Woe Is Me

Remember how I said, not too long ago, that I would soon find out what I would be doing with the next two years of my life? Well, I oversimplified. The idea was that, if I were admitted to the masters program I applied to, my next two years would be spent going to school. And, between the confidence of my boss and my boyfriend--and the program's relative obscurity--and the perceived non-shoddiness of my application--I thought I would be admitted. But I wasn't.

Now, what to do? I don't know. I have few ideas, fewer that sound easy and none that sound both easy and appealing.

I could stay at this job, and stay bored and mediocre (but comfortable!) for the rest of my life--but on second thought, I really couldn't. Another year, in fact, would be unbearable.

I could consider, in the future, applying to graduate schools in other parts of the country, knowing that accepting an (as yet hypothetical) offer from a faraway school would mean leaving someone with whom I can easily imagine spending a non-trivial portion of my life. (This is the secular skeptic's bet-hedging, anti-romantic, ultra-cautious version of "He's the One 4-ever! *gush*", I think). As far as options go, this one falls halfway between unattractive and unthinkable.

More appealingly, I could strengthen my candidacy and reapply. But I obviously didn't cut it the first time, and how much can really change in nine months?

M.'s answer is always the same: self-teach and publish. And then, go for a Ph.D.

I'll try, but I don't exactly have high expecations.

Part of my trouble is that my interests are a poor match with my temperament. My classes in college overrepresented certain populations: the frats, the sororities, and, more generally, the social types. My classmates were the kinds of people who studied politics because they wanted to be in politics, who studied international relations because they were interested in being international lawyers or businesspeople or diplomats or advocates for various causes. Such was my perception, at least. These kids spoke up in class, and participated in debate, and many of them went off to law or business school after they graduated. Those who decided to pursue politics spent their college years in a networking frenzy. They worked for their local Representatives, or at the Department of State. Meanwhile, I don't like politicians; I don't even think I like people who like politicians. I rarely like businesspeople. Hell, I don't even really like people.

I became interested in politics and IR from a theoretical, strategic, and ultimately, descriptive (as opposed to normative) perspective. I like studying, I like writing, and I like empiricism. M. says that for these reasons he thinks I am better off going into academia. But academia in the "softer" social sciences seems more political and more hierarchical than the harder sciences. And getting into an acceptable Ph.D. program would be so terribly, extremely difficult--much more difficult than the program that just rejected me.

Maybe I should look into developing new interests.

Or, if anyone reading this happens to be the editor of The Economist, I've read your Style Guide about a dozen times and I think I'd make a decent assistant copy editor.

---

At least I can't complain that it hasn't been a gorgeous winter.

Die, SUV Driver

While biking to work yesterday I was crowded off the road by a jagoff in a white Lexus SUV. Said jagoff was consulting a map or somesuch and couldn't be bothered to watch the road, and so I was given a second's choice between the SUV and the curbside. The curbside looked better (softer?), so I hit it, flipped over my bike, and landed on the ground. It wasn't so bad--I got away with a few scrapes on the hands, a few bruises on the legs, and a renewed hatred for these shitty suburban drivers who, I bet, have absolutely no need for an SUV, and no clue how to drive one. Biking in the city is like maneuvering through an obstacle course, but at least the drivers there have learned how to watch the road. I've had more close calls in the suburbs, by far.

Oh, and I saw the SUV slow down for a moment, as though the driver saw me eat it, but then it sped up through the intersection once he/she/it saw I wasn't dead. Thanks, dude!


On a completely different note, my cat looks somewhat like Falcore from The Neverending Story.

Quickpost

"Let's Party" brand prepared crab snacks: yum!


In other news--

(1) I just spent an hour and a half organizing pictures on flickr
(2) My flatmate is an alcoholic
(3) A hoodlum in a low rider and a tophat rolled down his window while I was biking up a steep hill to ask if I had any Grey Poupon
(4) M. and I will spend most of this weekend entertaining his mother and her boyfriend

and

(5) Within the next few weeks I will probably learn what I'm going to do with the next two years of my life.

Sunrise

I wanted so badly to watch Apocalypse Now and go to bed early last Friday, but instead we danced all night and stayed up to watch the sunrise, pictured here doing its best imitation of a nuclear explosion.




At first staying up until daybreak sounded like a bad idea. Then, when I was up on the roof looking east, it looked like a good idea; but on Saturday, when I woke up at 6:12pm and the sun was setting and my head was still pounding, it felt like a very, very bad idea all over again.


Best photo of my flatmate ever taken, best Leffe ad ever made, both, or neither?

I don't understand how M. was comfortable with a(nother) weekend of hard partying right before his Ph.D. interviews. Methinks he's made of much sturdier stuff than I.

Correction: Party Like It's 1997

It was the high-school party weekend I never had. Namely, it would have been much cooler and more appropriate ten years ago; and besides, I feel way too old for this stuff now.

First, our big raucous house party was shut down by the cops. The cops! Policemen with flashlights! We think they were looking for drugs, since it was fairly early Friday evening in a youthful neighborhood, making their "noise complaint" justification ring somewhat false. Or maybe they were trolling for seventeen-year-olds sneaking shots of Jagermeister. Regardless, we clearly weren't doing anything illegal, but they stormed through anyway and ordered us all to go home.

Amusingly, hardly anyone listened to them. People held their ground and stared back dumbly. From what I heard, the cops resorted to threatening the apartment's residents: "We're going to wait outside in the car, and if we hear the music come back on we reserve the right to arrest everyone in the building!"

It was equally amusing how Sam (bartender flatmate) and some of the other party-throwers reacted to the shutdown: they turned off the music and smoked weed instead. Take that, power-tripping agents of state coersion.

