I am surprised that my 300th blog post slipped by without anyone sending me chocolates or balloons. But I am equally, if not more, surprised that I unintentionally wrote my 300th blog post (according to my blog stats) about R.L. Stine writing 300 novels. Spooky, huh? What if this whole blog has been the first chapter of a horror novel? It only took us 300 pages to figure out something is hideously wrong.
I don’t usually gush over the human interest stories on CNN.com. Living in Virginia, I can’t often relate to being dismembered by alligators or to worshiping seven-legged babies as gods. But today I’m all over the headlining CNN story of “The Homicide Report,” an L.A. Times blog that chronicles the names, faces, and circumstances of murder victims in Los Angeles.
Because two to three people are murdered in L.A. every day, bloggers Jill Leovy and Ruben Vives work a lot harder than your average Gawker employee. They drive through the most violent, forgotten neighborhoods of the city to find their stories. They interview grieving families. They take note of spray-painted eulogies and impromptu memorials on urban street corners. They publish the races and ages of the victims, who are predominately young black and Latino men. And the bloggers keep the comments open so the public can post messages about the murders.
These bloggers are doing their city a great service. Not only are they trying to ensure that people don’t die anonymously, but the blog reads like an anthropological study that might prove useful in preventing future murders. In fact, the blog entries remind me of Jared Diamond’s “Annals of Anthropology” article in this week’s New Yorker (abstract).
Diamond writes about vengeance killings in New Guinea. In a society without formal state government, New Guinea clan members take justice into their own hands. In the Highlands, murder (interpersonal warfare) is an accepted strategy of social checks and balances. Murder seems to maintain order.
The same anthropological phenomenon appears to be taking place in L.A. In neighborhoods like Watts, populated by many impoverished, disenfranchised people (I’ve never been there but I watch a lot of movies from the comfort of my couch), it’s probably hard to feel like your life is actively honored and protected by the government. You might feel like the government at large is absent or even against you. And so, as a gang member especially, your Wild West society is regulated by another set of rules, where drive-by shootings seem far more functional than the court system.
In my own culture, The New Yorker and NPR tell me how to behave. But if I were born in South-Central L.A., I don’t know what rules I’d follow. I am a pretty good shot with a BB gun, so if someone wronged me, I can’t promise that I wouldn’t take it to the streets. But around these parts I am limited to blogging my vengeance on the Virginia Quarterly Review website. My lifestyle is basically Boyz in the Hood, but with hyperlinks and pretentious diction instead of guns and ammo.
I realize that anybody who is anybody on the internet has already blogged today about the “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair article, itself a response to the VF article “Why Women Aren’t Funny” by Christopher Hitchens. [Full disclosure: Christopher Hitchens will always be a god to me because he devoted an entire book to putting down Mother Teresa. Who else would have the audacity to do that?] Nevertheless, I want to weigh in on this important debate contrived to sell magazines. Are women funny?
Let me start by saying that all those SNL hotties were ugly in high school. I lack the evidence to back up that statement, but I feel in my gut that it’s true. They were ugly and that’s why they cultivated their personalities. And I have to put that out there because a large portion of the latest Vanity Fair article, supposedly extolling the comedic talents of the fairer sex, is about how pretty these funny ladies are. Alessandra Stanley writes:
It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.
At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.
Of course female comedians are beautiful. Vanity Fair loves to take pictures of beautiful people. Vanity Fair gets to pick and choose who to put on its cover. Vanity Fair gets to slather the funny women in makeup and dress them in revealing “costumes” and Photoshop them into oblivion and then slap rubber chickens in their hands and pretend that their sexuality is not being exploited.
I’ve decided to take the GRE, so there. What are you doing with your life that’s so great? I’m studying basic algebra.
Originally this post was going to be about ballet. This afternoon I introduced a three-year-old girl to The Nutcracker with 1977 vintage Mikhail Baryshnikov (swoon!). Everything was going awesome until she asked me about the bump in the crotch region of his tights. I was honest with her, and she quickly moved on with her life, but for the rest of the ballet I watched Mikhail exclusively from the waist down and worried that I was actually showing her pornography instead of a nostalgic piece of my childhood.
Egg to chicken. AKA breakfast to dinner in five seconds.
So gross, and yet so amazing. Is that you, God, all covered in mucus and hair?
When will American industrialists realize that they have created a chemical Molotov cocktail? If people don’t care about the environment, they can at least care about their gay babies and their back fat.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” [Captain Charles] Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
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.
I think my blog’s getting pretentious. Wordy. Anyone want to weigh in on this?
I need to figure out how to upload funny pictures of celebrities that I steal from here.
They say that the sweetest sound in the English language is one’s own name. I heard a lot of it today. “Wistar, you have no blood vessels in your left leg.” “Wistar, can you eat some fruit cocktail, or do you think you might throw it up?” “Wistar, we’re just going to stick this needle in your vein for a hot second.” I am my grandmother’s namesake. I was there with Wistar, sitting beside the orthopedic hospital bed, editing an erotica novel on my laptop while Big Wis watched the first few episodes of Desperate Housewives, and we both started to get confused. “Hey Wis,” said my other, visiting grandparents, “Would you like to come to dinner with us?” “No,” said Big Wis, thinking they were inviting her, demobilized with infection on her fluffy pillows. “I don’t have anything to wear. I think I will just dine here tonight. I ordered mashed potatoes.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was me who had been invited [that seems like bad grammar - me versus I - someone help me], that no one was dreaming of taking her out to dinner, that she was obviously bedridden while I was mobile and restaurant-able. The other Wistar. The young, healthy Wistar, who can hoist the 90-pound grandma onto the commode, who can eat a cheeseburger in 30 seconds, who can tune out the TV during Law & Order. As opposed to the elderly, southernly Wistar, who can catch a fever and be suspicious of Mexicans. Who can refuse to be hungry for dinner. Who can reject the circulation in her leg. One nurse came into the room and said, “My father-in-law is named Wistar. I’ve never in my life met another Wistar and here are two in one room.” “Terrific,” I said, “Make the other one get better.”
I know someone who went to Helsinki and spent $10 on an Us Weekly with this headline. Ten dollars seems extreme, but I can’t really deny that after a few days in Finland I might feel an expensive need to read about Britney Spears. Traveling outside of my comfort zone, where I know exactly who and what I’m contending with, I might feel so swallowed up by the sheer number of other, anonymous lives being led that I need celebrity reassurance. Reading about Britney might assuage my feelings of being no one in the world. She is a lighthouse around which we can all gather. “Come home to me,” she says. “Drink soda out of my baby bottle. Take shelter from the storm.” It comforts me that for a moment, one human can be the epicenter of the universe, even though she’s depicted as a bipolar cartoon from Louisiana. “You will not be anonymous for long,” she says. “Some people can break through the Earth’s crust. My genes are famous. My children have fan clubs. This magazine says I’m immortal. Do you want to bump uglies?”
First draft
First person
Last chance