Tag Archives: World At Large

Going to see the moon

She’d been alive for over three decades, but had never witnessed a lunar eclipse. She wasn’t sure why not. Maybe because they always happened at night, when she was more likely to feel shattered, celestially undeserving, or too strange to go outside, where she might meet a strangeness more sublime than her own. So she’d just look at the moon’s picture in the paper the next day and tell herself that life wasn’t passing her by. But on the night in question, the Sunday night of the blood moon, she had this person with her, and except for his dubious beliefs about UFOs and the U.S. government, he seemed to feel pretty much the same way that she did about the sky.

They decided to watch the moon from the park. To get to the park, they had to walk half a mile uphill. The incline made the sidewalk resemble a ramp to the moon, or maybe her legs were just tired and any route, including the one from her bedroom to her bathroom, would resemble a ramp to the moon. Already the eclipse was happening. Only 221,752 miles until they reached their destination. They hurried along as much as they could while shuttling three flavors of ice cream between them on little plastic spoons. They kept losing the moon behind buildings, light-polluted clouds, and nebulous treetops, but then they’d reach an intersection and there it would be, shining.

A festive atmosphere encircled the park. Someone played guitar on a front stoop across the street from a playground. An adolescent boy had set up a flimsy telescope on the sidewalk and was busy making adjustments to his lens. A steady stream of couples entered the park gates holding hands. They followed suit behind. It made them both happy to see other people out late at night for reasons unrelated to the consumption of alcohol. They were part of a community event. They hoped the community event was not the end of the world.

They settled on a grassy bank and waited for the clouds to clear. At first she was reluctant to lie down. They hadn’t brought a blanket with them and most people had a bad habit of not cleaning up after their dogs when they urinated in public. But then she remembered that she was in nature and nature does not make you dirty. And the sky was not a television set, even though the number of people currently watching it was comparable to the viewership of the final episode of Lost.

They lay down and waited for the moon’s face to blush. They had hoped for contemplative silence, but a nearby woman was reading aloud from her cell phone about the prospect of life on other planets. She was not just reciting a paragraph here and there to titillate her male companion; she was regurgitating the entire Internet. So they moved further down the bank, where they were annoyed to discover that they could still hear the woman’s impromptu audiobook. In some ways the annoyance was comforting. She frequently experienced annoyance, thus the feeling was familiar, unlike the stellar bodies overhead. Her gripe with the sky had always been that it never seemed very interested in her. There was probably a good reason for this.

“You know what we forgot to do before we left for the park?” she said, squirming to alight on her reverential mode. “Drop acid.”

The moon was slowly being consumed by an anti-moon. For the astronomically ignorant, an eclipse could only be interpreted as a harbinger of end-times. And yet there she was reaping all the palliative benefits of modern science, cognizant that the blood moon did not pose an actual threat to life and limb, and she was still feeling anxious about the darkening mass over Brooklyn. Not because she expected the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse to trot across the baseball field, but because life on Earth had felt so ominous lately, and here was one more glaring symbol of their impending doom.

But for her, even the doom was impersonal. In a way, she longed for the doom. In a way, her separation from the doom was what made her so anxious. When had she disassociated from the future, and her respective role in it? When had she become subhuman? Was it at the same time she’d become sublunar? She felt foreign to this universe blooming all around her. If aliens descended, she would have nothing to say to them, and vice versa. Her orifices weren’t worthy of their implants.

It would be difficult to eclipse the self-pity of that statement.

They lay under a popular flight path. Every so often a plane would pass over, wingtips flashing red, and she’d trace its dark underbelly across the sky and think, “What is that flying object? I can’t seem to identify it.” He joked about bringing a laser pen to the park and scrawling it across the moon, just to be obnoxious. When the moon was finally overtaken by its evil, ginger twin, spectators clapped halfheartedly and all the dogs in Brooklyn began to bark. Why did staring up at the night sky make her miss her father? No wonder she avoided stargazing. He belonged to that particular universe, and she did not.

