You Want Everything To Be Just Like The Stories That You Read But Never Write

I'm back! I had a very selfish month of obsessive, trivial thought patterns of the circular nature. Don't worry, it's over. But out of loyalty to my loving readers and to avoid later re-reading a post two weeks later and loathing myself (ref posts from 2008), I put a moratorium on blog posts until I had something to say for myself. Essentially, I sent myself to my room to think about what I'd done.

This has been a frustratingly long week of post attempts. I open the page every day, jot down a couple keywords for incandescently brilliant discourses that are already half-formed in my head, and then . . . I get onto xkcd.com and spend five hours clicking the "random" button. This is the final proof: it's out there, innocently lurking on a random server, enticing me with guarantees to delight me again and again. My digital kryptonite has been discovered. For someone as low-tech as I generally am, I didn't believe there was a temptation on the webbytubes strong enough to distract me from something so enthralling as this site that is solely commited to continuous minute examinations and sideways praise for myself. But by the sheer volume of links I have shared from that website in the past week, I've had to face the facts. I, too, am a vulnerable, easily impressionable, obsessive compulsive mortal who has an ever growing appetite for little nuggets of wildly nerdy and sarcastic observances.

Sometimes I pity my future children for the influences their parent has been under in her youth, and how that is going to inevitably damage them. Sometimes. Mostly I just think about the ridiculous names I'm going to stick them with just to make sure they're required to develop a personality to pull it off.

So, Canada Day was last Thursday. And I love me some Canadians--my dad's one, many of my favorite relatives hail from there, visiting there has been some of the best times I've had. Alberta could take Quebec any day of the week, by the way. But with that all said and done--and while you'll frequently hear me say that I'm half Canadian in an effort to obtain some distinctiveness--I'm now going to have to trash them.

Not to say that they aren't a nice little country. But when you put Canada up against US for sheer balls-awesome history, US takes them in a single 20 year period. Because the story of the revolt of the colonies under British rule and subsequent successful establishment of themselves as an independent nation? Freakin sweet. I've read an embarrassing number of biographies and historical accounts about the founding; nothing gets me as riled up as North America in the late 18th century. And that's all before you factor in the musical 1776, which aids by adding a snazzy soundtrack to the events surrounding the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And Canada? Not a catchy tune to be found about their gradual and respectful steps towards autonomy from their benevolent and still revered ruler. There just isn't anything very stirring about a series of treaties that released the United Kingdom from the obligation of keeping Canada financially solvent and permitted Canada to take control of it's destiny after it ever so politely and docilely requested it. So, yeah, love western Canada, but USA all the way!

And if any of you humble readers take from this the opportunity to post a snarky, condescending and/or sardonic comment about the founding fathers/US history at large/the despicable naivete of those who get so excited about such a failed nation, I swear I may go Cujo on you. I was speaking in a deliberately histrionic display of my real patriotic feelings because as a political science major I can never ever get away from those who validate their puny, grasping existence by making cutting and belittling remarks about events of the past. I'm not saying that as a citizen you shouldn't be informed of the real history of any time period, quite the opposite, but I do say that I find nothing wrong with taking positive lessons from my history and choosing to emulate admirable moments of imperfect lives. Ok, that's all for the venomous lashout at all past classmates that equated intellectual superiority with how little idealism they personally hold on to.

Do you know what I love? Really fantastic science fiction writers. Like our comrade Isaac Asimov. The singular quality about great sci-fi writers and great sci-fi shows (shout out to Star Trek, word to your mother) is that they take the world, throw it lightyears into the future, and bust the restraints of human potential right open. In the future, nothing is outside of humanity's grasp. Former ethical, social, medical, and technological shortcomings have been tweaked, twiddled with, and resolved into neat little packages. It's such a refreshing outlook on the ever-present-but-forever-in-the-future "what comes next." My friend Grant reminded me of this love of mine by having me read Asimov's essay "The Last Question," and my mind has been cycling around my admiration for the strength of his optimism ever since. I also maintain that it's only the true storytellers, like Asimov, who choose to give ultimate power to Thought instead of a more mundane tactile force.

On Friday I was reminded of yet another long-lost love of mine. It was an incredibly high-stress day at work: everything that could go wrong did, and even though I had my own specific task relatively in hand I was feeling the pressure of every coworker's stressed-to-the-limit auras. Laugh all you want, but put that many panicking individuals in cubicles and try telling me that there isn't an almost visual presence of their collective freak out. So anyways, I'm buckling under the pressure, blood is pumping far too fast and vessels in my eye sockets are bursting under the strain, when I was inspired to add an opera channel to my Pandora station.

Wow, what a moment of clarity. It's an even better match than listening to hard rock when you're in a rage or country when you have a fit of unbearable melodramatic cheesiness. Not only do the vocal expressions in opera emote on a scale no tiny individual could ever achieve alone, the orchestral arrangements sweep whatever messy emotions you've been unsuccessfully dealing with right out of your system. Crisis averted, I typed up my little wires in a bubble of serenity while lovers were betrayed, fathers perished, and villains triumphantly travailed in my headphones.

