Civility, Part 2

This elderly black woman greets me the same way every time I see her on the street: "Ni hao!"

I see her on the street pretty frequently. She is a Jehovah's Witness, and I know this because she always has copies of "Watchtower" and "Awake!", in myriad languages, pressed to her chest, titles facing out. When the weather was nicer, I would see her every day when I took Boo

for his morning pee walk. She'd sit on the benches lining Morningside Park and offer me salvation rags and the same infuriating greeting: "Ni hao!"

(A little known fact is that for a decade of my life, I was part of this little cadre of zealous worshippers, before I read about the Enlightenment and decided that reason and science triumphed over the pocket-sized Gideon's Bible from which I read aloud incomprehensible lines every night until I was ten or eleven years old. I learned to read by listening to all fifteen hours of "My Book of Bible Stories" on tape; I learned to draw by copying pictures out of the same book; I scratched my head at the masturbation section of "Young People Ask," which addressed an issue that was still several levels of perversion away from what my young mind could fathom. I took great pride in my perfect prayer record. I absorbed the eschatological fantasies of my belief, and kept a shoebox under my bed filled with bandaids and hydrogen peroxide, ostensibly for an earthquake emergency but really, because I knew the end was near.)

That's a long digression from the story, though.

Anyway, this morning as I walked to the 2/3 train, she was walking out of a building and our paths crossed. And again, she said, "Ni hao!"

It's a friendly and well-meaning but ultimately really fucking annoying way to say hello to somebody that you presume is Chinese. I understand that she is motivated by goodwill, so I don't hold this against her. I remember the weirdly racist goodwill gestures that my dad used to pull: once he hired two Mexican men to paint our house, and he brought them a stereo and tuned the dial to the Spanish channel. Every day when my dad left these two men would retune the dial to 106.1 KMEL, today's hip hop and R&B, and every morning my dad would retune it to the Spanish channel. He also insisted on buying these guys burritos.

So this morning I said, "Please don't say that to me!"

And we had a polite little conversation. She said, Well, there are some sisters down on Bleecker Street who taught me a little Chinese. There are Chinese sisters!

And I said, I know, I used to be one of them!

And she said, Why are you not anymore?

And I said, I'm gay! I can't belong to a church that won't respect who I am!

And she said, Well, I understand that!

Well, I know how hard you work. Keep up your good work!

Well, you have a nice day!

Well, you have a nice day!

Well!

(cold handshakes, names exchanged, smiles widened)

It was a pleasant exchange. I want to say that it really made me feel heartened about the possiblity of reaching out to folks, to religious folks especially. It kind of did. It also kind of didn't, because I had this conversation, almost verbatim, with the same woman in August. Oh well.

At least she didn't call me a cunt and spit her testosterone-flavored saliva on the ground by my feet (a more sordid, but equally true, crazy-person-attacks-me-in-NYC story).

Self defense with a cane

JNC, Barton-Wright, Self Defence with a cane part 1

Such a pretty picture.

I guess he lost his inaugural overcoat

WaPo goes to task on a vice president that Just. Can't. Be. Bothered.

Also illuminating: most headlines recognize how offensive this insensitivity is, e.g., "Dick Cheney, Dressing Down" (WaPo); "Cheney Criticized for Attire at Auschwitz Ceremony" (Reuters); "Cheney's Attire Draws Ire" (CBS). Note how FOX News trivializes the issue and not-so-subtly turns it into a cryptosexist, anti-alarmist joke: "Fashion Writer Tsks Cheney's Wardrobe Malfunction." A sort of "What torture? I see a frat initiation!" mentality, right?

At yesterday's gathering of world leaders in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States was represented by Vice President Cheney. The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen's hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?

Dick Cheney, Dressing Down (washingtonpost.com)

Who is Maggie Gallagher?

The Douche of the Month, apparently. Bob Somerby gives his rundown of her nastiness here.

Personality Disorder

Personality Disorder Test Results Paranoid |||||||||||||||| 62% Schizoid |||||||||||||| 58% Schizotypal |||||||||||||||| 70% Antisocial |||||||||||||||| 70% Borderline |||||| 22% Histrionic |||||||||||| 46% Narcissistic |||||||||||||||| 66% Avoidant |||||||||||| 46% Dependent |||||| 30% Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||||||| 70%

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Big Five Personality Test Results

My god! This is so fun! I'm Quasimodo!

Big Five Test Results

Extroversion (57%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity. Friendliness (33%) moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly selfish, uncooperative, and difficult at the expense of the well being of others. Orderliness (81%) high which suggests you are overly organized, neat, structured and restrained at the expense too often of flexibility, variety, spontaneity, and fun. Emotional Stability (34%) moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious. Openmindedness (82%) high which suggests you are very intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.

My Enneagram test results

Image Icon results:

Main Type	Overall Self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Scale (|||||||%) results:

Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||||||| 70% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||||| 62% Type 3 Image Focus |||||||||||||||||||| 82% Type 4 Hypersensitivity |||||||||||| 42% Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||| 54% Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||||||| 70% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||||||||| 74% Type 9 Calmness |||||| 30% Your main type is 6 Your variant is sexual

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

The New York Times > Arts > Television > Culture Wars Pull Buster Into the Fray

More on the cartoon rabbit that has Margaret Spellings' knickers in a twist.

The grant specifies the programs 'should be designed to appeal to all of America's children by providing them with content and characters with which they can identify.' In addition, the grant says, 'Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society.'

Meanwhile, this kind of programming doesn't exactly pay for itself. Give a buck; it's insurance for our futures.

The New York Times > National > Official Criticizes a PBS Cartoon

The New York Times > National > Official Criticizes a PBS Cartoon

You think this kind of shit is fiction (e.g., "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast on TV") but all the literary imaginations in the world can't keep pace with the pathorighteousness of our country's social conservatives.

