Thursdays with Brittaini

Why Bon Iver is a Tool

2012-02-12T21:35:00.000-08:00

At tonight's Grammy awards, Bon Iver won Best New Artist. Given, it is bullshit that he was nominated for best new artist, seeing as For Emma, Forever Ago came out forever ago* in Grammy terms.

So Bon Iver gets up to give his acceptance speech, and ends up saying something like, "It's weird to be up here, I don't really do this for the awards. It's all about the music for me. But, um, thanks, I guess."

Here's the thing, asshole, "It's all about the music for me" is what people say when they're not winning awards. "It's all about the music for me" or "this show's all about t&a" or "what a popularity contest" are all sayings and phrases that people console themselves with when they're not winning. Actually winning something like a Grammy is kind of a big deal, especially if you genuinely believe that you are the musical shit doing something precious and unique. Because to be doing something precious and unique and to get recognized as the best new(kind of) artist should validate what you're doing. It should signal to you that the Grammys are, for once, recognizing legit musical talent and innovation. And you should be gracious or at least respectful instead of a douchebag.**

In college, Janelle and I had a term for this kind of ridiculous behavior: ICADs, or "I'm cool and disaffected." It tends to permeate indie bands that then get up on stage in aviators and American apparel t-shirts with too-deep Vs and look bored with their own music.

So yeah, cool that you're too cool, Bon Iver. You're probably not cooler than Colin Firth, who, although he had stellar performances in little-known movies, had the decency to say something humble like, "I think my career has peaked" when he won the Oscar for best picture. You're also probably not cooler than Adele, whose songs, while I never want to hear them again, will probably be sung by our children as they weep over their first real, intense acquaintance with heartbreak.

But, you know, whatever. Is it a coincidence that Bon Iver sold enough records to be considered for a Grammy after he was featured on a Kanye*** track? Correlation doesn't always equal causality, but sometimes it is suspicious.

Maybe "music" is an art form that's too overwrought and industrialized for this rant to have any meaning. I'm sure Pitchfork is going to have an orgasm about how great it is that Bon Iver won while being About The Music. But imagine this:

Jennifer Weiner, chick-lit novelist that coined the term Franzenfreude, wins a Pulitzer. Weiner's genre is not typical Pulitzer material, but she wins over Pulitzer favorites, like Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. When she accepts her award, she says, "This is weird for me. I just write for the story, not because I might win an award."

Saying that implies that writing books is something that people do mostly for awards and not to write books. It applies that there's somehow something special about writing books for books' sake and not for the Pulitzer's sake, and that Franzen and Egan don't take their art seriously and are gnashing their teeth and plotting out the plots of their next books to be as Pulitzer friendly as possible.

It'd be presumptuous and pretentious and awful. And it was all three of those things at the Grammys tonight.
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*Four years.
**If you are going to be a douchebag though, at least take some cues from Kanye and have some swag about it.
***Speaking of Kanye, why wasn't My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy nominated for Album of the Year? [EDIT: Because it was on last years' Grammy cycle, which is maybe why you shouldn't do your research at 11:30 pm) Or Watch the Thone? Is that why Kanye and Jay-Z didn't even bother showing up?

Things I Love That I Shouldn’t Love: Shitty Reality Television

2011-10-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

We’re talking bottom of the barrel here, people. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have cable and am considering cancelling my Netflix subscription. This past weekend I house-sat for one of my Madison friends. In the course of staying at her apartment, I watched two episodes of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, a reality TV show on Bravo centered around finding raw artistic talent. This year, one of the contestants is a fellow who has a rat-tail on purpose and goes by the name Sucklord because he thinks it’s contradictory and clever. This is all that the other contestants and hosts are allowed to call him.

The Sucklord, looking deceptively unridiculous.

In the same weekend, I watched two episodes of Tough Love: Miami, the fourth installment in the Tough Love series. I watched eight beautiful women subject themselves to random dates, impromptu text messages, room searches, flirtatious encounters with men who don’t speak English but surprise! Do speak English, and exposure of their risque and embarrassing digital lives to dudes they like.

Steve Ward: "You know how not to find a boyfriend, Brittaini? Spend all your time watching my show! But actually keep doing that. Kthx."

And I loved it all. So much so that on Monday night, after leaving Board Games at Sarah and Caleb’s, I went home and purchased the next episode of Tough Love Miami for $1.99. If you want to see the sexy photoshoot surprise catwalk and dance the samba episode, just look at my iTunes. It will be there forever.

Reluctantly baking birthdays.

2011-09-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

Today I baked for the first time in three months. I made cupcakes I’ve made before, but I didn’t want to. Gathering the ingredients involved stopping three places (a Target, a friend’s house, a liquor store), and I knew I wouldn’t be able to frost them tonight, that people would have to wait for me tomorrow night when they’re all gathered in my apartment for me to make frosting and frost twenty-four cupcakes, because I wouldn’t let other people make me a cake.

Tomorrow (today, by the time anyone reads this) is my birthday. I’m turning twenty-three. I’m not great at birthdays. Last year I ushered in my 22nd year of life staring up into my ceiling, and cried in a professor’s office before the day was out. This year I almost said, "Dear Birthday, please come again in two weeks instead of on Thursday, Love Brittaini" as my facebook status. I only refrained because I figured it would look attention seeking and like I was trying to trick people into remembering my birthday.

I’ve been mopey and cranky all week, and while I hope something changes before tomorrow it’s not looking likely.

I almost called it off. I almost called up my friend Elizabeth and said, “Pull out your cake mix reserves, because I am not doing this shit.”

(I don’t know for sure that Elizabeth has cake mix reserves, but there’s a pretty high likelihood.)

Then I pulled open my drawer to grab the ¼ cup and the ½ cup and found that I do not have a full set of measuring cups. I have 1/3 cup, 2/3 cup, and ¾ cup. That’s it.

At that point I almost pounded my head against my counter in my messy kitchen, and the bad faith in people started to creep back. That nagging suspicion that you’re wasting your time, that the people you’re doing this for aren’t going to appreciate your cupcakes or your sense of humor (bad faith snowballs), convientently forgetting that you insisted on making these fucking cupcakes because you like to show off your mad baking skills.

But I pushed through. Because the person I want to be makes food for other people as a way of showing affection, and she does it well. Last year she made a whole dinner and dessert (there was the crying in the closet incident, and the nearly broken tart crust, but that turned out okay too in the end).There are 24 chocolate-whisky ganache filled chocolate-Guinness cupcakes resting on my counter, waiting for their Bailey’s-buttercream topping. And tomorrow when my new friends in Madison come over after dinner, they’ll sing me happy birthday and I’ll feel awkward, but then I’ll tell them I love them in decadent dessert form, while showing off a little bit. And maybe at some point gratitude will descend, and something like peace will settle over me. Here’s hoping.

Thoughts from a New Desk.

2011-09-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

This weekend I spent too much money on a desk. I told the cashier at World Market that if they couldn’t fit it in my car, I wasn’t buying it. After that a very helpful woman helped me take it out of the box and shove it into my backseat. Driving home on the beltline with a desk bisected rear view was harrowing, as was lugging the top of it into my house by myself, but I did it. I set up a wide workspace that is not dedicated to food or clothing or any of my other loves, but rather is dedicated to work, the life of the mind, etc. Not that this work always feels like work, it often feels like playing, but there’s a little bit of a difference between writing a blog post and watching Mad Men. Just a little, at least.

With the arrival of a desk, I’m just a few boxes away from this apartment looking like it is mine for real, just two chairs away from claiming all of the spaces. And yet the more I unpack and the more I live my life here, the less and less I feel like myself, or at least like the version of myself that I’ve known.

Part of that is the unnatural way I’m squishing my personality from an introvert into an extrovert. This is what my week looks like:

M: Panera, then board games at Caleb and Sarah’s
T: Library/car repair/sleep
W: Breakfast w/ Sarah in the AM; Bake birthday treats, go bowling at night
Th: Birthday dinner/show off birthday treats
F: Children’s museum adult swim
S: Drive home, close bank account, eat lunch with my family, drive back to Madtown.
S: Massive Customer Time (MCT) starts.

My days were less socially packed in college than they are now. And so, the more pleasant parts of my personality – the parts that can both listen and be silly, that can be selfless (not always, but from time to time), that can be kind – are fading behind my overloaded defaults of distracted and cynical and snarky and laughing without meaning to or making annoyed faces when I should hold my expression. And part of me knows that I should start saying “no” to more things, that I should spend at least two evenings at home, by myself, resting or reading or writing. But I keep scheduling things, keep making appointments, because if I have things to do then I have proof that people like me and want to spend time with me, that I’m not halfway to being the bookish 23 year old with multiple cats and an apartment that smells like a litter box. Which I don't need to worry about anyway, because people here have been more than kind about reassuring me that they like me. One of my favorite conversations was with my friend Sanmeet:

Me: Is it okay if I tag along?
Sanmeet: (vaguely annoyed) You don't have to keep asking. Yes. Sure.

But there's still that worry, that not-so-secret fear and insecurity. The conviction that I don't just have to be funny, I have to be funny and fun and considerate and everything good all at the same time. I've forgotten how to just be me, completely, without subconscious social paranoia. And so the part of me that comes out is cool and disaffected, is running jokes through a filter, is trying to make sure that there's not a more interesting conversation happening, or a better time being had.

Additionaly, I've forgotten how to be alone. It’s as though I spent so much time from January to June being by myself that I over-corrected way in the opposite direction. I've neglected the pleasure of my own company, of the companionship of a blank screen or a collection of assembled words. So even when I know there is something I would rather be doing - or something I've committed to doing, like posting in this space - I schedule my time with other people, just to make sure I don't miss out on anything.

But the truth is that you're always going to miss out on something, and if you spend all your time chasing the best time or the best conversation, you'll miss out on the actual experience you are having, you'll lose the ability to care for the actual people in front of you, or the opportunity to regroup and refresh and be the actual best version of you that you know exists, lingering just beneath your skin, waiting and hoping to flex her legs again.

Thoreau maybe once said that the unexamined life was not worth living, and that most people live lives of quiet desperation. While Thoreau was mostly full of shit, he might have been onto something there.

Welcome to the re-examination of my life.

The Life You Think You Want

2011-08-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

Or, "Lessons You Have to Learn Twice."

If you're reading this, you may know that last year I did a stunt writing exercise called "30 Days to a Prettier Happier You." I read and lived Skinny Bitch, wore cute clothes, did my hair, and worked out for half of the month. By the end of it I'd learned that:

None of it made me any happier. In fact, I spent most of my time feeling weighed down by all of the extra expectations, all of the extra things to do. And the things I’m most proud of myself for doing that month I did under the influence of ill-fitting jeans, haphazard hair, and no make-up. So while the clothes might make the woman for those few, elusive montage scenes, the woman makes the woman for the rest of the time.

At the time, I'd chosen the project precisely because it distracted me from that essential question: what does it mean for me to be the woman I want to be all of the time?

It's a terrifying thing to ask, because for the most part the answer is, "I have no fucking idea, but I know I'm not her yet."

If you're reading this, you may also know that I recently moved from the Land of Lincoln to the Land of Cheese and Beer (a.k.a. Wisconsin). I'm living in Madison, a hip, liberal state capital with an impressive university attached. I'm living in my own apartment, paying my own bills, working a 9-5 doing tech writing. So far I've done the hard work of making friends and establishing a group of people that I can comfortable call on Friday nights. Other than that, I haven't done much. I don't have a desk yet and have barely done any writing. In July when I moved I walked all over the place, but for the last month I've been largely sedentary. The other night I sat on my couch, watching Parks and Recreation, eating dino nuggets for dinner while wearing a sweatshirt from H&M.

While fun for the most part, this isn't quite the grown-up life I imagined. I'm not as good at working as I'd hoped, and I'm certainly not skilled at the art of discipline. Which is a problem, because the life I want isn't about doing what I want all of the time. The life I want involves a lot of slogging through the banal and weary moments in pursuit of the few, glimmering, transcendent ones.

But it's time. It's time to put away childish things. It's time to face each day, each task with an energy and focus that I'll first have to teach myself to cultivate.

