Withholding The Rest So I Can Be For You What You Wanna See

I have an insatiable hunger for pie this week. But instead of spending too much time whining about it, I have the situation in hand and will be devoting the majority of my Friday night to repieifying the county. I am particularly suited for this monumental task, since I make even better apple pie than my grandmother. Shhhh, she can never know. I don’t know if she would cry or kill me if she found out she had been knocked off the pedestal. She’s old now. She doesn’t need that kind of information to burden her twilight years.

I’m starting to talk like a coward. Or, worse, like I’m too nice. Either way I’m giving the impression that I care too much about what other people think to say what I really want to. It’s been a growing problem that has rapidly escalated in the last nine months.

I’m not liking the trend, so I feel the need to justify it in high-falutin language that makes me look like I’m really the next step in our ethical evolution by doin what I do. So, here goes. The reasons for my appearance of cowardice fall into two camps:

1.    I can’t control the crazy people I say things to--no amount of force can make them accurately interpret/portray what I say. Essentially, when I’m talking to someone I know to be overly dramatic, self-involved, a bibbling idiot, or just plain hostile, I’ve learned over time to just save myself the trouble of carefully crafting anything of note to say to those kind of people.

Because no matter how brilliant my syntax, and let's not cut corners, I bandy words with the best of them, I have learned from painful experience that you can never underestimate a person’s ability to turn everything and anything into a sentence that makes them look wonderful/like the victim and myself into a horrible, dark-slime-of-the-earth-like-in-Fern-Gully type. I’m not even talking about how they would twist my words when relaying a conversation to others, I’m saying they have some sort of horribly constructed camera obscura right in their frontal lobes that turns something like “Hey, roommate, I really like this guy, could you do me a solid and give us some alone chat time?” upside down and inside out until they’re narrating real-time “And then Mary head-butted me, called me fat, and said the next time I opened my mouth around her boy—like she owns him, gosh, she’s so possessive—she would key my car.”

Don’t even get me started on how much worse it gets if I ever allowed myself to talk politics with anyone my age—yes, I know, I’m a Poli Sci major--I must talk politics at least occasionally. That line of reason is entirely false. If you think I actually volunteer to discuss anything with those nimrods in my program, you’re crazier than me. I think it’s my constitutional right to refuse to give my peers fodder that they can flip into “And then Mary confided in me that she is a racist profit-driven oil whoremonger who would prefer nuking Beijing to discussing gun control.”

So essentially, in these scenarios I’m not a coward, and I don’t care what they think necessarily, I’m just tired. Just plain tuckered out, drained of any motivation to keep on hitting my head against the wall of another’s determination to misunderstand me.

You could easily turn this into symptons of a myriad of trust issues that I seem to be avoiding, but I’ve been burned often enough that I’m going to stick to my guns on my cautious, guarded manner. Also,

2. I don’t need to be forthright at the cost of making civilians a part of the collateral damage. Unfortunately for my rep as someone who cares more about telling it like it is than her own personal popularity/safety, the harsh truth is that about 90% of those people that I want to give a verbal dressing-down have either a blood or friend connection with someone who I actually like. And too often in the past I have disregarded that fact, with the inevitable result that the shared third party gets dragged into it and either has to choose between us, mediate, or sit there uncomfortably and try to juggle us.

Unkind. Unfair. I can sacrifice the natural high I get when sticking it to someone if it means at the end of the day I still have the highest stats of people who still like me and consider my friendship to be low maintenance.

So, in this case, I do care what someone thinks or feels. It’s just the man behind curtain number three, not the one I want to chew out for choosing to make a break-up or mourning period more about them than the people actually involved.

It’s a crippling new part of my character that I’ve come to a point where I can no longer accept innocent bystanders as acceptable losses in my expeditions to take the crazies down a notch or two. My mission has been severely compromised by this change in my mandate. But there are enough people in the world right now who are with full legitimacy still pissed at me, so it had to stop some time.

I’d like to think that all of this prudence comes from a place of growing maturity, but let’s not get carried away here. It has a lot less to do with how wise and awesome I am and lies mostly in the blame column of how much other people suck. But at least you can come away feeling warm and fuzzy inside if I verbally berate you—it means I think you’re not one of the crazies. If I seem typically polite in a manner reminiscent of Stepford, you better watch yourself.

Someday I'm going to be granted a wish from a genie and I'll have a voice like Mayer Hawthorne or the Temptations for a day so that I can sing the soulful blues in the manner a little pasty-faced chick like me will never be able to do unaided.

