| love for sale |
[Feb. 21st, 2008|02:52 am] |
I'm at one of those points, the low points, the points where things start to lose even the vaguest semblance of coherence. The moments just keep coming, one after another, in quick succession with nothing really tying them together and a sort of bizarre sense of unreality that all of them are supposed to add up to something that might be called "my life." Were it to end suddenly, it seems like it would be less than a grand narrative, and not even a mildly interesting sort of fizzling out.
What this means, basically, is that I need a sense of movement. I'm not being metaphysical here; in a very real sense, I need a job just to give myself an excuse to leave the house. At this point I think I am about ready to give up on trying to find a respectable job; all of my attempts have either ended disastrously or just failed to materialize properly. Another way of saying this is that I have basically been approaching the prospect of choosing a career in the way that an adolescent would approach an unsupervised chemistry set, with similar results.
I'm also sick of New York. There may be a variety of reasons for this, and many of them may have to do with the fact that I haven't exactly taken advantage of every opportunity I might have, but I also feel like this city's not only overrated but also seriously out of touch. After weeks of trying to whore myself into various positions in the fashion industry, I have determined that I basically have no interest in it. I think the moment of revelation came when the girl who interviewed me a KCD was wearing jeans and a pair of Vans; at the end of the interview she had the audacity to give me advice on how I needed to "talk myself up." I refuse to be condescended to in such a manner by a twentysomething who works at a top production agency and still dresses like a fifteen year-old going to a Fall Out Boy concert. What the hell ever happened to dressing like a professional? More importantly, whatever happened to style for adults? Since when is looking like some clueless emo kid when you're well past college-age considered anything other than embarrassing?
I think I'm going to try and move back to New Orleans. I keep having these fantasies of walking through the streets in a tank top, my skin broiling under the sun and palmetto bugs scurrying underfoot. I know it's completely romanticized and unrealistic and probably has a lot to do with the fact that it is currently February, cold and unyielding. It may also be due to loneliness and frustration with the fact that my life hasn't turned out to be miraculously successful and glamorous. So be it. But I think there's more to it than that; as James once said to me, something about that city makes you want to go back. Maybe I just get off too much on post-apocalyptic aesthetics, but I kind of liked feeling as if I was living in Dhalgren. Anyway, I'm at least going to see if I can't find a reason to go back. In the meantime I think it's time to just find something thoughtless and easy--I've been applying for messenger jobs and the like--in order to make some dough and ease some of the pressure of this slow century. |
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| november has come |
[Nov. 5th, 2007|07:52 pm] |
so if i keep going to the greenpoint coffeehouse for pancakes, i am going to be both tremendously fat and pitfully broke in a very short period of time. but i don't know what else to do, because they are sooooo good. my homemade pancakes just do not compare.
i am still jobless, which is becoming more and more of a problem every day. but! i am trying to fix that. i applied for a couple of jobs today and am planning to apply at another temp agency i've heard about tomorrow.
oh and i keep sleeping in waaay too late, which is another problem i need to correct. today i slept until 2, which is better than yesterday's 5, but still hella bad if i want to join the crowds of working bozos out there in the streets every day.
there's a mouse living under my refrigerator.
i need to kill it but it's not something i want to deal with tonight.
tomorrow i will buy a mouse trap and hopefully soon he will squeak his last.
i will write a real update soon, but i am back. hello, all. |
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| the rage and the pride |
[Apr. 30th, 2007|12:27 am] |
what follows is the text of my 'queer ethnography' written for scott's class (about two weeks late). it consists of my reaction to a particularly egregious entry. i'm posting it because i never write in this thing anymore, and because i actually kind of enjoyed writing it (except for the conclusion, which i'm not really very happy with. but i had to wrap it up somehow). i'm not trying to be arrogant by posting this here, but if i come off that way, well then damn. anyway, read at your own peril.
