all in green

The Literary Lunchroom

2009-11-23T08:16:00.000-08:00

I fully admit to being addicted to reading the Guardian online. The culture pages are like crack to me, and I’m realizing that with every little titbit I am slowly becoming more pretentious. I’m already a complete nerd so let’s be honest, there’s nowhere to go from there but into a deeply over-educated haughtiness.

Case in point, a few months back I discovered an amazing post on one of the Guardian’s book blogs on methods of arranging books. Sadly, for the life of me I cannot find it again. It went through several ridiculously obsessive and silly styles, from arranging by color to size to publication date. My personal favourite is the method of arranging books according to who the authors would be friends with in real life, regardless of when they lived. This is wildly entertaining, as it requires pretention beyond anything that I can come up with before the age of 50.

As a seasoned Barnes and Noble veteran, I fully adore the fact that the Guardian has devoted so much time to the arranging of books. This used to come to pass at the bookstore ALL the time:

Customer: Hi, I’m looking for a book.

Me: Ok, do you know the title?

Customer: No.

Me: How about the author?

Customer: No, I don’t know that either.

Me: Can you give me anything else to work with here?

Customer: It was blue.

Me: Blue. Ok. Anything else?

Customer: I think the main character was Canadian. Or was that the author? I don’t know. Canada was definitely involved though.

Me: Right. Blue with a Canadian association of some sort. I’ll see what I can do.

One of two things would then happen: someone (me/a co-worker/the amnesiac customer) would somehow remember what the book was called, and then find it OR the search would be long and drawn out and everyone would be really angry and finally run off in different directions and hide (including Mr. Amnesia). Usually the latter.

Anyway, if Barnes and Noble had read this article (yes, the entire chain personified should read this article – I’m convinced B&N actually is one collective consciousness, like that space ship in “Event Horizon” but without all the death), they could arrange books by color or geographical association and then everyone would find everything they needed. Except the people that convince themselves that books exist on subjects that no one would ever write about, like how to make birdhouses out of glass swivel sticks or how to teach your dog to play poker. Actually, I think there are actually books about how to teach your dog to play poker (get out your paint brushes). And people do actually ask for books on non-existent subjects. I once had a woman yell at me for a full half an hour because I could find no record of books existing on how to make medieval hats.

Actually, now that I think of it, there were a few random characters that used to come into the store all the time and became notorious. There was a mountain man with a big beard that the booksellers nicknamed Gandalf who was obsessed with German castles. Someone with a nose fetish used to call the store all the time to try to trick female booksellers into talking about their noses (I voted to nickname him Cyrano de Bergerac but he was just known as “the nose guy”). Bookstores seem to attract some obsessive types. The only things that the booksellers find it ok to be obsessed with are books and coffee. And possibly weed, if you work in the stock room.

Just for the exercise though, let’s think how this arranging books by author friend groups might work (you know, just to be obsessive). Now bear in mind that I do this based solely on the writing, and have done no research whatsoever into the actual lives of the authors (which makes the whole thing much more fun, because let’s face it, being historically accurate is boring). It needs to be put it in some sort of mythical place where we can imagine these authors all co-existing, so I choose the unique flavour of hell that is the high school lunchroom. So let’s begin.

The Literary Lunchroom

The bell rings and first to grace the lunch room are the very punctual but not altogether anti-social smart girls. Jane Austen pulls out peanut butter and jelly on white bread and immediately starts to spray wit in all directions, much to the entertainment of her posse of wannabes. The hierarchy is thick among the wannabes, it is a cutthroat game trying to be one of the smart girls. Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath busy themselves over the lunch hour successfully making everyone else feel inadequate. Queen of the wannabes J.K. Rowling tries extra hard to say something smart but accidently overuses the word “surreptitiously,” which the other girls see as a dead giveaway that she’s secretly a C student and shun her.

At a table nearby, J.R.R. Tolkien sits alone making up languages and wishing that J.K. Rowling didn’t turn him down for the Prom. He thinks she’s mildly annoying, but that she could be kinda hot in that elfish sort of way if she would just get off her high horse for a few seconds. He scowls (surreptitiously) and goes back to making up languages.

Better late than never, Douglas Adams and Roald Dahl bombard his table with a ridiculous concentration of energy in their latest efforts to get him to cheer the fuck up. Doug tries to get him to see the entertaining side of suffering, but J.R.R. interrupts him with a lyrical rant about how human folly only leads to squalor. Doug and Roald whisper amongst themselves about how having too many initials makes people take themselves far too seriously, and they stare down Ms. Rowling at the next table over in a weak attempt to test this theory.

