love letter

Dear Los Campesinos!,

I love you. First of all, I love you for incorporating a glockenspiel in your live act, and I love you even more for taking turns playing it. You should issue an indie rock memo explaining that real bands rock the glockenspiel (instead of twee percussives like the xylophone) and hold the glockenspiel hitters in their mouths when they’re busy playing something else. I think I’m going to go look for one on ebay.

I love you because you hung out in the audience to watch the opening act. I felt a little faint when I noticed that I was standing next to the most beautiful Campesino, the guitarist who looks like Sufjan Stevens. I found it charming when he acted as though the opening act was rocking, even during that “pitcher of piss” song, when I stood there shuddering with contempt. I was charmed, too, by his lady friend, your keyboardist, who looked bored and aloof because, let’s be honest, Jeffrey Lewis is kind of a douche.

Let me take this opportunity to apologize for my friend Z’s dance moves. He meant no harm. (And when I danced with him, doing the Neil Diamond snappy thing, I was just humoring him. Normally, I do the indie head bob thing, like all the other hipsters.) Also, I regret that he felt up your keyboardist…twice. It was very crowded, as I’m sure you noticed. Did you hear him shout that he’s gay? We were hoping you’d hear. I promise that if he were to deliberately violate someone, it would have been the Sufjan Campesino.

One of the many awesome things about The Empty Bottle is that it has a photo booth. That’s me with Handsy de la Handerson, the Accidental Lech.

This reminds me of a crucial point—I love you also for your good looks. Hands down, you are the most beautiful band I have ever seen. I saw a picture of you once, but it did not do you justice. At one point during the show, Z turned to me and said, “They’re so clever…and pretty!” Then he went back to dancing, and I to swooning.

Another reason I love you is for playing not one, but two, Pavement covers, the second one being from Westing (By Musket and Sextant). I mean, who covers a song from that album? Pavement didn’t play those songs live. Also, your singer has far better moves than Stephen Malkmus.

You guys, I even love your punctuated moniker, even though I was suspicious of it at first. The Great Unwashed may find your exclamation mark smug or lame, but I think you are young and fun and you deserve it.

People this good looking are allowed to use effusive grammar.

Finally, I love you for selling Los Campesinos! hotpants at your merch table…in two colors. I saw them there when Z and I ran over after the show to buy shirts like big dorks. Alas, I am 30, so I don't wear hotpants. Neither does Z, even though he is young and gay.

In conclusion, I think you should all move to Chicago so we can be best friends. Until then, I’ll just be here in your house, going through your stuff.

Just kidding,
KO
xxx

high school reunion

My friend K knows that there are nights when I can’t sleep, so he recently recommended that I spend some of the small hours looking up my high school classmates on myspace.com. K, as both my friend and a fellow graduate of Science Hill High School, is well acquainted with the joys of schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is absolutely essential to your survival when you grow up in a place like Johnson City, and I still fall back on it whenever I feel blue.

So, listen up, Class of 1996 (and whatever year K graduated): we took names and held grudges and still, after all these years, we wish you ill. Now that we can use myspace.com to monitor your misfortunes, we are counting your divorces, imprisonments, and remaining teeth with unabashed glee.

If you decide to undertake a similar project, or if you already have, I would be very interested to learn which recurring themes caught your attention. For my part, I was impressed by the number of Bible verse headlines, headlines containing misspelled platitudes, fantasy-themed backgrounds (wizards, fairies, castles, etc.), quizzes about Disney characters, two-in-one profiles (e.g., “Christy and Brad”—because I guess when you find your soul mate you lose your identity as an individual), and baby-centric profiles (for similar reasons, I reckon).

Let me walk you through the highlights of my journey:

MC: I knew that M was special when I saw that she wants to meet “people who speak the truth.” Then I noticed that she uses her myspace blog to publish her poems. Judging from her use of Random Capitalization, she is working in the tradition of Emily Dickinson.

