We wear our trousers rolled.

I got a letter from my first internet friend yesterday. This is the girl I met on Dragonriders of Pern RPGs, who happens to share my last name (no relation), to whom I would write long letters about my teenage angst and put them in envelopes I'd painted the same vibrant pink as her then-dyed hair. I'd yell at my parents for accusing me of having "no real friends," because I spent so much time on the internet. But she was a real friend, in an era slightly before people accepted the internet as a real form of communication and connection. I visited her the summer before I started college, and it was my first solo cross-country trip. We hiked near Mt. Rainier and picked berries and rode the bus.

We managed to intersect a few more times. I visited her in Indiana. She came to Madison. I visited her in Michigan. And yet, it has somehow been four years since we saw each other or really communicated about our lives.

She gave me a list of her major life events, sorted by year, since 2007. The heartaches. The jobs. Somehow her mother has had cancer and a year of treatment/remission in that time.

I started my reply with a similar format, and quickly ran out of room on the card I was using.

It is so strange to me how time can slip away like that. I guess that is how these 20-something years go.

some personal goals

• Finish putting my favorite photos on Flickr so it is a useful repository of my favorite photos the way Facebook used to be before I got proprietary.
• Purpose this blog. Or stop posting unless it's really a piece of writing I want to hang onto or an idea I really want to communicate or a life update that whoever reads this might actually care about.
  
• Spend some time with poetry. It's been too long since I read or wrote or even sat blankly attempting to write anything.
• The damn bees.
• Get a regular yoga habit going again.
  

gremlins

I really connected to this HTMLGiant post by Lily Hoang, though I am not avant-garde, nor am I Othered."

I have this thing against cuteness. Cuteness is dismissable, cast to the side as irrelevant. And I suppose, to be fair, what was the last cute thing you actually took seriously? There seems to be something inherent to cuteness that begs to be cuddled and pet, smooshed and distorted. Taken seriously, though, nah. Nope.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been described as “cute.” And I admit, I have something to do with it. I’m short, compact, I have a collection second-hand t-shirts, brightly colored with some kiddie design on it. When I’m nervous—and I’m always nervous—I fold, make myself smaller, and my voice goes higher, “cuter.” And yet, I’ve tried to balance this with being an “adult.” I’ve changed my wardrobe. These days, instead of emerald green short skirts, I wear drab slacks. Instead of bright blue t-shirts, I wear black or grey. I’ve learned that as a woman—a young woman, an Othered woman, a “cute” woman—in order to be taken seriously, I have to dress the part. Being a writer certainly doesn’t help. If anything, it makes other people see me as more quirky, more “cute.”

I'm 5' tall, 24, female, and fighting the "cute" monster every time I go to a school board meeting or have interviews in which I am standing up and writing and straining my neck every time I want to make eye contact with the other person. People with whom I must engage professionally are, a little too often, prone to patting my shoulder like I am an earnest, adorable niece. I tend to overcompensate with serious expressions. It's part of why I love film noir and related dark things so much. All these stories of people taking each other far too seriously. I like putting teeth and determination into my art that I'm not quite able to make everyone see in person.

Aral Sea, Kazakhstan

In high school, one of my later-to-be best friends wrote a poem celebrating my then-very-unshaven shins and submitted it to the school newspaper. For the April Fool's issue, the editor of the school newspaper parodied her leg hair poem. I was rather cowardly then and didn't defend her, even though I was on the newspaper staff too and at the meeting where the mockery happened. I think I didn't want them knowing the poem was about me, because everyone else on the newspaper staff was very posh and suave and well-dressed and heteronormative. Anyway, the friend thought it was pretty flattering to be mocked like that, though, and so in the end, everyone won. Except me, the coward, who still felt guilty. Lesson!

Interviewing techniques

Truman Capote: "Before he began the research for In Cold Blood, he had memorized a seven-hour monologue by Marlon Brando... Capote eventually revealed that he began the interview by talking in very open terms about himself. Brando later said: "The little bastard spent half the night telling me all his problems. The least I could do was to tell him a few of mine."