There's an incredibly inane OneRepublic song, "Good Life," that for the most part is just the vocalist showing off all of his international friends and repeating the term "good life" over and over again. There is an interesting line, though, when he says, "We're young enough to say/this has gotta be a good life."

The implication there is we (and who is the we in this song, sir? Define your speakers) won't always be young enough to commit to the idea of a good life. I won't always be young enough to have faith in a good life, but right now I am, even if I don't know what that means, even if I have to define it piece by piece.

Tomorrow morning starts day one of my real, intentional life. Tomorrow morning I will wake up, walk/run/hobble to my pier, and say, "Good morning sun. Good morning lake. Good morning."

It all starts again in six hours.

Evangelical Comedy, Take 1

2011-06-05T22:44:00.000-07:00

I found this first at Shakesville, and some of this post might be heavily influenced by Melissa's awesome smackdown.

Please, direct your attention to the train wreck below:

Opening line: Jack saved himself for marriage.

Ahem. Would you like a medal, sir? You bring up specifically that only 3% of people have accomplished what you've accomplished. Sound like you want a medal. Or an award ceremony. Maybe a conference in your honor.

So, here's the story. Jack has "saved himself" for marriage. "Saved himself" in this case refers only to sex. Other forms of intimacy, who knows, but sex has definitely been off the table for Jack and his ladyfriends. Because really, isn't sex the final frontier in relationships? Isn't sex what makes marriage different fundamentally from all other human relationships?

Oh, see, wait. I thought that what made marriage, especially within the Christian tradition, different from all other human relationships was the way that it fused together two people who were formerly two distinct entities, so that they become both physically and metaphysically one person. That the two will become one flesh did not just mean making the beast with two backs (thanks, Shakesie), but rather that the lines of division between two people dissolve completely. Is sex a representation of that metaphysical reality? Yes. Is it fundamentally what marriage is about - e.g., get married so you can get some whenever you want? God, I hope not.

Back to Jack. Just when Jack thinks he is finally going to get "biblical," which I guess he means get physical for Jesus, his wife is whisked off by the other love of her life, leaving Jack alone at the altar. And his reply? "I'm not going to do it tonight, am I?"

And thus, Jack is condemned to jacking off. Which the movie wouldn't talk about, of course, because this is evangelical comedy, but if the first thing you think when your bride leaves you at the altar is, "aw man, guess I can't have sex," you've probably been pregaming. Just saying.

After his bride runs off (she doesn't have a name. Only men get names), Jack's life goes to shit. He gets fired. Ted Haggard makes a cameo. Steven Curtis Chapman blends into Single Ladies, because that makes sense. And Jack decides to stop waiting.

But it would appear that God is looking out for Jack's virginity (because "saving yourself for marriage" is what being an American Christian is all about), and all of Jack's dates suck. Girl with hairy toes. Girl who sings "Open the Eyes of My Heart" like it's 1998 and then goes road rage for Jesus (it appears in the preview that the road rage is the dealbreaker. For me, it would have been the Sonicflood).

Then someone that Jack could actually like comes along, but he can't kiss her or something, and she still doesn't have a name, because only men get names. Which leads to the moment of serious revelation in the midst of a challenging game of wii chess.

Jack: I just don't know if I want to save myself anymore.
Friend: That's the problem, Jack. You can't save yourself.

All in all, if the trailer is any indication, The Waiting Game is low-budget, not funny, and repeats a lot of the tired myths of the evangelical tradition. Namely, that virginity is the best thing ever, and without it you have failed. Which might be true, but only in the context that everybody has failed. Everybody. Me, you, your mom. We all suck, and it's not like you get extra points for not putting your p in a girl's v.

Waiting to have sex until you're married when you have the choice to do so may be the ideal thing to do as it pertains to sex. I'm not 100% sold on this, but I'll let you know after I read Hauerwas. However, if I had to choose between being a judgmental, medal-seeking virgin and a kind or humble non-virgin, I'd take the latter every time.

Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, these are the fruit of the Spirit. Virginity is not among them. And while you might argue that self-control, faithfulness, and forbearance manifest themselves as pre-marital virginity, I would come back and say, "not always, and definitely not only." And it's foolish to say that because someone's had sex prior to marriage they don't have self-control and don't exhibit faithfulness and forbearance. Sex is not who we are, and you don't know someone else's story until they've told it to you.

Trailers like this one perpetuate the myth that Christianity is about listening to only Christian things, not watching R-rated movies, and not having drinkingdoingdrugshavingsex - that Christianity is fundamentally about what you don't do. That myth is alienating, not only to those who haven't heard the gospel, but also to those within the church. It holds people back from sharing their experiences honestly and encourages us to put on our best faces instead of our real ones.

It's the kind of Christianity I'm done with. And definitely the type of Christian men that I have no interest in dating, and definitely not marrying. I will marry a manslut atheist who knows how to be a real person before I give Jack or his ilk any of my time or affection.

More on how to do comedy as a Christian later.

PS. I don't speak for all Christians, obvi, and I might not even be articulate enough to represent myself. Comments/discussion are welcome and appreciated.

PPS. Just to prove that evangelicals can sometimes be funny, check out Rachel Dates (Around)

On Ghost World

2011-05-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert for all of Ghost World.

Earlier in the week, a professor told me that I was like Enid from Ghost World. And I said, "Ew, she sexes up Steve Buschemi."And he said, "Well, yes, but besides that." Then he saw my "Reading is Sexy" bumper sticker and said, "See what I mean! Thora Birch."

And so I watched Ghost World. My previous encounter with it happened when I was a sophomore in high school and my taste in movies and older men was underdeveloped, hence why all I remembered about it was that Enid sexes up Steve Buschemi - Seymour - and it was gross.

On the second, older and wiser viewing, it is still pretty gross. But in a way that's strangely sweet and pathetic and, as a result, very, very sad. They kiss less than thirty seconds after she says, "Don't you like me?" It's her one, real moment of complete vulnerability. And it's followed by a desperate attempt at a physical connection.

On the second viewing, I also see more of myself in Enid. Wikipedia describes her as: "intelligent, witty, artistic, cynical, sarcastic and a keen observer of the world around her."

That is the nicest way of putting it.

This is how I described her: "She is a dry-humored weirdo and a terrible person."

Her entire relationship with Seymour arises from acruel situation that she orchestrates. Throughout the movie she proves to be like most alienated post-high school girls - lonely and sad and easily wounded (though she puts up an impressive leather-jacket facade) and, in her loneliness and sadness and self-preservation, often cruel and mean.

And I'm very much like her. At the end when she says to Seymour, "I'm a disappointment to everyone." My internal reaction was, "Fuck."

Articulate, I know.

Opposite Enid of Ghost World is my current ladycrush, Leslie Knope, from Parks and Recreation. Who, after two and a half seasons of frustration with the menfolk, is getting together with Ben Wyatt, a co-worker, played by Adam Scott, who is much more attractive than Steve Buschemi. Not that that matters so much, except that it does.

This is a transcript of Leslie's conversation with Anne, her friend, when she is trying (futile!) to resist her feelings for Ben because their boss has a rule against interoffice extracurricular relationships.

Leslie: Anne, we have a serious Code Ben.
Anne: Well, it's not really a code if you say his name.
Leslie: He told me that he liked me. And I'm going to go make out with him right now. On his face.
Anne: That's awesome!
Leslie: No! Read me the script.
Anne: Seriously?
Leslie: Yes!
Anne: Alright. Leslie, it's Leslie Knope from the Parks Department speaking to you through Anne Perkins, friend and beautiful nurse. Aw, thank you. Do not do anything with Ben, be responsible, no matter how cute his mouth is. Your job is on the line!
Leslie: Shut up Anne!
Anne: You wrote that!
Leslie: No, then you - Leslie. Leslie you don't know what you're talking about. I care about him very much. And I've had two and a half glasses of red wine, and what that means is I'm gonna go make out with him right now, and it's gonna be awesome.
Anne: Yay!

And, well, that's momentarily thwarted, but the point is that Leslie Knope is adorable. And awesome. And should totally be able to make out with Ben on his face.

And I wish I saw more of Leslie Knope in me than effing Enid from effing Ghost World. Because the whole lazy and cynical and sarcastic thing ends up making you pretty grumpy and unpleasant to be around.

Enid, outside from a few good outfits and cute idiosyncrasies, is the part of myself that I'm tired of. And that's not me necessarily having low self-esteem or whatever, because my internal sense of superiority is pretty finely tuned and also a problem.

Like Zadie Smith wrote in White Teeth:

What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?...Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.

So, when you're being an Enid, it's okay to be tired of yourself. It's okay to not love yourself precisely because you're being an Enid, and part of being an Enid is alienation for alienation's sake. It's easy to say, "I can't relate to 99% of people" and then go off and build a sweet record collection or a fantastic bookshelf. It's harder to force yourself to relate anyway, to force a smile through the rote conversation or pretend to be interested in sports. But being the type of person who can do that might be what being a person is all about.

These things remain to be seen.

Excerpts from okcupid profiles when you a) have my profile and b) do a search for "Jesus" in the hopes of maybe finding a dude somewhere in the world who likes Jesus and would also vote for Hillary

2011-05-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

Jesus fuck they should stop publishing her.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

So if you have problems that only Jesus can fix do not bring them to me.

Yeah, most of the shit I listen to was either recorded 10+ years ago, was made with a computer, is in German, or would make the baby Jesus weep.

What would Jesus do for a Klondike?

Must love Jesus. Definitely must love Jesus. ... JesusChrist.Jesus ChristJesus ChristJesus ChristJesusChristJesus Christ.

(nb: I think he was jk on that one)

And I guess the reason for that is because I am ripped likeJesus . That's right, do you think Jesus woke up and said, "Ow, i have back fat!". No, ripped like Jesus .

Since I failed in trying to get “Breakfast with Jesus” published I have had nothing but bad luck. It would seem that thirty thousand or so evangelical Christians do not find my idea of writing our love and saviour Jesus as a 6”5 black transvestite with a fetish for masochism and abstract art

I love Jesus and I like figuring out how that changes things.... you'd like to get know a guy who thinks a simpler life might be better, Jesus is the Way, we need to take care of the planet, kids are hilarious and

People probably notice I look like Jesus with glasses on, I get the comparison often, sometimes from homeless people.

Please do not message me if:-You love jesus-You do drugs, yes pot is a drug

I have no clue how Jesus makes people listen to crappy music. He’s evil, I tell you.Jesus is a major downer.

My fingers are eight holy apostles and my thumbs are bothJesus.Is arrogance attractive? I'm really second guessing myself here. I don't think even one of my thumbs is Jesus.

If you want to talk about Jesus - man let me warn you. I could talk about Jesus until I pass out.

Other than that I'm just seeking to love and honor Jesus with my life. ... You're 20-28, female, love Jesus, read your Bible, dress modestly, and you're kinda short.

(nb: hey thanks for telling me how to wear my clothes, sir! it is my favorite when dudes do that.)

my username is Jesus_fool, as in "what's your name?" "Jesus, fool."i'm not some sort of zealot, and i don't want to hear anything about me not looking like Jesus.

It's gotten me into trouble, like the time I stole a baby Jesusfigurine from a house party. The party was so bad I did not think Jesus wanted to stay there, but lots of people were upset nonetheless.

(nb: that is actually pretty funny.)

Jesus, I use a shit ton commas.

People tell me I look like Jesus. I disagree, Jesus wasn't white.

Or if you're jesus. If you're jesus, message me.

I'm pretty sure my life will involve Jesus and/or suing people.
(This guy was actually legit and had some good law jokes. Too bad he was from Texas and did not want a pen pal.)

JesusI like cats , I don't have a cat , but I do like cats.

reppin Jesus Christ for days through my christian death metal rock music.

i am not like an indian person who prays all day but i believe in Jesus and i pray 4 times a day to myself morning lunch dinner and bed time

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So, obviously, that was a no-go. Before that I had tried Flannery O'Connor, but it turns out that most people like her for either her literary capabilities and/or her southernness, not her Jesus-ness.

To combat the failure, I decided to look up a theologian that I respected, since "likes Jesus and Mark Driscoll" is a little bit different than "likes Jesus and Stanley Hauerwas."

There are two dudes that mention Stanley Hauerwas.

