Check out these “book autopsies.” So cool.
Help, I’m getting old
Yesterday I was included in a country club lunch with my Virginia grandparents, their visiting niece (a poet), and her husband (a photographer). When the lively company wasn’t telling sacrilegious jokes, the niece stated her belief that everyone had an internal age, a subconscious clock inside her body that was frozen somewhere in time. She asked me how old I was. “Thirteen,” I replied automatically. It was a question I had thought about before, because my mom once told me that she always thought of herself as 26, even though she’s now in her 50s. In my mind’s eye, she will forever remain a youthful 32. But I am mostly 13, and I know that when I’m sad or lonely or confused, it’s easier to regress to that internal age. That teenage girl crops up and tends to make decisions that she shouldn’t in my adult life.
I was thinking about all this yesterday, and I realized that not only do I hold this secret belief that I am 13 and not 27, I also hold the juvenile beliefs that I should be able to eat as much candy as I want, that my parents should take care of me when I’m sick or unhappy, that I’m never going to die, and that I should have gotten a puppy for my birthday. There’s a whole constellation of youthful misapprehensions that go along with me not growing up in my mind. And suddenly I aged 14 years all at once. I felt like Robin Williams in that movie where he graduates from high school as an old man. I felt like I immediately needed to marry and have kids and get a real career and stop borrowing money from my mother. I felt like I had fallen out of my time warp and I needed to make up for all the years of delusion.
It’s all very confusing, I think, because I’m talking now about myself and about being scared to grow up and about being scared not to grow up, and I’m only 27 and I know that’s just a start – a jumping off point – but I also felt that way about 13, and I also thought that it would never be 2008, and now it almost is. I feel like everything would be better if I had an engagement ring and a puppy, but I also know that tomorrow I might freak out because I have to walk that damn dog every day and I’d much rather stay up late eating candy and reading books with no one pestering me about the pee stains on the couch. Anyway.
We asked my grandfather how old he was internally and he said he didn’t know. I proposed 105.
First stop, MTV Video Music Awards; second stop, Vatican City
Alicia Keys went on a spiritual quest to Egypt and she had this to say:
I needed to get out of town and clear my head, I went to Egypt. It was such a miraculous experience for me. I crawled to the top of the pyramid and I just sang at the top of my lungs right there. People walking in acted like I was crazy; I didn’t care.
American celebrities are such a spiritually enlightened bunch. “I went to St. Peter’s,” says Pop Starlet #9, “and I really felt God’s presence there, touching me personally. I felt blessed and I didn’t care who knew it. I took off all my clothes and started humping the Pieta.”
Sacagawea is your new best friend
The City of Charlottesville hosts a statue at the intersection of McIntire Road and West Main Street that has some forward-minded people seeing red (pun intended). The controversial statue (Charles Keck, 1919) depicts Lewis and Clark standing heroically over a cringing, subservient Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who guided the explorers to the Pacific Coast and back at the beginning of the 19th Century. The inscription on the statue reads:
MERIWETHER LEWIS/1774-1809/WILLIAM CLARK/1770-1838/BOLD AND FARSEEING PATHFINDERS/WHO CARRIED THE FLAG OF THE/YOUNG REPUBLIC TO THE WESTERN/OCEAN AND REVEALED AN UNKNOWN/EMPIRE TO THE USES OF MANKIND
A TERRITORY OF 385,000 SQUARE MILES WAS ADDED TO THE/COUNTRY BY THE EFFORTS OF THESE MEN; AN AREA LARGER/THAN THE THEN EXISTING SIZE OF THE UNITED STATES
With Columbus Day approaching, Miss Representation USA aka Jennifer is inviting women, friends of women, Native Americans, friends of Native Americans, and seekers of truth-telling rocks to protest the Lewis & Clark statue’s inaccurate depiction of Sacagawea. Here are the upcoming “Operation Sacagawea Never Cowered” events that you are encouraged to attend:
TUESDAY, Oct. 2
Miss Rep & friends at petition table by City Hall from 12-2 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 3
Miss Rep & friends at petition table near West Main Market from 12-2 p.m.
THURSDAY, Oct. 4
Miss Rep & friends at petition table Center Place/fountain at downtown mall from 12-2 p.m.
FRIDAY, Oct. 5
Go see Natsu Saito speak at UVA Art Museum at 5:30 p.m. (FREE) and then see The Canary Effect at Vinegar Hill at 9 p.m. as part of the Columbus: Myth and the American Dream Revisited event.
