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?
Plastic in our oceans, plastic in our bodies
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.
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.
Ugh
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.
It has always been our name so deal
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.”
My Shocking 6 Hours with Topless Britney
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?”
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.
Swimming in the City
If I had known in advance that I was going swimming at the city pool this afternoon, I probably would not have had six beers last night and a cheese omelette/home fries/English muffin/french toast/Gobstoppers for breakfast. But if I had known that someone was going to take a crap in the city pool today, I probably would not have gone swimming. Darren and I discussed who might have taken the crap in the Washington Park pool. There must have been a hundred witnesses, all of whom had to evacuate the area promptly after the incident. Who took the crap? Was it a kid old enough to feel ashamed at being responsible for closing down the pool? Was it an oblivious toddler or baby whose parents had to suffer the wrath of all the other swimmers for not putting their kid in a swim diaper? The timing of the accident could not have been worse. There is a drought going on so it’s not like the city can just empty, sanitize, and refill the crappy pool. We’re all supposed to be conserving water. Summer is basically over now. At the Meade Park pool the lifeguards won’t even let you go off the diving board because the splashing depletes the water supply. You are only allowed to dive for ten minutes per hour, and the fat kids and I just had to make the best of it.
Sleepy Little Town
This morning Darren drove me down Locust Avenue to retrieve my car, abandoned the night before so we could carpool to Superbad. As I drove home, I realized how sleepy Charlottesville is. Downtown, I was the only person waiting at the stoplight in front of an empty Lucky Seven convenience store. The former gas station/five star restaurant Fuel had For Lease signs in front of it. The few cars I passed on the road dawdled along at 20 miles per hour, the dulcet tones of NPR emanating softly through their windows. Only the sidewalks were minutely populated with lesbians out walking their babies and cute kids out walking their back-to-school puppies. And I wondered if this soporific Saturday morning could be attributed to the arrest this week of Charlottesville’s serial rapist, a man who has terrorized women in the area since 1997. The alleged rapist was described by his neighbors as a kind family man with a wife and four children. He held two jobs – one delivering newspapers for The Daily Progress and one working in the meat department of the Harris Teeter grocery store. [On a side note, my older brother once described this UVA-coed-frequented grocery store as a “great place to meet chicks.”] But now, due to DNA evidence, the rape threat has been neutralized and the women of Charlottesville can unlock their doors again.
I don’t want to give too much away, but in Superbad Seth Rogen plays a cop and he explains to the victim of a liquor store robbery that there’s no chance of them catching the perp because he didn’t ejaculate on the crime scene, leaving DNA evidence. So smooth move, serial rapist. You are a stupid jerk. Now I will go brunch complacently on organic omelettes and fresh fruit from Whole Foods while reading the New York Times on my sunny, rape-free back porch.
Iraq & Peru
This morning I was thinking about the earthquake in Peru and the victims of the latest bombings in Iraq, but how do you commemorate tragedy in a blog? People read blogs like this to escape, to be whisked off into someone else’s solipsistic universe. I actually thought of having “a moment of blog silence,” but then my eyes rolled out of my head.