Here I will reprint my favorite piece, “Paralyzed,” in its entirety.

Paralyzed

Life is changing
Moving So Fast
I can barely breathe
Drowning is NOT an Option
I will keep fighting
I won’t stop
I just feel paralyzed
Why can’t I wake up?

Clearly, she some kind of blighted superwoman: she is suffocating, fighting, and paralyzed...in her sleep! Under those circumstances, one wonders why drowning is NOT an option.

KG: I was mildly disturbed to read his single blog entry, which posed the question: “WTF is a blog?” I don’t think he was being meta, people.

ME (née MS): I knew that M’s profile would be a treat as soon as I saw her headline, “Married life is AWESOME!!!!!!!” Her name is listed as Mrs. ME and her picture is of her and her husband on her wedding day. (All this even though the wedding was a year ago!) Her pet name for her husband is “Bobo,” her favorite song is “Every Day” by Rascal Flatts, and her background is a heart motif rendered in bubblegum pink. Impressive, no?

MG: As something of an outcast, I had a special place in my heart for the handful of gay people at my high school. M was out since, like, elementary school, so I admired him even though he was dumb as a brick. His myspace page, which listed “Sweet Caroline” as his anthem, his occupation as a trainer, and the person he most wants to meet as Jake Gyllenhall, made me smile.

A: I knew A as the fat quiet kid in orchestra; I might have described him as a loner. Then, a few years after we graduated, I found out that he was a drag queen at the local gay bar, which made me regret that I hadn’t known him better. Now, judging from A’s 751 myspace friends, I guess he knows everyone.

One concern, though: A’s headline (“I am changing”) and profile suggest that he is, um, taking things to the next level. If so, I think that’s pretty neat, but I wonder what it means for his career as a female impersonator. (Does it still count once you’re the real deal?) Also, as a sidenote, A might be the second person in my graduating class to have a sex change. What are the odds? I guess Johnson City really is the San Francisco of the South.

April Ice*: In sharp contrast to A, April, my high school nemesis, has a mere six friends. I suppose I should applaud her progress, since that is at least four friends more than she had when we were in high school. If that sounds cruel, perhaps I’m still reeling from the time in biology class when April, who weighed around 300 pounds, picked up my desk and threw it across the room...with me in it. You’d never guess she was such a bully from her myspace page, which is decorated with babies and fairies. I guess motherhood (her “occupation”) has softened her.
*NB: I refuse to protect the identities of nemeses.

E: I didn’t really know E (who evidently is also known as “Filet Mignon”) in high school, so I feel a little mean-spirited laughing at her. But if thinking that her page is FUCKING AMAZING makes me a bad person, then so be it.

Where to start? A good jumping-off point might be “I Am God,” the Christian rap song that plays when you click on her profile. I’ll have to say that I love this song title because it so effectively combines the egocentricity of the rap idiom with the whole Jesus shtick. She carried through the God theme nicely by considering the people she most wants to meet both here and beyond the veil. When Filet Mignon gets to heaven, she looks forward to meeting Mary, Mother of Christ. Here on earth, she would like to meet the cast of Friends.

Finally, I’ll let this excerpt from her “About Me” manifesto speak for itself: I met my husband the summer after graduation at Taco Bell. We both worked there and were introduced by my lil' brother. I knew from that moment that he was the one for me...and we have been together ever since.

And that about sums up my cohort.

Unfortunately, my college classmates were not nearly so interesting, though it pleases me to report that my crazy ex-roommate seems to be going by the name “Sensual Cocoa.”

pen and paper

Over the five years that I have served as a professional scribe, I have found it difficult to muster the will to work on any creative projects; yet, even as a tender youth, I nursed ambitions of someday becoming a “real” writer. Here is a chronology of select works from my oeuvre:

Juvenilia (1978-1992)

[---]
An Essay
My mom still has a little sheet of white paper filled with uneven lines of oversized letters scrawled in pencil that I wrote at age five, upon the occasion of my sister’s birth. The bulk of the text is devoted to a detailed description of just how much I hated the new baby. It’s only in the last line or two that I concede that maybe I like the baby after all, which may well have been a hasty addendum demanded by my disturbed parents.