They are both in the UK. One is agnostic. The other one's religion is --.

Reason #342 I am going to die alone. But whatever, I won't have to shave my legs, and I can name my cats whatever I want. You guys will love Wallace Hauerwas Auden and Flannery Zora Smith.

An Open Letter To My Father

2011-04-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Dad,

I'm starting to get it. I've pieced together the narrative of your life, and I'm starting to see it. Starting to feel it.

You were the fifth son of an already tired couple. You grew up in the suburbs, doing well enough but not particularly trying hard at anything. There were opportunities you missed, a battle of the bands that didn't pan out, a tennis tournament you didn't quite make it to, and you would always come back to those moments as the big break you were denied.

You learned to be charming and win the friends that gave you the same kind of attention you gave your brothers, a slightly spellbound camraderie. In high school the ties weakened - especially after your best friend knocked up his girlfriend and they had to get married - and just when you were looking for a place to belong you ran into a girl at work at the banquet hall with mini golf and a corn maze. She was a foot shorter than you, but she was little and pretty, and most importantly she was looking for love the same way you were, though neither of you would call it that. You'd sneak off after work and make out in the golf course's gazebo.

You stayed together after graduation, but she didn't follow you to college. In the year you were apart you flexed your charm, exercised it on your frat buddies and the multitude of single girls at parties. You discovered its capacity, its depth and breath. You attended class sometimes too, when you weren't too hungover, and realized maybe for the first time that you were smart, smarter than your buddies.

And just as you started thinking you could do anything, the shoe dropped, and the girl back home was crying about your infidelity. You said things you only half meant, about sleeping with the other girls because you just missed her so much, that they were just bodies to you, not people. Maybe you realized then her capacity for love, for besotted unwavering affection, especially for men who categorically are bad for her. You loved her love for you far more than you would ever love her, in her person. And so you begged her, you pleaded, you promised her a ring.

And you two were married in her parent's church. She dropped out of community college and the two of you got an apartment that she paid for with her weekly paycheck from kmart. She was steady in a way that you weren't - she could party, but the next morning she'd be the one stuffing red plastic cups and empty beer cans into black trash bags. And she paid attention to you; she loved you in a way you hadn't known before, with a steadfast devotion.

And you knew, while you were wasting time and drinking too much and taking gym classes in lieu of anything academically challenging, you knew that you were capable. There was a small seed of ambition buried somewhere within you that lurked, restlessly. You looked into the future and saw adventure; your bride looked into the future and saw two kids and a single family home in the suburbs. And rather than put adventure into specific language, instead of trying to coax your bride into a city like Chicago (she probably would have followed you), you subscribed to her dreams. So long as you could play guitar on the weekends, you were okay with going home. You took an easy job sending mortgages while she went to work at the local ready mix. You bought a duplex equidistant from each of your parents and saw them on the weekends.

It was an easy life, but you knew from the start that it wasn't enough for you. But you kept the restlessness at bay, first with alcohol, then with the birth of your first and second children, then with the bodies of other women. But it was never enough, the potential that you discovered fleetingly in college haunted you, and the traditional American Dream was never yours.

And so you left. You left a wife of 18 years, a 12 year-old-daughter, and an 8 year-old-son. And though you tried, in a second marriage and in various careers, you could never find anything to make it enough. So now you dream, in absent hours, on commuter train lines, about what might have been.

And I'm starting to get it. All my life I've been the gifted child, the one that doesn't have to try too hard to be smart. I've given up on everything I haven't been good at because there have been other places of natural talent to turn to. I've never been as charming as you were - not in person, but on paper I can be if I try hard enough.

I graduated from college full of potential - potential that other people could recognize too. Now I avoid those people, because I don't want them to be disappointed in me and the four months I've spent doing nothing.

I can feel myself turning into you, being suffocated by the lack of kindred spirits and areas of interest. I have to pry myself out of bed in the morning and I'm learning to like the taste of cheap wine way too much. I know that if I wanted to I could probably get someone to love me the same way that Mom loved you. Someone to mitigate the loneliness, to show me a type of steadfast devotion that you were supposed to, though in an enitrely different context. A man whose love for me I would love more than him, in his person. I can see the ruts forming, the suburbs closing in, the notion of having had and lost some intangible but wonderful thing. I can hear the 'what-ifs' echoing through my 40 year-old-head as I destroy my relationships in pursuit of an illusory something more.

But don't think that because I'm starting to get it, you're off the hook. You're not. I still can't forgive you for not being braver, for not giving me an example of what that would mean. Because here's the truth: All of our what-ifs mean shit.

And unlike you, I'm getting out of here while I still can.

Man up, you manly man men you!

2011-04-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is off the cuff, it is late, I'm tired, and it's my blog so I'm free with my language. Don't say you weren't warned.

David French, assault-weapon toting Evangelical, thinks that men need to man up, because some bad shit has gone down. Notably:

Something has gone wrong with the American male. We're increasingly less educated than women, we're hit harder by the recession, and we're farless likely to attend church. Simply put, we often don't know our role in a highly feminized (or feminist-ized) two-earner society.

This crisis is the inevitable result of a cultural progression that began with the "feminized man," has moved to the "child man," and will end up with a country littered (even more than it already is) with broken families, lost economic potential, and relational dysfunction.

And all of these things are women's fault. Because as women redefine what it means to be feminine - or if that term is even useful - men don't know how to adjust what it means to be masculine and/or can't eschew that term altogether and, well, things fall apart. If only women would stay in the kitchen, dudes would go to college and not be bad dads. I especially love:

What do feminists and evangelicals have in common? Both factions increasingly re-classify typically masculine characteristics (say, aggression or adventurousness) as vices and typically feminine characteristics (such as emotionalism or an emphasis on relationships) as virtues.

No. Feminists - some of them, I'm not nuanced enough to tell first wave from third wave from womanists - this feminist, at least, doesn't think "masculine" traits are bad or that "feminine" traits are good. Aggression can be good. You also don't have to have testicles to be aggressive. What this feminist is arguing is that these traits don't fall into neat binaries of masculine v. feminine, or that being a man has to look like one thing instead of another.

And, as part of that, there are problems with traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity - problems that go beyond the public square feminist blogs and into the church itself. Because when people flip a shit about the church being "too feminized," all that does is marginalize the female members of the church...the same female members that have likely sustained the church through the centuries.

There's also the argument that one of the reasons that Jesus came as a man was to redeem masculinity from the travesty it'd become - that part of the wonder of the incarnation was Jesus's modeling of a different way to be a man.

Anyway. According to French, who is a soldier, lawyer, writer, and not a psychologist, biologist, counselor, or theologian:

The result is a strange form of "female emotional porn" (my wife's phrase), where the ideal man becomes—in many essential ways—a woman: emotionally available, always eager to talk, never afraid to shed a tear, and ready, willing, and able to shoulder the household workload. I can't tell you how many times I've been to Christian conferences or sat through sermons where I've been told that "real men" should behave exactly like that, that "real men" have the "courage" to set aside their emotional distance, to approach their wife emotionally and say "no" to their careers.

They're told to be "Christlike" by pastors or Sunday School teachers who imagine a feminized Christ, a Jesus always washing feet (or giving foot-rubs) and never clearing out temples, a Jesus of gentle words and not fierce anger, a Jesus always serving, never leading.

Again, black v. white, masculine v. feminine. I mean, seriously dude, have you not heard of tiger moms? Women can lead, too, and do so just as effectively as men do. Women can be filled with righteous indignation. What you're describing isn't feminine or masculine, it's human. And the idea that if these things are no longer solely masculine they must be solely feminine might be why a lot of men are confused.

I'm coming to find that "human" is a term that comes with much more fluidity than masculine and feminine, and in some ways, its scarier. There aren't narrow identities that men and women must fit into - where there were limits there's now possibility. That can be terrifying. It can also be freedom.

The thing is, as a woman and a feminist, I don't want to "wear the pants" in the relationship. I don't want to "be the man." But I don't want to "be the woman" either. I don't want to be in a relationship where I'm anything but Brittaini, a human who is a woman, and my husband is X*, a human who is a man. I don't want to relate to my husband as though he is an anonymous part of a larger monolith called Men, and I don't want him to relate to me as though I am an anonymous part of a larger monolith called Women. I don't want our relationship to be a power struggle, a war between the sexes. I don't want our relationship to be some binary where one of us has to submit to the will of the other.

I don't want to place largely societally defined stereotypes on X and expect him to grow into them. And vice-versa.

I don't want to be X's mom-wife, I don't want to be his daughter-wife either. I'd settle for wife in a relationship that's built and sustained on mutual dependence and trust.

Back to French. French goes on to outline what he sees as the Biblical way to be a man:

There's an alternative, of course, and the alternative is biblical. No, not the soft-spoken, ultra-sensitive version of "biblical" that dominates the evangelical small-group, but the robust, aggressive, and honorable example of the actual men of the Bible. There, men go to war at God's command. There, men face death, far from home, for the sake of Truth. There, men confront the powerful and call out injustice. There, men actually lead.

Emphasis mine. It's interesting that French wants men to lead their families, and then sends them off to face death far from home. Seems a smidge counter-intuitive. He continues:

It's not all aggression and confrontation. The picture is complex, with gentle moments amongst the harsh, with great tenderness and, yes, deep emotion mixed with necessary stoicism and steely determination. You lay down your very life for your family, even as you lead it—and you lead it with the same authority that Christ leads His church.

A Couple of things at this point:

1) Women are never necessarily stoic? Women don't have steely determination? Wtf?

2) Feminism as a movement is all about confronting the powerful and calling out injustice. Where have you been, sir?

2) This:

and you lead it with the same authority that Christ leads His church.

No.

In my marriage to X, God will join together a single flesh made of two intrinsically flawed people. That relationship - that fusion - doesn't translate into a metaphor where he's Jesus and I'm the Church. He doesn't get to be God's Only Begotten Son while I'm stuck being the fuck-up. We're both the fuck-up.

This Jesus-Man, Church-Woman metaphor is one that was, probably, at one time incredibly beautiful and useful. Sometimes it might still be that. More often it's used in the way French uses it, as a way to elevate men and create a hierarchy within human relationships. And I'm done with it.

French's article talks a lot about "feminized culture" and how feminists warp their husbands and have bizarre expectations. To dispel a little bit of that rumor, here is what I expect of X**:

1) That he's smart. One of my only virtues is that I have a voracious intellect, and for my sanity I will need to marry someone who can help me exercise it. This expectation is probably a reflection of one of my intrinsic flaws.

2) That he's kind.

3) That he's a good dad to whatever children I expel from my birthing hips. Part of being a good dad will mean being present whenever possible, and viewing the parenting of these children as our joint primary responsibility rather than my primary responsibility.

4) That he views me as the fully realized, actual person who is his equal and his wife.

...That's it. That is the sum of my wholly unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky, must haves.

Also, David French seems to be concerned that men who "strive for female-defined emotional perfection" won't get any from their contemptuous, home-dominating wives.

Ahem.

Dear X,

As you will probably know, because I'll tell you, my dad was a bad dad, and that screwed me up a lot. I'm sure we will talk about this. But you can rest assured that being a good dad to our futurebabies is what I will respect, admire, and adore most about you. And if you keep being a good dad, and can fight the battles in your backyard rather than the ones over the great wide sea, I'm pretty sure I'll keep putting out.

Just so we're clear.

With love,

Brittaini.

*X currently does not exist. He is the unknown.

**You may notice that I didn't include "loves Jesus" on that list. While it would be ideal if X loved Jesus, I am totally okay with missionary marriage if it lets me avoid the "real men" that David French seems to be encouraging.

Rebecca: A Plot Summary and Brief Commentary

2011-01-18T18:33:00.001-08:00

SPOILER ALERT: everything in the book.

PART ONE:

GIRL is 21 and sad and working for an obnoxious woman that nobody likes. She meets MAXIM DE WINTER and the two of them start going for car rides when obnoxious woman has a fake injury that makes other people pity her.

MAXIM takes GIRL up a hill and acts all crazy looking over the water. GIRL is like, "Haha I'm scared." MAXIM says "Sorry I'm a creepy weirdo. Let's hang out some more."