I went tonight to the annual Penn State Student Film Festival, and as usual, by intermission, my reaction was one of severe disdain. While my disenchantment could largely be attributed to the collective effect of all of the films shown, one short film in particular stood out in my experience as egregiously and patently offensive. The film in question, the ever-so-cleverly titled "The Scarlet Letters: LGBT," consisted of a seven-minute paean to the glories (and pratfalls) of contemporary metro-homo-normativity.
To be fair, I pretty much knew what I was getting into when I saw the title of the film, with its accompanying blurb, in the program of the event. However, nothing could prepare me for the experience of actually sitting through the film. The first shot begins with two hands being held by a walking couple. As the couple moves away from the camera, we see that they are in fact (or at least, appear to be) both male. They then exchange a brief kiss, and the titles begin. These consist not only of credits but also definitions of the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” and “transgender” (over a loop of the opening notes of the Postal Service’s song “Such Great Heights” in order to remind everyone in the audience that, yes, gays have better taste than you). Then, as the camera moved over the stripes of a rainbow flag (the image of which occurred frequently throughout the film, most often in short appearances between cuts back and forth), a narrator’s voice read out a number of “synonyms” for the word “queer.” All of these synonyms—such as “unique,” “surprising,” and so on—were what would typically be referred to as strictly “positive” qualities. After this series of pedantic treats, the film cuts between a number of interviews with self-identified gays and lesbians, both alone and in couples. There is a noticeable lack of any less mainstream queer interviewees, not only of any bisexual and transgender individuals (despite their interpellation by the film’s title), but also of any queers of color.
The interviews themselves mostly center on the subjects’ coming out narratives, which are related principally as humorous anecdotes. A recurring theme is that of the interviewees’ own self-betrayal—one lesbian recalls her family asking her if she thought they “didn’t already know”; a gay man tells of his sister urging him to “get the other foot out of the closet” after he told her he was bisexual. The purpose of this exercise seems to be to remind us that one’s sexuality is (and should be) proudly and glaringly on display at all times—either through public displays of homosexual desire; or through mannerisms, styles of dress, and so on that metonymically code one as “gay.” This investment in visibility is reflected in the film itself and the identitarian agenda it seeks to promote. After establishing gays as a visible and discrete minority, the film shifts its focus to “discrimination,” cutting back and forth between the interviews and footage of a group of fundamentalist Christians who visited the Penn State campus in October preaching the message (boldly emblazoned on their t-shirts) that “all homos go to hell.” Curiously, this was the only real evidence of discrimination actually given in the movie, and from the footage seen it would seem that most people who paid any attention at all to the anti-gay proselytizers regarded them as little more than extremist nutcases. And yet this somewhat anomalous event was apparently intended to represent the perceived disempowerment and daily struggles of the film’s lesbian and gay protagonists.
But this is a movie, and since it would be bad taste to end on such a down note, the final sequence presents us with the uncanny double of the Christian anti-gay protest; the Gay Pride rally held later in October on the steps of Old Main. Here we are given the privilege of watching the power of queer numbers, as a large group congregates to hear speeches (which are, oddly, absent from the film, replaced by music blaring over the soundtrack) from various gays, lesbians, and “allies,” culminating in a shot wherein everybody holds hands and forms a large circle of unity, respect, and mutual self-love. The “openness” of these final shots provides a semiotic contrast to the somewhat claustrophobic footage of the individual interviews with their descriptions of the difficulties of coming out; the whole spectacle is scored to the triumphant strains of the song “Beautiful Day” by U2, a band whose lead singer has become famous for his own pompous, self-righteous attempts to speak on behalf of the disempowered.
Needless to say, the experience left me cold, alienated, and somewhat baffled. Sitting in the audience at the theater, I spent the majority of the film’s short (in the objective sense, anyway) running time sinking further and further into the recesses of my chair, hands over my face in an attempt both to block out the film and to disavow any perceived connection to it. I felt neither proud not empowered; to be honest, I felt patronized and embarrassed. I did not feel I was part—and moreover, did not want to feel I was part—of the group the film was, in essence, creating (even if that creation is but a recapitulation of already existing ideas of sexuality). The film was deeply invested in the production of gay/lesbian (/bisexual/transgender, despite the fact that nobody conforming to these designations actually appeared, or was identified as such, in the film) as a class of people, rigidly distinguished not only from one another but also from the general population at large. It was discriminating, in a sense of discrimination that it did not recognize—creating roles for subjects, classifying them on the basis of something as arbitrary as sexual object-choice, and defining them as somehow essentially “different.”