I wrote a glib comment about Focus on the Family's attack on SpongeBob, but this situation is something that deserves serious scrutiny, because unlike James Dobson's fanatical ravings, Margaret Spellings' homophobia has traction. No one who has watched PBS or listened to NPR in the last decade needs to be reminded that federal funding for public broadcasting lags behind budgetary needs, and that without federal support, these valuable media institutions would be defunct or, more likely, just as commercial as private broadcasters.

So here you see the depth of BushCo.'s theocratic, homophobic, anti-family reach. Margaret Spellings is not just another undersexed wingnut from Concerned Women for America, she is the EDUCATION SECRETARY. I didn't realize the Bush Administration could tar this office any more than Rod "Teachers are terrorists/I lied about everything I accomplished" Paige already did, but once again, I've been unpleasantly surprised. I can't find any legitimate justification for denouncing this bunny cartoon in the following quotes; the only line of reasoning is that any depiction of same-sex families is inherently detrimental to children.

"Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced PBS on Tuesday for spending public money on a cartoon with lesbian characters, saying many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles.

The episode of 'Postcards From Buster,' which has not yet run, shows the title character, a bunny named Buster, on a trip to Vermont, a state that recognizes same-sex civil unions. The episode features two lesbian couples, although the focus is on farm life and maple sugaring."

Frankly, it also never occured to me to disclose that I am a poorly-designed animatronic doll remote-controlled by Wade Horn

The conspiracy theorist is right again. Again, folks, you are paying to brainwash yourself. How does it work? You pay your taxes to the government. The government pays a third party to conjure fantastical information. The third party feeds this information to you. You read the byline--an independent party, you think, disinterested and non-partisan--and give the article more creedence than you would if you had known that these are thoughts the government really wants you to believe. Then, for reasons that escape you now, you lumber to the polls and cast a ballot to entrench legal inequality in thirteen state constitutions.

Maggie Gallagher, a conservative columnist who has made a career--a lucrative career, it now seems--of piling vitriol upon same-sex families, was just revealed to have received $41,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services. She wrote brochures for the department, then drafted magazine articles for HHS chief Wade Horn.

She says it's not an ethical breach because she is like a "scholar," hired for her expertise and thus at no obligation to disclose her funders.

Wouldn't you like to know if a study that says abortion causes breast cancer was funded by an anti-choice organization? Or if a report on the necessity of school prayer was funded by the Promise Keepers? Or if a paean to No Child Left Behind was funded by Rod Paige?

It was more or less ethical for Gallagher to write the brochures, since, as she says, she is an expert at producing anti-marriage propaganda. It was not in any way ethical for her to write an anti-marriage piece for the National Review funded by the government, saying things the government wanted her to say, and then not telling her readers the impetus for the article.

It isn't as if the National Review wouldn't have published an article written by Wade Horn about Bush's anti-marriage initiatives. But an article by Wade Horn doesn't have the same cachet or same audience as an article published by a recognized columnist's voice. Filterning the Administration's message through a third party, supposedly independent, dresses up propaganda to look like an individual's reasoned opinion. A shifty tactic, but apparently effective enough to warrant at least $280,000 in taxpayer money (as has thus far been disclosed).

There are other names for this kind of work. We read about this in other countries and laugh. Sure, people ran back into burning homes to save portraits of Kim Jong Il. Sure, no one died on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square. We enjoy a hearty laugh and we shake our heads knowingly about the odd tyrannies of other nations. And then we smugly read our personalized news on the Internet while clutching our lattés, sometimes pausing to lather on sunscreen to avoid being burned by our own enlightenment.

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

Thanks a lot, Howard Kurtz. Why d'you go and spoil a perfectly lovely delusion?

Columnist Backing Bush Plan Had Federal Contract (washingtonpost.com)

Blurry eyes

New contacts blurring the eyes. Vision pleasantly rounds all sharp edges, blends distinct forms into friendly elisions. Plastic hardening the corneas. Tired eyes. I got the flu from a draft from a flue. That's a lie. I got a cold with all the symptoms of meningitis. I sleep propped at at 30 degree angle for half-days at a time, and breathe through my mouth at work until I am so embarassed to be mouth-breathing that I hold my breath until I erupt blue-faced in snot sneezes and reptilian coughs.

Nothing to say. It's 11 degrees in Central Park with what was formerly 13" of powder on the ground and is now 0"-6" of crust/slush/brown deflation everywhere. My boss reports that "some Russian person" has written him twice today soliciting money. A Gatorade bottle on my desk beseeches me to QUENCH MY THIRST but glucose-fructose syrup doesn't quench shit when your thirst originates from your sinuses and yearns to be drowned in tussins and tinctures. Now there are papers on my desk marked in black and red.

Now there is a phone call being ignored. Now there is a damp chill in my shoes. Now I am gathering my scarves. Now I will surreptitiously dart out the door and take a train that will take me home, where I will sleep until these sickly winches fall off my face. Now, now, now, finally.

Becca

All right, this is for you. Keep your mitts off your butts. That's all I gotta say. And bring your sweatpants to work on Monday.

A correction: PFOX

PFOX is not "Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Lesbians," as I had first posted. Rather, it is "Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays." Parse that one.

PFEG?

So much pathos, so little type

PFLAG has name recognition. Lots of folks, queer or not, know PFLAG. PFLAG moms with rainbow flags. PFLAG friends with "ally" buttons. Popular PFLAG. Maureen McCormick PFLAG with the straight teeth, blonde hair, wide-shouldered boyfriends.

The analogue, I guess, is the Jan Brady organization PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Lesbians). You can almost hear the shrill lament, "PFLAG, PFLAG, PFLAG!"

I found this sad little article on the PFOX site. It expresses the kind of sad hope that one imagines children must feel when they are told that they will be reunited with their dead pets in heaven.