GIRL says "Okay. But only because you have a car and I have no friends."

MAXIM is exactly twice the age of GIRL.

After two weeks of being in bed while GIRL and MAXIM hang out but don't get it on, Obnoxious woman is like, "oh hey, let's go to New York." GIRL runs to MAXIM and is all, "I came to say goodbye." MAXIM'S reply? "Marry me."

This is the last cool thing GIRL does.

THE REST OF THE BOOK:

MAXIM and GIRL go home to MANDERLY, which is apparently the bestest house ever. There, GIRL is told by everyone how much lamer she is than MAXIM's dead wife, REBECCA (dun dun dun). REBECCA was beautiful and awesome and social and everybody loved her. GIRL is plain and lame and MAXIM treats her like a dog (no joke, GIRL says, "He treats me like the cocker spaniel). Instead of growing a pair (of ovaries!) and saying, "Hey, you married me, at least pretend that you love me, okay? Let's make out in front of this fire." GIRL mopes. For about 100 pages. And the scary skeletal housekeeper MRS. ~~DOUBTFIRE~~ DANVERS psychologically tortures her and is all, "I loved REBECCA so much I would have cleaned her shoes by licking them if she asked me."

MRS DANVERS convinces GIRL to a) wear a dress that REBECCA wore on her last night of life. This makes everyone crazy-go-nuts. Girl cries. b) ALMOST COMMIT SUICIDE BY JUMPING OUT A WINDOW. Instead, GIRL goes and talks to MAXIM and says, "It's okay that our marriage failed, I'll just pretend that I'm happy on the otherside of this huge cavernous house. MAXIM says, "Okay, here's what happened. REBECCA was a bitch and tried to make me have a kid that wasn't mine, so I shot her in ~~Reno~~ the cabin where she slept with all her baby daddies and sunk her in the bay. Do you still love me?"

GIRL: "Yes of course I love you. I'm so relieved that you love me that I don't even care that you shot your wife, or think that it might have any implications for me and our wonderful future together. How soon can we make some babies?"

MAXIM: As soon as I'm no longer wanted for murder.

There's a trial and the coroner rules, "It's sucide!" Then DRUNK COUSIN (REBECCA's first cousin and possible baby daddy) shows up and says, "It can't be suicide, and I have this note that doesn't really say anything to prove it! Give me money and I won't prosecute you for the murder of my cousin who I loved oh so desperately." MAXIM, instead of ponying up the cash, says, "I am too dignified to be blackmailed, though not dignified enough to not murder some bitches. Let's settle this."

Along the way, MRS DANVERS is brought in as a witness. She says, "REBECCA hated all of you. She had eyes only for skeletal me." People are not phased. MRS DANVERS starts to realize that MAXIM may have murdered her ladylove. She goes off to smolder (foreshadowing!).

Everyone goes off to find a magical mystery doctor that REBECCA saw right before MAXIM gave her a shot to the heart. He says, "oh, she had cervical cancer and was going to die a long slow painful death that she specifically said she wanted to avoid." The Law and DRUNK COUSIN accept this as reason for suicide. MAXIM tells GIRL on the way home, "I think she wanted me to shoot her, just like eventually you'll want me to punch you in the face." Neither of them feel bad for REBECCA'S death.

Until, of course, GIRL has a creepy dream that ZOMG SHE IS REBECCA AND MAXIM IS STRANGLING HER WITH HER OWN HAIR, and then they come over a hill to see that MRS. DANVERS has set MANDERLY on fire.

And that, my friends, is how you write a classic tale of romantic suspense.

There are two problems with this book.

1) It made me think that it was going to speak to me.

At the beginning of Chapter 5, GIRL says the following:

"They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over the shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas.

And I thought, yes! That is what it is like to be 21ish! But then she didn't do anything cool and was just mopey and bahhhhhh why doesn't he love me that I wanted to slap her. Hard.

2) It made it seem like Maxim de Winter was going to be hot!awesome. After rather flippantly proposing to GIRL over breakfast - "Marry me so you don't have to go to New York with that obnoxious woman nobody likes" - GIRL is understandably stunned. He notices and says,

"I'm being rather a brute to you, aren't I This isn't your idea of a proposal. We ought to be in a conservatory, you in a white frock with a rose in your hand, and a violin playing a waltz in the distance. And I should make violent love to you behind a palm tree. You would feel then that you were getting your money's worth. Poor darling, what a shame. Never mind, I'll take you to Venice for our honeymoon and we'll hold hands in the gondola."

This is the last time that MAXIM is funny/charming. The rest of the time he's distant and "I like you innocent and not grown up" and then, toward the end, "Thanks for loving me even though I killed my old wife."

There is never any violent love made behind palm trees.

Overall, Rebecca left me feeling cheated and frustrated with weak heroines. Also, I read the wikipedia halfway through so the suspense was absent. Read at your own risk. Of boredom, I mean.

Book Thoughts: The History of Love; Super Sad True Love Story

2011-01-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is beautiful and luminous, etc.

Additionally, she is married to Jonathan Safran Foer.

This is how you look like an attractive, talented, literary couple.

Perhaps noncoincidentally, their writing has certain similarities. Including, but probably not limited to:

- Parallel stories told in different perspectives and persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd)
- One story line that is magical
- USING HEADINGS LIKE THIS WHEN YOU WANT TO
- The holocaust and separation/loss
- Child/teenage narrator
- Children who are probably to smart to be the age that they are
- Eastern Europe
- Prominent Jewishness
- Fathers who don't know their sons
- On that note, dead dads
- Surprisingly permissive mothers
- Loneliness
- Lost and/or unfulfilled love
- Old man narrator

Krauss's work is a little bit less experimental and less magical, but still, the similarities are interesting.

Also, if you haven't, read Super Sad True Love Story. Or just watch this trailer. It has James Franco. And Gary Shteyngart is totally my new literary crush, even though he 1) has a girlfriend 2) is 38 and 3) is, as Eleanor put it, "not cute." Even so, his book makes me want to apply for the Columbia MFA program. just for the distant possibility of ever getting to work with him.

image credit

30 Second Book Reviews

2010-11-23T22:39:00.002-08:00

Queen of Babble - Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot fail. Not funny. Why is this popular?

One Day - David Nicholls. It's been called Nick Hornby-esque, which basically means that it's lit candy that's not below you. Interesting use of form. Clever, self-aware, and romantic - smart escapism.

A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley. Boring girls on farms are boring.

Atonement - Ian McEwan. WWII and choices you can't take back. So freaking beautiful and tragic and lovely and beautiful. Seeing the movie took away some of the suspense, but it was still worth it.

Currently reading: Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, and trying to get into Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.

midnight rant: vanity

2010-08-26T21:33:00.000-07:00

I just took my first birth control pill. I'm sprawled here on the couch, wide awake, in an apartment that is silent except for the crickets, trying to determine exactly what is happening as the pill dissolves and moves through the necessary membranes and into my bloodstream. What are the side effects going to be? Am I going to gain five pounds by tomorrow? Is my body going to accept the pills or revoke them whole? Will I be sad tomorrow because of them? Will I be sad perpetually? Who do I talk to if this doesn't work out?

See, I'm not taking birth control to avoid pregnancy -- you have to have sex to worry about preventing pregnancy, unless of course your name is Mary and you start seeing angels while kneading bread. I went to the dermatologist today and told him I wanted to aggressively treat my acne, and now I'm signed up for Accutane. Accutane is apparently an FDA X rated drug, which means that if you take it and you make a baby, the baby will either die or not have ears. Other deformities are also possible. Doctors are required to explain this to all of their female patients that have not gone through menopause, and all such patients are required to enroll in the federal iPledge program. As part of iPledge, I am on two forms of birth control: the pill, and condoms for all the sex I'm not having. This is the iPledge procedure:

PHASE ONE:
1. Pee in a cup to prove there are no buns in your oven.
2. Sign and initial a lot of forms that have huge stop signs and look like caution tape in pamphlet form.
3. Start taking birth control.

THIRTY DAYS LATER/PHASE 2:
1. Fast for 12 hours.
2. Go to the hospital and have your blood drawn.
3. Pee in a cup to prove there are no buns in your oven.
4. Receive, fill, and consume prescription.
5. Repeat every 30 days for four months.

This whole ordeal is making me realize how incredibly vain, delusional, or both I am. Graduation is coming up in December, and there is a very large part of me that wants to leave Wheaton College as some sort of shiny new Brittaini. I've decided to keep a food journal and run 100 miles (cumulatively, not all at once) this semester so that maybe I'll lose some weight (we'll see what Yaz has to say). I have a coupon for Crest Whitestrips and am consistently checking ads to see if I can get a good price. I've been dismantling and rebuilding my wardrobe so that I look "like a grown up" - as if looking like one would make me feel like one. And now Accutane, which is supposedly awesomely effective. After 3-5 months on it, there is a 33% chance that I'll never have to hear my mom ask me, "What's going on with your face?" again.

Part of this obsession I feel perfectly comfortable blaming on the women in my life. My mother usually holds off for the first day I'm home, but before the second she's made an inquiry about whether I've been "taking care" of my face, and have I made a dermatologist appointment, and when is that all going to clear up already.

My grandmother is worse. This is a real life conversation:

Me: (Walk in the door)
Grandma: You can study for the LSAT outside, you know.
Me: What?
Grandma: You're so pale! Go outside. Get some vitamin D.
Me: Actually, because I'm so pale, my skin absorbs vitamin D really easily and I'm totally okay with what's in milk.
Grandma: You're like a ghost.
Me: ...
Grandma: You've gained weight.
Me: ...Yes, yes, I have. Isn't my dress nice, though?
(no response)

Don't get me wrong, I love these two women dearly. They are both fantastic, and I'll be lucky to turn out like them in the eventual future. But, neither one has ever made me feel especially beautiful, at least not consistently. The closest they generally get at verbal affirmation of my physical appearance is when they buy me a card for a birthday or other such event and it says something like, "To my special, beautiful (Grand)Daughter." As a rule, I don't believe greeting cards, at least not ones with entire paragraphs of compliments on the front.

So maybe, just maybe, some of this insecure narcissism is inherited, or at least shaped by those who have gone before me. Or maybe, focusing so much attention on how great I'll look sashaying around in a size 6 (who am I kidding...8) with white(r) teeth, clear skin, and a good haircut, is a way of avoiding the big questions. You know, the what are your plans now? question. I don't have plans. I have vague, uncertain outlines of plans that are so transient they aren't to be trusted. But this? This may be transient (beauty fades, etc), but it's not vague. It comes to me in pill, strip, and track form with timelines, specific instructions, and predictable outcomes. I think I need that right now. On the first day of chapel I almost cried after the opening hymn. I'm going to be a wreck by the end of the semester, with or without medical side effects. So, maybe it's okay to want specific instructions and definite timelines, even for vain and delusional reasons.

James Joyce -- He Doesn't Even Look Fun

2010-08-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, Dr. Jacobs. I'm sorry literary community. I'm sorry all of the "best of the best" lists that I have. I'm sorry modern canon, but I can't do it. I can't read Joyce. I didn't read Ulysses (not much of a confession). I somehow managed to eek out a paper on "The Dead," but I felt dead while I was writing it. I've now attempted three pages of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and all I have to say is this:

Dear James Joyce,

You are a very smart writer, but I'm sorry, I cannot read you. You are boring. You are tedious. I don't care about Stephen Daedalus, though I admire your use of myth. If you sent a story into Kodon, I probably would have rejected it.

With love,
Brittaini

I mean, seriously. He doesn't even look fun.

Pictured: James "I ran out of miniature railroad sets so I decided to write" Joyce*

*This is a made up tagline. I know nothing about Joyce's affinity (or hatred) of miniature railroad sets.

Book Thoughts: One Hundred Years of Solitude

2010-06-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

It took me three tries to "get into" One Hundred Years of Solitude enough to read it, and this summer I finally succeeded. I've decided that it is definitely a summer book, made for long, languishing days in temperate to hot weather. I started treating it as my bedtime story, and would read a chapter and be lulled to sleep by the fantastic prose and strange, mythical setting. I should probably try and say something more intelligent about the book, but it is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most famous book, and it made Oprah's book club, so I'm fairly sure the smart things have already been said.

