should have done more to help other people and less to feed my own ego.
Up here, my ego has been good and fed.
Looking down at the mountaintop, I say a little prayer that all this luck will make me more compassionate instead of more full of shit.
I’m a sucker for any author who performs a moral function through writing, who somehow – with or without an agenda – inspires us to think bigger, think more lovingly. And one who has the insight to know that he’s not always authentic or above fault himself. In this interview with Vice Magazine, Jeff Johnson asks Saunders who sees the first drafts of his work. “My wife,” he answers.
She has great judgment and honesty and, of course, knows me completely, all my tricks and falsenesses. And she has a brilliant impatience with the Merely Artsy—she wants stories to do very high-level moral work (as do I) and she reminds me of this, and forces me to go back to this higher-ground when I’m feeling tired and self-satisfied too early.
So now, thanks to George Saunders, not only do I want to go out and heal sick children, I also want to be a better writer. And find myself a wife. There goes my summer.
For my seven-year-old fanbase
Last night a friend of mine told me that her seven-year-old daughter reads my blog. I couldn’t have been more delighted if she had told me that Salman Rushdie was a fan. Granted, her daughter has also read the entire Goosebumps series, but I feel like if you can hold a precocious seven-year-old’s attention even for a minute, you are doing something right.
This also opens up a huge YA market for me that I hadn’t previously thought about exploiting. From now on when I write, I will consider, “Would a young reader like this post?” Adjusting my audience should be easy. For example, how hard is it to tell you about my weekend in the language of the Sweet Valley Twins? Not hard at all it turns out.
After I got out of school at 5 o’clock on Friday, I called my friend Harper* Wakefield to meet me downtown for hotdogs and sodas. Harper wore sequined silver tap shoes and a white peasant dress. I wore jeans and boots because I am not as crazy for fashion as she is. She would sleep in tap shoes if she could whereas I am most comfortable in an oversized sweater. And how she finds anything in that messy closet of hers I’ll never know. Her mom must be furious! Anyway, when we rolled up to the concert in her stroller, Harper wanted to prance around in front of all the boys, but I wanted to go to a restaurant and talk quietly about books and newspapers with platonic friends. Because last weekend we did everything she wanted to do (ate cookies, went swimming, colored), she agreed to come with me to the restaurant, but only if she got a balloon first. Even though I knew she’d just lose it and make a big scene, I said okay. And what do you think happened? Sure enough, an hour later the balloon was floating up into the sky and Harper was crying about it. But even though she acts like a big baby sometimes, I can’t help but feel bad for her when she cries. She wears her heart on her sleeve, that one. Not like me. I’m all bottled up inside like champagne or a semi-automatic gun waiting to be triggered. Speaking of champagne, later that night I drank too many big-girl sodas and left my credit card at the bar for the second weekend in a row. I felt like such a nincompoop! Especially on Saturday morning when I discovered I had slept in a neighbor’s vegetable garden and my underpants were missing as well. Haha! What kind of silly mixed-up scenario would leave a girl without her underpants? My mother’s going to kill me when she finds out we have to make yet another trip to the Junior’s Department at the mall. I guess what I don’t own in sparkly tap shoes, I make up for in floral underpants! Haha!
*Names have not been changed to protect the innocent, because how innocent are you really at four years old? At 28 I’m hardly much older, and yet I don’t see anybody trying to protect me. Okay, I’m a little older. Eat my dust, little girls!
Charlottesville blind items
1) Baby rabbits
2) Dates set up by mutual friends
3) Rear view mirrors
4) Bats
I was going to write a list of local blind items in the manner of Gatecrasher/Page Six, but everything I came up with just seemed too mean-spirited. How am I going to make it as a writer in New York City if I can’t stand to hurt anybody’s feelings? Gawker is going to laugh at me.
Not-so-blind-item: Which milquetoast local blogger took a secret nap this afternoon and dreamed that a Mexican racehorse almost stepped on her face and also that she crashed her car into a snowdrift after drinking too much wine on the road, but was grateful that no one was hurt in the accident, even though she was upside down? She/he also enjoys eating chocolate cake frosting out of the jar on Wednesday nights. Your guesses after the jump!