I'm going to close with this beautiful parody of Forrest Gump. Not because I agree with the sentiment--my world view has far too much bounceability to be so exquisitely cynical--but because it's a quality bit of writing by my close personal friends of the X-files 'verse:

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you're stuck with this indefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is an empty box, filled with useless brown paper wrappers."

Tubular.

A Sign That Says: It's Free, And I Hope You Have More Luck With This Than Me.

I had an unusual experience last night—I went to an entertainment event that had roughly 85% women in attendance. Since I don’t enjoy Twilight, listen to David Archuleta, or ever make it to Women’s Conference, this was a pretty unusual occurrence. But I didn’t have a moment’s hesitation on whether or not my sister and I were possibly mistaken in our chosen amusement, because Stars on Ice is the best thing since double-stuffed Oreos.

And while I traditionally disdain any efforts of sisterhood bonding unless it has something to do with a book club study of The Awakening, I had no problem feeling solidarity with everyone else there who was ridiculously excited and solemnly up-to-date on the techniques that go into triple axles, death spirals, double-toe-loops, and Sal chows.

Most of us can’t even skate backwards, but that’s beside the point. We are committed to the marriage of art, athleticism, and sequined men’s trousers that is figure skating. So, for today, I will look fondly on the female gender as a whole in a rosy spangle-influenced air of well-being. Until somebody walks by in sweats rolled down at the waist, raggedy ponytail, and perfectly applied makeup. This just happened. Goodwill officially rescinded.

X-Men has ruined my ability to pronounce the name of my coworker Xavier correctly. I’m pretty sure every time I’ve seen his name on the caller id I’ve answered it addressing him like he’s Patrick Stewart's character. It doesn’t matter how many times he tells me the X has an ‘h’ sound, I inevitably screw up the next time. Mortifying.

I’m starting to get stir crazy to the point where my skin might just rip off my body and head for the hills. Gross image, but it’s what it feels like. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t think a vacation is going to fix it, even if I do still think that my life will be incomplete until I go to Denver for a Rockies game and a viewing of King Tut’s tomb artifacts.

I’m 23, I have a year and a half left of school, and if I’m not out of the state within a month of my graduation date you’ll know that despite my best efforts I died inside before reaching the finish line. Ew, now my skin is gone and I’m dead inside, that just sounds like all kinds of unpleasant cleanup for you guys that are still around, picture sacks of decaying flesh and the stripped flesh of wasted ambition. Yuck. Guess we better hope for the best, then, hope that I get into a grad school in New Orleans or St. Paul or the like so that I can escape before I look like something from the aftermath of a comic book fight.

Let me share with you the best family moment of the decade:

A couple weeks ago I crashed a Sunday dinner my parents were having with another couple in their neighborhood. I was the loose cannon at the dinner: I only lived in that area for two years and have rarely returned in the last five years, so the gentler folk of Sandy suburbia approach me with all the caution I would give a particularly paranoid porcupine with projectile quills.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t my presence that made the quiet Sabbath gathering go sour—the guests committed unwitting social suicide all on their own. Everything was going more than pleasantly until the visiting wife responded to a reference of Mary Poppins with the comment “Oh, I’ve always hated that movie. She’s a real witch; I can’t see how anyone could like her.”

I swear those words echoed as a hush fell over the room. The temperature plunged into the arctic zone. The air pressure tripled. I tried to catch a look at my parents’ expressions without drawing attention to myself, and my dad—the man who prides himself in his superb hosting skills and even tempered conversation—had a frozen look around his eyes, his brow a mass of creases as he attempted to cope with that faux pas of epic proportions. Their guest’s faces lengthened in tandem with the sustained silence, their mouths opening occasionally in aborted efforts to save themselves, only to snap shut in a dejected manner before a single sound escaped.

Dad’s ears gradually lost the ruddy quality that had abruptly flushed up his face, and he took a few slow breaths, reaching over to enclose my mother’s tightly clenched hands in a reassuring manner. But time was still being pulled along like salt water taffy, my mother’s mouth was still pinched and downturning, there seemed to be no escape hatch in sight. I was having the time of my life.

Eons later my dad finally rallied with a boisterous “And the most aggravating thing about the Japanese people is their complete refusal to believe than anyone not Japanese can have any skill or understanding of their language.” An awkward transition, but no one was criticizing technique at this point. The dinner concluded shortly after, the guests still seemed to scurry within their slow even tread; their faces were still apologetic as the door closed firmly behind them before they could retrieve their tupperware.

It’s possible, just possible, that that event may be highly colored in my mind based on how well I know my parents. But whether or not that vein in my mother’s forehead was really as prominent as I remember, I maintain that having a family that reacts almost violently to any criticism of Disney’s live-action masterpiece is as cool as having a jetpack of my very own. It’s also one of the best demonstrations that despite all other proof and/or skepticism, I do share DNA with the most noble and ancient house of Shurtz.

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.