This of course was perfectly familiar and acceptable to the remainder of the audience, who are by now probably used to such messages. The reaction of the crowd to the film was generally subdued; it seemed as if most audience members were simply waiting for it to be over. In the larger context of the festival the film became just another in a string to be easily pigeonholed and ignored by the audience—the “feminist” film, the “arty” film, the anti-drunk-driving screed, the quirky comedy about an aging writer, and so on. Thus “the gay movie” immediately foreclosed any chance it might have had toward implicating its audience into any of the issues it attempted to address. Instead, it proceeded to reinforce all of the audience members’ prejudices about queer difference as an essential (and identifiable) characteristic, allowing them (including) to distance themselves through radical disidentification with the community depicted. Its purpose seemed to be to make everybody supremely comfortable with his or her sexual identity through the typical double gesture of reinforcing the dominance and normality of heterosexual identity by emphasizing the necessity of “coming out” when one fails to conform absolutely.
The second half of the festival proved to be less distressing than the first (albeit with some ideologically suspect moments of its own, including a strange entry of the “hillbilly horror” genre and numerous gay jokes in the final film), but the damage of the first half was hard to forget. I recall, leaving the movie theater during intermission, thinking I caught part of a comment from a passerby to the effect that the “gay movie” had ruined the first half. Was it just paranoia? I couldn’t tell then and I don’t know now, but knowing my own reaction, the comment was possible enough that the event seemed important enough to merit further consideration. |
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| Memory Is the Amnesia You Like |
[Feb. 5th, 2007|04:18 pm] |
ahoj, fellow travellers, and welcome back to the continuing adventures of arthur, four out of five dentists' favorite recovering poet, lover and misanthrope. as usual there has been something of a time lag between this current installment and my last attempt at moral edification. but fear not, friends, because devious sorcerer's apprentice that i am, i will make this temporal disjunction evaporate with but a few magical incantations and you will be so up-to-date that not even t. scott herring and all the queer ruralisms in the world will be able to save you from my temporo-metro-normativity. tak! ready? onward!
so in the approximately one month and a half that has passed since my return to america, my life has rather unsurprisingly taken a turn for the boring, the stressful, and the exasperating (kind of like the good the bad and the ugly without that nuisance of a positive term). it has been something of a really big kick in the face to discover that the four months i spent in prague were basically an extravagant romp among the lifestyles of the not-so-rich and almost-famous (here's looking at you, ida) which is now, sadly, over. these days, i sit in my room huddled against the aging space heater i kifed from my parents' house and try to force myself to read the empiricists while my boyfriend opens new parties, sleeps regularly with a swedish model, and generally continues to establish himself as one of the movers-and-shakers of the prague 'indie' scene.
oh woe is me, right? wrong! but i reserve the right to chronicle my life, my pride, and my inane boasting fantasies in a pseudo-journalistic manner so that the unenlightened masses may free themselves from their chains. if it was good enough for donatien-alphonse-françois, it's good enough for me.
what has marked my life since i've been "home"? well, there has been a rather considerable drawing-back of the possibilities of late. to summarize: i have no idea what i'm doing post-graduation. the current plan is, as ever, to move somewhere other than state college, find some way to support myself, and try to, you know, glean some sort of interest out of my existence in a manner typically called "creative." what that means, your guess is as good as mine. this entry is something of a forced exercise in attempting a style of writing, perhaps to be implemented again (hopefully with greater success) in the future. lord knows i'm no susan sontag. maybe i could be mencken.
