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Sociopathetic: a new word coined by Special Ed today. It refers to people who are totally self-delusional, but in a boring way, not in an interestingly psychotic way.
Sometimes I hate being a part of groups that have me as a member. If I have to undergo the virtual experience of having one more internet persona lean in real serious-like and intone "Go see Fahrenheit 9/11. Go see this movie now" I might just throw up my hands, move into a center hall Colonial in the suburbs and start clipping my "mobile" to my belt.
It's the tone that gets me. Like the movie is our Moses, leading us to the Promised Land. Like it's the long-hidden Holy Grail of Political Truth, imparting a self-righteous glow upon all those who BELIEVED against all odds that, gasp!, the Bush Administration is playing a dangerous game.
Do people REALLY think this movie is going to change anything? If you've been paying attention even half-assedly the past 2 years, nothing Moore is saying/showing is news. I'm well-acquainted with the outrages of this Administration and I am outraged at these outrages. But people who are not outraged by this Administration are not going to become so because of this movie-- a movie that might be better understood as the Cliff's Notes to Liberal Outrage, the Norton Anthology of I Thought There Was Something Fishy About this War, a pre-packaged political Hungry Man dinner for twenty-somethings too limp-minded to read a damn book or think for themselves.
See the movie by all means. Forgive me, however, if I remain slightly worried that a demographic so unconcerned by its own predictability, its Sesame Street politics and Pied Piper susceptibility, so easily believes that change will flow from its collective decision to open a Paul Frank wallet and shell out money to sit mute in a dark theater, nodding and agreeing, nodding and agreeing.
My iBook is acting like such a total twat. What kind of two-year-old computer has a hard drive that makes scary mechanical-sounding noises before freezing every 20 to 30 minutes? Remember when you were little and you could spend hours flicking that rubber-tipped springy door stopper back and forth because it made that awesome Doyoinnnngggg!!! noise? Apparently the little man in my computer, who used to spend all his time running fleet-footedly around making sure all my magical computing programs worked, has decided to regress and is currently spending all his time crouched down by the wall poking at that thing with his forefinger. Of course, this problem is monumentally compounded by the fact that I live in a town where the only Mac people have heard of is the Big kind (rim shot, please).
So since having my computer fixed would necessitate using the post office-- and I just don't "do" post offices, in case you hadn't heard-- to mail it to large warehouse staffed by geeks with gold-capped teeth*, I have decided to pretty much halt my life while I pull out my hair over it all. I am scheduled to deliver an as-yet-unwritten paper on Emily Dickinson and the visual in less than a month but I just can't bring myself to start writing something that most likely will get lost when my computer crashes. I can however, bring myself to write a bunch of nonsense for a website, because who cares if this turd gets flushed down information superpoopway. I'm thinking if I can't get the paper written in time, I might just try to improvise a rap about Emmy D. on the spot. I'm thinking Donald Pease might totally be into that.
This is all my just desserts, though, because a few weeks ago, after the Apple guys suggested I mail the unwarrantied piece of crud in for a tune-up, I worked a little mojo (did I seriously just write the word "mojo"?) and got it to at least run for an hour at a time. After this feat, I took to walking around the house declaring myself The Computer Whisperer. And so you see, I deserve all this and more.
*(a portion of the million dollars you pay to have your shitty computer fixed goes to providing our techs with the latest in bling)
Even though I'm feeling so vile right now, I can still say hurrah for this upcoming tidbit of wonderfulness. I so totally heart Nicholson Baker sometimes I can barely see straight. If I didn't hate postmodern hijinks so much, I'd write a book about my obsession with Nicholson Baker and title it Ewe and Mee. This is the kind of politics we need-- assassination fantasies! Where have all our imaginations gone?!
Yesterday I did something scary. I started looking at apartment listings in the Chicago Reader. Our move down to Louisiana wasn't exactly smooth. And that whole "movers showing up without our furniture" incident doesn't even include the July weekend I spent sweating and driving aimlessly around Monroe, trying to get used to the stench from the paper mill and holing up in the Super 8 out on I-20 (although: MICROFRIDGE!) all while Ed, in Las Vegas, celebrated his impending transition from boyfriend to husband by NOT CALLING ME BACK because there were too many titties all up in his grill. Because his 28 years of not-being-a-husband had been marked by nothing so much as SO MANY BIG TITS IN HIS FACE that he couldn't make a phone call. Unless that phone call sounded like this: "Uummph. Ermm, -ello? Hi sweet-mmmmphffff."