(Source: "The Literature of Journalism," edited by R. Thomas Berner)

I remember the day I learned matter was mostly empty space. 9th grade, Mr. Camosy's "ISP" (a fancy acronym for general survey of science) class, as he told us our chairs were just magnetic fields repelling our asses, I looked at the wall of the classroom and imagined running headfirst through it. Pushing aside the electrons and nuclei by sheer force of will like a curtain. White-painted cement. And the windows narrow as arrow slits.

Can someone please make a movie in the style of "The Divinci Code" or "National Treasure" in which it turns out that the body of Edwin Hubble (his wife never revealed its fate) is actually stowed somewhere in the Hubble Telescope, and our fearless investigator must act quickly to recover it before the telescope is de-orbited into the sea? The climax will involve a lot of fumbling in a space suit high above the earth, while the telescope's orbit slowly decays into a controlled downward spiral. It'll be a long climax. Also, we'll find out that in the time before the telescope launched, Hubble's body also went to the moon, hung out with Laika, and may or may not have spied on America from a Chinese satellite.

Helping poet friend assemble writing sample for MFA program applications. We talk about how doing an MFA in New York would really just be an excuse to live in New York. I would like to spend two years being poor in New York, writing and riding on the subway, breathing in smog and turning it into something else.

Healthcare Monday II

I just scheduled a dentist appointment for the first time as an adult who has insurance that is not her parents'. This is great, because I can investigate the strange sensation my jaw's been reporting to me when I am too quick to stand up or change my general orientation to the world. The nurse also promised my teeth would be shiny and white just in time for Thanksgiving. This seems like a fine idea. My relatives are sure to approve of my clean-looking teeth.

But really I feel really privileged and lucky to be able to call up a dentist and say "yes, I have insurance through XXX," and then they say, "We can see you Wednesday!" and I say, "awesome, this is like, close to free."

Next year I'm switching from a pretty decent medical plan to the scary high-deductible version because I decided it was the closest I could bring myself to sacrificing something in solidarity with the millions of Americans who don't have any choices. But when you're young and healthy, it doesn't actually feel like much of a sacrifice until you unexpectedly get hit by a car or a baby or manic depression.

In the meantime, I'm getting as many chest x-rays and hip replacements as I can before Jan 1. 2010 hits. Right right right?

Urban jungle

What if the whole reason for American overconsumption isn't actually rabid materialism, but just paranoia? I go to Walmart (that spelling is AP Style approved, folks) for a very specific item that I have so far failed to find in more socially-responsible settings, quickly determine they don't have it, and...still spend 20 minutes wandering in search of something to buy so they don't think I'm a shoplifter when I walk past the check-out counters, a little person in a big puffy merchandise-concealing coat. I mean seriously, I could hide about $300 worth of lipstick under that thing.

In addition, Walmart and its ilk have already impressed into me the fact that they possess everything a person could possibly want, and employees will think there is something wrong with a person who can leave such a store empty-handed. Or at the very least, you must be shoplifting.

I managed not to buy anything, but it was really close. Especially when I saw the $1 t-shirts. And no one accused me of shoplifting.

Let us say we throw our words behind us like bodies from a train.

Some friends and I are starting a project involving fake correspondence and making things up and creating dialogue between fictional persons with no regard for plausibility. Based somewhat on Hikikomori. There is a strong vegetable undercurrent at the moment.

One of us wrote:

"Ophelia,

This time I want to be the one wilting in the cow pond. What fun! Was it very hard to hold your breath until they thought you dead? Let us say I am a limp stalk of celery left too long in the sun. Let us say my navel drifts slowly with the current and HE finally cannot bear to touch me. I'll roll down my socks all slovenly. You'll be waiting with the coroner and a butterfly net to fish me out. Make sure he doesn't try to sneak "Lolita" on the death certificate. Try not to giggle! Look solemn! Say your name is Sofia and you're from the Hague and we'll have the most marvellous picnic when I am done corpsing.

