Chirrup! Chirrup! Chirree! Chirrup!

This may make me sound like even more of a sociopath than usual, but I HATE waking up to the sound of birds singing.  Granted, there is something special about being woken up early this time of year, as sometimes you wake up, see its light out, decide your alarm was about to go off anyway, and stomp out to the kitchen to realize it’s 5:58.  Which is great, because you NEEDED to get up at 5:58 to get a jump on your work for the rest of the week, but also are well aware of your propensity of setting alarms for extremely ambitious hours, then just switching them off again and passing out again while your poor bedmate lies awake, clenching his teeth in despair.  So, on that count, the birds were good to me today.  However, I do find birdsong, when it’s before 6 in the morning and the windows are open and the birds are three feet away, INCREDIBLY IRRITATING.  And I swear I can’t be the only one.  Listening to them talk to each other is like listening to a group of seventh-graders shriek about press-on nails.  It’s like listening to the Gap Girls.  ”Did you cinch it?” the white-throated sparrow asks, and I’m up.

A final bird question: do you think that a mass organizing uprising of crows or squirrels would be scarier?  For the record, I think squirrels: they’re incredibly agile when motivated, and they have those tiny creepy little hands.  But I also don’t take it lightly that crows can use tools and recognize faces.  One thing’s for sure: if the crows and squirrels band together, we’re fucked.

These boots were made for et cetera

I am not an exerciser.  There was a brief, halcyon period about two years ago when I suddenly and mysteriously became obsessed with a workout tape series called THE FIRM which combined aerobics with weightlifting with G-list celebrities (Sandahl Bergman of Conan!  LaReine Chabut of that one episode of Quantum Leap where Sam leaps into a woman!  Janet Jones Gretzky, wife of Wayne!), but then my friend Amelia came to town and I got drunk for a week and then sick and then I sort of stopped caring, BUT.  Since then I have come to believe I am CAPABLE of being healthy, if only I can find a road to health that doesn’t make me crazy.

To wit: I am incredibly clumsy and uncoordinated and have the lung capacity of Burgess Meredith.  Running is out of the question and I got whacked in the face too much during team sports to want to walk down that particular plank again.  I went once to my friend Emily’s Zumba class, and I got a great sweat and that familiar and wonderful “I’m going to die any minute now!” feeling that means you’re getting a really good workout, but I was so uncoordinated I nearly fell into about six people while trying to do the steps.

Which brings us to walking.  According to my gynecologist–and she should know, right?–walking is one of the great underrated forms of exercise.  My favorite method is as follows:

1. Pick a far off destination.  (That weird costume shop!  That coffee place with the crumpets!  That park with the really mean ducks!)
2. Take a smartphone if you get lost easily (like me), some form of currency, a book, and a pen.
3. Walk until you get really tired.  Sit.  Read.  When you feel better get up and walk again.
4. Repeat until your legs are tan and muscular and you know everything you ever wondered about Zelda Fitzgerald.

Even the most bookish and exercise-shy among you will love it.  And, if that doesn’t convince you, imagine the look on your biking friends’/frenemies’ faces when you say “oh, you ride a bike?  Yeah…cool.  I just…don’t like to put all that machinery between myself and nature.  But, whatever.  Diff’rent strokes!”

My Debi Thomas Metaphor

In the mid-eighties, it was hard to find an American skater more exciting than Debi Thomas.  She was not only the first black figure skater to come to any kind of prominence, but she was also an athletic dynamo, a tireless jumper whose speed and stamina paved the way for female skaters like Agnes Zawadski, Mao Asada, and Sarah Hughes.  She was also the best chance America had at beating Katarine Witt in the 1988 Olympics.

That Debi divided her time between racking up national and international medals and studying premed at Stanford just made her career all the more impressive, but when, in 1987, her performances began to suffer, she took some time off in anticipation of the Olympic year, moved to Colorado to train at the Broadmoor Skating Club, and became a part-time student at UC Boulder.

Debi Thomas has become one of my inspirations in the last few months, and though I feel somewhat ridiculous saying that–she’s an Olympic medalist and I’m a grad student–I do think we can all learn something from her tactic of stepping back, taking a deep breath, and figuring out what mattered to her most.  Often in the last year I’ve felt that I’ve taken on too much, and that by trying to do everything I do some things–maybe a lot of things–lousily, or at least not as well as I could.  For me, thinking about what I plan to do this summer has been about stepping back and thinking about what really matters, and I came to realize that it was writing–both my theses and whatever else I wanted to work on.  Other things, too, but mostly that.  Taking some time to tear across the ice, try some new things, and of course fall–but in a place where I can feel no one is watching.  To that end the above video–of Debi’s electric performance in the 1988 Olympics–is something I watch whenever I need to remind myself that it’s okay to not do everything all at once.

A head for business and a bod for sin

Every week warrants a new obsession, and this week it’s Boucher’s 1750 portrait of Madame de Pompadour.  Why?  For a start, Madame herself is hard to top as a Great Baller of History, and secondly one aspect of this painting relates closely to my thesis in a way that makes the act of actually writing my thesis over the next few months feel just a little less daunting.