Earlier in the party, before the cops, I actually ran into someone I knew in high school. And not only someone who went to school with me, but my old nemesis, my first-ever true enemy: the only person, as far as I know, who has called me a "frigid bitch." The guy had his reasons--I readily admit that he was the inspiration of an unflattering comic I drew for over three years. He was outraged when he found out about it. So, talking to him now, 500 miles and six years removed from high school, was jarring. And creepily reminiscent of the "best" days of my life. (Those are supposed to be high school, right?)

Also, this being a Valentine's Day party, I was hit on by:
1. A friend's forty-year old boss
2. A thuggish-looking white stoner who invited my boyfriend to "do some doses" in the park the following day
3. A nondescript drunk who called me "Darling" and then asked to kiss me
while my boyfriend was standing less than two feet away
4. One friendly and mostly agreeable person. What amused me was the following exchange:

Him: Will you give me your number?
Me: I have a boyfriend.
Him: So what? I have a girlfriend.
Me: Sorry, I don't have a number.

---

The following day, Saturday, consisted of varying levels of stupor. M. and Rockstar Friend woke up painfully early to get bloody marys at this place. I slept in. By late afternoon, though, we were all out at this bar for a barleywine festival (note: barleywine is far stronger than beer), followed by dinner at one of our favorite local sushi bars.

This dinner was notable because Rockstar Friend came along. Rockstar Friend, beyond being accident-prone, is a huge sack of neuroses. One of his many lifelong obsessions has been strict veganism. His veganism was not based on any ethical decision, but instead on a control-freak fastidiousness and, from what I've gleaned from M., an odd compulsion to inconvenience himself and others as much as possible. But in a rather charming way, if that makes any sense.

Rockstar Friend had been vegan since early childhood. But last weekend, for whatever reason, he decided that it was time for him to try sushi. Raw fish, of all things! We sat agog and watched him eat: uni (sea urchin gonads) with a raw quail egg; monkfish liver; toro (fatty tuna belly); fatty salmon belly; fatty hamachi (yellowtail) belly; dungeness crab; and albacore. He said he loved everything except the crab and egg.

From there, we continued to our ex-flatmate Hans's birthday celebration at an after hours club where M., Sam, and Rockstar Friend were scheduled to DJ the opening set. I've been to several of these after-hours clubs--a.k.a. speakeasies--in the last six months, and they always make me think of supply and demand. This is a young, childless town, and there are always thousands of people willing to pay lots of money for the chance to drink and dance 'til dawn. And it's clear that on the other end, there are plenty of people willing to buy space in old office buildings, pad the walls, seal the windows, and trade risk for good money. I wonder how many speakeasy owners pay off the police in exchange for being left alone. In my opinion, such regulations are moronic as well as draconian. (Today's theme: fuck da po-lice! rah-rah-rah!)

In a continuation of today's other theme, "high school party weekend I never had," our next stop was an honest-to-god RAVE. I had nothing to do with it; Rockstar Friend's younger sister led us there. While I suspect that the previous after-hours club had made some arrangements with the local authorities, this place clearly had no such deal. The taxi dropped us off at a freeway underpass with nothing in sight. It was a bad neighborhood, and no one was around. We walked cautiously along a dark, eerily quiet road with no sidewalk, and eventually came upon a cluster of ramshackle, graffitoed, seemingly abandoned industrial buildings. Walking closer, we heard the boom-boom-boom of heavy bass coming from inside.

The doormen--or door-boys, more like--crouched nervously in the entrance. They were uncomfortable about letting us in. Maybe we were too clean, looked too much like narcs. When they finally did open the door, they warned us to slip in quickly and not let too much noise leak out.

The kids at the door were high out of their minds on something. "Ten dollars each," they said. "Or seven."

M. was much bigger than them. "There are a bunch of us here. How about you charge us a group rate?"

"Um, whaddya got?"

There were six of us. We counted the money in our pockets. "Twenty-four bucks."

"All right, that's fine."

It's hard to describe how silly this rave was; sadly, my camera was dead at the time, so there are no pictures. But there were crazy hippies of all ages running around on various kinds of drugs. Punky high school kids mingled with fat, topless, dreadlocked, middle-aged flower children. The "music" in the main room was unbelievably bad, and the drugged-out dancing was even more so. At least there was cheap, decent, home-brewed beer.

While M. stood in line for the beer, I leaned back on a table. One of the hippies immediately saw me and wagged her finger.

"Please don't sit on the table. I spent HOURS arranging all the leaflets and flyers on there and I don't want to have to fix it up again."

I stood up. "Sorry. I didn't realize there was anything on the table."

"Yeah, I mean, I would really appreciate it if people would keep off."

"Ok. I understand."

"It just took SO much time and effort to set it up like that."

"Ok."

Once the hippie left me alone I turned around to see what was on the table. It was piles and piles of graphic vegan propaganda. And it could not have taken more than a few minutes to arrange. Then again, who knows what drugs she was on.

Later, a small, teenage Chinese girl with limited English skills started hitting on Rockstar Friend. "I like music," she told him. "I like boys." That's when he decided it was time to go, so we all walked back to the quiet underpass to try our luck with passing cabs. The first cabbie refused to pick us up, apparently suspecting we were up to no good. But the second one happily took the fare, and we were home by an easy 5 o'clock. In bed probably by 6.

---

Unfortunately, Rockstar Friend decided to wake us up at 11 the next morning for bloody marys and brunch. I don't understand why he hates sleep so much, but I went along grumbling.