Before I type up quotes, however, I will say that it was fantastic to imagine some of the scenes as a soap opera on telemundo. Particularly the duel over Ursula and the pig tail paranoia. That's pig tail as in tail-of-a-pig, not one of a pair on a girl's head.

Solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.

The others, more honorable, were still waiting for a letter in the shadow of public charity, dying of hunger, living through rage, rotting of old age amid the exquisite shit of glory.

I posted this quote specifically for the phrase "the exquisite shit of glory," which I think references the glory of being a soldier and having fought for some valorous cause. It's an exquisite kind of shit, it earns you respect, but it still costs - from you and from others - more than it could ever nearly be worth in the first place.

The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.

His fervor for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence.

Also, just for the record, I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the writer who has possibly used the word "shit" in the most brilliant ways I have ever read. Not that such a fact is why anyone reads Garcia Marquez, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Belated Shameless Self-Promotion

2010-04-09T00:30:00.001-07:00

It's me!

Wheaton Pub: Fall 2009

Excerpt from my Doors of the Sea review:

2010-03-16T19:28:00.001-07:00

On confessing a sovereign God in a suffering world:

It is the increasingly farfetched nature of the promise of divine victory that makes it difficult to confess a sovereign God in a suffering world. But at the same time, faith in the sovereign God as revealed by the Christian tradition seems, at some level, the only articulated and convincing alternative to ultimate despair. Even then, it is not necessarily a sure alternative, but a sort of mad, frantic hope. The confession of the sovereign triune God is one that I make because otherwise I know of no confession worth making. Admittedly, the idea of a world where all that is corrupted has been set right is almost incomprehensible, because the only world I have ever known is this one, this strange mixture of resplendence, atrocity, and everything in between. But this mad, frantic hope is necessary, because the alternative - a world without a sovereign God moving all of creation toward its redemption - is injustice forever. If human history proves anything it proves that people do not holistically become better with time. The alternative to God’s divine victory toward which he orients all things is an impossible hopelessness. Despair still exists – I don’t know how senseless suffering could prompt anything but despair– but it is impermanent and will be overcome. There will be vindication for the oppressed, there has to be. Otherwise life is not good, it is good for some, for the lucky and privileged, and everything is only random and meaningless incident.

-- language heavily influenced by David Bentley Hart, author of "Doors of the Sea," and the quote from Kierkegaard on the cover of Penguin's Great Ideas edition of "Fear and Trembling"

Damn you, Josh Ritter and the airport men.

2010-03-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night
I dreamt that I was swimming
And the stars up above
Directionless and drifting
Somewhere in the dark
Were the sirens and the thunder
And around me as I swam
The drifters who'd gone under

Time, love, time, love, time, love
It's only a change of time

So today at the airport there was another episode of Brittaini makes bad cost-benefit analyses. Because I figured that I was going to the airport anyway, and who cared what I looked like, and who would be there to see me. So, after so many superfluous hours in the airport when I just wanted to come home and go to sleep, I boarded the plane. I was wearing the jeans I have worn literally for a week straight, paired with the sweatshirt that's stained with red wax, a tie-dye t-shirt that I made but is unflattering, and my greasy, unshowered hair and no make up. I looked pretty disgusting.

And who was I sitting next to? A ridiculously attractive man. Mid height, mid-late twenties. Dark brown hair cropped short. Square black frame glasses that are cool without being ostentatious. Stubble. Reading about global warming while wearing a kind of weird t-shirt, so obviously he's not too perfectly put together. And I sat there in silence and stole glances while he fell asleep and cursed myself for not putting some effort into my appearance, because I was sure that if I had looked awesome I would have said something and been charming, winning, etc.

I had a dream lastnight
And rusting far below me
Battered hulls and broken hardships
Leviathan and Lonely
I was thirsty so I drank
And though it was salt water
There was something 'bout the way
It tasted so familiar

Then in the airport, after I informed all of my roommates of my new resolve to look awesome at all times so that the misstep of United Airlines Flight 655 would not be repeated, I noticed that, as a general rule, men are attractive.

Which is something that I know, of course. But I noticed it, really noticed it tonight. The attractive men were everywhere at the airport. And I'm not even talking movie star attractive or anything like that - just normal people, normal looking, but somehow in the midst of that inexplicably and compellingly attractive.

And then I thought about how I never notice that at Wheaton. Except when certain grad students ask me questions in the library, but that's another story.

The black clouds I'm hanging
This anchor I'm dragging
The sails of memory rip open in silence
We cut through the lowlands
All hands through the saltlands
The white caps of memory
Confusing and violent

And then I get back to the apartment and facebook-stalk the male friends that I can think of and realize, that unlike certain women who have so many men to be in love with, there's no one that I really want to be in love with here. There are absent curiosities. There are men that I could talk myself into developing deep and meaningful unrequited feelings for, yes, but there's no one that I sincerely want to fall in love with. I just want to fall in love. I just want to be around the attractive airport men, because there are among their rank those older than 23 but younger than 35, and some of them must even be smart.

Then I downloaded Josh Ritter's new song.

I had a dream last night
And when I opened my eyes
Your shoulder blade, your spine
Were shorelines in the moon light
New worlds for the weary
New lands for the living
I could make it if I tried
I closed my eyes I kept on swimming

(rough seas, they carry me wherever I go)

Oh, Josh Ritter. If you didn't already have a wife I would probably have a distant celebrity crush on you.

Seriously, though. Why can't people write beautiful songs that romanticize (and romanticize isn't even the right word, because it makes this song sound cheap and frilly and it's not -- it's filled with longing and beauty and still manages to be relatively unsentimental) useful things. It's been admitted universally that there is a honeymoon phase, and that's what everybody writes about, but it doesn't last and relationships are work, etc.

Why can't people romanticize doing your homework or being responsible or cleaning in a way that is as inspiring as songs and tributes and stories written about love? Why do we keep romanticizing love even after it's been proven to be other than the romanticization?

And why, in the midst of asking that question, does this beautiful incorrigible song make me want to go to an airport and find a man and make him fall in love with me? Why can't I get away from that?

Time love, time love, time love,

It's only a change of time.

(italicized = Change of Time, Josh Ritter)

Post Christian Thought (class, not as a concept)

2010-02-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

Our material lives are coated in a thick layer of Febreeze.

No wonder things are hazy.

No wonder we can't tell up from down.

Good from bad.

Light from dark.

God from nothing.

Dear GQ: What the fuck?

2010-01-31T23:53:00.000-08:00

I know, that's an f-bomb. I know, it should only be used in print when necessary.

Here I think it's necessary. I also think it is almost literal.

In November 2009, January Jones was featured on the cover of GQ magazine and they ran a story about her inside the magazine where she said that she likes beer and football and is probably the most interesting woman you'll ever meet. Online debate ensued over whether or not GQ had enhanced her "spectacular" cleavage on the cover of the magazine. Less debate or outrage ensued over this image:

A woman looking vaguely disinterested on an abandoned road on a foggy night. In matching underwear and tacky, thrown open red cheetah print coat that skims her thighs. Red patten leather heels.

People. This is almost porn, and is probably worse. This is an artistically photographed imitation crime scene. It's print legitimization of a hooker rape fantasy. Her legs are even slightly parted as if to say, "Insert penis here."

I'm not a fan of photo re-touching. I'm not in favor of the literally impossible standards of beauty that are imposed on women and reinforced by women. But for the most part, I've come to the point where I tolerate it. I don't get all pissy and demand that advertisers start labeling retouched photographs, mostly because I recognize that it's something that is so firmly entrenched that outrage doesn't do anything, and neither would labeling.

But this?

This has me furious.

This crosses a line.

It isn't okay.

It isn't attractive.

It isn't sexy.

It is disgusting.

It is dehumanizing.

It reduces a woman to her body.

(Even then one that isn't treated with much (if any) respect.)

It is misogyny.

And even now, there's not much I can do outside of posting this blog post and continuing to not buy GQ.

photo credit

2010-01-27T19:50:00.000-08:00

So tonight I posted a status on facebook that said: "my fledgling desire to go into speech writing has only been strengthened by tonight's State of the Union Address. Thank you, Mr. President." Which resulted in this conversation with my brother:

Andy

you do know he's killing the country right?

9:43pmBrittaini

did you watch the speech?

it was great

and pragmatic

9:43pmAndy

i didnt watch cuz i cant stand him

he hasnt dine anything brit

done*

9:44pmBrittaini

Andy, if you didn't watch the speech, you can't tell me he's killing the country

9:44pmAndy

he just talks and doesnt do anything to back it up

i dont have to watch the speech to know that

9:45pmBrittaini

um, Andy, if you didn't watch the speech then you have no basis on which to be talking about this right now

that's irresponsible citizenship

9:46pmAndy

no its not. its called an opinion

you should know that everyone has one

9:47pmBrittaini

it's called a badly formed opinion

9:47pmAndy

everyone has a right to one,

9:47pmBrittaini

I'm so glad you can't vote yet

9:47pmAndy

in case your forgeting the bill of rights and the us c

constitution

i wouldt vote anyway

9:48pmBrittaini

what do you know about the bill of rights and the us constitution?

9:48pmAndy

i have tp go. mom is making me

9:48pmBrittaini

good

9:48pmAndy

get gas

9:48pmBrittaini

go to bed

take a citizenship class

9:48pmAndy

and its called a us hostory class

9:48pmBrittaini

expose yourself to other, better constructed opinions

nope

citizenship is something different

9:49pmAndy

i wasnt talking about citizenship

dipshit

9:49pmBrittaini

the application of the bill of rights and the constitution to our PRESENT DAY SITUATION is the foundation of citizenship

Andy is offline: 9:50pm

I think I'm a post-modernist.

2010-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Even if Dr. Jacobs says post-modernism does not exist.

But I can't articulate how. Yet.

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all.

The Sinister Possibilities of Hearty Whole Wheat

2010-01-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: I almost submitted this with a pun in the cover letter. The rejection is still pending.]

The Sinister Possibilities of Hearty Whole Wheat

If Richard had been home when the inciting phone call came, this would have happened differently. But he told me that morning he had a late meeting with a client and wanted to prep at the office, which is conveniently located across the street from Beef Villa. Richard would eat there all the time if I let him, if I didn’t pack his lunch in the morning and throw fits when he doesn’t come home for dinner. When he eats with us I have to ladle a helping of vegetables on his plate and glare until he eats them, almost as bad as Amy. But I didn’t bring up the suspicious proximity to beef goods, I just said “okay” and “I love you” and tried not to let it bother me when all he said in return was “you too.” When I first met Richard he had All-American Richie Cunningham good looks and Fonzie’s swagger. I had a head full of 1970s reruns and thought, like an idiot, that if a one man blend of Happy Days characters tells you you’re pretty when he bums a cigarette, it is - or should be - love. Over the next twelve years Richard became the slightly chubby guy who gets people approved for mortgages. It’s a job he thinks he’s too good for so he doesn’t really try. That night I didn’t want to give him any excuse to fuck up the deal and lose the commission, so I didn’t complain and tell him he was a shitty husband for not coming home, again. I was docile and supportive, like an idiot.

After I put Amy to bed and told her that Daddy would have to read her a story tomorrow, I settled on the couch just before the phone rang. I skipped to the kitchen and picked it up on the second ring, certain that it was Richard and crossing my fingers for good news. “How did it go?”

“Who is this?”It was a man’s voice, but he didn’t sound like Richard or any of the burly truck drivers who pick up their paychecks on Friday. He sounded nervous and a little frail, like maybe he got beat up as a kid or took people cutting him off on the interstate as a direct challenge to his masculinity.

“I live here. Who are you?” I narrowed my eyes as I spoke and tried to sound stern, like when I have to reprimand Amy for calling her snot-nosed classmates “poopface” instead of snickering and saying “attagirl.”

“Please will you tell your husband to stay away from my wife?” His voice rose as he talked, escalating into a falsetto squeak. I’d have been tempted to laugh if I hadn’t felt every part of my body start to quake.

“Excuse me?” I asked. It was my turn to sound frail.