PFOX

The Red Sea

David Von Drehle is fair and minimally condescending, though David Adesnik thinks it's too anthropological (and therefore condescending). Well, all true. But I'm one of those bicoastal blue state homos, and an ethnography is sort of what I need. Anyway, it's an interesting read.

The Red Sea (washingtonpost.com)

BBC NEWS | Americas | Officer who beat boy gets $1.6m

A US policeman who was filmed punching a black youth and slamming him against a car has been awarded $1.6m (£890,000) in a race discrimination case.
Jeremy Morse, who was sacked by the Los Angeles police over the incident, said he had been treated more harshly than a black officer who was also there.

A second white officer was awarded $811,000 (£450,000) damages.

Inglewood Police Chief Ronald Banks, who had disciplined the officers, called the awards "ridiculous."

BBC NEWS | Americas | Officer who beat boy gets $1.6m

The New York Times > Conservatives Pick Soft Target: A Cartoon Sponge

I am so delighted that James Dobson is using his $126 million annual budget at Focus on the Family to focus on that most perverse gaywad of all, Bob l'Eponge. It ties up funds meant otherwise for fake social "science" "research."




If I were organized, I would start a campaign to have people mass email Focus on the Family, Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America and other anti-family groups about other such moral perversions. Just think of it: if we could convince Focus on the Family to spend a day writing a report, issuing a press release, and holding a press conference about all of the fey sponges, exposed nipples, four-through-ten letter words, gay penguins, and too-long man-on-man hugs that cross the airwaves, they would have so much less time to hide their own divorces, sexual assaults, abortions, and falafel fetishes and to slander and abuse maligned homos.

To facilitate this action that I will in no further way organize, please write:

Focus on the Family

Traditional Values Coalition

Concerned Women of America

If anyone writes these organizations, send me your letters and I'll post them.

Montana civil unions bill

"Heterosexual marriage and children is a governmental and societal imperative," said Dallas Erickson of Montana Citizens for Decency Through Law. "There is no societal benefit to homosexual marriage, which is based primarily on genital stimulation and the perception of love."

I'd like to introduce Bob Barr and George C. Roche III and Dallas Erickson to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, so that they can tell two women who have been together for 52 years that their relationship is based on genital stimulation and the perception of love. C'mon, you fucking pansies, I dare you.

Link

Thy Jubilee Throng

Oh, Christ, Lawrence H. Summers. Did you, too, sleep through second-wave feminism? Just because your name is on legal tender doesn't make it okay for you to say idiotic things about biological determinism.

Several women who participated in the conference said yesterday that they had been surprised or outraged by Dr. Summers's comments, and Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Dr. Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to "speak truth to power."

Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Dr. Summers's remarks.

"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile."

Since Larry was my former principal pal at fair Ha-Ha-Ha, this seems personal. So here's my public challenge: let's pit our wits, mano a womano, at some science test. I'll bet you my assets vs. yours that I can kick your ass at, say, building a robot that can deposit ping pong balls in a box or deriving number theory proofs. And then we'll proceed to the kitchen where I will bake macaroons that your fumbling XY mitts could never with a million years of targeted evolution come close to crafting.

The New York Times > National > Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women

Isn't it awesome

...when you're making out with someone and you get a bloody nose but it's dark so you don't know about it until a half hour later, when you turn on the lights, and both of you are covered in blood?

hungover

I'm a bleary bitch. What compelled me to start up my computer and post a blog when I was just about to pass out? There's a big cut on my upper lip. I found a pubic hair in my nose this morning.

AWESOME.

drunk

Drunk blogging. The dog is eating again. My face is full with floss. My face is segmented into worms. Goddamn. Central Park North, this guy turned 28. Coveting stuff I don't even want. Time to go to bed. Oh, god, the flush.

I also grew my hair out...

...and bleached my teeth!

Atkins pt. 2

...not that I'm on the Atkins diet. Or any diet, for that matter. I am as vegetarian and healthy as a free-range cow. As I have previously posted, the tumescence of my arms routinely renders my shirts unwearable.



Here is a picture of me and my left biceps. This was before I got contact lenses.

NipickleWatch: Alarm

I meant to say: "For what time should we set the alarm?"
I actually said: "What time shet the cat a whee?"

Three good reasons not to go on the Atkins diet

1) Your breath smells like cheese.
2) Your skin smells like your breath.
3) Diarrhea.

Words of the Year

Most news reports of the American Dialect Society's annual "Words of the Year" vote neglect the year's most outrageous term.

Word(s) of the year: Red state, blue state, purple state.
Word of the millenium (!): she. Apparently there was no English pronoun to describe women until a thousand years ago; women were addressed as "heo," or the male plural pronoun. Whoa!

American Dialect Society: Words of the Year

iCrock

Why is the Times so agog about Apple? As the Columbia Journalism Review noted this month, the Times have featured stories about iPods no less than four times this year. So when Apple puts out shit disguised with individualistic rhetoric--like selling the inability to order your songs on the new iPod shuffle by cashing in on Americans' delusion that they are less conformist than other nationals ("Life is random. Meet the iPod shuffle. The unpredictable new member of the iPod family.")--the Times falls over and dies of pleasure. Why gratify Steve Jobs and his well-crafted product release ceremonies? Why reprint an AP article that reads like a press release, "smaller than a pack of gum" schtick and all?

So one problem is the slavish press coverage of Apple products. Another problem is that these new products are not novel at all, but they are being promoted as if they were Segways. Another problem is that this whole "affordable" meme is so fake. Pay $500 for a computer with no peripherals and then fork out another few hundred clams for your monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, and printer! Man, I'm going into advertising. People love to spend their money on truly useless chyme.