but until i do graduate, i've got three months to spend whittling my time away in state college, and you know what that means: a return to old habits. so, for a brief update, things with BwO are odd as usual. there was some reconciliation and a bit of the old makey-outey, and he slept at my place on thursday. however he is also back to pseudo-dating the beastly girl from last semester. it's really kind of entertaining how she doesn't suspect a thing, and looks upon me as little other than an interesting character, but the question i keep asking myself is, who's fooling whom? something tells me it's not going to be answered and things are probably either going to stay the same or, god knows, degrade to much, much worse.
not that it really matters anyway at this point because apparently i've got a cold sore, meaning that somewhere along the line i picked up a case of the herp (almost, but not quite, as exciting as picking up a case of chivas regal, and somewhat costlier in the long run unless you're ted kennedy--or even if you are). which means that for the time being maybe i should be putting a hold on the makey-outey, or anything else for that matter. which is damned annoying, really, considering that sex is really the only thing that keeps me entertained in this half-horse (you guess which half) town. then again, perhaps that's what caused this problem to begin with, because while the possibility exists that i contracted this through purely innocent means, it is rather highly unlikely. in the immortal words of hanka, vý-fucking-borně. looks like abstinence for me! woo!
so that's really it for now: cold, emotional detachment, and sexual frustration. otherwise known as february, which is upon us once again like a bitch in heat. kisses. |
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| sunday (bloody sunday) |
[Dec. 3rd, 2006|09:27 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | sonic you(2)th | ] |
my sleeping schedule has gone from bad to worse. i've gotten into the pattern of falling asleep at six or seven a.m. and every time i try to fix this, something happens where i have to stay up and bam, i'm right back where i started. last night i tried going to bed at the semi-reasonable hour of 2:30, slept for three hours, and have been awake ever since. which has its advantages: i just went to the free breakfast they have for us across the street from the dorm, and i was the only person there. still, i would like to regain some semblance of sanity sometime soon. (does sleep deprivation increase one's alliterative potential? only time will tell!)
i am coming home in eighteen days. this means a number of things, first and foremost of which being that i have assloads of work to do between now and then. it's also incredibly surreal to think about how my sense of time has been fucked by this trip. lying awake in bed, i was thinking about how long ago it seems since i was going to berlin, and how bizarre it is that i've been here for the end of summer, almost all of fall, and now winter (though, sadly, without any snow as yet). summer feels like lifetimes ago, and i'm having trouble adjusting to the idea that in less than three weeks it will be almost as if none of this ever happened. or as if, rather than being part of my own life, i slipped into somebody else's life for about four months, only to slip back out again. strange. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 13th, 2006|09:27 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | just guess | ] |
I don't want to get over you. I guess I could take
a sleeping pill and sleep at will and not have to
go through what I go through. I guess I should take
Prozac, right, and just smile all night at somebody new,
Somebody not too bright but sweet and kind who would
try to get you off my mind. I could leave this agony behind
which is just what I'd do if I wanted to, but I don't
want to get over you cause I don't want to get over love.
I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don't exist
and not have to dream of what I dream of; I could listen
to all my friends and go out again and pretend it's enough,
or I could make a career of being blue--I could dress
in black and read Camus, smoke clove cigarettes and drink
vermouth like I was 17 that would be a scream but I
don't want to get over you. |
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| practical jokes, again |
[Nov. 10th, 2006|12:51 am] |
hello, friends. i really don't know what to write about but i felt somewhat obligated to post something seeing's how i haven't in a while.
i've spent the past week sick. last wednesday i was so exhausted i couldn't get out of bed until about 4 pm. yes, i realise that it was the day after halloween, but i refuse to accept any responsibility. on thursday i went to the doctor, where they charged me 4000 crowns, pumped me full of antibiotics and sent me home with orders to stay in bed. also, i was excused from five days of (worthless) classes. all in all, a valuable experience. although i guess scott was wrong about medical treatment here in the CR, as my doctor was actually very helpful.
i am so tired of being sick all the time. i'm starting to wonder if there isn't something larger that's wrong with me.
but now is not the time for hypochondria.