My dental surgery – a postgame
The Novacaine wore off about halfway through the grafting procedure, so suddenly I could feel as well as see the dentist’s dainty fishhook as it threaded sutures through my gums. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the pain. My dentist just hurts me so good, like Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors. I still have fond memories of having my wisdom teeth removed a couple years ago, and last week’s receding gum operation was like a second honeymoon. Today at my post-op appointment the dentist said that my gums would continue to look “angry” for another week. “They’re not angry,” I should’ve said. “They’re glowing.”
Unloading some sweet links
Stuff White People Do (as distinguished from SWP Like) is a thoughtful blog about racial behavior in America. This isn’t really indicative of most of the posts, but read this former slave’s response to his ex-master’s request that he return to the plantation in Tennessee:
I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.
Heavypetting shows the horrified pets captured on camera while their owners shoot amateur porn videos from their living rooms. All but the human silhouettes are blocked out, so the site is technically SFW. Unless you can identify the silhouette of a penis.
I prance around the internet in gold high heels. It’s hard to say goodbye to Caite White’s “Brick Watch!” blog on C-Ville.com.
Homeless soccer team wins its first match at Chelsea Piers.
Waldo Jaquith schools Mark Penn for alleging that 1.7 million bloggers profit from their work.
Maria Robinson writes about the future of sex. Apparently we’re all going blind.
I keep finding myself telling people about this at parties, so here is the proof that a 5cm fir tree grew in a 28-year-old Russian man’s lung. Perhaps now I can come up with something new to talk about after a couple drinks.
Disturbing Strokes:
Lit stuff:
Elaine Showalter on the literary tradition of women.
“Men are terrible” interview with Martin Amis.
Thoughts on the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address.
“End the University as We Know It” NYTimes op-ed.
AV Club interview with Bret Easton Ellis.
UVA’s Mark Edmundson promotes non-directed readings in college English classes.
Review of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.
Whites are mostly offstage too, but for these characters, as for many blacks in the upper middle class, there’s a constant worry about the white gaze. “You didn’t, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm. Even if you had a pretty good reason. Like, you were going to a potluck and each person had to bring an item and your item just happened to be a watermelon, luck of the draw, and you wrote this on a sign so everyone would understand the context, and as you walked down Main Street you held the sign in one hand and the explained watermelon in the other, all casual, perhaps nodding between the watermelon and the sign for extra emphasis if you made eye contact. This would not happen. We were on display.”
Sorry for the NYTimes-heavy links. I don’t get out much, I guess.
Lately I’ve been unloading most of my sweet links on Twitter, so follow me (onestarwatt) if you want the goods more often.
The limits of my vocabulary meet the Foxfield Races
Here is a girl who got a perfect score* on her verbal SATs, but who can’t find a synonym for “awesome” in quotidian** conversation. Or who finds herself stuck with “interesting” as a default adjective whether she’s discussing a Great American Novel or the pizza she had for lunch.
The verbal portion of my brain freezes up completely in mixed company. All I can process are the ways in which people are looking at me. I try to be articulate – I really do – but I get distracted by the sweat running down my back or by the scrutiny in other peoples’ eyes or by the fact that I lost track of what I was talking about a long time ago. If I’m going to say something borderline intelligent, the social climate has to be right to within an eighth of a degree. For example, the sweat glands, the digestive system, the state of intoxication, the room temperature, what I absorbed on the internet right before the party – this all has to line up perfectly or I will start blabbering.
This is all a prelude to an important lesson I learned over the weekend. If you really want to feel eloquent, hang out sober with a bunch of people who are balls-to-the-wall wasted. I picked up my lovely little sister and her adorable friends at Foxfield on Saturday, and I plan to take on the DD role every spring from now on. Not only did I get to be the hero who arrived in the nick of time to shuttle the kids back to town before anyone else got arrested, I also got to be the cool cucumber who knew just how to nonchalantly accept all the praise heaped on me for being the “awesomest.” I was driving a 12-seater van, I was cracking jokes, I was telling the drunk people about the salad I had for lunch – and they were all riveted and enamored by me, I swear to God. And when I walked along Barracks Road on the way to the field and was passed by all the undergrads in pickup trucks who shouted, “You suck!”,*** it didn’t even matter because I knew that I’d be able to recite the alphabet better than anyone within a mile radius. What a great day.
I’m wondering if maybe I should become a late-night taxi driver. I can try out some smart-person vocabulary on drunk passengers, give my self esteem a boost, and make some money in the process. I wish that I could be that sober all the time, but sadly, slight intoxication is the millstone I must wear around my neck in order to deal with average social events like lunch and dinner. I tried yoga, deep breathing, and meditation, but they’re so much harder than a mixed drink.
