October 2005 Archives
Read Part One
"Omigod," I said when she told me this. "Omigod."
"Are you going to stay on campus and wait for them?" she asked.
"I don't have any choice," I said. "I don't have my car keys to drive home, or my house keys to get in my house even if I got a ride from someone else. I don't have my wallet or my coat or my umbrella--if it weren't raining so hard, I'd just go look for the cop. But everything is in my office."
"Do you have a cell phone number where I can call you in case I get through to someone?"
"I don't have ANYTHING," I said, "except the clothes I'm wearing, which includes a skirt with a couple of great big blood stains on it. The whole reason I left my office was so I could go to the restroom and deal with the fact that I had bled all over the back of my skirt. Which is why I wasn't thinking clearly enough to grab my keys, because I pretty much never do things like this."
I finished a long day of teaching Tuesday at 5:15 p.m. I was tired and hungry but I still had work to do: I had to prepare to meet a colleague at 6:30 to discuss a panel on work and sex in Buffy the Vampire Slayer we're putting together for a Halloween horror conference. I sighed hard, sat down, and rolled my chair forward to my computer, rolling over and catching the hem of my skirt in the process. I disentangled myself, stood up to smooth my skirt, and noticed that my fingers came away from the back of it damp and tinged with red.
"Shit," I said aloud, though what was on my fingers wasn't shit; it was something else. I dragged my skirt forward and craned my neck back to inspect the damage and sure enough, smack-dab center on the back of my skirt, was a great big soggy blood stain.
I sat down for a moment, my face red as the back of my skirt, while I thought about the fact that the class I'd just finished contained a dozen freshmen boys and one freshman girl; if there was a group to whom I didn't care to announce my fertility, it was that one. "Let it go, Holly," I said, reminding myself that I'd been seated for most of the class, reading them instructions for a writing exercise, and that they never seemed to pay that much attention to me anyway.
My mother has begun doing this really annoying thing: she has begun emptying filing cabinets and drawers that haven't been opened for 20 years, and if the contents bears any relation whatsoever to me, she sends it to me.
Monday I got a big package containing my report cards from first, second and sixth grade; a bunch of my elementary school photographs, a few of which I'm posting just for the hell of it; the program from my kindergarten graduation ceremony (apparently I won the coveted role of Mama Rabbit in the classic play "The Little White Rabbits Who Wanted Red Wings," and I also got to play the Queen of Hearts in "A School Day in Storybook Land"--I actually remember the costume for that: it was this fabulous confection of a white dress with red hearts all over it, and I wore a tiara and carried a heart-shaped scepter); and lots and lots of really BAD poetry written before I had mastered cursive handwriting.
I can see why she saved that stuff. And I guess I'm glad she's sorting through it now, so we don't have to do it all after she dies. (I know my father is going to leave us a huge mess of papers, bills, uncashed but no longer negotiable checks--sometimes he just can't be bothered to go to the bank--and stashes of decades old sugar-free candy to sort through and discard.) But I admit I'm sort of resentful that I'm supposed to become the custodian of my own childhood at this point. After all, that's what parents are FOR: to maintain a shrine to our childhoods so we can grow up and forget about them, right?
A few week agos, Jana took this quiz designed to gauge your world view and posted her results on her blog. A few days later her husband John took the same quiz and posted his results, and not so long ago Wayne followed the links in my webroll to one of those places and took the quiz himself, though he didn't post his results on either his first or second blog. Instead, he read me his results over the phone, and told me to take the quiz. So I did. Turns out I'm a Cultural Creative, and
Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
I didn't just score highest in the Cultural Creative category; I scored perfectly in it. I don't particularly know what the term means or how long it's been around, but I guess I really truly am one, if I buy into it 100%. I'm rather glad that "new ager" is not a category; I appreciate quite a few new age ideas, but there's so much annoying posture that goes along with being new age. As for the other terms, many of them don't mean to me what they seem to mean to the creator of this quiz, so I'm not sure how revealing the results are. To me, a Romanticist is someone who studies early 19th century British poetry (not many of those around these days) and a Modernist is what I almost became, someone who specializes in British and American lit written between the two world wars, and a postmodernist is a silly person who writes badly whose work you have to read in graduate school. At least I'm absolutely NOT a fundamentalist (which I would have predicted but am glad to have confirmed nonetheless). Anyway, here are my results:
Cultural Creative 100%
Idealist 94%
Postmodernist 69%
Existentialist 63%
Materialist 38%
Romanticist 38%
Modernist 19%
Fundamentalist 0%
If you take the quiz yourself, let me know how you score.