The popular kids show up halfway through lunch with bags of McDonalds, mostly to show off the fact that they’ve all got cars and can go off campus. e.e. cummings is going through a punctuation-shunning phase that annoys his English teacher to no end, but since he’s kind of a Casanova she still gives him straight A’s and constantly babbles on about his creative skills. This pisses off Gertrude Stein to no end, who is at the other end of the cafeteria giving him the stink eye. Doug and Roald decide from their table that the initials rule doesn’t apply to e.e., because he whispers things into girls’ ears that make them go crazy and they really want to know what the hell he’s saying to them so that they can try it too.

Dan Brown sits between Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and e.e. has to laugh because he knows that the only reason they tolerate him is because Dan has rich parents and always has loads of drugs. Half the high school is addicted to Dan Brown’s drugs, and a few of the teachers too. Dan doesn’t do the drugs himself, he’s just a really good salesman. e.e. spends the remainder of the lunch hour wondering where Salinger has gone. Salinger used to be popular but he suddenly disappeared, and no one knows why. In his place is Ian Flemming, and he’s very cool so no one really worries that much about Salinger. Jack and Hunter decide to ignore Dan for awhile, because after 5 minutes he gets really bland. Lewis Carol has showed up and they’ve been saving him a seat (Dan accidentally sat in it, and apologises profusely when he realises this and goes to sit by whoever the hell it is that wrote The Secret so that they can be bland in tandem).

Elizabeth Gilbert and the Marley and Me guy are running for prom king and queen and stop by the popular table for a few to do some expert PR. They have everyone’s vote there anyway, but they are still really worried they will be usurped by Stephanie Meyer and Dr. Oz, who are a force to be reckoned with. This rivalry has caused a minor upset at the lunch table, but it won’t matter once the votes are cast and everyone is surprised and delighted to see that Kurt Vonnegut and Zadie Smith have won it in a surprise landslide. This single event will cause them all to suddenly realize that there are people outside the popular table who do in fact cast votes.

I’ve just realized I could go on all day like this. I’ve also just realized that the fact that I could go on all day like this is vaguely sad, so I’m going to stop now.

spiderman, spiderman

2009-10-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

At my new job, I’ve been very impressed that my co-workers immediately managed to pronounce my name correctly. Until this point in time, no one in this country has been able to realize that Kirsten and Kristen are not the same name. From time to time I even got Christian and Christine. I just started answering to anything that vaguely resembled my name, under the assumption that this must be what life is like for people with much more difficult names to pronounce. I’ve come across people named Roisin (Ro-Shayne) and Aisling (Ashley, apparently) and have really began to feel for them.

My husband and I have always thought that the French must be secretly wetting themselves every time Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin is mentioned, as “putin” is French for “whore”. When we taught at a small language school in Dorset for European kids, there was a kid from somewhere in Eastern Europe named Mert (pronounced may-ert) whom I’ve heard got no end of grief from his French classmates due to how close his name resembled “merde”, the French word for “shit”.

This got me to thinking. When we were in China, our students all took on English names so as to better identify themselves to us non-Chinese speaking morons. It was common practice, and a lot of them had apparently been using these names in English class for quite some time. It brought to mind my eighth grade French classes where we all chose to be Gabrielle or Corinne to feel more Francais. For us it was a bit of fun, and usually the teacher forgot which names we had chosen and reverted back to our actual names by the third week of term. This was always epically disappointing in the realm of imagination, as somehow ceasing to be Gabrielle or Corinne also meant the loss of our imaginary boyfriends, Jean-Luc and Francois. Quelle dommage.

Anyway, the other English teachers at our University in China advised us that we needed to create attendance registers where the students would write their names in three ways. Once in Chinese, once in Pin Yin (a sort of phonetic Chinese), and finally their chosen English name. A lot of them chose simple, mainstream English names like Sarah or John, but it became clear early on that creative license was a key factor in naming oneself English-style. In my first class I had a Spiderman.

Here are some of the favourites: Batty (male), Bleach (male), Sugars (female), Kashmir (male), Only (female). My husband had a Space Rat (male) and a friend named Wagon (male. In his defence, his name was actually Wang Gong, so he was logical in choosing the English word that most resembled his actual name). Another of our co-workers had a Seven that sat next to an Eleven (both female), and a Voldemort.