Love and lollipops!
Dolores."

And another:

"Alice,

Give me some of that shrinking potion. I’m desperate. I went to the store and bought three boxes of Oreos, the Halloween kind, and ate it all. My teeth were orange, my tongue orange, my lips, my face, my insides orange. Orange and black. What is the color of shame? Orange. Caution. Stay away. And black is the burned spirit. What do you get for staying alive for thousands of years only to realize that loneliness is never ending, and that your real friends are fictional? Oreo comas. I never realized what a beautiful word “oreo” was until today. It makes me want to die.

...

Thanks for the postcard!

-Grendel."

The internet is so exciting when it comes to allowing quick interchanges of ideas and collaboration and the shucking of names and ownership when it becomes too cumbersome. I'm excited to see where this goes. Or fails to go. Or where it sits limply in its own randomness until the three of us lose interest. Either one.

Isaac Asimov also predicted Michael Pollan. sort of.

This is what you get for letting me read old science fiction anthologies. I don't know who you are or why you had any say in what I'm currently reading, but for some reason two hundred pages of delightful speculative frolick turned, suddenly, deadly serious. I think suicide might be involved.

"...so the question is whether a non-nuclear war is really possible, and the answer is "No!" The trouble is that the advance of technology has made war into such a high-energy game, played with such high-sophistication pieces, that no one can afford to play anymore.

Under the best conditions, war is fought with a nation's surplus energy and resources. Or a nation can fight a short war even without surplus energy and resources in the hope of seizing and enemy's energy and resources and continuing the fight with those. Where no nation has surplus energy and resources large enough to support the current technology of war, the whole process becomes purposeless and a mere exercise in suicide, albeit one somewhat slower than the nuclear variety...

So war will vanish not because of a growth of goodness in the human heart, or of understanding in the human mind (would that it were so!) but only because war has already priced itself out of existence, except as a form of world suicide."

From, "Is there hope for the future?" Isaac Asimov, 1974

Okay, so I'm still thinking about fictional writing

I am lucky enough to have friends who force me to watch special features on DVDs. For example, Cloverfield, which had me thinking weird paranoid thoughts I as I drove the treacherous, drunkard-infested streets of Madison on my way to my Capital City crash space. What if University Square fell on me! What if that lightpole was covered in spiders! What if that freshman's head exploded onto the wall behind her for no obvious reason except maybe that the Army had shot her/spiders were bursting from her brain sac!

Anyway, the guys who invented the Cloverfield monster were so excited about how much it changed everything for them that they could imagine it as this big bumbling baby animal that doesn't understand anything and is very confused about land and is rather blameless but even more frightening because it can't be reasoned with. That this, in some ways, made the whole movie happen, even though we the viewers couldn't necessarily see the difference between what they, the film monster makers, imagined, and a malicious intelligence that just couldn't get off the damn island.

Conversations like that get me very excited. The creator of anything has such power over those who view it, if they do their job well in not telling you everything. Confessions get boring - I'd rather read a grocery list full of seemingly unrelated items. Backtrack - sometimes confessions are very interesting. But the best part about Cloverfield was also kind of the most infuriating: at pretty much every turn you're left still not knowing what the hell is going on. Just like the protagonists! Isn't that awful? Aren't you glad you didn't die not knowing anything useful? Because a lot of people sure did!

On another note, this botched execution in Ohio made me very angry and I'm going to say some things when I'm less sleepy and don't have to wake up for 231221 catch-up coffees with friends.

Life goals of an ageist slob.

If I were the oldest man in the world, I would start a convention for old men. I do not mean for AARP members. I mean for the ten oldest men in the world. The membership changes very often, and sometimes the 11th oldest man goes in place of the 7th oldest, who is in a hospital dying. This is not a tragedy, as he is the 7th oldest man on the planet and has been very happy this last year or so.