i realised the other day that i'm only going to be here for another six weeks. this is actually somewhat depressing, as i have only recently realised how much i like it here. also, it totally feels like i've been here maybe a month, tops.
however, i do miss people. i'm sad that i won't be home for thanksgiving festivities, and as much as i like it here, i miss talking to people who've known me longer than two and a half months.
i'm seriously losing track of time these days. it is not a happy phenomenon.
sigh. anyway. i was pleased to wake up yesterday and find that rick santorum is no longer considered "my" senator. things are, maybe, looking up a bit. it makes coming back to america slightly less depressing. but most of all, i'd like to see everyone again. when i get back, we are going to india pavilion and fucking feasting.
peace. |
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| (post)modern life is rubbish |
[Sep. 20th, 2006|12:04 am] |
i suppose i should update. but what to say? tonight i got hit by my first wave of real homesickness, which was surprising but i guess somewhat overdue. it's not that i particularly miss state college, given that the town for me means mostly misery and boredom. i do, however, miss seeing people who have known me for longer than four weeks. basically, the loneliness is setting in, hardcore.
or at least it was earlier. i'm feeling okay at the moment; i decided a little while ago to stop with the lame self-pity and instead to go out and do something. in my boredom i went in search of a mythical cafe which apparently no longer exists, and which therefore i was unable to find. so i bought a large cappuccino from "coffee heaven" and a cigarillo and walked home.
by the way, if anybody feels like calling me, my phone number is in my facebook profile. hint, hint. |
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| "if there's one thing this country does well, it's random blackouts" |
[Sep. 6th, 2006|05:57 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | dig me out | ] |
on monday i went with ben and keith to the museum of communism. on the whole it was a bit disappointing, as I ended up paying 140 crowns for what was basically a collection of Things That Existed In The Communist Era with accompanying signs which informed me, for what must be close to the millionth time by now, about how awful life under communism really was.
then, shortly after watching a video which included footage of the occupation and student protests in wenceslas square, we ventured back out into the city. and what i've come to realize is that, since the velvet revolution, prague has been re-occupied. it's just that now instead of soviets with guns, it's full of tourists with credit cards. i suppose the only thing that's (kind of) changed is who's doing the exploiting.
last night, we saw grandmaster melle mel and the furious five. yes, i came all the way across the sea to go to a concert by a washed-up old-school american hip hop group. and it ruled. especially when dynamite mistakenly called the country czechoslovakia and had to quickly apologize (note: there is also a skinhead bar across the street from my dormitory. yay nationalism). tak. |
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| the world in the evening |
[Aug. 29th, 2006|10:23 pm] |
greetings, all, from the sketch republic. as you have probably heard by now, i am newly sans computer [it having been stolen directly 'do not pass go, do not collect $200' from my luggage], so right now i am coming at you live [wink] from the one muthafucking computer here in the dormitory, which is wonderfully ancient and has a czech keyboard [and for which i am henceforth blaming all typos].
the first week has been weird but mostly good. for the first three days we had 'orientation' which basically broke down into two parts. in the mornings we were stuffed into classrooms and told over and over about all the rules and regulations we were expected to follow during the program. then, in the afternoons, we were led around in small groups by 'czech buddies' who were assigned the task of informing us about various things we may have needed to know. this included showing us tram stops, metro lines, bus and train stations, et cetera. i suppose all this was necessary, but the forced exploration of the city got a little old after a while when all i really wanted to do was to go home and sleep off my jet lag.
for the most part the people here seem at least inoffensive. i have, of course, already managed to find a couple of people i completely despise, but the rest seem to be pretty decent. i have also made two interesting friends from the lovely little town of kirksville, missouri [actually they are originally from saint louis]. they are in a certain sense the nicer, midwestern analogs of two of my other friends who shall remain nameless [save to say that one is referred to by the name of a certain kitchen appliance]. so that has been an interesting turn of events. we are probably going to see the plastic people of the universe at some point. rawk.
anyway, i suppose i will write more when i actually have something to say. just wanted to let y'all know that i'm not dead [or, worse, in new jersey]. paka. |
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