Randomly-chosen morals of the story:
1. High-school party weekends can be fun, but mostly I prefer moderation
2. Vegans are usually lame, except for Rockstar Friend
3. Paternalistic regulation sucks
4. Some people still live in the '90s
5. Fuck da po-lice
6. There will always be hippies in this city
7. Bloody marys are best made with horseradish, habanero peppers, limes, and olives
8. Not mentioned in the post, but one secret to a really good grilled cheese sandwich is to sprinkle parmesan cheese on the bread before frying it in butter.

Forgive me for this meandering novella of a post. I can't concentrate on work, and I badly need a break from reading about politics.

I think I will follow this with pictures. I have a glut of them; I took 500 over the weekend.

Party Like It's 1987

M. and Bartender/DJ Flatmate are throwing a Valentine's Day party tonight with the help of M.'s Rockstar Friend from LA. The last time that Rockstar Friend drove up from LA, his bicycle was run over and smashed to bits by a crazy uninsured driver, his car's transmission blew up so the car was junked, and he ended up sleeping on our couch for an extra, unplanned week. As a result, I didn't sleep for seven days, came to work late every morning, and picked up a nasty, lingering cold. Whenever I ask myself, "Since when am I a disgusting vector for pestilence, a shitty delinquent worker, and a brainless underslept zombie?" I can only answer, "Oh, yeah--ever since the time Rockstar Friend drove up from LA."

So I am bracing myself for the worst. Rockstar Friend is particularly accident- and crazy-prone--he is, for example, the only person I know who has been stabbed--so every possibility is game. He is borrowing a car this time; will it be jacked or get into a wreck? Will he inadvertently bring us a mosquito carrying the West Nile virus? Or will he get us in trouble with the Feds, or the Russian mafia?

Less of an open question is whether my sleep and health will suffer. I answer that now with a confident probably.

The picture above is the flyer M. made for the party. He was going for a corny, smutty, eighties softcore fantasy-mythology look, which I think he accomplished quite well. Art courtesy of this guy.

I Have Become a Blogger Reactionary

They made me change to New Blogger, but not without a fight. I expect that New Blogger will suck--maybe even more than Old Blogger. Maybe I will move to Wordpress.

M. and I had a lavish Valentine's Day dinner last night, and not because either of us cares a whit about Valentine's Day. My French flatmate left for France this morning, so she and her husband shared a good-bye dinner last night, monopolizing the common space. M. is a spendthrift, so he saw this as a convenient excuse to make a last-minute reservation at a Japanese restaurant. (To him, almost everything is an excuse to make a reservation at a Japanese restaurant.) And it turned out to be a great dinner involving a lot of daiginjo sake.

We came home shortly before midnight, drunk on sake, which is in my opinion the best kind of drunk.

"Let's watch some South Park and go to bed," I proposed. My sleep has been atrocious recently--erratic, restless, and insufficient. I have been showing up to work hours late and tired, too: not exactly a recipe for health and happiness. Or for continued employment, for that matter. So, the thought of going to bed at a reasonable hour was quite appealing.

"No, first I need to play records for a while," M. said, and did.

Clearly vetoed, I sat down at the computer and decided to write in this blog. I am not sure what I would have written last night--only that it would have been highly incoherent and neurotic and maybe even entertaining--but alas! My blogging ambitions were quashed by New Blogger's stubborn insistence that I switch over, the intricacies of said switch-over being hopelessly confusing at the time. Upon which I gave up, roved mindlessly around the Internet, and stumbled upon this video clip of what is possibly the worst TV programming that I have ever seen.

The moral of this story is that New Blogger kills dreams.

But since I am stuck with it now I may as well use it to tag my posts with stupid labels.

Reflections Upon Returning Home From a Bad Party, Having Walked Through Rain to Get There, and Then Going From the Bad Party to Somebody's Apartment,

Whereupon a Group of Friends and Acquaintances Sat Around a TV Smoking Weed and Watching Music Videos and Eating Cheetos--Except for Me Because I Don't Like Weed or TV and am Generally Anti-Fun--Until I Convinced My Boyfriend to Walk Home With Me in the Rain, Yet Could Not Convince Him to Go to Bed Because He Was/Is High and off His Meds and Wants to Play Records Until at Least 5 Ayem Regardless of What Anyone Thinks, Which Annoys Me Because I Am Too Neurotic to Sleep Before He Does:


Tonight was boring and pointless. This post is boring and pointless. These events are intimately related.

Spies and Whiskey

Somehow, on Friday night, 4am, I find myself on a balcony in the warehouse district, standing between 1 portly Englishman who used to be a spy for the MI6 and 1 nervous American man who used to be a spy for the NSA. My boyfriend stands across from me, drunk on cheap whiskey, jabbering loudly at a million bpm.

I've barely slept in a week and I feel a cold coming. 75% of me wants nothing more than to go home and sleep. Enough excitement already, or pseudo-excitement as it were. Three hours of failed napping (on accounta my being anxious to the point of handicap); an empty dance floor at a giant local venue; a self-indulgent loft party thrown by and for the techno-DJ underground; and I am more than ready to call it a night.

"You want to stay and talk to these people," says M. "I think you'll be interested." Indeed, I am interested. Interested enough to ignore my exhaustion for the time being and stand outside in the cold, breathing lungfuls of other people's cigarette smoke.

I listen as the ex-spies talk about war with Iran, and intelligence failures, and Iraq, and the 2008 presidential race, and how they came to work as spies, and they thereby keep me interested. So far, so good.

Regrettably, though, whiskey makes a first-class asshole out of my boyfriend. A loud, arrogant asshole who cannot stop talking to save his life. For instance.