The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Apple Tries to Break Out

Reggie White Day

Last Sunday was "Reggie White Day" in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The celebrated former defensive end for the Packers died the day after Christmas of some undisclosed ailment, and the sports media can't find enough adulatory gems to bestown upon his posthumous crown. Curiously, though, some of White's most notorious public moments have been left out of his eulogies. Contrast this with the mean-spirited posthumous excoriations that some of Susan Sontag's critics have doled out.

But no, you say, Susan Sontag was a public intellectual! Reggie White was a guy whose job was making people fall over! The comparison is specious!

But alas, you are wrong. White, an ordained Christian minister fond of using his sports celebrity as a platform for promoting increasingly bizarre ideas, beggared his own entry into public discourse by appearing in a series of full-page anti-gay ads in USA Today and the Washington Times in 1998. The ads, headlined "In defense of free speech," employed a familiar rhetorical trope of the Christian right: we are powerless and disorganized Christians beleaguered by rich white queers. (I'm happy to be working for the fourth richest of the so-called powerful homo agenda pushers, whose total annual operating budget is still only 3.9% the annual operating budget of Focus on the Family and only 36.6% of the annual operating budget of the American Family Association. Those flunkies and their failed math! More on the myth of rich queers.)

After the fallout from his ginormously offensive comments to the Wisconsin legislature, White was unrepentant, saying, "I didn't start a ministry to please everybody." From the horse's mouth, folks. White was foremost a soapbox opportunist; his football career was merely a huge soapbox that guaranteed his opinions would be heard. So do the man a favor in his death, and hold his legacy accountable to the ideas he was so proud to have made public during his life. Some of these key ideas were, in fact, once presented to state legislators:

White had been invited by Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen to talk to lawmakers for about 10 to 12 minutes about his recent trip to Israel, his work with urban youth and his New Hope economic development project in Green Bay.

But White, speaking without notes, delivered an address that resembled a lengthy sermon with numerous references to the Bible and pronouncements about sin and morality.

In making a point about the need for all races to work together, White discussed differences between races that many lawmakers said they found to be inappropriate stereotypes. Among his comments about races:

Blacks: "When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to a black church, you see people jumping up and down because they really get into it."

Whites: "White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job with building businesses and things of that nature. And you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people around the world."

Hispanics: "Hispanics were gifted in family structure. You see a Hispanic person, and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home."

Asians: "When you look at the Asian, the Asian is very gifted in creativity and invention. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They are very creative.""When you put all of that together, guess what it makes? It forms the complete image of God," he said.

In another part of his address, while talking about sin, White said "one of the biggest ones" is homosexuality.

He added he was offended that homosexuals "compare their plight with the plight of black people" and say they they have been persecuted and discriminated against. "Homosexuality is a decision; it's not a race," White said.

(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 3/26/1998)

Buy my used gear!

For sale:

1) One Timex Ironman Triathlon watch. One of the rubber nubbins is missing, making it difficult to switch modes. It is covered in white and lavender paint splatters and calcified sweat deposits. It cost me $19; it'll cost you only $18.

2) One magenta hair tie, slightly warped, slightly frayed, slightly rusted...but entirely yours! For $.15 (PayPal, please).

Oh, it's all a lie. I'm keeping them both. But I thought I would just give selling my used shit a shot. My inspiration: http://www.scottsloan.com/store_gear.html

Makeover

It's 4 a.m. and I'm giving the site a makeover. It's ugly and impossible to read but whose ass gives a damn?

Insom-maniacal

The reason I was looking through my old journals (see the Jodie Foster post) was because I wanted to find evidence of my two weeks of insomnia a few years ago. Here it is:

day one
6pm arrive in boston
toss and turn

day two
7am-noon sleep
10pm-1am sleep
then toss and turn

day three
11am-2pm sleep
awake and productive
9pm-10:30pm sleep
toss and turn

day four
until the present minute! where i am a crazy bat! i am starting to see shit.

Twelve hours of sleep in four days was HOT! HOT! HOT! I felt like a freak and I stayed up all night listening to Iron & Wine hoping that Sam Beam would be my soporific.

Now it is two years later, and I am still insomniac.

As promised, here is my live colonoscopy camera: I am thinking about Kenneth Peasley and Karl Rove's moral compasses, and how the angles of declination for these spots in Tucson and Washington, D.C. seem to be so obtuse. I am thinking about fast-twitch muscles and the empty space adjacent to my office where I spent fifteen agonized minutes today doing roundhouse kicks and push-ups in an effort to shake the cubicle-ache out of my bones. I am thinking about how a photograph of a woman standing on her head,



naked except for opera gloves and chintzy bracelets and thigh-high sheer stockings and red Dorothy heels, might be used to sell Christian Dior sunglasses--is it a poupée-ification



suggesting necrophilic (and therefore unresisting) possibilities? I am thinking about why it takes some people three minutes to respond to my emails and others three weeks, and what that says about me. I am thinking about the size of my biceps, which I always seem to overestimate.



I am also thinking about how goddamn long it takes me to get tired.

Wisdom and Jodie Foster

My dad is a paranoid guy. I have thought about this a lot. All the corners of all the furniture in the house I grew up in were sanded into round edges, because my dad feared for my and Richard's eyes. But that's very pedestrian example of paranoia, and understandable. My dad is also gripped with paranoid fantasies beyond the normal pale of paranoia. I just found a file from 2002 in which I wrote down a few, almost verbatim, with some translation from the original Chinglish:

1. Jackhammers will ruin your insides.
2. Massages can kill you, or at least seriously inconvenience you. Don’t get them in China.
3. Thai masseuses will break your back.
4. Unlicensed masseuses will kill you.
5. Cover your face in oils before it is too late. “Irreversible damage will happen.”
6. Wear a sweater or you will die of cold.
7. Dry your hair before you go to sleep or your face will be covered in spots.
8. Carbon from burnt toast will give you cancer.
9. Don't go to San Francisco because it is too cold. You will die.
10. Bare feet in the garage; nails will pierce your skin.
11. Do not play the guitar in the chair. The sharp end of guitar will puncture the laptop screen. “Fluid everywhere.”