On the walk home they encountered two men standing on a street corner, trying to locate the blood moon behind cloud cover and a church steeple. One of the men quickly lost patience with this activity. “Whatever,” he said petulantly, then they both turned their backs on the park and descended the hill. She was appalled. “That man just whatever’ed the moon,” she said. “Who does he think he is?”

They took their time getting home. He said he wanted to absorb as much of the moon’s female energy as possible in hopes of reading her mind. They stalked a caravan of wailing fire engines to an apartment complex that was not on fire, only bathed in red emergency lights. She tried not to be disappointed. A fire was the blood that would bring her back to earth. That night she got her period several days before it was expected. Maybe the sky had a tracking device on her after all.

She knew exactly which people were going to post blurry iPhone shots of the expanding universe on their Instagram accounts. They wanted other folks to know that they’d seen the moon. It was important to broadcast their primitive lunar connection. She was also pleased that she’d finally taken the moon’s picture. Only later did she feel the need to publish it.

Super genius saves the world on her lunch break at the DMV

It’s hot enough outside to liquify rubber and she wants to continue using her five 30,000 BTU window air conditioning units around the clock. Unfortunately, every so often she feels guilty about the toll that her 62-degree apartment takes on the environment, especially when she’s hard at work in her DMV kiosk for eight hours a day, unable to luxuriate in the cold air blasting away at home. Therefore she uses her Thursday lunch hour to devise a series of ingenious solutions for global warming and its consequences.

First she conceptualizes a tree that generates its own water supply via photosynthesis. This vegetation makes absolute sense on a Post-It note partly stained with fried lasagna. When the sun is shining, the tree’s roots produce enough water to hydrate the surrounding soil and replenish local aquifers. When the sun is not shining, the tree simply produces oxygen, and sometimes apricots. People will plant these chemically-enhanced trees in deserts and in two years those same deserts will be deciduous forest. Even people who don’t get out much into nature will go bonkers for these trees. When planted in clusters, these trees will sculpt out deep ponds where before there had only been desiccated craters. These trees will either cost nothing or be available at deep discount after federal tax rebate. These trees are gods amongst thirsty men.

Her second ingenious solution has to do with population control. She will move everyone in the world onto a single continent. This continent will probably end up being North America for the sake of her own convenience. When humans see how many other humans exist on Earth and begin to feel claustrophobic, they will probably not want to have sex with one another. Within a few generations, cities will revert to a manageable, medieval size. Meanwhile plant and animal populations on the remaining six continents will bounce back because they’ll have more food and territory at their disposal. But if anyone misbehaves in North America, they will be deported to Australia, same as before.

Her third ingenious solution addresses the frying of the oceans. The oceans need to be cooled. What cools water? Ice. What objects are made of ice and can be dropped into the ocean like rocks into a glass of Smirnoff? Moons. Just off the top of her head, she can think of two icy moons that are currently going to waste in the immediate solar system: Europa and Callisto. Europa alone has enough ice on its surface to chill Pacific bathwater into polar bear central for at least five years. All it takes is a space rocket and the kind of machine that breaks up highway cement. But she is not in charge of logistics. She is the idea person.

Lastly, air pollution. This is a no-brainer, at least for anyone who has ever had a connecting flight in Phoenix or Las Vegas. If power plants and oil refineries are to be located exclusively in North America, where all the people are, there is no reason why industry, in its entirety, can’t be situated inside the Grand Canyon, which the Senate will have covered with a tarp. The toxic gases will collect under the tarp, then get sucked down many miles of canyon into a giant vacuum built for that purpose in Lees Ferry. There, the pollution will feed into a factory operated by Original Americans who will know how to convert toxins into something innocuous, like fresh breeze or a cancer vaccine.