NSA Guy: I think this is important because--

M.: No, no, NO! You're wrong and I'll tell you why. [insert long, pedantic speech on a political, scientific, mathematical, linguistic, musical or other topic].

NSA Guy: I understand, but I still disagree with you because--

M.: Well, I think I have some credibility here because I just got published in [prestigious science journal]. Anyway, as I was saying, [insert interminable speech].

MI6 Guy: I agree with NSA here, I think--

M.: Well, *I* think [insert position] and that's legitimate because I'm smart and my girlfriend told me something to that effect, and my girlfriend reads The Economist and blogs.

Me: (embarrassed) I do read The Economist and blogs, but that hardly makes me an expert. I think we should at least listen to what these guys have to say since they have way more experience than I do.


Yet it is nearly impossible to do any such thing. M. keeps talking. It is six AM now, and he keeps talking. I am a zombie at this point and our new acquaintances are rubbing their eyes.

If I could, I would hereby ban M. from whiskey for ever.

The necessary disclaimer here--for M., if he ever reads this--is that he does not typically act in this way. My guess is that his rantings were a product of (a) too much whiskey, as I've already said; (b) a very, very long time off his meds; and (c) the euphoria of getting his work published. Moreover, this is the only example that comes to mind of my boyfriend having seriously embarrassed me as opposed to the reverse.

---

Bonus round--the intelligence guys predicted the following.
(1) A McCain presidency
(2) No war with Iran

I do, however, take their predictions with "a grain of salt" as they say: on (1) because they were experts in international not domestic affairs, and on (2) because both retired from their government jobs during the Clinton years, presumably giving them little insiders' insight into the workings of the current administration.

Kauai 1

Kauai 2

Kauai 3

Kauai 4

Kauai 5

Kauai 6

Kauai 7

Kauai 8

Kauai

In a word, unreal.

In more words, by our second day there we were already scheming to find a way back. Now, a tentative plan:

1. Achieve academic success in a variety of fields
2. Acquire capital
3. Over decades, build an empire
4. Do not retire; instead, expand empire
5. Steer ample progeny into strategic industries
6. Buy holiday mansion on beautiful tropical island
7. Remodel mansion on beautiful tropical island
8. Paradise

At least, that's what our boss has done. And how it's worked out for him.

I have never known a truer capitalist, a truer empire-builder--a truer American, really--than my octogenarian boss. And I mean that in the best possible way. I wish I could tell his story here, as it's remarkable on a million dimensions, but the last time I wrote too freely of my boss I earned myself a list of brand-new enemies.

Somehow, the man himself was conspiculously absent from that list. I still wonder whether that's because old men have no use for grudges; or, more plausibly, whether something peculiar to his character made my sins seem irrelevant to him.

I am someone who keeps grudges, who takes offense and who is often slow to forgive. I'd rather not be, but so I am. Yet I'm still young, with relatively few experiences: compared with my boss, I exist in a small space. Maybe I have no sense of perspective. Such petty blights as grudges could very well recede to insignificance against the background of a long, full life.

---

Soon there will be pictures.

Science and Debauchery

Apparently being a published scientist involves scheduling interviews and otherwise acting as your own PR agent. Who knew? M. has been running around trying to manage what looks to me like a science-media frenzy. But as I told him yesterday, unless his stuff ends up in the science section of The Economist I will remain unimpressed. Well--that's not strictly true, but an article in my favorite news magazine would definitely win me over for life.

On Monday, unsuspecting, I went to a workplace holiday party with Bartender Flatmate as his date. The restaurant he works at rented a swank downtown bar for the occasion, but we got kicked out a few hours too early when an irate co-worker mooned the audience during the gift exchange, I QUIT written on his ass. Restaurant workers are a rowdy bunch, and soon the whole inebriated lot surged into the quiet street and into an empty, ill-prepared bar.

Sober I wasn't, but still I think I was the most sober person there. Strangers approached me and drawled all sorts of nonsensical things. Bartender Flatemate pointed out his workplace crushes one by one and, later, smoking on the street, confessed to his "#1" that he liked her. One girl, who acted as though she was on speed but was probably just maximally "type A," was talking to me about one thing or another when a raving drunk came up to us, pressed us together and shouted, "Two of my favorite girls. TOPLESS FOR THIRTY DOLLARS?"

"Come on, you ain't got thirty dollars," the girl said.

"Hehe, I'm BROKE," the guy admitted. "Free, then?" I think he was looking at my face for at least ten seconds before he realized he'd never met me before.

Maybe the high point of the evening--though there were so many high points--was being hit on by a self-loathing loser while Bartender Flatmate was talking to his crush #1 outside. The guy had long, unkempt hair, equally unkempt facial hair, a long flannel shirt, pot belly, and a bitterly self-conscious way of talking.

Loser: Are you calling someone on the phone?

Me: I'm sending a text message.

Loser: I don't know how to send a text message.

Me: I can show you if you want. It's not that hard.

Loser: No, I don't need text messages. I don't have any friends.

Me: I don't either, but if you send a text message you don't have to talk on the phone.

Loser: So, are you here to pick up somebody? Everyone's here to pick up somebody.

Me: No, I'm not. I'm here with my roommate for his work party.

Loser: Sure, uh huh. I believe you.

Me: Ok, fine, don't believe me.

Exit Loser; enter Bartender Flatmate. But later, Loser returned.

Loser: (Taps me on shoulder) Do you think that guy is cuter than me?

Me: This guy? He's my roommate. I don't know.

Loser: So should I just give up then? Just like every time?