In my paranoia hunt, I also found a letter that Jodie Foster had written me!

Dear Mandy,

Of course, I will let you go down on me. Please, come now, come quick, and come alone.

Waiting,
Jodie Foster

P.S.: And of course, I will wear denim overalls over a red union suit.

"Cautious, careful people worried about their reputations should not be leading reform efforts."

So said Susan B. Anthony, and so repeats Cheryl Jacques. I guess all that stuff the HRC PR folks said about "differing management philosophies" really meant what everyone suspected it meant: a cold water reascension of the organization's balls. Kudos to Cheryl Jacques for attempting to do what she was hired to do.

Boston.com /Jacques stands by marriage rights goal

More at http://www.cheryljacques.org/

Deepest sympathies

I extend my deepest sympathies to you if you were so unlucky as to have been born a moon-faced white man.

Rent Girl

In my convalescence this weekend, I read one okay book and one excellent book. Laurenn McCubbin doesn't tell you how she does the illustrations but this is my guess: they hired actors to pose the scenes in the book, and then McCubbin photographed them and went over the photos either by hand or in Illustrator, making simple line drawings with startling verisimilitude. Worth it just for the pictures. It's the author's memoir of her time as a sex worker with a Boston escort service, so no matter how sloppy the prose is, it's a fascinating read.

Rent Girl

Bad Education

The folks at Slant Magazine are wicked smart. They say what I am not sharp enough to say about this amazing movie.

More so than Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Almodóvar’s heartbreaking Pieta acknowledges cinema as an extension of the soul. Because it seems to touch on every theme and perversion seen throughout the director’s illustrious 20-plus-year career, Bad Education truly evokes the sensation of a Jackson Pollock “action” painting: Almodóvar’s canvas—like that of another hot-blooded drama queen, Federico García Lorca—is one of uncensored emotion and pure energy. There isn’t a single person in the film (or film-within-a-film) whose life isn’t fractured (next to Brian De Palma’s Sisters, Bad Education may feature the greatest use of split screen in movie history), states of unrest the director fabulously emphasizes by frequently situating actors before mosaic art or walls covered in paper decorated with jagged lines shooting in all sorts of directions.

Just as everyone remembers the silent film sequence from Talk to Her, no one will forget the “Moon River” scene from Bad Education. During a school retreat, a young Ignacio (Ignacio Pérez) is forced by Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho) to sing the Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer classic while the boy’s half-naked buddies swim at a nearby spring. Unlike Talk to Her, Bad Education is more schematic than gimmicky, but Almodóvar is still scripting a complex morality by conflating movie dreams and sexual awakening. This subversive sequence is at once funny and tender. Almodóvar tastefully and cleverly obscures Manolo’s abuse of Ignacio at just the right moment (“Waiting 'round the bend,” the boy sings), anticipating the masochistic role-reversal of their future relationship in the emotional back-and-forth of the song’s lyrics, much in the same way the swimming children prefigures the incredibly erotic pool sequence between the two leads later in life.

Link

DoucheWatch: Tony Andrade

The vaginal and rectal lavage sack who brought you the Governator now tries to put California among the ranks of such states as Mississippi and Alabama. As if being the 43rd dumbest state in the union isn't enough.

Move to Stop "Gay Sex" Talk in Calif. Schools

Courtesy

Laura and I sat down to eat a pizza at Koronet's tonight and took the only available two spots in the place, two barstools along a short counter against a mirrored wall. I sat down next to a boy who looked about fourteen or fifteen, who was regaling his neighbor with tales of sucking titties and loving titties. Titties this, suck that. It was pretty clear that he was trying to provoke me, because he kept staring at me in the mirror as he said this. Typical bullshit from the world's least deserving carbon-based lifeforms (pubescent boys, of course).

In a bemused and slightly irked state, I decided to flex my teacherly muscle on these two boys, who were very similar in age to the ones I taught last year. I have no problem with frank talk about sexuality. I'm not one of those abstinence-only-until-marriage self-deluders. But I am not interested in being the victim of an obnoxious child's power trip, and I wasn't going to be humiliated or silenced by his misogyny. Ever since I watched Ms. Hutchinson gently (and successfully) berate a boy who threw a half-full juice carton onto the platform of the 174-175th D train stop last year, I have increasingly felt it my adult responsibility to stop kids who are behaving badly. I know this welcomes accusations of condescension, naivete, or privilege, but I'll save that defense for another blog. Anyway, I thought it was time to show the tittie-talker who was boss.

In a polite but authoritative voice, I said, "Would you not talk about that? I am not interesting in hearing what you have to say, and I'm trying to eat." Or something else like that, consciously articulate and prudish.

The boy said, "I'll say what I want to say. This is America!" I shrugged, not quick-thinking enough to find the right answer.

There was more and more vociferous tittie talk. Then the tittie talk moved on to dick-sucking and then, curiously, to eating shit. He continued, "I saw this person take a shit the other day, and I just picked it up and ate it! I just ate this big piece of shit! Mm-mmm!"

After a few seconds of this, I said, "Wow, you eat shit. Tell me, what does that taste like?"

That was probably a mistake. I was trying so hard not to stay level, to think of ways to get him to leave. I wasn't going to lose a battle of wills to a little asshole who just wanted to piss people off.

"It tastes like that pizza!" he said, pointing to my slice.

But then I pointed to his slice and said, "You're eating the same thing." And I pretended to laugh heartily and turned away from him. I should have known then that I had taken exactly the wrong tack, and I had descended into this strange world where I was accusing him of having eaten shit, rather than just maintain a distant, teacherly, absolute authority.

The boy continued talking, and muttering something about me and Laura being lesbians, said, "Then there were these two lesbians, who sucked my dick, and then they sucked my crack..." and on and on.