But to back up a little and talk about that: my original plan for my MA thesis–which is actually, in PSU parlance, called a “qualifying essay,” and length-wise is more like a Thesis-lite–was to write about the evolution of the modern romance novel from the Medieval heraldic narrative through Richardson and ultimately to Nora Roberts and her ilk.  However, that goal did not fit within the length parameters of thesis-lite (predictably, this is more or less the story of my life), and so I scaled it down to the connection between the rise of the modern novel with a focus on Richardson’s Pamela and Bronte’s Jane Eyre (since they essentially tell the same story yet are so utterly different) and the general consensus, stemming from that time period and reaching into the present, on how women read.  And how do we read, after all?

In general, I think, ideas re: what women do when they read tend to skew the activity as somewhat self-indulgent.  A woman reads to enfold herself into a narrative, to escape, to become the heroine and live through her.  Women are often described (and often describe themselves) as curling up with a book.  Men, almost never.  Men read to conquer, to pillage, to strip the meaning from a text and carry it with them through life.  Men absorb books while books absorb women.  Obviously there are exceptions to this–there are exceptions to everything–but for the most part, I’ve found, the descriptive divide holds true.  Why?

Let’s take a second look at Madame.  Pompadour was and is regarded as a major influence on Louis XV, as well as a patron of contemporary intellectuals and artists.  She had, in the words of Working Girl’s Tess McGill, “A head for business and a bod for sin,” and Boucher’s portrait of her conveys this well.  But look again at the book she’s holding, obviously a reference to her intelligence and interest in literature, and look at how she’s holding it.

The book itself–especially when held against the massiveness of her gown–looks miniscule, the writing in it cramped and illegible, but then again the words don’t really matter.  She is holding it loosely, the pages curling up around her thumb, and even if we wish to look at the book our gaze is draw up her delicate wrist, to her pearl bracelet–perhaps a gift from the king she served–then up to the tide of lace that envelops her forearm, and the pink bows of her corset.  The book itself is nearly subsumed by the richness of her clothing, and perhaps this in itself relates to the above theory of reading and gender: a normal woman is absorbed by a book, but Pompadour’s endless clothing, a sign of her power and wealth, serve to overwhelm the book despite the fact that a female is inside them.

Pompadour is of course not actually reading, but looking wistfully–hopefully?  Thoughtfully?–to the left, at something the viewer cannot see.  The book looks as if it could from any moment slip out of her grasp and come to rest on the floor alongside the roses that lie crossed before her feet.  Most meaningful of all though, I think, is where the book rests in her lap–at precisely the place where her legs would be crossed, if we could see them, and used either to draw attention to or to shield–or to do both to–that small opening that had guaranteed her a living where her great mind simply could not.

None of this really answers my question, and I don’t quite know what I think about it yet.  But I don’t think I can start my thesis without a further exploration of Boucher’s portrait, and  as soon as I figure out just what I think you can bet that you’ll hear about it here.

Search terms that you, my beloved internet, have used to find this blog:

addiction movie edia falco
Who is this “edia” Falco?  is she related to Edie?  Was she constantly pissed off when The Sopranos was on the air?  Don’t go!  I have so many questions!

tonya harding barefoot
No one has seen Tonya barefoot and lived to tell about it.

me and pinky do the jane fonda
I assume you were looking for the Mickey Avalon song and mistakenly remembered that it was sung my Maurice LaMarche.  If only.

jumping movie sardines
Does anyone know what this movie is?  Because I want to see it now, too.

how read naked lunch
How read anything, really.

why sarah marshall
I have no idea.

josée chouinard butt

You’re welcome.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Here in Portland we’ve had a string of gorgeous days–hot without being overpowering, bright, sunny, summery days.  And it’s been wonderful, but it’s also been, for me, kind of a pain in the ass.  Here’s the thing: I’m an Oregonian at heart.  I always have been and I always will be.  Rain doesn’t bother me–I can pretty much switch it off, the same way you can ignore the white noise from a fan when you’re trying to sleep.  Yesterday morning I had an appointment to get my hair done and ended up missing my bus and having to walk from NE Halsey to Alberta, in the process getting pretty soaked (the rain that’s come to roost had, by then, set in), and also sweaty and gross because it was alarmingly humid.

Now, why is it that I really don’t mind that feeling (or even the fact that my hairdresser had to blow-dry me before the appointment and then give me a glass of water and a couple of minutes to quit panting) but I’m completely grossed out by the bodily sensations of a traditional summer?  Sunburns.  Freckles.  That weird sense of tiredness you get after being in the heat all day.  And, worst of all–at least for me, in all my neurotic glory–the feeling of being compelled to do things outside or at least be outside because who knows how long the sun is going to last!

Another question this brings up, of course, is why I’m perfectly happy to walk two miles in the rain for no good reason but feel bullied as soon as the perfect weather shows up?  And not bullied by people who want to get out and do things in the weather, but by the weather itself.  The same principle may hold true for my TV-watching hangups–I refuse to watch Mad Men because I’m tired of hearing people gush about it, but as soon as Girls started airing and people started writing long, introspective blog posts about how they just weren’t sure how they felt, I decided I would LOVE IT.