And why not? Someone comes in to teach you English and asks you to choose a name that isn’t yours, for the simple fact that they can actually say it, why not be (for the most part, excluding Wagon) totally arbitrary and choose something unrelated and pointless. It was as if they were saying “Hey, this isn’t my name, and I’ve chosen something that you will never be able to take seriously as if it were. You won’t easily forget that I’m not actually Spiderman.” And amazingly, the ones who chose to be Sarah or John actually became Sarah and John in our minds. Spiderman was always going to be Liang Ming Chao because there is no way in hell I could train my mind to believe his name was Spiderman. So hats off to you, not-really-Spiderman, point well made. Maybe I should have taken issue with being called Kirsten and replaced it with something much more entertaining.

step in time

2009-10-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

No internet is not a fun place in my world. I never thought I’d react all that badly to being without it, but there it is. It is like being denied something that you partake in so frequently it doesn’t mark itself on your memory significantly. I’d compare it to being denied coffee or wine with dinner. It’s fine when you’re doing something else, like reading, riding the bus, whatever. But when the moments settle down, you think, “A glass of red wine would be so nice right now.”

I think the reason I hate not having internet is because I can’t write to people. I’m terrible at answering e-mails on time as it is, but I feel so much better about it when I can at least know that the possibility of me being a responsible friend actually exists. I mean, who knows. I’ve not written to Sally in about 6 months, but hey, today could be the day. No internet takes that away from me, and then I have no choice but to worry that poor Sally is sitting there thinking about how horrible I am to have ignored her so completely. If I were able, I could just tell her of my plight… but this requires internet. (I mean, why the hell would I call her? So very archaic.)

Really, I have no friends named Sally, though in the last five minutes I have managed to convince myself to go find one. I don’t think I’d get too far with that, as no one seems to have that name anymore. It seems a good cat name though. (Things to do: 1. Buy cat. 2. Name cat Sally.)

So now I live in London, land of limited internet connection. (BT openzone my foot). It has been 2.5 weeks since my relocation from the peaceful Dorset coast and I’ve managed to learn a couple of things (though not many) about London. The first is that London functions like some giant machine that drains your energy. I get up to go to work, travel around a bit, do some work which is moderately but not insanely taxing, travel around a bit more, end up home. My work day is no longer than it was in Dorset. Quite possibly it is shorter. Anyway, by 8pm I am in my pyjamas, and by 9pm there is really no communicating with me. Apparently I am 97.

But another thing I’ve learned is that THERE ACTUALLY ARE CHIMNEY SWEEPS IN LONDON. No, seriously. Our neighbour had them over to sweep the chimneys in the old Victorian building that we live in. I even got to MEET them. Total disappointment though, as they didn’t look adorably sooty and carried no classic wire brushes. Damn. So I patiently waited for them to suddenly burst into song and dance, and when that didn’t happen I was thisclose to yelling at them, “What kind of crap London chimney sweeps are you, you don’t even sing and dance!!” Honestly, what is the world coming to when there are no dancing chimney sweeps in London, I ask you. Dark days. My bubble is officially of the burst variety. Next thing I know, I will be down at St. Paul’s cathedral only to find out that you can’t even feed the birds for tuppence a bag.

tubes under ground

2009-08-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

I had a job interview in London last week. Rather than worrying about the interview itself, I spent my energy worrying about getting myself from the innards of Dorset into London and then across town on the tube. All the while I had to think about what the commute would be like from my future London flat to said place of potential employment. It is going to take most of forever, but it will be a step up from my current commute, which is a bear. I am not exaggerating, it is a classic pain in the ass. There are boats involved. One of them only holds about 50 cars at once and pulls itself through the water by large chains. All this, and I still worried about having to take the tube.

Here’s my biggest tip if you have never taken the London tube before: do not use a black and white computer print-out map of the tube to find your way. The colors mean something, they aren’t just some fun spaghetti rainbow. So when I was trying to figure out what stop I needed, and the polite woman stuck in the ceiling said “change here for Jubilee line”, I had ten seconds to decide what to do. I grabbed my black and white map thinking, “Jubilee. This sounds familiar. Is this actually what I need, or is it just some term that bounces around London and therefore seems vaguely useful but really isn’t. I bet it has something to do with the Queen. Better stay where I am.”

There is something about the mechanical closing of the tube doors that causes you to have the epiphany that you actually needed to get off there. Those bastards are laced with insight, and it sprays out at you right when there is definitely no getting off. So I got off a stop too late and proceeded to follow the signs to get to the other side of the tracks to go back the other way.