Laura wanted to leave, though we weren't done eating. I wanted to stay and wait it out. But it was pleasant for no one, so we left. Upon leaving, I couldn't resist a final jab and I said, "You know, you should seek therapy for your shit-eating problem. I know people you could call."

We left with half-finished slices of lukewarm pizza leaking grease into our gloves. The boys followed us out. I stood my ground, pointed down Broadway and said, "You two can walk that way." They did, but then after ten feet turned around and the voluble one said, "We were going to walk this way anyway!" They bounded half a block downtown, turned and threw something in a cup at us--it landed at least twenty feet away, anyway--and then sprinted across the street in a frenzy. Laura and I went back inside and finished our pizza.

I was livid! I wanted to swing both of these boys by their feet into the building and stomp on their skulls and stuff my thumbs into their eyesockets. My thoughts ran from fucked-up to violent: I thought about calling the cops and filing assault charges against them for throwing a drink at me, which would have been an awful exercise of gentrifier privilege against two black boys; I wanted to wrestle the boy to the ground and break his wrists; I wanted to pulverize his misogynistic little testicles against the heels of my boots and the sidewalk.

So they had won. Laura and I were upset that two teenage boys could successfully harass two grown women--something that happens all the time--and that neither of us could have found a way to deal with them. Laura thought later that the proper thing to do would have been to shame them into better behavior. That might involve either

1. asking loudly in the pizza place for them to leave us alone; this probably wouldn't have worked because they were so derisive and hungry for attention that they would have relished the indignation of a roomful of Columbia-types;
2. creating a lie, a la "You don't know who I am. Somebody in my family just died and I'm coming from the funeral and I am in no mood to be listening to this." This is curious. Aside from all the bad death karma it engenders, it might actually work. It accuses the harassers of gross indecency without being direct, and it may call on some deeply buried reserve of shame.

Shaming rather than engaging would of course had been the better choice, but neither of us could think of anything to do. Also, I'm so cynical that sometimes I think shame won't work at all, because it offers an impossibly optimistic portrait of humans as compassionate beings capable of understanding their own mistakes. (My semi-permanent reference for this cynicism is the second Presidential debate, when George W. Bush found himself unable to think of any, let alone three, mistakes that he had made in the first four disastrous years of his presidency.)

It feels awful to be harassed by kids who just want to make people unhappy. It feels worse to be so disarmed by them that you can't even conceive of the right way to make them stop. Why do people do this?

This episode was quickly followed by three other events that fall into the "Reasons I Love to Hate This Shitty City" category:

1. Laura and I waited for the 1 train at 110th Street. When it came, a woman who was hugely pregnant--like 9 1/2 months pregnant--was trying to get out. Two massive men just squeezed right past her, jostling her and crushing her against a pillar on the platform.
2. The train was packed, and I was looking for a place to grab a pole. The guy next to me was reading a book and leaning the length of his body against the pole, so that I could lurch all I wanted to but not find a place to get a grip. I wedged my fingers right underneath his neck and made as big a fist as I could so that he would show some goddamn courtesy and lean his unctuous body elsewhere.
3. When I finally got a seat, the woman next to me--a early-twenties-ish hipster with an impractical and soon to be dated haircut and pre-torn jeans--propped her feet high up on the center pole. Which didn't inconvenience me in any way, but inconvenienced everyone who was trying to find space to stand on the train. And she had on a pair of white, knee-high boots swaddled in faux rabbit-fur. I just wanted to vomit all over them, or just bring my feet down in an ax-kick and snap all of her ligaments cleanly in half.

Being in this shit-sandwich makes me crazy. A tiny island with 8 million people and not nearly enough resources to make all of us comfortable. I start to think violent thoughts, and I lose so much faith in humanity.

And then I go back to Palo Alto and I realize that all the faith that I had in humanity was based on a vast web of delusions that my parents' hard-earned money so painstakingly bought. It's so easy to be polite when everyone around you has lots of disposable income, big roads and big cars, and all people who might be unsavory or unfamiliar just manicure your lawns with their hats pulled over their eyes and then shuffle back across Highway 101, where they will be safely invisible until the grass needs to be trimmed again.

What the hell am I saying? Goddamn it all.

"Get some devastation in the back."

What a wonderful photo-op the deaths of 150,000 people make.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/06/world/main665329.shtml

Ithyphallophobia

In trying to find derogatory Yiddish words to call Alex K., I found this delightful repository of hitherto unknowable sexual terms. Fascinating! Now my allantotrioism finally has a name.

http://www.sex-lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/penis (scroll down to "See Also")

Blogzilla

This man promised me a weeklong bender, but all I got was a pitcher of beer. What a schmekel.

http://blogzil.blogspot.com/

Where your tax dollars go...

You are paying to brainwash yourself. The conspiracy theorist always suspects this is true; here's proof.

Armstrong Williams, a prominent conservative commentator who was a protégé of Senator Strom Thurmond and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, acknowledged yesterday that he was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote its initiatives on his syndicated television program and to other African-Americans in the news media.

The disclosure of the payment set off a storm of criticism from Democrats over the Bush administration's spending to promote its policies to the public. According to a copy of the contract provided by the department yesterday, Mr. Williams, who also runs a small public relations firm and until yesterday wrote a syndicated newspaper column, was required to broadcast two one-minute advertisements in which Education Secretary Rod Paige extolled the merits of its national standards program, No Child Left Behind.

But the arrangement, which started in late 2003 and was first reported yesterday by USA Today, also stipulated that a public relations firm hired by the department would "arrange for Mr. Williams to regularly comment on N.C.L.B. during the course of his broadcasts," that "Secretary Paige and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests," and that "Mr. Williams shall utilize his long-term working relationships with 'America's Black Forum' " - an African-American news program - "to encourage the producers to periodically address the No Child Left Behind Act."