This all seemed very unsettling until I unearthed a short story called “The Critters” that was written by my ex when he was seven years old. It detailed a series of gruesome murders, including a crucifixion, that plagued a Michigan neighborhood visited by aliens. I should have known then that he was disgruntled…

Loving, Caring Parents
A Memoir
Bound in yellow construction paper and tied with green ribbon, this slim volume was my first foray into that jaundiced genre, memoir. This piece, which was written as a Mother’s Day present when I was seven or eight, was a treatise on—wait for it—loving, caring parents. It seems like a shame I never got around to writing its sequel, Yelling, Fighting Parents.

Loving, Caring Parents was a seminal work for me, as memoir remains my favorite genre as both a reader and writer. I am particularly fond of non-fiction essays. Can you tell?

Young Adulthood (1992-1996)

Really Bad Poetry
An Anthology
I have never been so prolific as during my teenage years, when I produced an astonishing amount of terrible poetry. Most of the poems were about my high school boyfriend, S, a remote and destructive fucktard who I still consider the gold standard for all the unhealthy relationships that I have since enjoyed. I suppose I should be grateful that I wrote crummy verse instead of going to jail or having lots of children, as he did. Sometimes being a dork pays dividends.

Adulthood (1996-present)

Creative Writing Class
A Cornucopia of Crappy Short Stories and Poems
My senior year of college, I took a creative writing class with one of the worst writers (or teachers, for that matter) I have ever encountered. It was a humbling and unpleasant experience that culminated in one of the most humiliating moments of my life, a public poetry reading where my instructor required that everyone in the class read their favorite poem by a real author in addition to their own work, a format that I imagine was designed to showcase just how dreadful our own stuff really was.

The night of the reading, I drank vodka so I could bear reading my poem (which was about, um, a voodoo trickster god), along with “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot. (Hey, at least I didn’t try to read “The Waste Land;” I saved that indignity for my MA thesis.) Sounds awesome, right? “The Hollow Men” was an unfortunate selection because it’s hard to read out loud, though I will say that it didn’t demand the same reserve of lameness required to read something like, say, “America” by Allen Ginsberg, the unwise choice of one of my classmates. I vividly remember watching him and thinking my god, we should all just kill ourselves.

Shopping for Love
A Pink Book (incomplete)
Co-authored with T
Some years after Bridget Jones's Diary spawned a proliferation of “novels” about finding husbands and having babies, my friend T coined the phrase “pink books” to describe the cash cow that lesser people call chick lit. Pink books are sort of like Danielle Steele for modern women who think they are too clever to read romance novels with Fabio on the cover.

The idea for Shopping for Love was to write a satire that combines the two things most dear to pink book readers’ hearts: consumerism and romance. Courtney Sotheby, a successful personal shopper, could find the perfect blouse, but could she find the perfect man? We only got through the first chapter, but I’m fairly certain we could have made our first million. Let’s get cracking, T!

Untitled
A Jane Austen adaptation
To be co-authored by D
D and I enjoy thinking up half-baked schemes for becoming rich and famous. Since most wealthy people seem sort of stupid, we feel like coming up with a million-dollar idea should be fairly straightforward. Following a conversation about Shopping for Love, D and I began talking about co-authoring a novel. We threw around a number of ideas before settling on a Jane Austen adaptation.

D had the idea when we spent an afternoon at Borders, a veritable goldmine of pink books. We began noticing that the shelves were lined with books based on Pride and Prejudice. As far as I can tell, it’s creepy fan fiction about Mr. Darcy that people actually pay to read. Straightaway, we were faced with a dilemma: is the Pride and Prejudice market saturated? And if we adapted a novel other than Pride and Prejudice, would the crazy lady book buyers even consider reading something that is not about Mr. Darcy? As a result, we’re thinking about adapting Persuasion, but we’re still in the brainstorming stage.