This is where the tube REALLY starts to mess with you. It takes so long to cross back over, and getting there is so complex, that once you end up on the other side you totally can’t tell that you’ve moved at all. I was honestly standing there looking across the track and trying to remember where the vending machines were in relation to where I was standing, and what posters were there, and I got really pissed off when I realized that everything is completely the same. I think even the people were the same. It was like that scene in “Being John Malcovitch” where John Malcovitch goes through the portal to his own brain and everyone in there has his face and all they can say is “Malcovitch” over and over.

It was a combination of that, and this (ok, ALOMST. If David Bowie were there it would have been AWESOME. But minus the stripey baby, he's just weird.)

I got there fine, all went well, blah blah. Londoners and English people in general like to bark about how unreliable the tube is. I don’t doubt that it might be questionable, but the widespread complaining about it seems to have affected the atmosphere all throughout the underground. When I was there, everything was operating normally. AND THEY WOULD NOT STOP TELLING ME THAT. I swear every ten seconds polite-trapped-in-ceiling-woman had to let us all know, “The underground system is operating a normal service on all lines.” If you listen to her closely, you can hear a proud and content tone in her voice, and it starts to worm its way into your head and you walk around feeling proud of the tube and content that it works. Not my country, not my city, and I was wandering around feeling like I was somehow responsible for the marvelousness of the system. Go me.

And you know, this is totally the equivalent of those WWII posters that were apparently in the tube everywhere back in the day. You know, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. I love those posters. I have one. With that woman telling everyone that the underground is functioning, London has replaced the posters with a more subtle and slightly creepier system. I say bring back the posters. They are friendly and pretty and I don’t have to wonder where my complacency comes from, I can stare it in the face.

some stuff about some humor

2009-08-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here trying to gather my thoughts, which usually isn't that difficult, but our neighbor seems to be tap-dancing on the goddamn wall. Since our houses are connected, this is a major pain in the ass. In addition to this, my adorable husband seems to have taken his inner monologue and turned it inside out. As I am usually the one accused of doing this (not by him, but by any individual who has been in my presence for more than five minutes) it causes a unique reaction. The traits I possess myself, when displayed in other people, simultaneously invoke endearment and annoyance. I've done enough reading in my life to understand that this is apparently common to most of the human race.

It is because of this that I have both a serious love and serious limits with British humor. The line sits somewhere between "The Office" and "Borat". I think it settles just this side of "Peep Show"? But I love "Mitchell and Webb", and they are the equation that brings "Peep Show" to life.... argh. This is so complex. Why the hell is this so complex.

British television has a knack for bringing to life that unique reaction that explains EXACTLY why my husband doing what I usually do to unknowingly annoy people makes me feel like a yin-yang on crack. On the one hand, there is that comforting and relatable familiarity about everything. You feel like you could dive into the moment on the T.V. screen and be at home there. Even when you aren't from Guildford (where apparently everyone in this whole country comes from) and you've never seen people on BBC breakfast go on and on about nothing in particular, you still feel like you could be one of those really englishy English people in some comically embarrassing scenario involving too many peas. I love it already, and it isn't even real.

I'm not even joking about this - there is an actual famous comedy sketch where someone goes into a shop and is chronically misunderstood. He says one thing, the shop owner thinks he's said something else, and for all I know no one is speaking English the whole time. And I laugh at it nonetheless. It is still funny to me and I have no idea what the hell is going on. Something about forks. Or candles. Candle forks, whatever. I love these people. They make hilarity out of absolute air.

But then there is the other hand. The other hand involves showing the populace what happens when you take the bits everyone can relate to and amplify them. This is where I get caught. The comedy sketch or show or film starts out with characters that you empathise with, laugh with, and then things BUILD. And then they pull crap that you would never pull. But they TAKE YOU WITH THEM nonetheless. How the hell do they do this? I end up empathising with some magical relatable assholes. Then I get to a point where I can't tell who I am laughing at more: the crappy individuals on screen, or myself for being such an idiot for emotionally following them into some antics that I would never normally follow them into.

I'd put a youtube clip as an example, but that would defeat my point. You have to watch the full episode of whatever to truly get to the point where it all falls in place and you are deeply embarassed for the characters.