Me: I have a boyfriend. I'm not looking for a date.

Loser: Sure. Well, I have a girlfriend.

Me: Ok. Well, you're welcome to hang around if you want.

Loser: Fine. I'll go. It's clear I'm just not cool enough for you.

After that, I was fully ready to escape. We got back to the apartment at around the same time that M. was arriving from the airport. He was in New York for a three-day uber-bender and his friends' ultra-extravagant wedding. The bride was the Boss's daughter, whose father is taking us to Hawaii next week. I haven't had anything resembling a vacation since March. I am looking forward to it.

Lawsuits and Good Luck

What a wonderful morning. After a late wedding-party night, I woke up unusually early to take the train for an 8:15 doctor's appointment. I waited for the train in record-low temperatures. I missed the appointment anyway. Then, I staggered to work dead-tired and spent the morning researching libel law.

Yes, libel law! That's how swimmingly the wedding party went last night. I sat across from a particularly awkward co-worker, and by the end of the night I was actually afraid of being sued (by somebody else--not the co-worker). I won't give any more details, lest they amount to libel--what doesn't?--but suffice to say, I am extraordinarily grateful for this state's 1-year statute of limitations.

Nonetheless, the idea that there are people out there who truly hate me and appear to desire my ruin is rather distressing.

Such things would drive me mad with anxiety if not for how lucky I have been otherwise. My job may not be terribly exciting, but it is stable, and although I once despised my lazy unwillingness to find another job, I now realize that staying here was probably the right choice. For if I get into graduate school, my boss has offered to take care of my tuition if I keep working part-time. I say: and spare myself a hundred thousand dollars in student loans? Hell, yes! It is an offer I can't refuse.

And our boss is paying for M. and I to go to Hawaii soon on a work-related retreat having to do with M.'s work, not mine. My work, it seems, will involve eating lunch and exploring the island.

My flatmates are perfect; my apartment is perfect.

M. and I get along better by the week, and meanwhile he is poised for spectacular academic success.

I am now taking bets over what species of killjoy will next spoil my good fortune. An unforeseen lawsuit? E-coli? A dreadful bicycle accident? An affair? A rare tumor? Or an "unknown unknown," as Mr. Rumsfeld would say?

New Year

On New Year's Eve, we planned a balloon drop. For an hour and a half I pumped air into cheap balloons; then M. and Liam (our artist flatmate, whose wife Renee lives with us too) stuffed them in opaque paper tablecloths taped to the ceiling. When it was all set up, it looked as though our ceiling sagged.

The first party guest was a quiet, austerely dressed Italian girl named Arianna whom none of us had ever seen before. She stood awkwardly in the kitchen with us, refusing drink. She told Renee about her (Arianna's) novel, and Renee told Arianna about her (Renee's) paintings. Then Arianna saw the balloon drop and pointed at it.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Have you ever seen the movie Coccoon?" said Liam, deadpan.

"Water damage," said M., equally deadpan.

Unsurprisingly, Arianna didn't stick around for very long. But we were happy with that; everyone we knew and dozens we didn't know came to our apartment that night and danced 'til three in the morning. M. played the best DJ set of his amateur career and our common space was filled to capacity. I ran around in what was perhaps the most absurd outfit I've ever worn (and I have worn many absurd outfits)--it made me look like, if you can imagine this, a whorish cab-driver candy-cane. Picture hat, boots, dress pattern and dress length accordingly. An ordinary-looking but apparently rather kinky guy with glasses approached me early in the party and insinuated that he wanted me to hook up with him and his girlfriend. "What kind of guy do you like?" he asked.

We were standing in front of the DJ booth, so I pointed at M. "That's my boyfriend," I said.

"Oh. Do you have any hot girlfriends you can direct me to?"

"I don't have friends," I told him, and meant it. Why else would I be dancing in front of the DJ booth alone?

A fifty-some year old woman bopped happily a few feet away from me. I have no idea how she got there, or how she heard of our party, but she danced all night in a pink tutu and glittery blue tights. I think she garnered even more stares than I did.

At midnight, M. was too nervous to give a countdown, so he stopped the music and shouted, "IT'S MIDNIGHT! NOW, EVERYONE JUMP UP AND TEAR DOWN THE CEILING!" Everyone did, ripping madly at the white paper, and soon dozens of balloons of all colors fell to the floor. Enter the irrepressible human urge to stomp on fallen balloons: a general ruckus ensued. Amid the ruckus I slipped behind the DJ booth and M. and I shared our first new year's kiss. A good end to a relatively good year.

Now for new year's resolutions:

1. Drink less
2. Eat less
3. Exercise more
4. Get to work on time (relatedly, get to bed before 2am on weeknights)
5. Get into graduate school: largely out of my hands now, but 'twould be great.
6. Replace current set of contact lenses, which I've worn for countless months and which are probably deteriorating in my eyes as I write
7. Find a way to prevent estranged brother from killing himself
8. Spend less money: indeed, consider saving some (closely related to items 1 and 2)
9. Learn calculus
10. Plan things (vacations etc) rather than perpetually stumbling into them
11. Do something about social anxiety disorder
12. Start talking to people outside my apartment
13. Get in touch with old friends
14. Stop being a friendless steel wall of a person living vicariously through the successes of my boyfriend--I mean, be a better person

This is where I go to bed, as I'm working hard at violating (1) and (4) at this very moment.

Happy 2007, invisible Internet comrades.