MONDAY, Oct. 8
Columbus Day Observed. Hide the Statue! Intersection of Ridge-McIntire & West Main & Water from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
If all goes according to plan in C-Ville, for her next activist feat Jennifer may drape the White House in fabric like Christo, or put a sun visor on planet Earth to protest global warming. There will be no stopping her after her first success. Be smart and get in early. The Jennifer train is leaving the station and the world will be a better place when she is done blowing her horn. And because it’s Jennifer we’re talking about, that train metaphor will remind her of farting.
For more info, contact Jennifer at the hotline: (434) 227-6521
Grandmother update
Today Big Wis received a letter from her cat Rascal in Georgia. She has been feeding this stray cat for years on her back porch, and at night it sleeps on her bed. She has been worried that the cat would abandon her during her convalescence in Virginia, because a week-long trip has now become a month-long medical ordeal. Her faithful employee David, who has changed her lightbulbs and watered her flowers and filled her car with gas for decades, has been putting cat food outside her condo twice a day. Like many Southern white folks of her generation, Big Wis has a close, albeit complicated relationship with her black “help,” but David is like family to her. I always assumed that he liked my grandmother, but kept a certain distance because of the de facto social segregation that still exists in the South between black and white, not to mention employee and employer. They were so different, she with her genteel Sweet Briar education and he who learned to read and write only much later in life. And then today she got this letter in the mail, addressed to Wisteria, which made her cry:
Mama,
Thangs have gone to hell hear since you hav gone. David feeds me the same ole cat food. I miss u at nite. I stay wif Ellie & Barney [the condo neighbors] but it was not like u being here. Come home soon.
Rascal
Wedding pictures
-Posing by the gazebo
-The second best date at the wedding, after the bride
-Gleefully instigating a dance fight
-What’s a wedding without a secret tree fort?
Saturdays in September
I went to a beautiful wedding yesterday, but with great beauty comes great anxiety. I sat in the church pew and thought of all the ways in which I might inadvertently ruin the bride and groom’s big day. During the ceremony I chewed a piece of gum, because I encountered no trash can at the back of the church. What if when I went to give the bride a congratulatory kiss on the cheek, I accidentally I spit the gum into her hair? The updo, the picture-taking, and possibly our association would be over. But I did all right. At the reception I managed to limit myself to two plates from the buffet, I only caused one physical fight (but the principals were under three feet tall), and I found a pretty white purse to replace my green one (I’m just kidding, Lisa. I did not steal your purse. I hope it turned up by the end of the night.). Darren danced with me, which was awesome, and I got lots of compliments on my cleavage, mostly from the hot lesbians at Sian’s post-wedding birthday party. I might start showing up to all parties in fancy dress, saying that I just came from a wedding. I love any excuse to wear a push-up bra. I will post some pictures in a little while.
Serial killers love diner food and Jolly Ranchers
I just stumbled upon this amazing site, detailing final meal requests from Texas death row inmates. If I had a million dollars, I would commission a psychological study based on this data. Why would Frank McFarland, who raped and brutally murdered a shoe shine girl, request:
Heaping portion of lettuce, a sliced tomato, a sliced cucumber, four celery stalks, four sticks of American or Cheddar cheese, two bananas and two cold half pints of milk. Asked that all vegetables be washed prior to serving. Also asked that the cheese sticks be clean.
Then there’s Miguel Richardson, who murdered a hotel security guard. He requests:
Chocolate birthday cake with “2/23/90” written on top, seven pink candles, one coconut, kiwi fruit juice, pineapple juice, one mango, grapes, lettuce, cottage cheese, peaches, one banana, one delicious apple, chef salad without meat and with thousand island dressing, fruit salad, cheese, and tomato slice.
But I am almost more fascinated by the killers who don’t request anything special for a final meal. They’re just done with life and its simple pleasures. “None,” says the table. The whole thing makes me very sad. Especially this line: “* The final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served,” and the fact that one man, who had stabbed two young Austin women to death, requested the Eucharist before his execution.
I am in the middle of all these books, and getting overwhelmed
I like them all, and it is my and not the authors’ failure that I have not finished them. But the stack is getting taller and I keep going to the library and I keep going on Amazon.com and now I have birthday gift certificates to spend. New books are constantly coming into my life and distracting me. What should I concentrate on?
Martin Amis – Experience: A Memoir
Saul Bellow – The Adventures of Augie March
Charles Baxter – Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Daniel Amen, MD – Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
Marisha Pessl – Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Walter Kaufmann – Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
David L. Holmes – The Faiths of the Founding Fathers
T.C. Boyle – If the River Was Whiskey
Don DeLillo – End Zone
Daniel J. Meador – Unforgotten
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
I feel like right now changing my brain and changing my life are priorities, even though I usually don’t buy into self help. And then I also have this Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet to read – Would You Like to Know More about the Bible?