Okay, that makes me sound like an even more annoying contrarian than I actually am–but you get the idea.  At any rate, it’s rainy today–gray, drizzly, bleak, overcast.  I love it.  I’m sitting on the couch in pajama pants about to get caught up on writing and course work and travel plans, because finally, after a week of beautiful weather, I am ALLOWED TO BE INSIDE.  And it is glorious.

Eating the Cockroach

Last night I had a dream.  (And, side note, I hope I’m not the only person who immediately hears “I was in a desert called…CYBERLAND” after typing those words.)  I was eating a piece of cheese and felt something crunchy and very uncheeselike, and looked at the cheese only to find half a cockroach perched on it.  You know the old joke about a worm in your apple.  I spit the cheese and the cockroach out, though I remember thinking it didn’t taste that bad, kind of like burned, overbuttered toast.

I had a lot of weird dreams last night, partly because I did eat a lot of cheese right before bed, which may not have been the best idea.  But I think this one was particularly meaningful.  To wit:

Last night about an hour before I went to sleep I got in a fight with my mom.  It was about my upcoming trip to Portugal for the Gothic conference, and how I wanted to go by myself and then spend another week or so traveling around Europe.  (I’ve never been but I hear it’s all right, as continents go.)  We had talked casually about going together, but it seemed to me that the only way to grow from the experience–and, more simply, to do what I wanted–was to go alone.

My mother was aghast.  Not at the fact that I wanted to go by myself but at the fact that I didn’t want to go with someone–my boyfriend, my friend Emily, maybe just an acquaintance, but someone.  I couldn’t go alone!  Why?  Because it would be lonely and alienating and also VERY VERY DANGEROUS.  I did my best to explain that the fifteen-block trek I take home from the MAX most nights at about 10 PM is probably VERIER DANGEROUS than visiting extremely populous areas of Western Europe, especially as a non risk-taker who’s fonder of cathedrals than nightclubs, but she was adamant.

Now, this puts me in a sticky situation.  On the one had I know she won’t rescind funding–and her generous funding is making this, the grad school costs not covered by my stipend, and the J. Crew sweater I’m currently wearing possible.  I could survive without her help, but I would live with six other people and eat a lot of crackers.  (I eat a lot of crackers now, but that’s beside the point.)  We’ve always been close and always agreed on a lot, and I know that deep down she will acquiesce to this because she wants me to grow as a person and somewhere deep down she knows she’s being a little reactionary.  This will work itself out in a few days during which I feel sort of guilty but mainly stoically determined  to go to Prague and see the bone church, because Jesus Christmas you only live once.

But what the argument got me thinking about was this: for a split second I was willing to go along, to say “you’re right, it’s dangerous, I should just go to Portugal with you and then scurry back to the states.”  I want to adventure out into the unknown but I’m also afraid–not of danger but of loneliness and new things and francophones making fun of my accent.  I am by default a homebody: I like my crummy couch and my crummy weekly rituals and knowing where to find not-so-crummy coffee in the town I know so well.  There is part of me that wants to let her take charge of my life and do the easy, simple thing.  This is also the part of me that’s too easily infected by her anxieties.  My mother is an anxious woman, and I am an anxious person, and I am particularly susceptible to her anxieties even if I had never thought of them on my own.  This has to end somewhere, and I think now is the time.

Which brings us around to the cockroach, and my own halfassed dream interpretation.  When my family lived in Hawaii–when I was between 8 and 13 years old–my mother hated cockroaches more than anything.  I had never really had a problem with bugs or worms or creepy crawlies before–I was, and am, a gross human being, and a gorehound to boot–but seeing her shriek every time she opened a drawer and found a roach, seeing her flip out trying to kill them, seeing her go to insane measures trying to avoid interacting with them at all, I learned to hate and fear them to.  To this day I have to sleep with my feet under the covers (if I don’t cockroaches will crawl all over them) and to eat with a light on because I’m afraid of finding cockroaches in my food.  (Blessedly this neurosis does not interfere with my experiences at the movies.)

Now for the cheese.  This week I won in two categories at the PSU English Department’s Kellogg Awards.  I had a good year of writing and submitted everything I had that vaguely fit a category and was lucky to boot, and because of that I have enough prize money to buy a one-way ticket to Frankfurt.  It’s not much, but it’ll help get me closer to the bone church.  Despite this wonderful honor, my favorite part of the Kellogg Awards has always been the big plate of cheese cubes they set out at the reception.  I love them so much.  I station myself by the buffet and eat cheese on toothpicks and awkwardly say hello to everyone who walks by.  And when they started dismantling the reception and gave everyone to-go boxes the other night, I filled mine with cheese, which I was eating last night and dreamed about later on.

So, here’s my halfassed analysis: by eating the cheese I’m enjoying the fruits of my labors, i.e. the prize money that allows me to go to Europe.  The roach I inadvertently eat along with the cheese represents my mother’s anxieties, this time about Europe in particular.  But in my dream, the roach didn’t taste that bad.  And the moral is: fuck anxieties.  Embrace the cheese.  Live your life and see the bone church, and send your mother a nice bone church postcard before you leave.