This is why British humor is so effective. If you get that far into the whole thing, you are laughing in multiple dimensions. The reason I get part of the way in and then can't deal with it is because I take a moment and analyze the crap out of whatever I am watching. It only takes a few seconds and you start mentally backpedalling. British humor does not accommodate this. You have to just go with it, or you're fucked. The funny is gone. And then you are just uncomfortable, and the British people you are watching the funny shows with get to laugh in three dimensions - at the show, at themselves, and at you for sitting there like a tosser and being embarrassed for people that don't even exist.

the case of almost-not-really swine flu

2009-07-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

The other night I developed a slight sniffle and then lay awake in bed convincing myself I had swine flu. By the morning I had full on sinus issues, and fell asleep in the car on the way to work and dreamt I was climbing a giant red Lego. Four hours later, I was on the bus trying to make my way home, and fell asleep again. I feverishly dreamt I was sitting in strawberries. Possible swine flu-induced delirium is apparently limited to the red end of the color spectrum.

The next morning (or NOON as some folk like to call it) I woke up and realized I had never been home sick in this country, and didn't know what to do with myself. In the states, I would drink loads of 7up and watch re-runs of Little House on the Prairie. There was nothing even remotely resembling this anywhere on television. The closest I could get was Hollyoaks (filmed nowhere near a prairie), which I get confused with Eastenders, which I get confused with Neighbours, even though the Neighbours live in Australia. You see my predicament. I was two steps away from being back in Lego land (which, strangely, is an ACTUAL PLACE in Britain, but that's for another time).

I simultaneously discovered two things. 1. A show called "The Kitchen Pharmacy" where some girl with perfect skin tells you how to cure everything short of the apocalypse with herbs and 2. A show called "Come Dine With Me", where some strangers make food for each other and compete for £1,000 while the narrator mocks them and they secretly mock each other. Both very, very British.

I really hate finding two interesting shows at the same time, because I have to flip between them and try to watch them BOTH, and my brain doesn't keep up with that even on my good days. I always end up thinking that everything would be better if the two shows merged. (Or I get convinced that the two shows I am watching are actually one.... any difference between "Antiques Roadshow" and "Cash in the Attic"? I mean, really?)

British daytime television is a unique cultural slice. It is like ancient sawdust pie served with all best efforts (and then secretly rated by the guests in competition for £1000). We get 35 channels, and among these I found two antique shows, two shopping channels, a show about individuals trying really hard to get in some yellow garden guidebook, and a show where farmers invite archaeologists to their farms so they can dig up old roman walls (that last one sucks you in, I swear. The part of my day spent wondering if they were in fact going to find the roman kiln was nail biting. I’m not even joking, I was THAT entranced).

But that Kitchen Pharmacy woman totally sold me. Check it out: http://www.medicinechest.info/series/kitchenpharmacy . By the end of the day I was completely convinced that I was going to have a little herb kitchen just like hers where I can make hops/lavender pillows for insomnia. And she’s just so cute, and looks so healthy, I’ve become determined to take up her mantle. I know nothing of home remedies, but I am on the hunt for an aloe plant. And lavender, as apparently that goes in every remedy. I might start putting it on my cereal, as it seems to benefit every type of ailment.

This could prove somewhat problematic, as I don’t tend to discriminate when it comes to my enthusiasm for plants. I’ve been known to pull up grass and eat it, thinking it was chives. Stupid-ass grass masquerading as chives, why to they have to look so similar? I’m lucky that I hate mushrooms, or I could have met an untimely end years ago.

We went to the garden centre and tried to find me an aloe plant, to no avail. We did come home with a Venus fly trap though, which is really fun to poke at. I keep looking for bugs around the house to feed to it. I swear though, once that thing came through the door it was like all the bugs KNEW. And they vanished. The plant didn’t eat them, it is still sitting on the windowsill, all toothy and hungry. Poor famished plant. If I don’t find any bugs for it soon, I may have to see if that Kitchen Pharmacy woman has any remedies made of Venus fly trap. I bet she has some kind of carnivorous plant infused balm to cure indigestion or something. Then it won’t be pitiful and hungry anymore, but I bet those damn bugs will show up again.

welcome to england

2009-07-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

SO. Tori Amos totally got me through the day. I’ve had her new album on in a loop and I’m positive that without it I may have come dangerously close to sticking something sharp in my eye. Around noon I had already been staring at my computer screen for so long that the colors in the type started to peel apart so that when I looked at black type I also saw red and blue.

And then I looked her up on youtube. She is in Seattle singing “Welcome to England” and someone has taken a video on their phone. But the point is, TORI went to SEATTLE and sang about ENGLAND. It was like three pieces of me that are normally far apart suddenly came TOGETHER. And she wore shiny gold leggings. (For the first minute and a half I was convinced you could see up her skirt, but she is wearing amazing shiny gold leggings).