“My wife, tell him to stay away from my wife!” His voice cracked into a sob on the last word and he hung up. For a second I couldn’t move; I just stood there with the phone in my hands, my fingernails digging into the plastic seams, the blood pounding in my ears. Disbelief, more than anything else. I’d told Richard at his brother’s New Year’s Eve party what I would do if this happened again. I warned him, in that low, even voice I have but rarely used. I might only be five feet tall and weigh half of what he does, but he was a fool for trifling with me.

Richard and I had a pact to quit smoking, so I withdrew my pack of Virginia Slims from behind the cinnamon and nutmeg in the spice cabinet and went to the garage. I closed the door behind me and sat on the cold concrete step. I lit up and took two drags before hanging my head between my knees. My eyes began to burn and I felt weak. I should have left him so much earlier, when he was in downstate in Decatur and I was in Algonquin, and he slept with some sorority slut and told me it was because he was lonely and he wouldn’t have if I’d been there.

Then I’d stayed because his mother heard that I told him to go to hell. She called and told me that I was the only one who had ever loved Richard, really, and if he was going to make anything of himself I’d have to be behind him, pushing and prodding every step of the way. Maybe I felt bad that no one else, not even his parents really, loved him. Maybe I thought I could make something of his cleverness and friendliness when I was failing accounting and thought I couldn’t make anything of myself. Maybe I was terrified of being alone and thought that no one with as much charm as Richard would ever love me again. Maybe it was all of that and a smorgasbord of issues, but that was the first mistake, and I’d been making more of them ever since. Weakness.

I couldn’t tolerate more weakness. More inaction. I had to follow through. Back in January I said that if it happened again I would destroy him, and this was the time for punishment. Retribution. Justice. I had to kill him. The anger escalated with the cigarette dangling from my hand and my head between my knees. It might have been the nicotine, or the blood rushing from my head back to my body, but when I sat up and blinked, empowered by a righteous rage, I saw it. The answer to my problems on a footstool behind the bikes. Salvation in a kitchen appliance.

The Breadmaker.

It was perfect. Richard is prone to health problems, and besides the asthma and sleep apnea he is allergic to everything. Dogs, cats, peanuts – once he ate a peanut and almost died in a hospital bed surrounded by machines – pollen, sandalwood, goat cheese, and live yeast. We found that last one out with a loaf of raisin bread – which I hate but Richard loves and gets excited because it’s swirly. The Breadmaker releases live yeast into the air while it bakes, and a fifty-eight minute quick bake cycle in the kitchen while he was snoring through an afternoon upstairs turned his entire back and arms red with hives. He complained and itched for three weeks. The Breadmaker was banished to the garage; if I wanted fresh bread I had to get it out and plug it into an extension cord.

As far as executions go, it was a better option than a peanut, which would look suspicious, given his medical history, and was too tiny to be satisfying. I needed to do something dramatic, even if I was the only one who knew it. I could have adopted several animals from the pound, let them loose around the house, vacuumed up their hair, and strewn it all over Richard’s side of the bed. But that was ridiculous and would make Amy cry when she realized that her new pet friends were instruments of justice that she couldn’t keep. Plus, goat cheese is expensive, pollen is scarce in November, and I didn’t have easy access to sandalwood.

No, the Breadmaker was convenient and perfect. And I suspected that if it gave Richard hives from the kitchen, it would do far worse in our bedroom closet, three feet away from his lungs.

I went through three more cigarettes and plotted until I heard a faint knock on the garage door. I dropped the cigarette, snuffed it with my shoe, and kicked it into the dustpan. “Amy, you’re supposed to be in bed,” I said so that my voice carried. It came out more stern than I meant it.

“I had a bad dream.” I sighed, rubbed my eyes and opened the door. Amy’s bowl cut was all disheveled and she was looking at me with wide, concerned eyes. She had Rabbit, an old stuffed animal she’d won at a raffle, cradled in her arms. It was floppy, the once white fur tinged the dirty gray of loved childhood toys. One of Rabbit’s legs was stretched out and hung at an angle that’s awkward, even for stuffed bunnies. I’d threatened to throw out Rabbit so many times that Amy started hiding him. She only exposed him to my dangerous gaze when her distress overcame the need for his protection.

I sighed, again, and sat back down. For once I had to look up at her. “What happened?”

She swallowed and quickly began. “There was a big red monster named Ralph-”

“You haven’t had dreams about monsters since you were five. That was so long ago.” Amy likes to feel like a big girl, and even two years ago the monsters didn’t have names.

She didn’t freeze like she does when she lies, and she wasn’t consoled. “But he was big and scary and his name was Ralph and he said that he was going to eat me because my Daddy was never coming home.” Her eyes began to well, and she hid them in Rabbit. My heart broke a little more, but in a way that made me stronger. That possibly imaginary bastard Ralph and that very real bastard Richard weren’t going to get away with this.

I picked Amy up, and she pressed her little nose into my shoulder. I held her tightly enough to crush Rabbit and carried her upstairs. The bathroom light was on and shining onto the end of Amy’s four poster bed. I tucked her in and snuggled with her in the room that had belonged to Richard, once upon a time. The walls were redecorated for Amy with antique carousel wallpaper; before they had been a steely blue. Richard and I used to spend hours here when his parents were gone and mine thought I was at work. He played me songs he’d learned from the radio on his guitar and daydreamed. He wanted to sell out more concerts than Pink Floyd, or cure his mother’s cancer, or at the very least pay for the research. And he wanted me to be there with him. That’s the only part that came true. When we were setting up the room for Amy, I had to arrange the furniture in a way that was as different as possible from before to remind myself that I was a mother and didn’t have time for nostalgia.

I put my arm around Amy and stroked her terrible haircut as I lied to her. “Daddy will come home. He’s just working late tonight.”

“Promise?” she asked.

“Promise. Tell me your sixes.” Richard had started teaching Amy how to do multiplication a few weeks ago and she’s spent hours with flashcards, even though the other kids in first grade are still struggling through addition and subtraction. If I had tried to teach her she wouldn’t have listened, but because it was Richard she sat at the table with him and frowned at the grid of numbers until she almost understood them. Amy isn’t what I expected. I thought that having a girl would be like having my own living, moving doll who would want to grow up and be just like me. When she was smaller, I used to dress her in expensive frilly dresses with dainty matching socks. She always got grass stains on the dresses and fed the socks to my parents’ puppy. It drove me insane.

If you place Amy’s baby pictures next to mine they look almost identical. My button nose, my infant baldness, my smile. But ever since then she’s been moving away from me and closer to Richard. It’s strange –difficult – to love her so much it overwhelms me, while knowing at the same time that she loves Richard so much more.

Once Amy’s breathing slowed, and the tension on her face eased, I tucked her back in. I lifted the comforter at the end of the bed and pulled out the two Boxcar Children books Richard was supposed to read with her. Bastard. How could he not know what he had? How could he need me to force him to come home and pay attention to her? Even then his attention came and went in spurts. Like the whole multiplication thing – she shouldn’t have to spend hours with flashcards like some crazy robot child just so that Richard is impressed by her math. At best she’ll turn into a ridiculous perfectionist; at worst she’ll become female Richard. I was convinced of better things for Amy, and at that moment I was determined to be the strong female role model we both needed and do what was necessary.

The light was still on in the bathroom. I stood in front of the white porcelain sink that was so clean it reflected the light from the fixture. My mother always said that you could tell the quality of a woman by the cleanliness of her house. It’s her only advice I’ve taken seriously. I leaned on the sink, putting my face up to the mirror. I looked for my pores, a leftover habit, but instead found faint, almost imperceptible lines moving out from my eyes. God, I hated getting old. It’s pathetic, reaching that place where I would have loved to see a blackhead and be able to count the pores on my nose. That’s another reason. When I saw him come in from the balcony with that whore on New Year’s Eve, both of their faces flushed, I calculated how long it would take me to pack my shit. Two hours, max. But instead I sat on a barstool in a navy satin dress and asked myself what I would have if I left him. I’d be thirty and have a high school diploma and a daughter who just wanted Daddy to come home. I sat there and cried until my mascara ran into my champagne.

This time, though, things would be different. I would be different too, if I had to. Fiercer. Stronger. I stood upright and took my most expensive lipstick out of the drawer. It was a deep red color, “Vixen Rouge,” the tube said. I’d never had the guts to actually wear it. I started to put it on my lips, but that wasn’t enough of a departure. I needed to channel the spirits of Amazonian female fighters and maybe Xena, Warrior Princess, so I drew two diagonal lines on each cheek underneath my eyes. Then I put on a bandana and a black racerback tank-top and got to work. I unplugged the Breadmaker from the garage and carried it up the stairs to my side of the closet. I’d forgotten that it weighed twenty pounds, but used the weight dragging down my arms as an excuse to grunt. I rested it among the dresses I wore to church every Sunday. The cord wasn’t long enough to plug it in without setting up a tripwire, which was tempting, but would also give everything away. I dug around in Richard’s tools, finding a pack of cigarettes and condoms in the process, until I unearthed the extension cord. I routed it through the closest, under a rug, then underneath the bed to the outlet hidden behind the headboard.

Every bed is dusty underneath, no matter how clean the rest of the house is. I emerged from the space between the box spring and the wood floors with dust clinging to the lipstick war paint. I took a shower and tried to concentrate only on the pulsating hot streams of water colliding with my skin, almost burning. I tried not to think of how many showers Richard took right after getting home - It averaged out to at least three per week. When I finally put on an old t-shirt and pair of shorts, it was 2 AM.

Richard still wasn’t home. Since I wouldn’t be able to kill him that night, and there was no other reason why I’d feel obliged to share a bed with that asshole, I went downstairs to the hall closet and pulled out the guest linens. We never have guests. The sheet, blanket, and pillow that reside at the top of the closet are exclusively used by Richard when I’m pissed. At some point in our marriage, it became more convenient to keep the linens of exile in the coat closet on the same floor as the couch, rather than with their more benign counterparts upstairs. I tucked the sheet into the edges of the couch, fluffed the pillow, and arranged the blanket. He might be getting kicked out of our room, but the presentation of his fate would not reflect badly on me.

In the morning, he apologized. He got up from the couch, still in his dark pants and dress shirt, with his hair sticking up on one side, and apologized. He kissed me on the cheek and told me that he got the account and went out with the guys to celebrate. He celebrated a little too much and had to wait for the buzz to wear off before he could drive home. I said “Whatever” and “You’d better come home tonight.”

Amy gave him a big hug and recited her eights. When I told her she had to get ready for school, she turned to me and said, “Mommy, can Daddy drive me today? Please please please?”

I glanced at Richard. He shrugged so I nodded. When they left, Amy was holding Richard’s hand and they were both singing 5’s to the tune of “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes,” Richard’s favorite Paul Simon song. I told myself that she only wanted him to take her because he was indulgent and would stop for donuts on the way. He would let her listen to her choice of music and turn the volume up, but I kept the radio dial tuned to the weather. It wasn’t anything more than that. It wasn’t.

The entire day at my desk I couldn’t focus on any of the invoices. I just kept staring at the little red truck logo so that my eyes wouldn’t drift over to the picture frame on my desk. Richard’s holding Amy in the picture when she is approximately eleven minutes old and it’s typically adorable. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he loved me, a little, and maybe I was a little shrewish and obsessive and tended to yell first and ask questions later and maybe Amy needed him. Maybe. At lunchtime I turned the frame so it was glass down, stand up, but it didn’t help. I told myself it was the jitters, just the jitters, and maybe it’d be a good idea to leave work early and pick up some food for Richard’s last meal. Prisoners on death row usually get a last meal, right? One last steak? I counted down the minutes until I could leave early without bringing too much attention to myself.

At the grocery store I associated the things I had done for Richard with every item I bought for his death meal. The asparagus was the double shifts I’d worked at K-Mart while he was getting a BA in Finance to get a job he performed satisfactorily at best. The fillet mignons from Omaha were the hours I’d held him when his mother died, when I stroked his hair and listened to him tell me the same seven stories twelve times. The potatoes were the objections I didn’t voice when he sang Prince in falsetto at local open mic nights. The chocolate cake was the lunch I made him every day and the coffee I bought and brewed but didn’t even like. The merlot was the agreement to buy his parents’ house. But the bread mix, the bread mix was for me. I was a good wife, and I didn’t deserve to get phone calls from unnamed men telling me to keep my husband away, and Amy didn’t deserve a father who couldn’t keep his pants zipped or be a normal, responsible, respectable man.

