thirty helens agree... my ass is SLAMMIN'
if you were my real
boyfriend, i'd never say things
like that in public.
but you're not, so i guess i have no choice but to go on hollering it at the top of my lungs in the stationery aisle of the local cvs.
top ten fantasy professions (in the order of first come, first served):
1. curator of conan o'brien's tie collection
2. seahorse breeder
3. full-time tester of sleep medications or mattresses, or, even better, both
4. buyer for the world's largest japanese pop art gift shop
5. williams street intern/concubine
6. submissions editor of "found" magazine
7. personal assistant to albert einstein (i said fantasy.)
8. say somewhere there's a database containing summaries of all the books ever written. i'd like to read every book ever written and write these summaries. not critical reviews, mind you, i don't want to have to convince anyone that a book is good or bad, worth reading or worth burning; i want to offer a straight presentation of pure fact. on page 48, character b said such and such--that's all. it's all i could do within my set boundaries, since the second you attempt to interpret something someone else thought up you have launched yourself from the shores of fact into the sea of supposition.
9. copyediting assistant at "the new yorker" (they'll never hire me, i know, because of my evident distaste for capital letters. for the record, i do know they're supposed to be there, i simply prefer the appearance of lowercase ones. it's like painting a room pale blue instead of burnt orange; capital letters are a hue i reserve for accents. and while we're somewhat on the topic, i'm pretty sure i caught said magazine using the wrong form of "capital" in the context of a sentence not so very long ago, so, um, maybe it's about time they brought me on board.)
10. in medieval europe, criminals were frequently branded on the face or hand with a letter representative of their crime, such as "r" for "rogue." i'd like very much to brand all of the rogues with their glaring and ostentatiously capital Rs.
i read these and am struck by my passion for thankless, menial, behind-the-scenes drudgery. it is what it is, though, and i'm not at all shamed by the fact that i like dull work; i am saddened, to some extent, by my lack of interest in humanitarian efforts. but i've come to the desperate conclusion that the single greatest thing we could do for ourselves, those who'll come after us and this perfect planet we owe everything to would be to ban childbirth for the next thirty or so years, just skip a generation. my interpretation of the numbers in the cia world factbook is that, currently, about thirteen million people are born every year, and about six million people die every year. our resources are already stretched so thin that even a balance of the two rates wouldn't help us out any in the long run; the earth has to have less people on her. i don't want to kill anyone, so the utopian solution would be for every woman of childbearing age to step up and receive her IUD, and in three decades the population would be down one hundred and eighty million, and maybe we'd be getting somewhere.
think about it: i'm not plugging abortion, just birth control, which we mostly know and love anyway, so not one person is being honestly hurt, and the decline in population means more food and clean water and parking spaces and whatever else you're into for the billions of us still running around out there. if you can't stand the thought of not devoting your life to child-rearing you could most likely adopt; there will always be tragedies, there will always be orphaned and abandoned kids who will need you more than your imaginary ones. bottom line, to me, is it buys us some time, in a more effective manner than anything else we could do. in my mind, humanitarian efforts have to stretch beyond the current batch of humans and into the most distant hypothetical future. they haven't, really, thus far, and i think that's a big part of why we're in the mess we're in.
who'd take it seriously, though? i'll be shocked if anyone even reads this to the end, so i'm not going to waste a lot of time selling my idea, and it's the lone idea i'd be interested in selling . . . the list stands, is what i'm getting at, pointless or self-indulgent or what have you. i'm sociologically defeated. you buy yourselves some more baby clothes from wal-mart, and i'll stay home and tend to my seahorses.
boyfriend, i'd never say things
like that in public.
but you're not, so i guess i have no choice but to go on hollering it at the top of my lungs in the stationery aisle of the local cvs.
top ten fantasy professions (in the order of first come, first served):
1. curator of conan o'brien's tie collection
2. seahorse breeder
3. full-time tester of sleep medications or mattresses, or, even better, both
4. buyer for the world's largest japanese pop art gift shop
5. williams street intern/concubine
6. submissions editor of "found" magazine
7. personal assistant to albert einstein (i said fantasy.)
8. say somewhere there's a database containing summaries of all the books ever written. i'd like to read every book ever written and write these summaries. not critical reviews, mind you, i don't want to have to convince anyone that a book is good or bad, worth reading or worth burning; i want to offer a straight presentation of pure fact. on page 48, character b said such and such--that's all. it's all i could do within my set boundaries, since the second you attempt to interpret something someone else thought up you have launched yourself from the shores of fact into the sea of supposition.
9. copyediting assistant at "the new yorker" (they'll never hire me, i know, because of my evident distaste for capital letters. for the record, i do know they're supposed to be there, i simply prefer the appearance of lowercase ones. it's like painting a room pale blue instead of burnt orange; capital letters are a hue i reserve for accents. and while we're somewhat on the topic, i'm pretty sure i caught said magazine using the wrong form of "capital" in the context of a sentence not so very long ago, so, um, maybe it's about time they brought me on board.)
10. in medieval europe, criminals were frequently branded on the face or hand with a letter representative of their crime, such as "r" for "rogue." i'd like very much to brand all of the rogues with their glaring and ostentatiously capital Rs.
i read these and am struck by my passion for thankless, menial, behind-the-scenes drudgery. it is what it is, though, and i'm not at all shamed by the fact that i like dull work; i am saddened, to some extent, by my lack of interest in humanitarian efforts. but i've come to the desperate conclusion that the single greatest thing we could do for ourselves, those who'll come after us and this perfect planet we owe everything to would be to ban childbirth for the next thirty or so years, just skip a generation. my interpretation of the numbers in the cia world factbook is that, currently, about thirteen million people are born every year, and about six million people die every year. our resources are already stretched so thin that even a balance of the two rates wouldn't help us out any in the long run; the earth has to have less people on her. i don't want to kill anyone, so the utopian solution would be for every woman of childbearing age to step up and receive her IUD, and in three decades the population would be down one hundred and eighty million, and maybe we'd be getting somewhere.
think about it: i'm not plugging abortion, just birth control, which we mostly know and love anyway, so not one person is being honestly hurt, and the decline in population means more food and clean water and parking spaces and whatever else you're into for the billions of us still running around out there. if you can't stand the thought of not devoting your life to child-rearing you could most likely adopt; there will always be tragedies, there will always be orphaned and abandoned kids who will need you more than your imaginary ones. bottom line, to me, is it buys us some time, in a more effective manner than anything else we could do. in my mind, humanitarian efforts have to stretch beyond the current batch of humans and into the most distant hypothetical future. they haven't, really, thus far, and i think that's a big part of why we're in the mess we're in.
who'd take it seriously, though? i'll be shocked if anyone even reads this to the end, so i'm not going to waste a lot of time selling my idea, and it's the lone idea i'd be interested in selling . . . the list stands, is what i'm getting at, pointless or self-indulgent or what have you. i'm sociologically defeated. you buy yourselves some more baby clothes from wal-mart, and i'll stay home and tend to my seahorses.
Labels: antihuman, confessional
posted by juniper pearl @ 5:12 PM
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