I Got Cutter Spray and A Healthy Sense of Worth

Ok, we have a lot to fix in this world and there isn’t much time, so let’s skip the pleasantries this time (if "Four Minutes to Save the World" just popped into your head, you are not alone).

Item 1: How are the loyal-inspirational-tear-jerker-animal movies still being made? You know, the ones about the dog who waits at the train every day expecting his master even years after his demise and the whole town rallies and talks about how this dog is their hero.

Ok, there was a little breakthrough in psychology called classical conditioning where Pavlov used a dog to show that through repetition, a significant stimulus will evoke an innate, often reflexive, response. Essentially, the dog doesn't know what it's doing.

And don't get all surprised or defensive about that statement. It's a dog, for crying out loud. I find the idea that people call an animal that licks its own genitalia their hero a little offensive.

Anthropomorphism is all grand and dandy, heaven knows I think my stuffed animals from my childhood are still pissed at me for leaving them in Sandy, but when push comes to shove Lassie can save Timmy from the well as many times as she wants but if she gets rabies or even just humps my leg I'll be the first one to grab the rifle.

Go get real heroes, people. There have been some pretty awesome individual humans out there. Maybe you like to make dogs your heroes because then you don't have to worry about unpleasantness surfacing, like your favorite world leader miraculously turning out to be a flawed person who's a tool to the serving staff. Well, it may be safer, but I'm still going to judge you for giving all glory laud and honor to something that regards plastic bags caught in the wind as real threats.

Without ruining the validity of my argument, I want to make clear that none of this criticism applies to White Fang. He's the balls.

Item 2: What is with the proclivity dough boys have of growing out their hair so that it hangs around their shoulders in an unkempt tangle? To clarify, dough boys is a term I've assigned in my head to men who have thin flyaway flaxen hair, are over six feet, three hundred pounds, and have the unfortunate pasty and splotchy coloring of a Celt.

You're already fighting battles on three different fronts, boys, don't compound your problem by emphasizing the unfortunate color and texture of your hair by letting it run wild. You don't look bad ass. You look sloppy and potential molester-status.

I know I frequently appear as the champion of nonconformity and doing-what-expresses-you-with-your-appearance-without-a-reference-to-others, but I'm truly just at a loss to see what your endgame is with this act. If I can't tell what your statement is, that means it was a complete communication failure and you should try something else now.

And yes I recognize that I am quite the coward, shouting at you from the anonymity of my screen since you could literally squish me into a little squawking puddle with your thumb. But how about we redirect your energies and not do that--instead, let's cut your hair.

Item 3: The ending scene of The Wizard of Oz is the biggest cop-out in cinematic history. I make it that strong of a declarative statement because this film, unlike most movies who back away from their potential, gets assigned Classic Movie status. And it is a classic. I still expect apple trees to start throwing their fruit at me, and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is truly the song of the century. It's a fabulous piece of storytelling. With an ending that honestly wouldn't make sense to anyone at all if we hadn't grown up with it.

What is up with the answer that Dorothy gives Glinda about what she's learned on her adventure? "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!" What kind of un-American jibber jabber is that? Is she saying that we're not supposed to dream big, reach far, achieve things that no one has even imagined yet? What is this, some kind of police state where the region you were born in is doomed to be the only place you're permitted to explore? We already have enough people in the world who are living that way without pushing it further through brainwashing Hollywood techniques.

And that really wasn't what the movie was about up to that point! It was about finding inner strength to overcome huge obstacles, believing that even if you aren't fully equipped for the journey (i.e. no brain) you'll still be able to find the gumption to push through if you have a goal worth fighting for or if there's a real evil out there that must be thwarted.

When you think about it, not only is that ending a betrayal of L. Frank Baum's vision (don't even get me started about how they have it all be a concussed dream. So not how it went down in the book.), it's actually a demonstration of the protectionist values that Americans were embracing in the 1930s--don't worry about the bad that's going down out there in the big scary world, stick to your backyard, you'll learn to like that everything is the color taupe.

It comes down to this: how can you take the quote at the end and rationalize it with "If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?" I refuse to cancel out the song in favor of the conclusion.

And yes, if you must know, I am searching for ways to fix the world because I have a final in two hours I don't want to study for and I would rather tackle impossibly large problems than attempt to study and fail. But who are you, the homework police? Ohhh, burn, I just went fourth grade on your ass.