Mr. Williams, 45, apologized yesterday for blurring his roles as an independent commentator and a paid promoter. "This is a great lesson to me," he told Paul Begala of CNN, who himself has an off-air job as a paid Democratic political consultant but discloses both roles.

Link

Playing identity

The Right plays identity politics so much better than the Left. All this cloying talk of Alberto Gonzales's up-from-the-bootstraps life story makes me want to chew through my own immigrants'-child's wrists. As if benefitting from affirmative action gives you a free ride to promote torture.

These identity-based story lines have so much traction--just think of how Congress's investigation of the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode shut down after Thomas accused the court of conducting a "high-tech lynching of an uppity negro"--and it continues to confound me that none of the major national LGBT organizations are headed by people of color. The Right loves to play LGBT rights against civil rights, as if they are oppositional, or as if all LGBT people are privileged white professionals who piggyback on the victories of truly oppressed groups. That's clearly bullshit: LGBT people are proportionately poorer than non-LGBT people, proportionate percentages of LGBT people are people of color, LGBT people suffer discrimination and oppression for fundamental, immutable facets of their identities, analogous to, but of course not exactly like, the discrimination and oppression that people of color suffer.

But it sure doesn't seem like that when the public face of the LGBT movement is so colorless. Sure, we're committed to diversity, and we work with groups representing people of color, and our workforces try to be diverse, and we support legislation and litigation that benefit people of color. I haven't done a staff analysis or a content analysis, but I'll bet you if I compared the ten most funded LGBT organizations with the ten most funded anti-LGBT organizations, I'd find that LGBT organizations are more diverse and the issues that we work on ultimately benefit people of color more than the issues that anti-LGBT organizations work on.

But the public only sees a dozen black preachers versus Cheryl Jacques and Joan Garry. This is tactically retarded. The Right isn't afraid to milk a person's skin color for political gain, and the Left should not undermine its own genuine efforts toward racial equality by presenting faces that do not represent its values.

In other words, Hilary Rosen ought to be Keith Boykin. Goddamn.

Pre-Massengill Syndrome

So I'm up late last night doing the thing that I occasionally do: staring at Laura until she wakes up and then dousing her with the wellsprings of my cheesy love. I doted, I complimented, I massaged, I even made moon eyes with my slanty eyes. It was 4 a.m., and I was sleepless and giddy. Laura was--in this order--awoken, tired, flattered, happy, asleep within minutes.

A few hours later, I'm watching the first hint of my monthly menstrual bonanza dye the water in my toilet. And I'm thinking, so was my upwelling of love just an unpredictable fluctuation of womanly hormones?

I'll bet anyone anything--c'mon, folks, I'm feeling hot--that PMS is a constructed phenomenon. It was first documented in the 1930s, at the tail end of an medical era notorious for misogynistic misdiagnoses of feminine "disorders." I believe that my estrogen and progesterone levels change before, during, and after my period. But how much do these hormonal changes really affect my emotions? My guess is less than I have been led to believe. Since I harbor deep conspiracy suspicisions about almost everything, it wouldn't be hard to convince me that the perpetuation of a possible myth about PMS is perpetrated by pharmaceutical companies who produce period pills that produce periodic profits.

I would love to comission a cross-cultural survey asking women about the changes in their emotions, comparing women in countries that have widespread information about PMS to women in countries where there exist no PMS cults. I would love to research the jokes, oral histories, and informal media of many cultures for references to women's emotional changes as they are connected to their periods. PMS seems like a big load of bullshit. Can somebody prove this?

High-tech lynching of an uppity grifter

A $1.5 million book advance from Harper-Collins isn't enough for him?

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts since joining the high court, including $1,200 worth of tires, valuable historical items and a $5,000 personal check to help pay a relative's education expenses.

The gifts also included a Bible once owned by the 19th century author and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, which Thomas valued at $19,000, and a bust of President Lincoln valued at $15,000.

He also took a free trip aboard a private jet to the exclusive Bohemian Grove club in Northern California — arranged by a wealthy Texas real estate investor who helped run an advocacy group that filed briefs with the Supreme Court.

Those and other gifts were disclosed by Thomas under a 1978 federal ethics law that requires high-ranking government officials, including the nine Supreme Court justices, to file a report each year that lists gifts, money and other items they have received.

Thomas has reported accepting much more valuable gifts than his Supreme Court colleagues over the last six years, according to their disclosure forms on file at the court.

Link

So long, bowtie

How big a role did Jon Stewart play in Tucker Carlson's canning?

[Incoming CNN president Jonathan] Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America."

Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

Link

DoucheWatch: The First Squirt

Since there seems to be a steady stream of douchebags so oily that they escape exposure, I'm starting a new segment of my blog to exposing these frauds, malingerers, and Tartuffes for the douches they really are.

Inaugurating DoucheWatch will be the tight-lipped draft-dodger du jour, House Majority leader (not for long!) Tom DeLay.





How is Mr. DeLay a plastic sack of saline solution meant for vaginal and rectal lavage?

Many reasons, most currently and obviously his pending grand jury investigation for abusing the FAA into disclosing information about the airborne Texas Democrats who attempted to break quorum by flying out of the state during the state's unusual mid-decade redistricting process. Laundering money for Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (though only his aides were convicted). Taking a hunk of cash from Westar Energy just as energy legislation was being hammered out in Congress. Dodging the draft. Chaperoning an embarassing effort by House Republicans to change ethics rules to remove the stipulation that Representatives act "in a manner which shall reflect creditably on the House." Lots of great reasons, all articulated elsewhere in the blogosphere.