To get back at him, I was considering making Ed do all the apartment searching this time. Until I realized that Ed would totally be ok with the oak cabinets and oak trim all those landlords from Skokie put in their rehabbed three-flats. And if I've learned anything in this life, it's that oak is just mediocrity in wood form.
So it looks like I'm on the hunt again.
The problem is, I don't even know where to look. Chicago is a huge city, its neighborhoods-- especially the ones we young palefaces favor-- are like tar pits, heaving and seizing the landscape around them. I'm pretty sure the ghettotastic street I used to live on has been successfully de-Hispanicized by this time. Lest you think I'm one of those "I am so punk rock, and by punk rock, I mean I like to live relatively close to a population of brown people while wearing Marc Jacobs and parking my Vespa safely" let me reassure that my remarks have less to do with a willful ignorance of my own silly demographic or an unseemly desire to "slum" and more to do with a serious lack of cash reserves in the Drunken Bee household. I don't know if we can AFFORD to move back to where we were. Ed would say we reap what we sow, and he would be right, if he meant to indicate that I've spent all year sowing the seeds of cute high heels.
So if you live in Chicago, holla at me if you know of a nice, cheap apartment in the East Village/Ukrainian Village area available in August or September.
In the meantime, if you are that frustrated University of Chicago English major stuck writing apartment listings for the North Clybourn Group, PLEASE STOP THE MADNESS RIGHT NOW. "It's like ice cream. Cool and cozy at the same time"? "Funky Vintage Love. Charm, spice and everything nice"? "Rock Star Status. Kickass Rehab, beat that sucker!"? These listings are making me lose my mind because a) they make no sense but b) they make me think things like "Hmmmm, I ∗do∗ want rock star status. I wonder if Ed does?" and THAT IS NOT A COOL THING TO MAKE CROSS MY MIND. We're vulnerable here, please stop toying with our fragile self-conception.
RE: CNN Story "Man Surprised Rampage Plan Wasn't Discovered"
Poochy424: was he just calmly eating his breakfast until the appointed "rampage" time?
festus80: did he like set his alarm to "rampage" that morning?
I really have been having monstrously frightening computer troubles since I got back to Louisiana on Monday, and so this thing here, this computer-based exercise, has fallen by the wayside a bit. But also, I have to confess, I'm sort of at a loss of what to write. "Dear Diary, My trip was so fun?" "Dear Thing that I Obviously Often Strike a Variety of Disingenuous Poses In, This is what I did on my trip, aren't I so cool?"
The problem is the trip does not coalesce into a nice narrative. There is no one story or happening that I can deploy as a preciously fitting metaphor for the journey, no possibility for synecdoche, nothing pithy or worthy of a knowing and pleasant chuckle.
I mean where would I even begin? The impromptu neck-sucking session that broke out in the middle of the dance floor at the bachelorette party (names withheld to protect the slutty and latently lesbian)? The major yelling I did at Ed when he disappeared for about 10 hours after the bachelor party he attended? The invitation to be on a panel at a conference on Emily Dickinson in Hawaii? How I successfully repaired a broken wedge sandal using bandaids, in one of my more Section 8 moments?
Meeting a number of lovely new girlfriends of good male friends? Getting completely weepy and romantic at Greg and Colleen's gorgeously preppy wedding? Jockeying for position with my best jockeying-for-position partner, Lauren? Nearly absconding from the Art Deco tennis club where the reception was held with a number of pieces of furniture? Morphing from a classy lady in heels to an ass slapping hobag on the dance floor in the space of two hours?
How after the party there was the hotel lobby and after the lobby there was the after party? And how round about four we had to clear the lobby, and we went up to the room and......well actually we all crammed into one room ducking the launched missile that was a drunken, reeling Special Ed, and then I decided to berate poor Mike into doing the Presidential Fitness Sit and Reach test, and when he finally acquiesced to the loud drunk in a disheveled dress, sat down on the floor and sat and reached, I declared the whole exercise to be "boring" and wondered why he was doing what I said anyway. (But really, can I be blamed? You should see this man's hamstring flexibility when he's on stage doing high kicks. I rightly imagined his sit and reach might very well be historic.)
Perhaps a good story from this weekend would be how Ed and I drove 14 hours, hung over, in an unairconditioned car, through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana? And how at one point, in Mississippi, the road stretched out before us, soupy and glittering at the horizon, Jon Krakauer droned on about Eiger Dreams and individuals pushing themselves to the limit at 27,000 feet, and I really thought that it might be the end for me, that I might really expire at the wheel, dripping with sweat, greasy-headed and white trash as I could be. And I thought, well shit, I'm not even wearing clean underpants.