Each year at the convention for the world's oldest men, everyone goes for dinner at a nondescript diner in New Jersey. This diner has not been written up in any travel guides as one of the "top ten charming destinations on the East Coast," nor has it been designed to look like the 1950s. But it does have free coffee refills, fairly decent banana cream pie, and a cynical but good-looking waitress who provides fodder for conversations about women from their youth.

Topics of discussion include growing up in the late 19th century, which war was the most interesting/devastating, and what may be happening at this year's convention for the world's oldest women (in a tea house in Kyoto). The oldest man is always the keynote speaker, and usually has prepared a rambling speech approximately 17 minutes long dedicated to his predecessor or predecessors, depending on how many of the world's oldest have passed away in the last year. Sometimes he will have very little notice, and sometimes he will have assumed - based on the frail health of last year's keynote speaker - that he should be prepared with something witty.

Language barriers surface frequently. Also, they have little in common except their fortunate old age and their very arbitrary gender. The American delegates almost always fight about the New Deal. As the convention consists only of that one, albeit lengthy meal, delegates from overseas suspect they have wasted a lot of time and money on airplanes. Sometimes a wizened man teeters through the doorway waving a signed doctor's note to the effect of, "This man is probably old enough for your club even though he never got a birth certificate and his age cannot be verified."

At the end of the convention, everyone jumps in a chartered airport bus. Some will try to get others' phone numbers and tips for befriending estranged grandchildren, who are probably battling menopause and prostate cancer. At the airport, they will all shuffle (or roll) to their respective terminals, and hope it will be their chance to give the keynote address next year.

I'm thinking about another writing project.

I know, I haven't finished the detective poems yet. But the world's oldest man died this weekend and now there's a new one. "Apparently."

I keep thinking of this "world's oldest man" in the context of a Miss America or a Nobel Prize, where the winner is selected from a long list of candidates. Or maybe it's the same dude. Or maybe we're all on a train about to collide with a semi-truck, and instead the semi is split in half and we end up waiting in the desert for three hours waiting for a new engine, with no air conditioning in the dining car.

And every year there's some new advice from the World's Oldest Man about how to live longer.

two items relating to previous travels

1. I found these old blobs I wrote after leaving Lesotho. I guess I have been very piecemeal about sharing stories from abroad. So here's some stuff, since the original purpose of this blog was to streamline the whole anecdote-sharing process.

"M. complains in Malube-lube that there is too much electricity in this, the 'remote' part of Lesotho. He wants to start a lodge somewhere you cannot see even 5 tiny lights in the distance. The electricity here is solar. Kids charge their phones at shops. A girl asks me to buy her a phone, but I cannot(?). Wherever you travel, these days, people (who are not hungry) tell you not to give handouts. To reduce the culture of begging, we say. 'A hand out is not a hand up.'

...What is a Lesotho? Remoteness, "Real Africa," proof that you care enough to get close to people? We say, look at this cute village with cute animals and cute candles and etc, etc. Meanwhile, they want electricity and a dam is coming to provide that. And money (mishandled) from South Africa for the water. 20% of Durban now, and hopefully 80% of all S.Africa by 20__. I want to research what it would do to the ecology. Rudy insists nothing but good will come of it for all parties. Alexandre, who says he will be the prime minister some day (or maybe a priest, or maybe a teacher), wants to bring farm machinery to the mountainside cornfields, and feed the people. He asks about America, and when I say Madison is okay but not great, he says, 'You have roads and lights.' What I mean is, Lesotho does not want to be cute."

2. The best single quote from the book that kept me company in that particular two weeks of my life.

"The woman's figure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head. There's a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and this laughing, muddy woman, weeds around the fingers of her hand gesturing to him in intimate argumentative pleasure. This person who is barely Anna." - Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

Traffic jams on the information superhighway.