When I was finishing up my first master's degree, I saw a career counselor who told me I should figure out what I would want if I could have any kind of life at all. My desires were modest: I wanted to live alone in a pleasant house with lots of windows. I wanted to spend most of my day writing, alone. In the evening I wanted to get together with friends and eat pasta out of big pretty bowls, and then I wanted to go home alone. I didn't care whether or not I was rich or famous; I just wanted to be comfortable. I also wanted all of this to take place in Italy. And wouldn't you know I got it all, six years later, except that as far as the place goes, all the universe got right was the first letter: it happened in Iowa, not Italy.
What if I had wanted something grander, more elaborate? Why didn't I want something grander, more elaborate? One reason is, I think, that I was tired. Life had been pretty stressful up to that point and I wanted some peace. I wanted less to be expected of me.
At this point I'd like to want more. I want more to be expected of me and I expect more of me and I expect more of the universe. What, after all, am I allowed to want? That has been part of my thinking all along: If you have this, you can't want that. If you are a Mormon you can't want a life full of drugs and orgies. If you have even a certain level of enlightenment you can't want the ease of living a stupid, unenlightened life. Furthermore, if you want certain things, then you can't really want other things. If you want to eat whatever you want whenever you want no matter how many calories it has or what it does to your liver or your pancreas or whatever, then you can't really want to be thin and healthy. If you want to smoke then you can't really want to breathe well. If you want to be nasty to your neighbors then you can't really want to be enlightened. If you want to be a writer then you can't really want to be not a writer. If you don't really feel like writing then you must not really want to be a writer.
Some of those probably hold true and some probably don't. I want to want everything I can possibly want. I want to want so many things that I get at least some of them, even if they are contradictory.
Read Part One.
The biggest things Mormons plan for, of course, is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse that will precede it. Gotta be righteous, so you don't get burned with the heathen! Also must stock up on a two-years' supply of raw wheat (don't forget the hand-cranked grinder so you can still grind it when the power goes out), a two-years' supply of potable water, and a two-years' supply of toilet paper. Mormon pantries are a sight to behold, as are the spaces under Mormon beds: cans of dehydrated potatoes and cornmeal and god only knows what.
At some point, when the church grew large enough that its membership wasn't concentrated in the spacious intermountain West, where people could have huge basements in which to store foodstuffs well beyond the expiration date (ever walked into a basement where two dozen cans of potted beef have exploded? That stuff stinks even when it's not rancid), someone in charge said, "OK, we'll let you scale back to just a ONE-YEAR supply of all those necessities. And don't forget to rotate your canned goods!"
You may think I'm kidding, but in her attic, my mom really does have a one-year supply of toilet paper. Outside the house, my father has a ten-year supply of rotted firewood, as well as dozens of old car batteries that can be hooked up to a generator and recharged and power various special appliances he has bought because they will run off old car batteries. (He also has two old Cadillacs: a 62 with rocks in the gas tank courtesy of some nasty neighbor boy, and a 49 that still runs, which he periodically has repainted, drives for a day or two, then parks again for ten to fifteen years. In addition, he owns an ancient aluminum motor home, a piece of junk whose only virtue is that its exterior is recyclable; a small RV in which he and my mother have driven across the country a time or two; a 40-year-old green Chevy pickup, the vehicle in which I learned to drive and which we all agree Dad should keep because sometimes, you need to haul stuff; a hideous white suburban with a broken driver's seat that he refuses to sell because it might come in handy, but which never will because of the truck; and a Ford Yukon he drives every day and complains about every day because it's not a Lincoln, which is what he really wanted, but he bought that damn little SUV brand new because my brother could get him a deal on it through his job, and Dad was too cheap to fork out the cash on a Lincoln, even though he could afford it. The front of the house looks fine, but the side view.... I swear to god, it looks like the opening shot of a movie about people who leave their empty whiskey bottles under the bed and tether a goat to the lawn so they don't have to mow it. The only thing that redeems the scene is the fact that none of the cars are on blocks.)
I have always been someone who spends a lot of time "just checking" things. It's not like I think the world will stop whirling frantically on its wobbly little axis if I don't look up every so often and make sure the sun is progressing across the sky in a timely fashion. But I do harbor the suspicion that if you don't rattle the knob of your door at least three time to make sure it's locked, gremlins will come along and unlock it as soon as you are out of sight.
Preparing for contingencies and anticipating consequences, that's what I believe in, because you've got to stay ahead of the gremlins! In order to do this well, not only must you Check on Things, you also have to Remember Stuff and Keep Lists and Plan Ahead.