Time-Fill Redux

My flight back from the homeland was terrifying. I am intensely phobic of flying anyhow, so the frenetic jerkings of an unusually weatherful flight just about spelled the end of me. Forget tumbling to an earthbound doom; at some level I know rationally how unlikely that is. On the other hand, the danger that my heart might explode? Too likely. As the plane bucked to and fro last night I wept like a frightened child, biting down on the corner of my Economist to keep myself from screaming out loud. I shuddered and shut my eyes. I wished M. were there; I thought about calling him and my mother to say goodbye. Ultimately unnecessary, as here I am now to write about it, but still I am more or less certain that I lost a few years off my life last night.

My sojourn down south and my near-death-like experience left me in a foul mood. M. took me to dinner upon my arrival and I spent much time staring at walls. My math percentile on the GRE was disappointing, my writing score even more so. (Writing, by God! Isn't that what I do?) I resented M. for having too much fun in my absence, more fun than he ever has in my presence, enough fun to leave him dead tired and more ill than he was a week ago. I ruminated on not getting into graduate school and laboring at my boring job on into a banal perpetuity. Twenty-four hours away from the oppressive homeland have proved a tonic, though: I feel quite a bit better now.

Nonetheless I have a dreadful case of writer's block. I am trying to finish my personal statement for the graduate program before New Year's and I don't believe I have ever produced such a textbook example of hackneyed tripe. (With the possible exception of my GRE.) It is as though I am following some middle-school essay template. I write sentence by sentence and each is stilted beyond all redemption. What is wrong with me? Have I completely forgotten how to write? Maybe I need to blog more.

Apparently I forgot how to write transitions, so now I will say that we are hosting a big ole New Year's party at our apartment again. Rockstar Friend was supposed to drive up from L.A. to DJ, but he flaked. The news of his treachery came on the same day that Bartender Flatmate (who is also DJ Flatmate) learned that his pernicious new employer had scheduled him to work until 2am on December 31 and then beginning at 8am on January 1st (is that even legal?), meaning in essence that M. will need to man the turntables for more than four hours on end, a feat that will at best try and at worst exceed his abilities. Now he is playing record after record with his headphones on, singing along to the pop. He used to disdain pop, music snob that he is, but he has learned after many an unsuccessful party that the kids want to hear New Order, they want to hear Kelis, they want to hear Outkast, they want to hear The Cure and other hits from 1 year ago or 10 years ago or 20, not the too-hip underground dance stuff coming out of Brazil these days. I think he secretly relishes the pop. Under no circumstances will he play Kylie Minogue or Shakira, however.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is a way to procrastinate, and blogging is among the many fruits of my bad habit. There was a reason why I used to blog regularly during my last year in school, back in those ingenuous days of this website's doomed predecessor. There were always papers to write, and so there was always blogging nonsense to write. Very offensive nonsense, apparently.

My god, it is a million ayem. How am I not sleepy?

A happy end of 2006 to all. For me it was a boring year, a stable year, ultimately a decent year. If all goes as planned I'll be back to blather on the other side of it.

Postscript: I don't know why my post from mid-month is cut off, or if it only shows up that way on my computer. Either way, bugger Blogger.

Time-Fill

The longer I've lived away from this place, the more depressing it feels when I come back to it. There's something soporific about it; somehow I sleep twelve hours a night and still wake up tired. I lost my driver's license a few weeks ago at an "underground house" party, so I can't go anywhere, held prisoner just as I was seven long years ago. At least, I console myself, I should have time to work. I need to work. Goddamn it, why can't I work?

When I'm here my head fills with dark thoughts. There's too much silence and pitch-blackness here, not the busy whirrings and beepings and blarings of the city but silence, the kind of silence that is filled with the ghosts of one's own creation. As a lonely adolescent I imagined grinning skulls and rivers of blood; I thought I was going crazy. I wasn't really going crazy. My madness was only atmospheric, but atmosphere can prove a mighty oppressor.

My boyfriend won't even give me a call to help fill the silence. My first night back here I dreamed he left me for a willowy nymphet with long, straight, black hair, ageless, bathing with her sisters in the surf of some tropical beach. "I'm sorry," he said, "I love you, but life's too short," and walked out to meet her on the sand. I'm not a lucid dreamer, so I did not doubt it was all real, and felt so terribly sad. I woke up in a panic. How pathetic! I was probably whimpering in my sleep. Only a dream, it's true, but this place brings out my worst thoughts, and today I think he ought to die for not bothering to call me.

If I still lived here I would blog daily in order to stay sane and it would make a dismally boring blog.

My parents live in a world that is separate from my brother's, which is in turn separate from mine. I can be in this house with all my family and yet it is as though I am alone. My parents live in an anachronistic, Eisenhowerian world wherein a shot of brandy in the eggnog is too much, where the word "shit" is met with gasps and giggles, where Michelle Malkin is a genius, where ten o'clock is bedtime, where "secular" is a bad word, where Rummy did a heckuva job, where Reefer Madness speaks the truth about marijuana, and where my boyfriend and I share an apartment but surely not a bed--God forbid.

My brother, meanwhile, occupies a penumbral sphere that is like a nightmare within my nightmares. Instead of going to school he works the graveyard shift at a big retail store, making minimum wage. In the morning he comes home and sits in front of the computer, talking to invisible, underage Myspace girls with monikers like **LuVz2Kiss69**, listening to death metal and watching porn with the shades drawn. Then, when he has a night off, he goes to lame, red-cup parties with less-invisible, still-underage Myspace girls, and in order to work up the strength to talk to them he swills long island iced teas, doubtless mixed strong with Ketel One and its kin. Then he drives home, I imagine. And as I've said before, he's dangerously depressed. Fuck, wouldn't you be dangerously depressed? (I know all this, by the way, only because my brother was stupid enough to use the computer in my room without deleting the history, thereby enabling me to find his Myspace page: I am a nosy bitch.)