A lot of people are citing comments DeLay made in 1998 about people with "foreign-sounding names," which he mentioned during a House debate on campaign finance after the indictment of several Democratic fundraisers. I found some quotes from an old Houston Chronicle article so that the scope of his vaginal and rectal lavage becomes clear:

Standing next to an enlarged photograph of Vice President Al Gore at a Buddhist temple fund-raiser, DeLay said: "If you have a friend by the name of Arief and Soraya, and I cannot even pronounce the last name - Wiriadinata, something like that - who donated $ 450,000 to the DNC and was friends with a guy named Johnny Huang, and later returned it because Wiriadinata could not explain where it came from, then probably there is a high probability that it's money from foreign nationals.

"I could go on with John Lee and Cheong Am, Yogesh Gandhi, Ng Lap Seng, Supreme Master Suma Ching Hai and George Psaltis," DeLay said mockingly, citing names of contributors that surfaced during the Democratic campaign finance controversy.

(Houston Chronicle, "Democrats accuse DeLay of 'grotesque' remarks in speech," 7/18/98)

A douche! A Santorum-filled douche!

(A note: I have nothing against vaginas, nor rectums, nor lavage. Nor vaginal and rectal lavage, if that's your cup of saline-solution tea! DoucheWatch is not intended to reinforce normative notions of sexuality and gender--the illusion of virginal feminine cleanliness, or the presumptive undesirability of anal penetration, for example. Think not of an doe-eyed, befrocked Massengill model astride a white horse; think instead of an unpleasantly chill drip between the legs. DoucheWatch surges forward.)

Coming soon--Grandmaster Douche Phil Burress!

Day in court

(This isn’t prosody, people. Every riddle gets overly ridiculous, eventually.)

I spent the morning in court, with people who had been caught
travestying justice: urinating on lampposts,
owning uninsured commercial vehicles, riding bikes.
Lothario with the lidded eyes had been caught “exiting at an un-
designated exit.” I was summoned for political purposes, and
yes, unhappy about it all.
On the bench: a doddering magistrate, with six rubber stamps.
Under my feet: a rain-soaked umbrella.
In the courtroom: four court police officers, six la-
wyers (include a guy who was so recently graduated you c-
ould still see the linear impression on his finger where his grad-


uation ring had recently lodged), a guy in a white shirt who kept
lying supine on his bench. The police officers did not
dig this man. We were thirty petty criminals. The
woman next to me had been arrested for selling
Rastafarian clothing on the street. She came wrapped in tr-
icolor ascots and a tan skirt with a matching
tan shirt with marijuana leaf patches on the sl-
eeves.
Alert and exhausted, I waited for my law-talking guy. He sat
next to me. He knew one of the police officers and gave him
a friendly nod. I waited patiently and offered my most


contrite expression, to no one at all, because no one cared o-
r looked. Captives love their captors: I fell in love with my judge,
ornery guy. I fell out of love when a headline brought
sense back into me: “LASER LOSER.” After an hour,
the judge called my name. Tentatively, I approached. My law-talk-
ing guy made a good case for me. But the judge
cupped his rubber stamp in hand before I even approached.
February, he said, come back to court.
Overall, a shitty time. It is terrifying to be at the whim of a c-
riminal justice system that I don’t understand and I can onl-
y feel grateful for not being in a position where I encounter this
often. Does this pay the bills for the judges and cops and infrastr-
ucture? I wonder how much revenue a cop brings the city, a-
rbitrarily enforcing the lesser laws of the city so.
Apprehending the unlucky can stimulate the economy. I’m
jaded. Writing this makes me feel crazy. Thanks a lot, Raj.

New Year's resolutions

When I first got back to Palo Alto, I was bored so witless that I started a blog. And since that didn't fill all the empty hours between masturbation and eating, I started reading all the old letters I'd saved. They dated back to 1989 (a Whitmanesque poem entitled "Blue is for Blueberry" by one Ruth W.) and continued uninterrupted to the present (from proto-lesbian platonic love letters to/from my friends in the pre-Laurel Holloman stage of my life, to a letter written on Vermont white birchbark from Laura).

All this epistolary crap made me pine for all the love that I used to have in my life. I'm nostalgic like that. In particular, I reread a postcard from an ex-girlfriend, sent in March 1997, two months after the subitaneous decline in our heart-stopping first love. She wrote, "I still love you, and I value and respect your friendship."

I got all teary, wrote emails to people I used to know demanding we meet again, and then made abstract and sprawling New Year's resolutions to: 1) be a better person, 2) keep in better touch, 3) live more in the moment and quit pining about the past, 4) pine more about the past, 5) be more patient, and 6) be less monstrously bitchy.

Then I met up with this ex-girlfriend, and it was pleasant but abundantly clear that we had grown up into different lives. She worked at Yahoo! and wore flesh-colored shoes that came to a point three inches past the end of her toes. I am paid in peanuts by a queer non-profit and I recently thought I had been gifted with scabies and lice in the same week. We got along, and I was happy to re-see someone I liked, but 1997 it was not.

A week later, I met up with the ex-girlfriend of this ex-girlfriend, who once threatened to become my girlfriend. I hadn't seen her in almost four years, and was expecting another dull ride on the unmoored nostalgia boat. I was surprised! I expected rusted parts, but found working machinery! No pointy shoes! We see-sawed on a piece of driftwood near the Golden Gate bridge and had a lovely talk! A peach!

She later wrote to say that I didn't have the wherewithall to articulate:

I'm finding it rarer and rarer in my old age to revisit people from the dregs of history and not feel like it's some sort of scripted gesture of goodwill and misguided faith in continuity. Which is to say that seeing you was just the same as seeing a real friend, or even the same as meeting someone new and being delighted at connection you don't necessarily have with everyone, and not just an attempt to hold on to former pieces of myself.

So I rewrote my New Year's resolutions. I'm going to stop reading old letters and twisting my head into nostalgia braids. Finding real connections with old friends is great, but pining for 1988 has serious shortcomings.

Another friend recently told me that her resolution is to stop eating when she feels full. Awesome!