OK, so I didn't come up with that title myself: It's the title of an article in today's Independent UK, about China's environmental problems. (And for those of you who don't remember or don't care to remember, China Crisis is also the name of an 80s British pop band who achieved modest success with a single called "Arizona Sky," which, now that I read the lyrics, is kind of lame, but I always liked the lines praising the vast, brilliant blue sky of Arizona.)
Anyway, this article makes some truly dire predictions, which I have no problem believing are very, very likely. For instance:
deforestation is only one of the threats to the planet posed by an economy of 1.3 billion people that has now overtaken the United States as the world's leading consumer of four out of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities - grain, meat, oil, coal and steel. China now lags behind the US only in consumption of oil - and it is rapidly catching up.Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.
The article then discusses population growth in China and other parts of Asia, and quotes an expert who offers this opinion:
The bottom line of this analysis is that we're going to have to develop a new economic model. Instead of a fossil-fuel based, automobile-centred, throw-away economy we will have to have a renewable-energy based, diversified transport system, and comprehensive reuse and recycle economies. If we want civilisation to survive, we will have to have that. Otherwise civilisation will collapse.
I lived in Shanghai for several months in 1991. It was the most polluted place I had ever been, though Kaohsiung, a filthy port city in southern Taiwan, ran a close second. I can only imagine how much worse it it is now, with more cars and more people and even more people who can actually afford to heat their homes in the winter. (It was also very poor.) And supposedly Shanghai isn't nearly as bad as Beijing, which becomes particularly polluted each winter.
Um, so, British scientists have discovered a new worm, which they have cleverly named Osedax mucofloris, Latin for "bone-eating snot flower." Remarkably enough, the bone-eating snot flower is not related to some zombie worms living off the coast of California, the name of which was not provided in the article I read. In any event, you can read all about the BESF here.
This is a review of the movie Chocolat that I wrote in 2001 for a class on, well, on writing reviews. The teacher liked it but suggested that it was a bit too idiosyncratic to be appropriate for most publications, so I never bothered to do anything with it, but it seems it might find a home here, especially since I posted all this stuff about movies.
****
Once at a party a friend of mine who had been sitting near my television said to me, "I can't believe your movie collection. It's so...brazen."
"You mean ‘cause they're almost all chick movies?" I asked.
"It's not just that," she said. "It's that you have them out, where people can see them. I mean, some of my friends own a lot of these same movies, but they put them away before people come over. But you're not even embarrassed."
It's true: I like chick movies, I watch chick movies, I buy chick movies; I don't care who knows. I might add that my collection is alphabetized, ranging from Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chasing Amy, Clueless to Sense and Sensibility, Singin' in the Rain, Sixteen Candles, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Truth or Dare. I feel entitled to add that I like other kinds of movies as well--I love Lawrence of Arabia and The Pride of the Yankees, and I don't think those qualify as chick movies. But then, I haven't gotten around to buying those movies. Maybe I should. Nothing in my collection starts with L or P.
Another piece culled from old files, this was written five or six years ago.
I was very depressed last week until Wednesday night, when my friend and former f*ck buddy Sergei came over. I called him because I hadn't heard from him in weeks. He himself was terribly depressed, having just been named "Employee of the Month" at Barnes and Noble, an honor that means he's a responsible grownup who must renounce all claims to being a hip, cool bad boy. Since we were both depressed, we decided to commiserate. He showed up with a bottle of tequila and Heat, this long Al Pacino movie, because there's a scene featuring the very Heckler and Koch assault rifle he owns (and which I fired one day at the shooting range). We watched the movie and downed a few shots and he gave me a back rub and then we ended up wrestling and it was just like Ado Annie says: "Every time I lose that wrestlin' match, I have a funny feelin' that I won...." So I have this very attractive man straddling me and pinning my hands to the ground, and all he does is say, "OK, kiss me." So I get one lousy kiss and then he gets up and goes home because after all he has a girlfriend and I don't approve of infidelity.
Tuesday I collected a batch of essays and yesterday I went to a coffee house to start grading them, a time-honored technique adopted by graduate students everywhere: grading is often so boring at best and so loathsome at worst, that it helps to go someplace where you've really got to grade stuff, can't get up and check your email or wash your dishes or start a load of laundry instead of plowing through the papers, no matter how awful they are. I sat down with my decaf medium mocha, regular milk but no whipped cream, served in a mug instead of a paper cup (my standard order these days), hauled out my folder and my pen, and started reading. At the top of the stack was an essay that began, "The as an average student I carry many things with me schoolwork, personal items, utensils for completing the tasks at hand, and not to mention the emotional aspect of my day."