On a much happier note, when I was actually successfully studying last night for this final I flipped open a library to the exact page of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #35 (seen above). I have been mildly obsessed with this piece since my Introduction to Art History class five years ago. And somehow I had forgotten the name. And now me and good ol' #35 are reunited again. God bless finals. Ish.

Livin' Just To Find Emotion

Recent news: I had a near death experience. My head almost snapped off my neck completely. This was largely due to a week of where I attended four different concerts up in Salt Lake. Epic, but it had a price.By the time I was at Passion Pit (concert number 3), I was forced to sedately step-and-snap to the music, since my head was already at such a precarious state that I was a perpetual bobble head. Oh wow that just created an awesome tongue twister in my head: “At Passion Pit my pate was perpetually placed precariously.”


But in reaction to this brush with my own mortality, I feel compelled to confess to something. It’s a shameful secret, something that has been gnawing at me for some time. But even now as I’m on the brink of telling all, the Radiohead I’m listening to right now seems to be shouting me (or angstily scolding, as is more their style) into silence. But if being close to becoming a dashboard novelty has taught me anything, it’s that above all you must be true to yourself! Well, that and if you’re going to head bang, do it more with your entire back folding forward, but that is not the point we are going to focus on right now. The truth will out me one day, might as well do it myself:

I enjoy the music group known as Train. I thought it was a fluke, that “Meet Virginia” was a one-time delightful bouquet of clever nonsense lyrics and a swingin tempo, but I’m afraid it’s much worse than that. The percentage of their tunes I find myself gleefully bopping along to unfortunately confirms that Train and I have a game show love connection we can’t deny. I know, I am way too cool-hipster-obscure-groove-reverence-for-the-classics to be this person!

And yet it remains. I like Train. Which if you look at it a certain way, it’s a pretty cool demonstration of the wonders of music—how personal an individual reaction can be, and how unpredictable what chord progression is going to sing in your bones and what epic classics are going to leave you saying “meh.”

Yes, I did just try that hard to make my fanness of Train cool and philosophically significant. And if you’re judging me or considering cutting me off as an acquaintance because of this revelation, consider two things: A) ever since I informed Pandora of my Train love it has clogged my station with all sorts of sentimental twangy crap. I believe that is sufficient penance, and B) that’s insanely lame of you to not be ok with what other people like.

Other confessions that have been crawling stealthily out of the suppressed area they were supposed to stay in: I appreciate Led Zeppelin but never listen to it for pleasure, I think Zac Effron was hot in Hairspray, I’m going to see “The Jonses” even though it looks pretty crazy lame solely because it has David Duchovny in it, I still know every word and musical cue for Alanis’ album “Jagged Little Pill,” I’ve read a Nicholas Sparks book or two—although now that he’s publicly stated that he’s a better novelist than Cormac McCarthy I solemnly swear to never read another—and I cried through the first twenty minutes of “Up” and at the end of the Glee episode when she sings the Rhianna song (she’s so sad!). There. Whew. That felt good. It isn’t even close to the amount of dirt I have on myself, but at least the load has been lightened. Marginally.

To conclude, let us focus on two songs I’ve been currently obsessed with: The Door’s “Hello, I Love You” and Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll.”

The Doors rock, even though I have to be in the mood for their more self-indulgent nine minute songs—not that I’m against those epic recordings as a strict rule, but because even the greatest musician in the world could learn from the three-minute pop song format. There’s a reason why The Beatle’s became gods of the earth with “Help!” and “She Loves You.” You gotta earn your “Revolution No. 9.” This means you, pretentious local bands. That’s awesome that you can turn your back on the audience and rock out without hitting anything discordant. No one cares.

The key point to “Rock and Roll” is the lyric when Jenny “couldn't believe what she heard at all. She started dancin' to that fine fine music—you know her life was saved by rock 'n' roll.” Does anybody else have that moment in their life when they really listened to rock and looked upon it and found that it was good? For me it was when Royden and Jeff were rocking out to “Foxy Lady” by Jimi Hendrix. I must have been about 12 or 13. And I couldn’t have told you it was Jimi singin’ to me, but I know we played that song eight or nine times straight, taking turns spinning and jamming on the slick hardwood floor in our kitchen to the gutsy guitar riffs.

And then I’m pretty sure Randy came in and was a complete buzzkill. But still, my life was changed by rock ‘n’ roll.