All of which is a long way of elaborating on my point that my family is so divided and unlike that being here is like being alone.

And yet it's somehow distracting. I can't work. I would work far better at home with all its pleasant distractions--the cats purring while kneading my stomach with their pink paws, my boyfriend spinning records and offering beer, the drunks cursing one another on the street below, my newlywed flatmates yammering in French while cooking dinner. That, I can work with. I can't wait to get back to that.

In the meantime, I am trying to write a painfully long, poorly conceived post in the hope of going to bed soon after its completion and thus avoiding all thought. Have I succeeded yet?

Not yet? Very well: more then.

At the underground house party where I lost my driver's license, I stood in a long line waiting for the bathroom. The guy standing next to me struck up a conversation with me, something about censorship in China. (I love this city.) But soon we were interrupted by Random Guy #2, who for some reason took an interest in my place of origin.

Random Guy #2 (pointing at me): You are from the Midwest.

Me: No.

RG#2: Europe.

Me: No.

RG#2: Manhattan.

Me: No.

RG#2: LA?

Me: No.

RG#2: Washington, DC?

Me: No.

RG#2: Bay area?

Me: No.

RG#2: Vegas?

Me: No...

RG#2: East coast?

Me: No...

RG#2: California.

Me: Yes.

RG#2: Fresno?

Me: No.

RG#2: Central Valley?

Me: No!

RG#2: Bakersfield?

Me: No!

RG#2: I give up.

Me: San Diego.

RG#2: That's basically LA.

Me: No, not really.

Random Guy #1: What a tool.

Later, downstairs, I was privileged enough to hear the following conversation between a couple of meatheads:

Meathead #1: So dude, she was, like, totally hot.

Meathead #2: Like, wow.

MH#1: I know, like, yeah.

MH#2: So, like, whaddidya do?

MH#1: Well, I was like, and she was like, her boobs were like...

MH#2: Fuck yeah.


Now have I succeeded? It's late; I think so.

The Toil of Trace and Trail

I could write a few boring, er, gripping paragraphs about applying to graduate school and taking the GRE, but I don't think I will.

Instead, in the aftermath of an exceedingly bad coffee prepared by an unpromising trainee, I will write about my absurdly sheltered, weirdly happy childhood.

My childhood was happy, even in the absence of such supposed prerequisites to happiness as friends and TV. For an accurate illustration of my blissful pre-adolescence, look at this photo:

There I am, circa 1992, apparently unaware that I'm wearing bright pink socks with profoundly un-cool, jungle-themed tye-dye shorts.* My classmates shunned me, because I was the kind of kid who brought diagrams of rabbit skulls to class for extended (and unsolicited) show-and-tell sessions, but I didn't fret: I could always count on the neighborhood curs.

The black one to my left was Meeka. The gun-totin', BMX-racin', animal-husbandin' hillbillies across the road owned her since I was four or five, and she remained my official best friend up until adolescence, when I finally realized how crazy "my best friend is a black dog named Meeka" sounded to real people. I'm not sure what kind of mutt she was--probably some kind of lab mix. But she would be at my house waiting for me when I came home from school, and would return to her owners only to sleep and be fed. I talked to her, told her stories, and got in "arguments" with her long after such behavior lost its age-appropriate cuteness and strayed into social weirdness. I also convinced myself that Meeka possessed near-human levels of intelligence, and that she would doubtless save me if I were ever lost or injured.

The mutt on the right is Sheva, the dog my parents let me have in third grade after years of my begging them for one. Believe it or not, she's still alive, albeit a decrepit, betumored centenarian in dog-years. At the time this picture was taken, though, she was barely beyond puppyhood. She and Meeka were jockeying for local dominance, snarling at each other and clashing bloodily from time to time. Their fights both frightened and intrigued me. I observed the dogs for hours every day, noting their body language and patterns of dominance and submission, and recording the details in my journal. As you might conclude, I was a dangerously hip child.

My reading preferences closely reflected my "social" life. Throughout most of elementary school, I was reluctant even to touch a book that didn't have a picture of an animal on its cover. Human interest stories reliably bored me. I read, instead, books like Jurassic Park (a dinosaur on the cover), Black Stallion books (horses on the cover), Clare Bell books (they're rare, sadly, but they had to do with an ancient race of intelligent cats), and especially books about dogs and wolves. I loved Gary Paulsen's stories of sled dogs in Alaska, for instance. And my absolute favorite author was Jack London, whose Call of the Wild and White Fang I must have read at least ten times before I had the smallest inkling of their pseudo-socialist themes.

I glorified these fictional dogs and their brutal lives. I found beauty in descriptions of "gleaming fangs" and "lips writhing and snarling," torn jugulars "spilling life-blood," gnashings and lashings and slashings. In writing my own stories I aped London's style as well as I could. My magnum opus, a sixty-page "novel," contained a series of violent dogfights and culminated with a grisly scene in which a pack of wild dogs kills and eats a panicked doe. Upon which her jugular spills life-blood and the dogs, gnashing their gleaming fangs, slash at her underbelly and partake, snarling, of her soft, warm flesh. What a sweet, gentle little girl I was!

I glorified, too, the "toil of trace and trail," as the oft-overwrought London referred to dogsledding. I romanticized the "primordial urge" that supposedly lay dormant in all dogs; I imagined that underneath, even the neighborhood mongrels who were my companions felt some inborn yearning to be strapped in a harness. I fantasized about Alaska (the Land of the Midnight Sun, in florid-speak) and dreamt of one day commanding a dogsled team in the Iditarod. I would breed huskies, I thought, and find a wolf-dog to be their leader.