The only thing to do at that point was to bury my face in my hands and mutter, "Dear god, help me." Which prompted a man seated at a table near me to say, "Kids getting you down, are they?"
I looked up. "They are indeed," I said. "Just listen to this," and I read him the sentence.
"That's pretty awful," he said. "What are you reading this stuff for?" he asked.
"I'm an English professor," I told him, and asked what he did. He was significantly older than the kind of guy I usually go for, but I have a long history of dating men who are too young for me, and decided recently that I would cultivate an interest in age-appropriate men. This guy had, I learned, a grown son, but he also had a full head of well-coiffed hair, and he was in good shape, wiry and lean. Which is why I felt a twinge of disappointment when he told me he invested in real estate for a living. Shit, I thought. That might mean he's a soulless, money-grubbing Republican. Still, I was even more disappointed when he quit chatting me up in order to turn to his newspaper and his extra large beverage in a paper cup.
A piece salvaged from old files, this was written in August 2001, when I first moved back to Arizona.
"People look better back-lit," my photographer friend told me. It's also true of mountains. This evening I rode my bike down to the Gila River a mile north of town, which involved passing the old sewer pond and the new wastewater treatment facility, both of which smelled especially bad, perhaps because it has been so long since it rained. The clouds were orange for a long time and then they were gray. The mountains had contours for a long time and then they were just a stark, dark outline before a diminishing brightness. I had never noticed before how the Pinalenos and the Santa Teresas look like a felled dinosaur, the head pointing southeast and the massive tail jutting northwest.
These two ranges, connected by a long, low ridge, look like they could be one mountain range, but they're geologically different, I'm told. The Pinalenos, which are taller and thicker and longer, have nothing in them worth mining. The Santa Teresas contain gold, silver, copper, etc, and if anyone wanted those minerals badly enough, they could get them out.
I haven't done anything exciting in the past eight years except: get a PhD, fall in love and get my heart broken, write a book. Each of these activities has hampered the rest of my life in certain ways. Getting a PhD involved being in graduate school in the Midwest for eight years. I hated many things about being in a PhD program, course work being at the top of the list, poverty running a close second. Once I finished course work and could just sit at home and read the books I needed to read for teaching or for research, graduate school became a lot less vile. I had lots of time but not a lot of money. I started to knit and quilt again. I took up yoga. I began to garden. All of that was enjoyable but it doesn't exactly rank high on anyone's list of huge thrills.
As I mentioned, a few weeks ago a friend and I visited Kirtland, Ohio, an important site in Mormon history. I've been sitting here preparing to write the sentence, "Church history doesn't really interest me," but something stopped me, because it isn't quite true: I've always found the story of the Saints Crossing the Plains thoroughly compelling, but I think that's partly because it involves the vast, expansive landscapes of the West. I guess it's more accurate to say that "Church history in Ohio never really interested me;" all that stuff about how Joseph Smith and his hardy band of trusting converts moved hither and yon after Joseph exhausted his credit or a bank failed or whatever always struck me as feeble preamble: after all, they were moving distances of a hundred miles or so, from one small- to medium-sized eastern state with trees and stores and ROADS, to another. That is an enterprise much less romantic than carving a thousand-mile-long path across a wind-scoured landscape where you encounter more wolves and buffalo than people, and where, if you want something like grains or vegetables, you either have to bring them with your or camp for several months while you plant, grow and harvest them.
Can you tell I'm a little homesick right now? We had a string of glorious fall days, but autumn has well and truly arrived now, not as the culmination of summer but as the harbinger of winter, with vicious cold rain flung from a sullen sky. I can't help checking the weather report for Tucson.... Anyway, this was not supposed to be a post about why I still prefer the parts of this country west of the Mississippi to the parts east of it; it's supposed to be an opportunity to post a picture of myself, so I'll get back on topic.
I frequently hear this inane argument against reincarnation that "no one ever imagines a past life where they're just some ordinary yahoo; everyone always believes they were Cleopatra, or Attila the Hun, or Casanova, or Joan of Arc." Not me. I once got hypnotized in order to do some work on my early childhood and ended up progressing right through three past lives, each one every bit as nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes would have imagined. In the most recent I was a British farm girl raped and murdered during some civil war. In the next I was some hot Teutonic babe, imprisoned in some fortress on some cliffs over a river. I hated my husband, a nasty little rodent of a man, and I was very mean to him--I was very mean to everyone, in fact, except my children, whom I loved devotedly. To punish me, my husband had me shut up in this tower unless I agreed to be nice, and since I wouldn't agree, I died of starvation and heartbreak.