*STILL bragging even though it was over 10 years ago and those smarty-pants brain cells are all gone now. And please don’t ask me about the math portion – just give me my moment in the sun.
**See!!?
***In fairness to these people, after they harrassed me they would typically notice the purebred dog I was walking and then they would forget that they’d just yelled, “You suck!” and politely ask, “Aww, is that a Bernese?”
“If today is opposite day, I’m happy.” –Paul Legault as Emily Dickinson
In local lit news, UVA poetry graduate Paul Legault has “translated” all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into straight-up English. Charlottesville’s new Try & Make blog has excerpts from the book. I will reproduce the excerpts here because I like them so much and because I am a poem burglar. Lock up your poems, people.
7. If you’re a flower, I’m kind of like your zombie-gardener.
8. Dig up my grave, would you? I’m a zombie, and I’ve got some flowers for you!
9. If today is opposite day, I’m happy.
11. If you pick a rose, it can no longer access water and other vital nutrients that it needs to live.
201: Because of your absence, I have turned into a feral cat. Finally.
204. I saw the sunrise this morning. Let me tell you about it. It was fantastic.
I’m feeling unhappy about the way things are going in my bank account
I’m feeling unhappy about the way things are going in my bank account, and years of therapy have taught me to openly express my feelings whenever it’s convenient and the feelings won’t lead to confrontation. The status of my bank account is nobody’s fault – especially not mine – but my feelings about my financial situation need a public forum.
Why doesn’t my bank account give me the money that I need to live in a highfalutin manner? I give it my everything, especially on the two days out of the month when I sometimes receive a paycheck, and I feel like I deserve more. It’s like I give and I give and I give and all I get in return are questions, statements, invoices, deficits. I start feeling bad about myself. I already have self-esteem issues, so why am I in this abusive relationship? I know I should just get out, say goodbye to the debt and the disgrace, but something inside me says, “Keep up the hard work. It will get better. Someday you will be able to afford Chipotle again.” And then I find out that a check bounced and my credit card had to kick in $200 at 50% interest just to keep me afloat.
And it’s like, why are you treating me this way? What did I ever do to you? All I did was try to grow up in an upper middle class home without any concerns about money, and now it’s like I’m being punished just because sometimes I got bicycles for Christmas and I was always above health insurance because my dad said I didn’t need any damn antibiotics, or stitches for that matter, and how dare my bank account get all high and mighty on me now like just because I don’t have a real job with real benefits I should be taken down a notch when it comes to writing bad checks to my creditors. So they bounce sometimes! So what! Who are you, Mademoiselle Bank Account? The Queen of Sheba of Financial Solvency? It’s like you don’t even care about the person – no, the ARTIST – behind the lack of money! It’s like all you care about is what’s coming in and out of the stupid account. I am a person with feelings and I am suffering direly from feeling poor. It actually hurts me, deep inside. But no, you don’t give a shit about feelings. Well I’ll tell you what, Miss Cold-hearted Bank, you are a grade-A insensitive jerk-off. And the next time I receive a paycheck, I am going to keep it to myself because you don’t even deserve it. Signed, Fuck You, made out to CASH.
This blog is going downhill in a hurry.
The Ten movie for the win!
I just found out what a bunch of funny people were doing between roughly January 2006 and the 21st of August, 2008, when their movie was finally released on DVD in Russia: filming The Ten! Written and directed by David Wain, The Ten features Paul Rudd, Liev Shreiber, Thomas Lennon, Rob Corddry, Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer reunion!), Famke Jannsen, Jason Sudeikis, Jon Hamm, Michael Ian Black, Rashida Jones, and a bunch of other people who aren’t even credited on IMDB because the cast is so phenomenally large. And yes, I acknowledge that you played a part in the movie too, Winona Ryder. Anyway I had to browse the Netflix “Watch Instantly” comedy titles for an hour (big Wednesday!) to even chance upon the film. I’d never heard of it before tonight. And it earned 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, so you already know it’s good without my having to tell you. Look, I’m not a film critic; I’m just explaining to you what I like.
If you have a Netflix account, you can watch the movie online right this minute.
Oh yeah, and I’m really, really baked from smoking woozies all day. Just kidding. Trying to cover my tracks in case no one likes my recommendation.
P.S. Paul Rudd makes out with Jessica Alba in this movie.