But what is to be done about the existing atmospherics, the extreme weather conditions and the deteriorated ozone layer that humanity lives with everyday? She would prefer to leave this job to Obama, but she shouldn’t stop now, not when she’s already come so far and still has half a Diet Coke left. Her solution is this: if chemists in New Jersey can put disinfectant, cheese, and hair product into aerosol cans, surely they can determine how to spray an element into the air that will rise up in a heroic cloud to bind with CFCs, causing chlorine to fall to earth in the form of raindrops. And if scientists play their cards right, they could even get the chlorinated raindrops to descend directly into untreated public swimming pools, thereby saving the government money. Every human will receive two of these specially formulated aerosol cans free of charge, care of the House Budget Committee, and he or she will use them liberally, though always after reading the cautionary label which provides instructions for what to do if someone’s eyeball is sprayed accidentally.

Now that she’s done her part to save the world, she can’t wait to get home and lower all five of her AC units to a goosepimpling 55 degrees. She’s bored of her entire August wardrobe and has been longing since April to sleep under a pile of blankets in her fuzziest flannel pajamas. Before bed she’ll crank both her bathroom and kitchen sink faucets so her apartment will sound like the Colorado River in the midst of winter monsoon season. Then she can rest easy, knowing the government has it from here.

Literal and literary street harassment

Lately the news (aka my Facebook feed) has been broadcasting this video, which draws attention to the problem of street harassment and catcalling. Frankly it’s never bothered me much when a strange man says, “Hello beautiful!” or “Have a nice day!” as I pass him on the sidewalk looking beautiful on a nice day. This seems like pure friendliness on his part, and the comments help challenge my working theory that I’m a ghost. It’s annoying when a strange man tells me to smile, but at the same time the directive makes me question why I’m not walking around smiling all the time because it’s such a nice day and I look so beautiful. Maybe I should be smiling. Maybe this guy trying to contort my face into a different position using only the power of his voice has been to hell and back and is now wise to the ways in which a smile turns a frown upside down and he wants to share this happiness with me and the rest of the babes.

It’s hard for me to distinguish between my sensitivity to street comments and my sensitivity to people in general. I don’t know whether to look someone in the eye when I pass him, to give a little wave, to steal his iPhone, etc. It’s just like how I get nervous standing in line at the post office or visiting the bodega downstairs where I might run into one of my amiable neighbors. Other people are scary. They throw off my equilibrium. Sometimes they even say things out of their mouths, which can be horrific.

When a stranger speaks to me on the street, I don’t know when a response could be construed as flirting and when a lack of response could be construed as rude. It sucks to be put in that position every time you leave the house, but a lot of people for whatever lunatic reason like to stay socially engaged. They like to interact with the transients who enter their communities, especially if those transients seem carved out of marble. I condemn sexual harassment and catcalling, but most of the time people are just saying hi or telling me how wonderful I am. We exchange niceties and continue on our business, no harm done, sometimes with a little glow about us because that social interface went so well. I’d honestly rather live in a world where people notice each other than in a world where we pretend strangers don’t exist and where my beauty isn’t recognized for its cataclysmic power.

My other objection to shutting up everyone on the street is that I, too, am a street harasser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared out a coffee shop window and have proceeded to write down graphic details about a stranger’s dress or stride or baleful countenance. I put words into their mouths. I ascribe feelings to them. Sometimes I write explicitly about their butts. I violate the personal privacy of innocent passersby again and again by way of my notebook. You’re going to wear those hot pants outside my coffee shop window? You deserve to be written up. I might even put a baby in you. (But in 25 years that baby will discover that his absentee father is in fact the President of the United States, which is ironic because the baby has been trained as a political assassin.)

No one has the right to take physical or vocal possession of anyone else’s body. But humans are naturally interested in each other. So I think someone should make a video that doesn’t shame men for their interest, but instead tells them what kind of speech is invasive or prurient, and what may genuinely put a smile on two faces. (Kinda like this?) And also teach them that NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF URBAN LIVING HAS EVER GOTTEN A GIRL’S NUMBER BY HOLLERING AT HER WHEN SHE ALREADY HAS SOMEPLACE SHE NEEDS TO BE. For god’s sake. But, to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel, if we can’t build elaborate fantasy worlds wherein every passing woman is a potential future wife or perhaps a serial arsonist on the run from Johnny Law (according to my notebook), then who will build them for us? Not the Republican Party, that’s for sure.