My friend Mary and I, (failing to find Eastgate's movie theater with three minutes before our showing of Harry Potter was due to start and ending up hauling our asses all the way to Point for a slightly later showing), discuss relationships, the meaning of happiness, the massive Internet explosion of our generation and our own personal failures in filtering all the information, tools, and various experiments underway all over the world.

It's true. The internet sometimes gives me a headache, when I think of all that is possible and how little I'm really utilizing that, and how much time and energy I could spend in creating an organized corner of cyberspace. I have three blogs (of one type or another), a very dusty Twitter account, a Facebook account, and - now that I've discovered some of the more social features like chat and GReader's content-sharing - an increasingly interactive Google account. I have a long way to go before I am using these tools to their full potentials, and I can't help feeling that my "informational" life is as much of a mess as my physical apartment, right now, minus dirty laundry.

And then there's information intake. I love to learn, and I'm interested in almost everything - it's part of why I went into journalism. But if I don't set clear goals for a period of time, I fall easily into the dread hyperlink tangent, the internet equivalent of forgetting why you walked into a room.

And choice overload. The list of subjects I want to investigate further grows faster than I get through it, and when it comes to picking where to start, I generally get little help from Google's deceptively simple search page. "Hello, Christie," it says. "I have 250 billion brains. My goal is to one day contain all of human knowledge. What did you accomplish today?"

I guess it's a matter of discipline, to some degree. Of learning to selectively filter out all the billions of pieces of data waving their arms and screaming at you - at least until you've finished the task you've set for yourself and can resume "aimless browsing time." But then again, is any research task ever truly complete? There are always finer details and larger implications to investigate. A 20 inch story almost always has the potential to lead to an entire novel. Not always an interesting one, but a novel nonetheless.

I suspect that, while there are many people out there who are using the internet thoroughly and well, it's the younger generation that's going to do it best. After all, they're growing up in a world of interconnections and information overload that I only started with, one very slow pageload at a time, in 5th grade. By then, the brain is already developing the intractable rind of mental habit. In theory (my theory, my completely unscientific theory), the kids who are growing up with modems in their cradles are going to be so used to the barrage of information by the time they can read that they'll know exactly how to filter out what they don't need or want.

And while it's my mission as a journalist to become a master of finding, organizing, and presenting fact from all formats and sources, I doubt I will ever be able to look at Google's search box without feeling at least a small temptation to shut down entirely in the face of so much choice.

At the school board meeting.

"We have had some very serious grief issues this year." - re: why the school board should retain the employee assistance program for counseling during times of personal crisis.

But tell me, what is a "grief issue"? Is it more or less than grief? Is it resolved once and then forgotten? Can it be summarized in an annual budget? Is it a matter of opinion? Does it cause deadlocks in contract negotiations or tardiness to staff meetings? These are things the writer asks and the journalist cannot fit in 20 inches before deadline.

Oops! WI Governor uses outlawed veto power, breaks law.

It looks like in all the hurry to strategically veto things from the newly-passed Wisconsin state budget, Jim Doyle forgot(?) he's not as powerful as he used to be. After last cycle's budget, when he selectively deleted words from several items to create new sentences and raise the state property tax by more than 150%, and the previous budget year, when he appropriated millions of dollars from the state transportation fund-- the all-powerful "Frankenstein veto" was finally banned. The veto allowed Wisconsin governors, Democrat and Republican, enormous freedoms in vetoing language from appropriations bills - and often, as a result, creating new items within those bills, with little recourse available for the legislature.

But it's back? The Wisconsin State Journal reports that, albeit in a "minor" policy item, Doyle very clearly used the unconstitutional technique to cancel the creation of a committee to study facilities caring for the mentally retarded. In the post-error scramble, it's not yet clear what will happen to the vetoed item. And it's still not quite clear what happened that led Doyle to do it in the first place. His office blames the need for haste in approving the bill before the July 1st deadline, admittedly admirable given the budget hasn't been on time for years, but isn't it more important that we don't have to go back and fix problems for which we have very little legal precedent?