I cruised the bakery aisle, trying to decide whether hearty whole wheat or traditional French would make a better murder weapon. Hearty whole wheat won out – it had 30% less calories and I’d probably have to eat the evidence to have a chance at not getting caught.

Richard came home promptly, with an apology bouquet of flowers. I smiled at him through dinner until my jaw ached. He taught Amy math tricks I’d never learned in the first place while I washed the dishes. When I sat down at the table, Amy asked me if 346 is divisible by three. Apparently it’s not, but any number with digits that add up to a number that is divisible by three is also divisible by three. Amy related this in her serious voice that she uses when she explains the rules of Lego village or why we should get a puppy. Richard smiled at me over her head. She was sitting on his lap holding a pencil and his tie was flung over his shoulder. His eyes still got this dreamy look whenever Amy was in the room, little dimples emerging from the corners of his mouth. I thought of how many times I’d seen that smile:

When I came home from Halloween at K-Mart in my unsexy walrus suit, waved around a “FIRST PLACE COSTUME” ribbon and babbled exhausted nonsense.

When he rolled his eyes over his mother’s should while she said I would make a good addition to the family because my aristocratic bone structure would carry on the family aesthetic.

When I lost Amy’s baby fat and cried because my size 0 hips were permanently size 4 hips and he kissed me and said he hadn’t even noticed.

The moments blended into a blur and I had to go downstairs and take too long to change a load of laundry. I bent over the Maytag washer and cried, and when I was finished I wiped my face on clean, fresh towels. Jitters, I told myself, again. Just jitters. Repeat his crimes and fold towels. There were the sorority sluts and that whore at New Year’s Eve. Those were just his priors – the ones that I knew about. There were other things, too. Telling me we needed the money so I couldn’t stay home with Amy. Treating me like an accessory at social gatherings. Criticizing my cooking skills, but never making anything himself except eggs. Leaving his dirty socks on the coffee table. Going out with the guys until he was too drunk to drive home. Never helping me clean, not once, not ever. Making Amy love him better. And the last straw, the final blow, cheating on me with a married woman and breaking up her family, too, instead of just ours. Last week’s Dateline said that they stone women for adultery in Saudi Arabia. Releasing live yeast into the air was more humane.

I loaded the whole wheat mix into the Breadmaker as Richard read to Amy from her Boxcar Children books. I tried to think of a title for our dysfunctional situation. Boxcar Children Mystery #435, The Case of the Revenge Loaf. Richard went to bed after the Tonight Show monologue, and I stayed up with my book until 1:15 when he was fast asleep and snoring like a gorilla. I opened the closet door and pushed the power button. All I had to do was push quick bake, the button directly to the left, and the Breadmaker would start, and the yeast would be released, and Richard would be quietly ushered out of the land of the living. I placed my index finger over the button, felt its grooves, felt its power. I pushed the button in, felt it depress and release.

The Breadmaker went to work. It was louder than I remembered, but not louder than gorilla-man who I usually slept through just fine. I couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe that’s normal – maybe you’re not supposed to be relaxed when you’re depriving people of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of infidelity. But Amy, Amy sitting at the kitchen table with her pencil reciting multiplications burrowed into my head and wouldn’t leave me alone. What I had been repressing for vengeance’s sake came to me. I thought of the Ralph monster and the fact that I was bringing her worst fear, the one she could only acknowledge through “dreams,” to life. If I killed Richard before he had a chance to fuck up his relationship with Amy, she would just go looking for him later. She’d end up married to the same kind of asshole. I’d be in jail and unable to do anything because, really, I was going to get caught and this wasn’t any kind of foolproof plan. And then twenty three years from now she’d be where I am, trying to kill her husband with a toaster. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t predestine Amy to husband-icide.

And maybe a part of me, the part of me that loved Richard in the first place, loved him still. Loved him enough to hate him, but not enough to kill him.

Seven minutes into the fifty-eight minute quick-bake cycle, I got out of bed and tried to turn the Breadmaker off. Apparently, to my surprise and momentary apprehension, a quick-bake cycle is something that can’t be shut off. The plug to the extension cord was underneath the rug, but I didn’t ruin my most expensive tube of lipstick, and channel the Amazons just to lamely unplug a machine. That wasn’t enough. I bit my lip and tried to decide what to do, and the answer came to me then just like it did when I lifted up my eyes in the garage and saw the Breadmaker the night before.

I jumped onto the bed, feeling the mattress move under my feet. Richard jolted awake. “Em?” he asked, drowsy, but I ignored him. I crossed the bed to the window and undid the locks, pushing it open and letting in the dusky autumn air. It swirled around the room as I yanked the Breadmaker free of its constraints, hobbled with it over to the window and set it on the sill. I paused for half a second before extending my arms and pushing it out. The Breadmaker hit the grass with a dull thud and bounced as it broke apart. In the moonlight the mix spilled out from the top, covering the grass like ashes. The white plastic shell split into pieces, revealing its metallic mechanics. I looked at them glinting underneath the moon and I began to laugh, loud and shrill, until my stomach hurt.

“What the hell?” Richard sat upright in bed, his hair sticking up like always.

“Your daughter just saved your life,” I said, and left our bedroom. I think Richard went back to sleep – he probably thought he was dreaming until he woke up the next morning and lumbered to the window. I figured he’d scratch his head and ask me about it and I’d have to either make something up or tell him the truth. Then I’d probably start crying and cause a scene that Amy would overhear from the top of the stairs, but at that moment I didn’t have to deal with it. I went to Amy’s room and climbed onto her bed. She woke up and before she had a chance to say anything I said, “I had a bad dream. Ralph was there. Tell me your nines.”

Amy closed her eyes and snuggled into my chest, reciting, “9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90, 99, 108,” until we both drifted off to sleep.

On Beauty

2009-12-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

On Beauty
This break, after finishing Freddy and Fredericka, I read Zadie Smith's On Beauty and loved it. Which shouldn't be a surprise, but I did. Maybe it's territory that comes along with being an English major, or maybe it's symptomatic of my ridiculously particular personality, but I'm finding it so rare that I'm excited to read anything. And Zadie Smith makes me excited to read again. There were several parts in the novel that I actively wanted Carl and Zora to get together, and several more where I wanted Kiki and Howard to just make up already.

On Beauty takes on academia and is a more American novel than White Teeth was, which was interesting. I don't know if I can say that it's changed anything in the way that I think yet, there's not necessarily that one blinding passage like "What was it about this unlovable century" in White Teeth, but still. So good. I'll be reading it again in the distant future. There was one passage, though, that I could see myself a little bit too fully in:

She prepared a face - as her favourite poet had it- to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn't seem to her that she had a face at all...And yet in college, she knew she was famed for being opinionated, a 'personality' - the truth was she didn't take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn't feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way that other people seemed to have them...Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. (p. 209)

I doubt very much that I'm a 'personality' - certainly not to the extent that Smith's Zora Belsey is a personality - but I'm never quiet in class. Usually this results in me making a fool out myself in some way or another, but nevertheless it's there. And yet I always feel like I'm faking something, maybe everything. Like I'm only pretending to be smart or know what I'm talking about or have anything resembling true dedication. I'm secretly terrified that someone's going to catch on.

I'm thinking of writing Zadie Smith a note. A small one, brief, to the point, thanking her for writing and publishing. Yeah. I'll need to do that soon.

after midnight realizations.

2009-11-28T22:39:00.000-08:00

my idea for novella next semester is terrible.

oh. shit.

(this is actually a lot less pathetic and xanga-esque than the blog I wrote twenty minutes and opted out of publishing. just so you know.)

a fragment

2009-09-21T17:03:00.001-07:00

Between the Chicago suburbs and the 18-25 year old metropolis of Urbana-Champaign there are one hundred miles of fields and fields of grain scattered with barns and trees. In these hundred miles a soul could find quiet. On bright days it testifies to lost Americana, to hopeful heartlands of possibility. But today, beneath billowing clouds and a gray-gradient sky, ominous shadows emerge and the buildings, the solitary few, look angry. Like they resent the emigration of successive generations, first to Urbana-Champaign then onto the suburbs. Like they are fuming in silence as leftover relics of an American dream. Their silence contrasts with the noise that oppresses in car horns and drunken shouts and train whistles. The noise for which they feel no pity. It is the reward for leaving. And I am leaving too. I am leaving at 74mph on I-57, and I am not looking back.

Character Sketch

2009-09-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

The Fundamental Importance of Blue Eyes

My daughter has stopped returning my phone calls.

It’s strange when it happens, when children stop needing their fathers. Actually, it’s not strange at all. It’s a natural thing, part of growing up, leaving the nest. I did it twice, and the second time was harder because I’d built it. In the next place I tried to make room for her, tried to move some things over, show her how she could fit. But she’s more of a homing pigeon than a duck or a goose. She can’t live comfortably in more than one place. She feels the need to return to her point of origin.

I just compared my only daughter to a modified flying rat. She’s not. She’s smart and strong and lovely. I’m not sure what kind of bird that means. Not a swan - too obvious, and all grace and no spark. She has a spark. Maybe a summer tanager, the only completely red bird in all of North America. Red isn’t her color though. Blue is. She has my eyes. Her mother and I both have blue eyes, but you can tell that she has my eyes because of the yellow near the pupils. A blue summer tanager would work if it didn’t just sound like a blue jay.

I thought I saw her in the city last weekend during the Jazz Festival. I’d left and come back because the drinks were ridiculously overpriced. The vendors wanted eight dollars for a glass of wine or a beer. Instead I went to the nearest Trader Joe’s and got a bottle of two-buck chuck. Jazz almost demands that its listeners have a buzz going on. I didn’t drink the whole bottle, though, definitely not the whole bottle. That would have been excessive. I drank just enough to make sure I’d gotten my money’s worth and just enough to feel the tingle all the way down in my fingertips. I’m a big guy. It takes a lot to affect me.

I sat in the second row of the second section, and in the middle of an incredible scat a young woman sat down in front of me. I was convinced it was her. Her body type matched, a short hourglass inherited from my mother, as did the short brown hair. She had a feminine version of the jaw line I see when I shave. She wears it better. All I could see was a slight side profile. There was no way to be certain, but I had an intuition. A father’s intuition. I didn’t know what to do. She was with people, probably friends from Northwestern, and she sat thigh to thigh with some guy with floppy musician hair.

My impulse was to say something - to tap her on the shoulder. I’d smile and hope that she’d smile back and that look wouldn’t creep into the eyes we share. That worried, patronizing look. It’s the one people have when dealing with addled children or mourners grieving to the point of hallucination. It’s not a look you give your father. But I wanted to see her. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to hug her like I used to, when I was close enough and could have made the bird metaphor work. It became almost a physical need. I stared at her, with hopes that she would turn around. A look, not that look, but a different one could tell me if I had permission to be her father.

It took one song for her to turn around. One song that felt like seven. Our eyes met. Hers were a deep, strange brown that I couldn’t see either of us in. I blinked and looked away. Pretended that the eye contact was an accident. There's been a lot of that, lately.

These are my seashells.

2009-09-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

In the opening to "Don't Waste Your Life," John Piper recounts an anecdote from Reader's Digest. It goes something like this:

“I will tell you what a tragedy is, I will show you how to waste your life. Consider this story from the February 1998 Reader’s Digest: A couple took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball and collect shells. … Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: ‘Look, Lord. See my shells.’ That is a tragedy.”
- John Piper, but requoted from Bob AuBuchon

I think I have two copies of "Don't Waste Your Life," because once my mom started to read it and got bored with it, and once they were giving it away at school because John Piper came to instruct us all. I probably won't read it, even though I already own it, and even though Jen asked me to.

That quote has a lot to do with why. Maybe there are a lot of people who want John Piper to tell them exactly what is important in life and what they should be doing. I don't. I think if John Piper looked at what I spend my time doing, he would shake his head and give his own book to me for a third time.