In the earliest past life, I was some six-year-old child taken captive and enslaved during some ancient war--the Peloponnesian or something--and had to watch my parents' brutal murders. That was bad enough, but what really upset me about that past life was the realization that that particular time around, I was male--I remember the hypnotist asked me, "Are you a little boy or a little girl?" and I responded, in complete indignation, "I'm a little boy!"
Those of you who have visited my blog before will notice some changes: It's no longer utilitarian and spare, but spiffed-up and fancy! Check out the picture in the upper right corner--that's one of my favorite photos of me. Check out the Chinese character in the upper left corner--that's my surname and my tattoo! Check out the soothing green palate and the larger, easier-to-read font!
I owe all of this to my friend Jim, who generously offered to host my blog and custom-design the template.
I couldn't be happier with the results, or more grateful for his work.
Feel free to leave enthusiastic comments praising the beauty of my blog--but remember, Jim is the genius behind it all.
Thanks, Jim!
There have been three or four times in my life when I've lost a significant amount of weight (fifteen pounds or so) without dieting. Instead, something awful has happened--a serious illness, clinical depression, a devastating breakup, or some combination thereof--that has made it hard to choke down food, and made the food hard to digest once it was down.
Recently I lost over ten pounds without trying. I wasn't depressed or ill, but I was extremely anxious. It had to do, first of all, with the standard post-traumatic Sunstone syndrome I go through every year. But what I didn't want to admit to many people (though I did tell Tom and his wife about it) was that what troubled me most was this visceral certainty that I lacked a fundamental piece of bad information about the romance I'd begun at Sunstone.
Every morning for a month I'd wake nauseated and grossed out. I'd raise a carton of orange juice to my mouth (I live alone, so I feel entitled to drink straight from the carton) and my throat would contract after a swallow or two. Along about noon, I'd find myself ravenous and toss a salad, but I could never finish it. At dinner I'd grill a cheese sandwich and end up throwing the last few bites away. As for dessert, I couldn't even go there! The way I felt reminded me of how my sisters described morning sickness, except that instead of random smells making me want to puke, it was random thoughts: I'd think suddenly of this guy I was utterly enamored of, and I'd feel dread, foreboding and a trace of sheer physical revulsion, which, to state the obvious, is not a good sign.
Eventually I discovered what it was I hadn't known. Soon thereafter, the relationship went away, and with it, much of my anxiety. But my appetite didn't return immediately, which was OK with me. I'm generally quite healthy, with an appetite to match; I'm a decent cook, and I enjoy food. But I discovered that fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for four years offers certain enjoyments too. Having begun losing weight, I rather wanted to continue.
Yesterday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes & Noble. (Yeah, I know: how terribly corporate of me. But my little home in the Rust Belt doesn't offer much else. I have tried and rejected as thoroughly inadequate the various non-corporate alternatives for book acquisition, with the exception of my university library--that rocks. And even non-corporate coffee is hard to come by. The one entry in the corporate coffee delocator for this area was provided by me, and that place is a million miles away, with mediocre mochas.)
My friend was late, so I browsed the books. On the "New Arrivals" table, I saw several copies of Best American Short Stories 2005, but couldn't find the other titles in the series. Finally I located a sales clerk. "Where's the Best American Essays?" I asked.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"The same thing as this," I said, holding up the collection of short stories, "except with essays."
He led me to a display, and there it was. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents: twenty-five essays, by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Edward Hoagland, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace--and me.
Go here:
They're all good, but I especially liked the 30-second version of Pulp Fiction.
I would love to invite Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens and Oscar Wilde to my house for a sleepover. I rather suspect that Jane and Wallace might be disposed to decline the invitation, but I would wheedle and flatter, tell Jane how much I admire the navy and promise Wallace I'd buy all my insurance from him, until their resistence would deliquesce like a snowman and its mind of winter thrust suddenly into the orderly heat of Key West. Before my guests arrived, I would bake a batch of my special chocolate chocolate chip cookies, because those cookies always garner me praise, admiration and gratitude. I'd stock up on different flavors of Ben & Jerry's, because after all, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. I'd buy a case of Bass Pale Ale, as well of plenty of tequila, triple sec, limes, salt and ice, because who wouldn't like to see Emily Dickinson completely shitfaced? We'd lay our sleeping bags out on the living room floor and play Truth or Dare.
Actually we'd play Truth or Truth. Like I'm going to dare Frank O'Hara to make out with Oscar Wilde? I mean, yeah, I'd love to watch that, but I'd bet my entire poetry collection it would happen on its own. I'm far more interested in what they can tell me.