Check it out, and try not to yell at the people talking at the beginning or the people whose heads totally get in the way. It’s a video, they won’t listen (I totally forgot that). Plus, the person with the phone has way better seats than I could afford if I could have gone myself, and I didn’t get to go myself, so I salute you little miss phone-cam, for allowing me to watch live Tori on youtube.

She has three pianos. I have one piano that I can’t even play properly and she plays three. New incentive to practice. Anyway, after my recent trip home to Seattle, I was being a little brat about England. I was cranky and homesick. I’ve even been known to complain about the air not smelling as nice over here. (Though sometimes I stand by that one, yesterday when I took the bus it smelled of cat urine).

Anyway, one of the reasons I love Tori so much is that her songs take awhile for me to digest, and also because they often change meanings for me as time passes. So I’m not going to deconstruct this one. You have to let any song exist as it immediately falls upon you before you gain the ability to let it speak to you properly. And even then, you can’t commit yourself to one meaning, you have to be open to letting things change. Because people change, so why should songs be any different? Or books? Or paintings?

But back to England. I decided to think of things that define my in-between moments over here. Things that I can love or not love depending on my moods. Because that’s what any perspective really consists of, isn’t it? The little things that slip in and become old or new, good or bad at different times simply to prove that nothing is ever static.

Anyway, here are a few:

When we go on coastal walks, my phone thinks we are in France.

If we leave the house before 7:10, we get stuck in traffic behind the same set of cows being moved from a field on one side of the road to a field on the other.

I cannot get a double espresso at my office before 8:30, and I drink breakfast tea without milk.

BLUE VINNEY CHEESE

I cannot say the word “lolly” without sounding drunk. Try it, I bet you can’t either. Especially if you are actually drunk.

Dogs in pubs make me happy. Chickens in pubs freak me out. Even in sandwiches.

When we drive in the summer, the leaves overhead are so thick that the world becomes one big green leaf-tunnel.

Last year, when it snowed, the bus driver suddenly pulled over and ran out. We all thought he’d hit someone, but it turned out he’d seen an old woman slip and fall on the sidewalk and went to make sure she was ok.

Heels: They get stuck in cracks between cobblestones, and I wear them down to the screws in about 5 months. My mind is so used to hearing the high clicking of metal on stone that when I get shoes re-heeled, the absence of that sound makes me think I’ve got gum stuck to my heels or something.

NO DOG-FOULING SIGNS

NATIONAL TRUST VOLUNTEERS. They teach you more than history class.

There are ammonites in the walls.

People on the bus talk themselves. There are enough people on the bus who talk to themselves at one time that it is almost like they are talking to each other. This leads me to wonder if my understanding of conversation is skewed. When I talk to other people, it is likely that I talk to myself, and then they talk to themselves back. I suppose if this is true, then only truly lost people would have misunderstandings.

i love the smell of communists in the summertime

2009-07-20T05:07:00.000-07:00

Two really entertaining inductions into British life came to pass for me this weekend.
The first was a football match (Southampton), and the second was a leftwing village festival (Tolpuddle). I’m not going to be drab and compare football to communism, even if both had people dressed in red singing and waving their arms. As interesting as the marriage of sports and political metaphors can be, I will sum it all up for you so you don’t have to use up any more time on the matter: blah blah football blah international differences blah blah camaraderie blah. There you go. Feel free to thank me anytime.

Anyway, the football match was hilarious for me, as you don’t really get that volume of singing and shouting at any American sport. I don’t care how many Americans might argue the contrary out of loyalty, you just don’t. I was as equally captivated by the pen of singing people as I was by the game. I’m pretty positive some of the songs were more than a little bit rude, and the fact that half of the people there had their kids singing along just made it all the more beautiful. You’ve just not lived until you’ve seen thirteen year olds swearing at Portsmouth in song.

Anyway, the pen of singing people (which I can only deduce is fuelled by beer) taught me a bit about football. I learned that even when your team is really sucking it up, you can will them to play better just by emanating beer-favored good vibes. I saw it work, no joke. I also learned to yell at someone named Rasiak. As in “move your ass Rasiak!” because apparently he doesn’t. Though as a result of that lesson, he’s the only Southampton player I can actually name. After awhile I think I started shouting at Rasiak even when he wasn’t actually on the field. It’s ok though, he’s always there in spirit, because one of the other lessons I learned about British football is that there must always be someone for the crowd to yell at for being a lazy git.