That's not to say that I don't waste my time, I do, and I'm not proud of it. But I feel a kinship with the seashell woman. I, too, have things that I like to gather around me. If other people looked at my collection, they probably wouldn't understand it. They probably wouldn't see its value. As soon as I figure out how, I'm going to make a tumblr. I'm going to collect quotations and excerpts and lyrics and photographs and things of that nature. And if asked to account for it, I would say,

"These things are small. They are transitory. I find them true or beautiful or meaningful or funny or a combination. They are important to me. They are my seashells."

And maybe, hopefully, that will be enough.

image credit

EDIT: pssht, forget tumblr. I want tags!
EDIT #2: I feel silly. Tumblr has tags.

That'll teach you to turn left.

2009-08-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

Last night I had one of the more ironic experiences of my life, but it's an irony that will take a few years to ferment so I'm not going to go into it.

Tonight people laughed at my jokes. Granted, those people were largely family and were slightly obligated, but still.

I've missed that.

The Wonders of An Omniscient Narrator

2009-08-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Safran Foer is great.

But his writing is a little bit like really rich chocolate or, I don't know, goat cheese. In a certain amount it's delicious and you think that you probably couldn't get enough of it. But then you unwittingly meet the point of saturation and discover, while re-reading "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (which you are rereading because your new friend is doing something cool that makes reading a more communal experience) that really, it's important to take breaks from Jonathan Safran Foer.

Because eventually the quirkiness moves past being endearing toward being annoying. And you start to think things like:

- Why does Oskar have to be so freaking weird all the time? No wonder he doesn't have any friends.

- Why doesn't Oskar's mom have any faults? [Because really, she doesn't. Her only fault is that she is not as perfect as Oskar's dad.]

- Thomas, I know your life is tragic and you lost Anna and blah blah blah but come on, people lose people, cataclysmic things happen, you can get over it. I know its hard to believe, but your "only having one life to live" doesn't make it okay for you to abandon your wife and unborn son.

- Grandma Schell, really? Thomas?

and, finally --

- I get it! You're sad! And your sadness is the most unique and memorable sadness since the birth of sadness as a concept!

And if and when you get to that point, it is a good decision to skip one of Thomas's sections, quickly finish, and the immediatly pick up "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith. Because while she has characters who are quirky and oddball enough to keep your interest, they are narrated by a snarky and omniscient narrator who can put them all in their places.

Side effects may include writing blogposts in second person, a practice I am going to cease right now.

A large portion of the novel takes place during the UK in the 1980s, and in the chapter "Mutiny!" Smith briefly talks about a book that is being burned by Muslim protestors. She doesn't name the book, but a newscaster says, "the writer denies blasphemy and argues that the book concerns the struggle between secular and religous views of life." When I read the whole episode, I thought of "The Satanic Verses" scandal, where the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing blasphemy about the Prophet's wives.

Then I checked the back cover and read this:

"An astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious...I was delighted"
-Salman Rushdie

And I couldn't help but wonder if, when he read the novel, Salman Rushdie saw himself in that chapter, too.

Some miscellaneous gems:

"It occured to him that, for the frist time since his birth, Life had said Yes to Archie Jones. Not simply an 'OK' or 'You-might-as-well-carry-on-since-you've-started,' but a resounding affirmative. Life wanted Archie." - 7

"This is what divorce is, taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love." -9

"She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk."

"What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll - then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everbody deserves love all of the time."
- 462

These are the reasons I am jealous of Jhumpa Lahiri

2009-04-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

1. She is an incredibly talented writer that helped me love the literary short story my senior year of high school.

2. Her first collection of short stories was published at the age of 32 (I did the math in my anthology when Professor Wright was talking about Annie Dillard).

3. That collection won the Pulitzer.

4. She is of Indian descent.

5. "Unaccustomed Earth" just beat out Salman Rushdie for a prostidigious prize. SALMAN. RUSHDIE.

6. She is married to a Guatemalan-Greek-American journalist and they will have super smart super multicultural babies, in addition to the two children she already has.

7. She, who has earned the pretention of writing, is not pretentious and claims often that writing is difficult and not necessarily enjoyable. And her Pulitzer is still in its bubble-wrap.

8. She looks like this:

chyeah. So not fair.

[i say all of this as an ardent jhumpa lahiri fangirl]

a cynical embodiment.

2009-03-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

My father is old. Not legitmately old, but life-old. You can see it in the sparse grey hair that he allows to grow and curl, the the over-definition of his facial planes. I grudgingly had lunch with him on Friday and talked about writing. He told me I was a pessimist and that I should have a more optimistic outlook. Like he has. Because that's working out well.

Either way, that conversation prompted some final conclusions.

If you write to be read
If you write because you think it's going to save the world
If you write to get paid
If you write because you think its important

Shut up.
You're annoying.

Poetry makes nothing happen. No one will read your work unless you force it on them, and if the history of Britain would be the same without Shakespeare, then the sentences you piddle out won't change anything. While literature might enhance life, it's a far stretch to call it important. Things that sustain life are important, things that enhance life are luxuries. And getting paid? Well, I guess there's money in domesticated vampire series with personality-less heroes. If that's what you're into

But.
If none of that matters -

If you know that what you're doing is most likely entirely futile and pointless, but you do it to create, to refine, to make something beautiful or funny or true even if no one else will ever see it, then it becomes something more than just this random ideal that film and music glorify. Then it becomes something real, something with a chance at actual meaning, however accidental and fleeting.

And that's what I want.

In other news, I've been finding a lot of literature boring because of its marraige to realism. Updike might have nailed middleness, but the relatability of middleness doesn't necessarily make it intersting.

Then I picked up "The Best American Non-Required Reading: 2003" and read "The Littlest Hitler" and was reminded of why I love books/literature/stories. Thank you, Ryan Boudinot.

two ducks in one sentence

2009-02-26T23:55:00.000-08:00

Beverly wants that piece of bread far off in the distance but I want it too so I paddle hard and make that head bobbing motion that I bust out to impress the ladyducks, but not Beverly because she is gross, and I paddle and I paddle and I make it and I get the bread but when I grab it with my bill it's a moldy piece of pumpernickel and when I turn around to gloat Beverly is swallowing a beautiful piece of sourdough that she really wanted all along.

future-tense remembrance

2009-01-31T07:48:00.000-08:00

Amidst a shifting sea of green hues

Of grass, cabbage, broccoli, life -

She kneels at a pepper-bush altar

My grandfather, as one of his retirement projects, went through boxes and boxes of old slides and put them onto Cd's. They have cheesy little covers that read "Kramer Times" 1971-1975 in WordArt on the side of the case. Most of them, like this one, reveal his complete lack of skill as a photographer. The photo is supposed to be centered, but isn't, it's exposed strangely, and he's cut my mother's head off. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorite images of that disc and, maybe, of the Kramer Times altogether.

First, I'm partial to pictures of my mother, more so than I am to pictures of either of her sisters. Not that I begrudge the many photos of my Aunt Mari's ten year boy phase, or my Aunt Shari's omnipresent cuteness, but I know neither of them in the way that I know my mother. I'd like to think that I'm pretty familiar with the woman who gave birth to me, so it is more unsettling to see her in pictures in ways that I haven't known her. The photo was taken in 1971 when she was nine-years old, and I have no idea who she was or what she was like at nine. I only know her from year twenty-eight on, there's almost three decades of her life that I've missed.

Secondly, I love the space-time-person ambiguity of this photograph. Like I said, I didn't know my mother at nine, so all I have to go on is hear-say that tells me that this fragile, beautiful girl is her. And her expression gives nothing away. Is it devotion, rapture at being in the garden amidst life itself? Is it repressed irritation because it is hot, and instead of playing down the streets with the boys who have cooties, she is in the pepper bushes again, weeding? Is her smile genuine, or does it carry a subtle edge of mockery?

And while it's obvious the picture was taken place in a garden, there is no way of knowing which garden. To the casual observer, there's no telling landmarks or "Now Leaving Arizona" signs to reveal the landmark. The only clues are the grass, the pepper-bush, the laughable stick and rope fence, and her. They tell you nothing without prior knowledge. There's no way for someone to pick up the photograph and know that the blurry white square is the back door of my grandparent's house, and that this garden is a quaint backyard affair rather than a larger enterprise.

If you can't tell by casual observation who or where this photograph features, when is just as ambiguous. Ever since photographs came in color, little girls have worn sleeveless dresses with slightly disheveled long blond hair. She could be her grandmother on the South Dakota plains, she could be her mother, longing for unfamiliar territory, she could be her, she could be me.

She is everyone and no one, everywhere and nowhere, never and always.
And I think that's beautiful.

I've decided that when I get older I'm not going to keep pictures of people as they are scattered around my house. At least, not for the most part, and certainly not for my mother. I'm not going to frame a picture of her at eighty, with a feigned smile, caked on make-up, wrinkles, and thinning hair. Because to me that isn't her, that can never be her. To photographically represent her as such and present her like that to other people would be a form of dishonesty. To me, she isn't - won't - be that. To me, she is nine years old, an enigma in a garden, smiling softly at life itself while the light casts its glow around her.

She is an enigma, and in a sense I think that's truer than framing a picture of her that I would know. Because there is so much of us, so much of our mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, enemies, that we never will and never can know. Lest I get too carried away with any imagined heroic social skills, I'll be able to look around at the photographs of people in my life that remind me of their inherent enigmatic quality. And I will face my relationships with a renewed desire to know people more fully and more completely.

That's the hope, at least.

Extremely Ordinary and Incredibly Sad

2009-01-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

Cajoling Janelle into letting me borrow Everything Is Illuminated on her library card was one of, if not the best thing I've done in the past year. I had always gotten the impression that Jonathan Safran Foer was probably kind of cool, but one of those kind of cool authors that you read and forget about, or who don't turn out to be as cool as you thought they were. Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Charles Bukowski's Post Office come to mind almost immediatly. And I've never made it through the design and prologues of Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, let alone the first chapter or even the book itself.

But Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated managed to be brilliant and beautiful and heartbreaking and - dare I say it - inspiring all at the same time. So, on a slightly educated whim I added Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to my Christmas list, got it, and while in the process of reading it have discovered quite possibly the saddest thing ever.

Thomas is getting ready to leave his wife, and before he does he urges her to write her life story on a typewriter. She spends months working on it, and at the end brings him into the room to present it to him. He stands there are leafs through 2000 pages of blank paper. It is at the point that he realizes that he had taken the ribbon out of the typewriter in some sort of hissy fit, and her eyes really were bad, so bad that she couldn't see that her typing wasn't leading to anything. Her life story, with all that work and effort, is nothing more than 2000 blank pages.

I read that, and wanted to cry. And I have been crying more - like in chapel...I swear there's something wrong with me. Because outside of the initial sadness of wasted effort, there's the whole metaphysical question. What are our lives worth? Do they have stories? Or do we spend so much time and effort and concern on what really amounts to blank, barren emptiness? Is it all futile? Are we capable of writing stories anymore, or has that ability died out with Homer and Viriginia Woolf? Are modern writers just kidding themselves when they try to produce things that are beautiful and true and meaningful, because everything that is true and beautiful and meaningful has already been said and probably with a better vocabulary?

Anyway, that was an inarticulated downer of a post.

lit.angst

2009-01-19T22:52:00.001-08:00

I should be doing something - anything else. I should be reading the creative writing assignments. I should be creatively writing.

[just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor]

Sometimes I question what exactly is the point or use of English as a discipline. I know that is a dangerous question to ask, especially when there are plenty of English majors and creative writing students who cling to the whole, "poets are prophets" and "writers are like real men, only better" and "I'm an artist so it's okay for me to be pissy for no reason. I'm delving into things you couldn't possibly understand."

All of whom, at several times, make me want to gouge my eyes out (which would really be useless, because I'd still be able to hear them) or attempt to bury them alive with daffodils. Because really, English is great, but it's not the absolute best discipline ever known to man, and being a writer doesn't make you special. Often, literature isn't even important. Auden claimed that the history of the world would be the same if none of the great writers (Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, etc) never lived. He also said that poetry makes nothing happen, and they still anthologized him and named a group of poets after him, the man was that good.

But. If poetry makes nothing happen, and I'm starting to see how it doesn't make anything happen, especially because almost no one but egotistically sublime English majors read poetry, then what is its use?