Untitled
A Novel
Guess what? Over the last few months, I have been chipping away at a new creative project. Is anyone else writing fiction right now? Maybe we could form a support group this summer so I don’t become one of those d-bags who bores people by talking about her novel.

on cliché

So I have been feeling really sad about something. I have been trying to blog about it, and also around it, for days, not because I believe that blogs should catalog life’s little miseries—that’s not my thing—but because I believe that finding the funny in our darkest moments (and also our best, most boring, and most lame moments, for that matter) is probably a pretty good way to keep things in perspective.

You see, I find solace in writing in all its myriad forms. Often, I write for money, and while I sometimes feel like an apologist for what I have come to think of as bookish prostitution, I appreciate that my profession allows me to preside over an orderly universe of signs and symbols, even when they aren’t, in themselves, all that interesting. And those words take on a fuller meaning in my personal life, whether I’m purging the crazy in my journal, chipping away at a creative project, or cracking wise for this page. Writing brings things into focus; it helps me make sense out of things that, on the surface, seem pretty fucking weird.

But after a few false starts I haven’t been able to find a way into this particular problem. I just stare at my screen feeling sadder still that my words have let me down. In fact, I haven’t been up for any of the things I enjoy most, whether it’s talking on the phone with my mother (because, deep down, I’m no better than Buster), reading, or baking. Evidently, in times of crisis, my most trusted coping mechanisms devolve into the stupid shit I enjoyed when I was, like, twelve years old.

The old me had good taste and was a big fan of Arrested Development.

To wit: two nights ago, I found myself at McDonald’s ordering the Big N’ Tasty value meal (and also Chicken McNuggets, but those were for D). I know that some people (like my friend R, who I hereby out as an eater of Manwich, which I had thought was a casualty of the eighties) might not think that’s so weird, but I’m not really into fast food because I prefer to be able to trace my food to a readily identifiable plant or animal. Also, I don’t smoke pot.

The first funny moment was when I rolled up to the counter (I actually had to go inside since I don’t drive) and worried that the cashier was judging me as some kind of binger-and-purger who could knock back both a Big N’ Tasty and a 10-piece McNugget, which was immediately followed by the realization that the typical McDonald’s customer would probably consider my order a light appetizer.

The second funny moment came after I walked by a gaggle of homeless people, who hungrily eyed my stinking bag of shame, to my home, where I ate the whole thing (minus D’s nuggets) while watching bad television, enjoying squeezing those little ketchup packets to such a degree that I began to worry that I might become a huge fat person on top of everything else.

I have also found myself watching a lot of MTV, and I’m not just talking about quality programming like The Hills. When I can’t sleep, I chain smoke and watch this appalling (awesome?) show where really skanky people stay in a hotel where they fuck their exes in the shower while their new partners watch on cc-tv. Or, when I’m really lucky, I watch Headbanger’s Ball, which, like Manwich, still exists against all the odds, much to my delight.

When there is something so terrible on MTV (e.g., Jackass) that even the new/old me can’t bear to watch, I turn to terrible movies to distract myself. The other night, I watched Because I Said So because (1) it has Lorelei Gilmore and (2) it has Mandy Moore and (3) I’m just too sad to concentrate on anything remotely good or interesting. It was the worst movie I have ever seen, worse even than Saw IV. Seriously, I can’t believe that people watch this sort of thing for real pleasure. I feel like I have turned into the stereotypical disgusting American, which has me wondering: is America depressed? That might explain a lot.

There. That’s a start. My words, I know, will find their way back. Maybe I should continue to channel my twelve-year-old self by writing some bad poetry. That should really get the ball rolling.