And now I must adjourn to pace the block where the half-blind men in their 80s hang out on their stoops just waiting for an angel to walk by and make their day.

Taking the role seriously

Because every blogger’s opinion about the world at large is valued and unique, I have decided to weigh in on some of the day’s top controversies. By doing this I hope to prove that I am a woman of broad social engagement. A political being who won’t be silenced. A tastemaking culture vulture whom other people turn to when they want to know how to think about things.

The World Cup

I’m totally for it. What began eight years ago as my excuse for day-drinking has now blossomed into an aggressive spectator sport that has me rooting for any number of obscure, rowdy nations that somehow manage to exist outside of America’s borders. But as much as I enjoy learning about the soccer players’ family backgrounds and signature hairstyles, every once in while, because I am a refined and cosmopolitan person, I vaguely wonder what’s going on within the homelands of these athletes, and where those homelands reside on a map. So it would be helpful to me if this information could be printed somewhere on the team’s jerseys. The players can still keep their numbers and their names (as long as those names aren’t interminably Greek or Russian), but the jerseys should also incorporate a news headline or two from the originating country, and maybe a diagram so I can tell how far that country is from America.

Student debt

I have very few friends who aren’t at least $100,000 in debt. I write that, and I’m shocked. Shocked. What am I doing hanging out with such impecunious people? From now on I’m only fraternizing with peers who never made it past the eighth grade, so they can buy all my drinks.

Sexism

This bizarre and hurtful essay came to my attention last night as I was trying to decide which of my poorer friends to de-friend on Facebook. As far as I can tell, Ed Champion (a popular literary blogger known for being persnickety) had a playground crush on Emily Gould (a writer and Gawker gossip alum), which Emily never reciprocated, so Ed stole all the Number 2 pencils from Emily’s classroom desk and then stabbed her with them a million times. Then he had a mental break and got sent to reform school. If Ed’s rant (and I was almost with him until the third paragraph) hadn’t been written in misogynistic earnest and didn’t involve real people and was included in a first-person novel about a narcissistic boy who never grew up or learned how to use English properly, then I would be thoroughly entertained. But the whole thing made me want to protect a difficult woman’s vagina, and that is a weird place for me to be. I will continue to relish literary eviscerations, but they shouldn’t be so ad hominem that every female writer in America feels the need to rally around the victim. That is just too many voices, and we all know there can only be one authoritative voice in random cultural affairs—my own.

Racism

How can Ta-Nehisi Coates allege that racism still exists in America when every once in a while we white people look up from our gimlets of Grey Goose to the martini bar’s high definition television set and cheer on a BLACK man in an uninformative soccer jersey? How?!

Income inequality

This one really bothers me because yesterday I discovered that my roommate has an entire BOWL full of dimes and quarters in her bedroom while I could not come up with ten cents to help my boyfriend buy a loosie cigarette from the bodega downstairs. I even looked under the couch cushions because in movies these often conceal a great wealth. I am okay with my roommate having more change than I do, but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know that some people in the world have their pockets bursting with coinage while I have to scrounge around in filth so I can buy a soda. Hey rich person, you were in the right place at the right time to beat the slot machine, so just take your winnings and go. But if you stay, and you want to live on this great green earth with the rest of us (or potentially share my microwave), then at least scatter some pennies under the couch cushions from time to time so we can keep the bodega in business.

The oceans

Say goodbye to the whales, everybody. I would not be surprised to find out that an early version of man existed around the time of the dinosaurs but we kept putting poison in their food and water dishes again and again until we killed them off and sterilized their babies and then we were all butt-hurt because the dinosaurs didn’t share our superior survival skills and then a meteor came and wiped us out because we suck.