After we watched Southampton lose like no one has ever lost before, we went to Tolpuddle festival. Tolpuddle is an amazing little village where apparently there were martyrs a long time ago who paved the way for trade unions. Every year they celebrate these guys and use it as an opportunity to talk about all sorts of other stuff. I was all excited to find out the back-story, because everyone likes a good juicy martyr story, and then I found out that they didn’t actually die. What the hell kind of martyrs don’t die? Someone TOTALLY used the wrong terminology here. Because I looked into the whole “sacrifice” thing, and here’s how it went. They got in loads of trouble, and tragically got shipped off to Australia as convicts. I can deal with that as a term of their martyrdom, because back in the day it is possible that Australia could have been pretty crappy. (You know, poisonous snakes and fanged kangaroos and all.) But then, after some serious campaigning by their friends and families, they CAME BACK. So… that pretty much ends the sacrifice then? They were away in Australia for a few years and then they were done? That’s like someone throwing a bucket of water on Joan of Arc after her feet were slightly crispy (I mean, she’d be traumatized, sure, but not dead) and saying, “ok, we’re done here now, thanks”.

I was hoping I got this whole martyr thing wrong, because let’s face it, it has been a few years since I’ve read the dictionary cover to cover (real page-turner, that one). So I consulted the source of all concrete hard-hitting knowledge, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr Notice the focus on death throughout the entry. So it’s not just me.

I don’t want to stomp all over a really great little festival though. There were some amazing highlights. I loved the people with the banners and causes and petitions. Inside me lives a good ol’ fashioned protestor. I wished I had a sign to carry, I really did, their excitement was contagious. The wind was so intense that they were all like little campaigning ships.

While I sat there snapping pictures of them on my phone, I started thinking back to my old protesting days. During the Iraq war protests I went to, I took the most amazing photo. I don’t have it anymore, because sadly this was back in the days of actual film. It was shoved in a shoebox in a closet somewhere and is likely halfway to Narnia by now.

Anyway, the following excerpt was part of my novel, but I’ve since decided that the novel is junk and that I need to start over (you know, part of the “process” apparently). So I’m going to be a lazy ass and recycle it here (which only seems fitting, as I recycled actual bits of my life into a novel in the first place, so now I’ve come full circle. Kind like being sent to Australia and then getting to come back again.)

It was a picture I had taken when I went to the Iraq war protest at the state capital building in Boise. Most people there were university students or retired hippies, but there were a few housewives and businessmen and people you don't usually peg as the protesting type. All of us university students were trying to recapture the vibe our parents had tapped into when they protested Vietnam. We'd even borrowed their slogans. People carried signs that said things like "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity" and "The ones who call the shots are not among the shot." I was also a big fan of "My parents went to the polls and all I got was this crummy Orwellian nightmare." There were a few that were original to this particular war, like "Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too" and "The last time we listened to a Bush we wandered in the desert for forty years." It was all very illuminating.

My photo was of a woman about age 25, who had her son (who couldn't have been more than three) in a little red wagon. The wagon had a sign on the side that said "Peace Train", and her son was sitting in it playing with a GI Joe. His GI Joe was about a foot tall, complete with cammo and mini plastic machine gun. I remember watching them, all of us (including his mother), shouting "No blood for oil!" and watching him playing with his toy soldier and making war sound effects to himself. The American flag that hangs on the capital building is just visible in the background, and I thought to myself as I snapped the photo, if this isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.

the mirror of the spectator

2009-07-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

I have only just picked up a copy of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray". I read the preface twice, closed the book, and will likely carry it around everywhere I go in the next few days before I start to read it again. I do this with books from time to time, but it is a habit that marks my contempt at adulthood more than anything else. I'll explain.

When I was in high school we read "Cry, the Beloved Country" one year. I remember loving it. It was honestly ten years before I picked it up again, but I was reading it on a flight from Seattle to London when I realized everything about it for me was suddenly different. The book itself has this pulse of its own, and it beats out in repetitive language as it slowly pulls you apart. I sat there in my tiny little seat, elbows prodding me from either side, reading about despair and fear. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child, who is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply..." "Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end." And the engines came to life on the plane, and I felt stretched thin between the idea of pushing up through the air at however many hundred miles an hour and the pulse of the despair on the pages in front of me. I had never been an anxious person before, and I realized at that point what it must actually mean to be an adult in this world. I felt my own mortality ringing in my ears. I took the idea that we could plunge back to earth and set it lose in my mind, let it mingle with the language still bouncing around in there. "Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley."