This brings me back to the picture above. Meeka, Sheva and Flor (a gentle German shorthaired pointer who is standing behind Meeka) were certainly no wolf-dogs, but I intended to make a dogsled team out of them anyway. I made them stand still, in an upside-down V formation, tied them to ropes, tied their ropes to a central rope, and tied that rope to one of the bricks that my father had left over from building the foundation to our house. Then I cried, "Mush! Mush!" and stomped the ground behind them. They only turned around to watch me bemusedly. I went back to the house and tried to coax them forward with treats, but the dogs just tangled themselves in each other's "traces" until I gave up, a bit disappointed that I'd failed to tap into the beasts' collective memory.

Fifteen years later, I'm blogging at work while drinking beer I snatched from a holiday office-party. O, how things change.

* That outfit is actually not half bad, compared to what I would usually wear in those days. Aquamarine or purple tights with stirrups were frequently worn, along with mismatched socks and maybe a bright green visor. Even worse, I would wear a big, baggy T-shirt with pictures of wolves or cheetahs on it. And god help me, I'd tuck it into the tights--asymmetrically!--such that there were bulges all around my waist. My mother would meanwhile keep my bangs trimmed short--also asymmetrically, as she was not adept at cutting hair. Now imagine being in a class with this freakish child as she's reminding the teacher of the homework she'd forgotten to assign. My classmates hated me.

Worry

My sense of dread is back. I had lunch with my advisor today, and he seemed worried that my letters of recommendation would be the death-knell of my application. Naturally, this made me even more anxious than I already was. The fat, murky question mark that hangs so drippingly over my future looks ever fatter and murkier.

I bought GRE study books yesterday. I opened one up last night and there in its introduction it recommended an absolute minimum of four weeks' worth of study. I'll have exactly ten days. My life, of course, is a sloppy amalgam of near-hits and near-misses (do "near-hit" and "near-miss" mean the same thing? Be damned, you English language), with a good dash of poor foresight thrown in, so by necessity there must be at least one extra confounding force. This time, its name is Sam.

Chris moved out last night, after a month and a half of escalating passive-aggression wars, and lo! Our instiutional alcoholism runs deep, for we have traded a sommelier for a goddamn bartender. Sam, our new roommate, is my boyfriend's good friend from his old high-school bartending days in the industrial Midwest. M. borrowed a car to meet Sam at the airport today, and immediately--in the early afternoon!--they hit the bars.

My worry is this: M. has poor impulse control. Sam, a bartender by trade, will persuade him easily to share his hours, drink heavily, and spin records late into the night. These activities will be particularly likely to occur over the next week--i.e., the zero hour--as Sam goes searching for jobs in bars and M. happily follows. As I am nervous of disposition, their reveling at late hours will mean sleep deprivation and more anxiety for me. Catastrophic exam results may follow.

In the longer term, I worry how this will affect my relationship with M., which is unbelievably healthy for the moment but which could credibly deteriorate under stress.

Even were I to get into the masters program, I live paycheck to paycheck and cannot even conceive of how I would pay for it. So I worry about money. Yes, I know: welcome to the human condition, Penitent.

Looking beyond myself for a moment, I worry too about my family in Southern California. My brother, it seems, is in a depression so severe that his physician warned my parents that he was a danger to himself and recommended that he be institutionalized for a week. He agreed, instead, to some kind of intensive outpatient treatment, but I worry.

My mother worries, but her solution is to pray. To pray very, very hard. I did not want to irk her on the phone and tell her that her prayer, with all its fervor, was far more to her benefit than to my brother's, but I did say: "Medication works. You need to get him to take medication."

Imagining myself in his place for a moment--which I suspect, at its core, to be a psychological world similar to mine, but ten shades darker--I see how group counseling could be oppressive in itself. How the dingy institutional settings, the self-awareness of dysfunction, the judgment read into a ring of strange faces, could depress someone mightily. On the other hand, I told my mother, I have seen what good psychopharmeceuticals have done for my boyfriend and for my friends.

My parents are being idiots, though. "I don't think he should go on medication," my mother said. "He's been drinking alcohol, and alcohol could react with the medication."

"Then get him on something that doesn't react with alcohol."

"I don't know about that. I also think he should be doing the counseling so he can get over his alcohol problem. You know, your grandmother's sister was an alcoholic and she killed herself, and I'm worried that he has her genes. And alcohol is a depressant, you know, so it is probably making him more depressed."

I hadn't known that about my grandmother's sister. My family doesn't talk about such things, at least not with "the kids." But I realized on the phone with my mother today that my parents' teetotaling is so fanatical that it's dangerous. It means they tread in ignorance. That my mother sincerely thinks my brother's occasional drinking is as much of a danger as his suicidal state of mind is plain crazy. Has it not occured to her that alcohol might be a way he copes with his unhappiness, not a cause of it? That it might be a way he copes with a social anxiety that's much worse than mine? That, independent of depression and drunk driving, alcohol need not be a problem? That a single great-aunt with alcoholism is probably a statistically insignificant predictor for addiction? And so on.

Then there's the news. Reading anything about Iraq makes me feel ill. I did not exist during Vietnam and I wonder how it compares. My advisor, who did exist during Vietnam, works at a conservative think tank and he thinks Iraq is worse, that this country has been torn apart even more by this war than in that earlier era, draft and burning monks and 4 dead in Ohio and all. I don't know if he's right, or if comparisons matter.

Well--time's a-wastin', and there's yet more worrying to be done.