Iraq

I’m not afraid to tackle the hard stuff. At heart (when they haven’t been exploded), terrorists are miserable, desperate people. Let’s find out why they are so miserable and desperate so those conditions can be addressed. Maybe they can all play in a soccer tournament with their grievances stitched onto their jerseys. I would definitely watch those games on TV. But from a bar in a well-off, gentrified neighborhood. Not in person because that would be terrifying.

Watermelon

Still delicious.

Kesha

She is probably going to be okay.

My time being the wise and lucid spokesperson of a generation

Up.

Uphill NYC

She enters the city going the wrong way down a one-way street. Rush hour in the rain, driving past the Empire State Building in a 14-foot U-Haul, herds of black umbrellas bobbing across the road. Nature seems upside down. The real world is overhead where the buildings crest. She walks a trench at the bottom of a concrete ocean. In New York City human beings seem to navigate ditches. She feels the ground somewhere above her; she’ll have to take an elevator to find it. The scale of herself is completely off. When had she shrunk to the size of a bug? She’ll never look at bugs the same way again. She’ll stop grinding them into a paste and spreading them on toast. When had the range of skyscrapers replaced the Blue Ridge Mountains? What if Donald Trump got attacked by a bear?

Her feet hurt. She’s going to take a carriage ride around Central Park. The horse merges into the right lane and picks up speed. The city must seem even taller and weirder to horses because they all have to live on the ground floor. Their hooves are engraved with four-digit numbers. She recognizes the park from scenes in monster movies. Something’s going to eat her. The buggy driver points out the bridge from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. She feels a sudden kinship with Macaulay Culkin and regrets not reviewing his movie before moving to Manhattan. When Macaulay was lost in New York, did he also have BO? Her map says there’s a train station around the corner. Riding the subway elevator is a bad idea: It’s an airtight enclosure full of someone else’s pee. If it was her own pee it would be okay, but probably not for everybody else.

Home is a fourth-floor walk-up next to Our Lady of Sorrows church on a Lower East Side block that one hundred years ago supported a busy brothel and saloon. Home is quiet, rejuvenating, full of vodka. It’s fun to spy on the senior citizens who live in the housing project across the street. Not fun, but sad.

Routines have been established. Dumplings have been found. Drug dealers have been identified. Life is getting good and comfortable again. They call it the Big Apple because you want to pick up everything from the ground and put it in your mouth, but real New Yorkers frown on that behavior. It’s better to just load the stuff in your shopping cart and take it home with you.

Notes from a Dominican travel diary

I survived my travels (the tropical travels that I neither deserved nor paid for). But surviving them gives me hope that I am four planes and five Xanax closer to conquering my fear of flying. Our suitcases full of dirty clothes are apparently still sitting on the runway in the Dominican Republic, but I don’t even care. I will buy a new toothbrush. My luggage can stay in Punta Cana and soak up the sun and tip its handlers indefinitely because our lives have again been spared. And all without anyone acknowledging just how close we came. Except for my mother whose “Call me as soon as you land safely” text was waiting for me in Virginia and whose “But all the other doctors’ wives get Valium!” is a common refrain on long trips.

The agony of flying was a peak experience, but the honeymoon was pretty good too. I had no idea that Johnny Castle, Baby Houseman, and all of Johnny’s Dirty Dancing coworkers were alive and well and still being suggestive with their bodies on a Caribbean island decades after their triumph in America’s Catskills. In fact, this IMDB plot synopsis of the movie does a better job of summarizing my trip than I ever could:

It is the summer of 1963 and Baby and her family are to attend the holiday resort in America’s beautiful Catskill Mountains. But when they arrive Baby is almost immediately swept off her feet by the sexy and talented Johnny Castle. When her father forbids her to have anything to do with the hunky resort dance instructor and his pals, she finds herself falling madly in love with him and learning how to dance the passionate Latin dances that Johnny loves. Like the beginning of the 60’s signaled the ending of an era of innocence for the U.S.A., it also signals the ending of Baby’s innocence and the awakening of her feelings as a young woman.