I had to close the book, close my eyes, quickly down two glasses of crappy airline red wine, and try my best to figure out what the hell had come over me. I was feeling the loss of things that weren't lost. A part of me was mourning children I didn't have, wishing for places I'd never seen, and clinging to some sort of connection to everything around me that I didn't know was there. And I suppose that's when it started. My humanity became full and unforgiving, and from now on I'll have to fight not to cling to it, even when it isn't threatened.

So I still pick up books with reckless abandon, but I no longer read with it. Literature is sticky now, like walking through cobwebs and compulsively brushing them off for ages afterward, even when you know they've gone. "The Picture of Dorian Grey" threatened to stick to me with its heavy implications, and I sat with it tonight, reading the preface over and over and thinking about art and spectators. I ran my mind through all the things the preface was suppose to draw up in me, possibly missing some of the more important ideas but adding unimportant ones of my own, and soon I felt the sentences become leaden and once again felt that fear of loss that I've only felt in adulthood.

Wilde writes:

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

I plugged my brain back into the circle of all this. While on that flight from Seattle to London I went beneath the surface, let the language of the book prod at my senses, and was left in peril. I couldn’t do that at sixteen, and I haven’t decided yet if this new talent means that I love my life too much, or not enough.

just trying it out

2009-07-16T02:52:00.001-07:00

So. Blog. How fantastic. I was actually profoundly excited at the prospect of starting a blog until I sat down to put a first post together. It took about five seconds for me to realize that I am not actually as exciting in print as I am in my head. Why I hadn’t realized this before is beyond me, as things are ALWAYS more exciting in one’s head than in any actual form of reality. The most exciting thing that has happened to me all week was when I opened my desk drawer at the office and accidentally mistook my green Expo marker for my pack of Polo mints. I can now say with full conviction that green Expo markers freshen breath in a far superior (albeit hallucinogenic) way and that Polo and Expo should definitely merge their formulas. They wouldn’t even really have to change their names much. Exlo? Personally I like Popo. But I can be flexible.

In my defence it was easily done, and I had to take a photo just to prove my point.

Notice also that my desk drawer comes complete with 80s calculator and the BIGGEST wad of blu-tac known to humankind. I’m basically planning on sticking a dinosaur to my wall. The more I rummage in there, the more amazing vintage nonsense I come across. I am hoping that if I close my eyes and wish hard enough, I may dig up some Whitney Houston cassette tapes and then my work day will be complete. (Nobody’s work day is complete without Polo-Expo and “One Moment in Time”. Nobody’s.)

I found a nice little blog template, but I can’t get it to stop speaking Spanish. And the fact that my blog speaks Spanish is not enough of a reason for me to start learning it. Sorry Spain. And Latin America.

Anyway, I was all perplexed about what to write that was blog-worthy, and then I got over it by reading the Guardian online. I love LOVE those guys. And not for the reasons that you’d think. I went through a Charlie Brooker phase (here you go: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker, of the recent ones I recommend the Michael Jackson one) and then gradually grew out of it, because apparently when reading Charlie’s work online everyone is obligated to comment with “Ah, yes, Charlie does it again!” or with things that equal the wit expressed in the above column. And he is witty. Disconcertingly so. I don’t think there actually is a Charlie, there’s a team of writers that were cast-off from the Family Guy for being too crass and obscure who thought, “who would take us, we are so very crass and obscure… the Guardian!” and then they invented a persona so that they could slyly infiltrate the paper. And it is working, because loads of people are trying to be Charlie, apparently. Lately I’ve become much more attached to Tanya Gold because Guardian readers seem to hate her and that makes reading the comments much more fun, and beats smug witty team-Charlie. (here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/29/dirty-weekend-glastonbury-tanya-gold). Read the comments, people flay her! It’s ok Tanya, I find you endearing and relatable. But only until people start to like you, then I will turn my back on you and invent conspiracy theories to pretend you aren’t real.

But then I found this on the books blog, and this has to be the best ever. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jul/07/words-wince-hated-poets
Post after post of amazing reasons why people hate certain words! I personally vote for “deplane”. So clinical. Ugh. And that was my epiphany. I went from Charlie to Tanya to language analysis, and thought I’d take the easy way out. So I’ve blogged about blogs. And my office desk drawer. Enjoy.