Keep in mind that I was not playing the part of Baby in this scenario. I was playing the part of the complacent, elitist married woman who rolled her eyes every night when her beach resort’s nubile entertainment staff started shaking their Dominican hips on the mainstage for the tourists. No, this old lady did not participate in the “Fun Club” or in its after-hours activities at Mangu Disco where perhaps a few foreigners were specially chosen to merengue with the less discerning resort employees. This old lady and her equally crotchety husband wore SPF 70 sunblock every day and went to bed as soon as the band started up and found the unlimited rum drinks a bit too “Pixie Stickish.” They were also confused about how they were supposed to perform on the “Party Boat” (strip and dance on the bow or be the private, inconspicuous couple that the other passengers forget in Open Water?) and about how they could possibly finish reading their serious novels with the techno music blaring from the swim-up bar speakers.

No, in this scenario we were definitely the reluctant, forbidding, Dr. Houseman-type abortion givers, not the fun-loving, Penny Johnson-type abortion givees. In a way it’s sort of sad to leave my provocative dancing, unwanted pregnancy days behind me (kidding, Mom!), but at the same time it’s awesome to have a husband who is willing to complain when the music gets so loud that his wife can’t finish her book or when the Canadians drink so much rum that there’s nothing left with which to disinfect a papercut.

The turtle frog spider picture – now with more sex appeal

When the bbf and I each posted the spider-sitting-on-top-of-the-frog-sitting-on-top-of-the-turtle-in-my-parents’-pool-filter photo on our individual websites back in August, we expected to receive a handful of comments like “Cute!” “Rad!” and “Aww.” We did not expect “Your photo inspired me to get a permanent tattoo.”

“Incredible Journey” Tattoo

Aimee Pierson of California was so touched by the story of these interspecies friends working together to survive that she wanted to spread the word about their “incredible journey.”

It would not have occurred to me to get a tattoo of this image, but I am proud and amazed that our photo made such a difference in someone’s life. And the photo will continue to make a difference at every cocktail party Aimee attends in a backless gown. And at her community swimming pool. And in her sex life.

Looking at this tattoo, I feel like I’m standing on top of a smile on top of a puppy on top of Christmas morning. Thank you, Aimee, for sharing the turtle-frog-spider love.

Let me tell you what’s going on in the world

People are reacting to Obama’s victory.

People are making MFA Fiction programs the new International Affairs programs.

People are giving up their personal email accounts.

People are divorcing because of cyber affairs in Second Life.

People are interviewing ingenious 10-year-old girls who write books and ride scooters at Smart Girls Have More Fun.

People are feeding designer Kool-Aid to design junkies.

People are talking about how f’ing cute this French girl is.

People are hungry for weiner dogs.

People are excited to see the Twilight movie because Bella Swan is apparently the new Jane Eyre.

People are making refrigerators without electricity.

People are microwaving things they shouldn’t be microwaving.

People are still amazed.

New Yorker editors eloquently endorse Obama

The Choice“* from the October 13 issue of The New Yorker.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.

*Not to lessen the gravitas of this occasion, but why are the words “taco talk” part of this URL? Am I missing something? And does anyone else want to eat a burrito with Barack Obama right now? A huge, America-sized burrito full of hope and change?

“George W. Bush was a much better pilot.”

Sometimes I just have to love Rolling Stone Magazine. It’s so unabashedly biased in its political views. Gone are the days when David Foster Wallace could express his moral ambivalence about the McCain 2000 ticket in RS. In this election the magazine is clearly taking sides. But so are the rest of us. Which is why I’m reading Rolling Stone online instead of Right Wing Rock Quarterly or Preaching to the Other Choir Dispatch.

I devoured Rolling Stone’sMake-Believe Maverick” by Tim Dickinson and its sister article “Mad Dog Palin” by Matt Taibbi with the same delight I usually reserve for reading scathing book reviews (even if I liked the book!).

“McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” [Lieutenant Colonel John] Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.” –Dickinson

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation. –Taibbi

This is entertaining stuff. And isn’t that what journalism is all about? Making me giggle?

When I’m not crying?