stories about my family

the miracle of pie

when i was about two years old, or somewhere between two and three, the whole maniacal herd of us—my parents and i, my father's parents, his two younger brothers, his sister, and maybe one or two dates—went out to dinner. no one can remember what time of year it was or why we were out, and no one can remember where we were, but the food was good enough and everyone was happy. i was still small enough to be in a high chair and was sitting at the head of the table, from which point i could see everyone and everything, and one of the things i saw was that someone had gotten a piece of pie for dessert.

very politely and peaceably, as that was the sort of child i was, i turned to my mother and said, "mommy, i'd like some pie." and mommy said, "no, you don't need pie." and i said, "no, but i would like some." and she said, "no, you had enough, we'll have dessert another day." and i said, "tim has pie." and she said, "you're not tim."

i, apparently, thought that was a ridiculous and offensive dismissal of my wants and needs, and i slapped my tiny palm down onto the tray of the high chair and shouted, "if one person has pie then everyone should be able to have some, and i'm a person and i have my rights!"

the table, and the tables around us, got very quiet. tim, my youngest uncle, who, incidentally, shares my birthday, was only about eighteen at the time and had no interest in firm parenting. he did, however, have an interest in my burgeoning sense of social justice and my seemingly inborn antipathy to the rabid capitalism and self-centeredness that was preparing to sweep the nation, so before anyone could laugh at me and permanently sully my love of fairness, he said, "you're right, joon. i'll share it with you."

and a pinko was born. now i substitute things like "health care" and "access to higher education" and "the right to get married and live happily" for "pie," but the tiny palm slaps down with just as much force and optimistic adamancy. my uncle, a god among men, got married and moved his family down to georgia and managed to raise two kids who are pretty sure they represent 25 percent of the state's pro–gay rights constituency, and i couldn't love them more or have more hope invested in them if they were my own. the four of us on our best day can't get my grandfather to stop feeling "sad about the queers," but we sure as hell make sure everyone in the room gets dessert.

who's bored? I'M BORED!

things i got for christmas:

* a small shopping bag filled with tiny, deformed, enchanting pipe-cleaner chickens

* a call from a friend who has not returned any of my calls or e-mails in months and who needed to know what he should do about his cat, who he believed had a cactus spine lodged in the roof of his mouth

* my neighbor's mail

* my period

* a chance to spend an hour talking with my baby cousins about how house of leaves blew our freaking minds, leaving one of us unable to sleep without a light on for a week, two of us incapable of conversing sanely with other human beings for even longer than that, and all three of us wondering why we bother to try to talk to anyone or even put our shoes on the right feet when there are people in the world who can create things like that book out of nothing at all

* a video of my oldest cousin drinking beer with drew carey in an old nazi meeting hall in munich

* kitty vomit

* ashtray-scented tissue paper

* a torn, yellowed print of a love poem in a broken wooden frame, left between my storm and interior doors in the middle of the night by someone who must not know me at all and probably thought he or she was at someone else's house, since i haven't given my address to anyone besides my parents and my ex-roommate, who is out of the country

* a fleeting sense of guilt at not being able to do anything about the misdirected love poem

* a fleeting sense of terror at the idea of the love poem being from the mailman

* a migraine

things i did not get for christmas:

* cholera

* margarita glasses

* a shirt without a picture of a bird on it

* peanuts

* the respect of a peer

* a kitchen sink/counter devoid of dirty dishes

* excedrin

* a full night's sleep

* a blast wound

* scabies

* your heart--unless you are my mailman

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the "i don't know what to do with my hands" issue

whatever issues i have with my father's politics and social morals--and those issues are many and varied--i'll always be the first to stand up and say that he was a hell of a dad. when my parents bought their first house, a few months after my younger sister was born, my dad was thirty-one years old and the main earner in the household; my mother worked because she liked to be busy, but her income was more or less pocket money. not long after we moved, though, my dad was laid off from his job as a machinist. neither of my parents had more than a high school education, and with two kids and a new mortgage, they couldn't afford to be choosy about work. my mom took a night job as a waitress, and my dad, who'd just gotten used to the idea that he was actually going to be able to come through on that promise every good father makes about giving his kids a better life than he had and being as good or better a father (depending on the family history) as his father was, stuffed his hopes and his ego in his back pocket and did what had to be done.

for a while he couldn't find any work at all, and my mom had to pick up whatever extra hours she could at the restaurant to cover the loss. my dad became responsible for preparing meals, something he'd never had to do, having gone directly from his mother's cooking to my mother's. at first we ate a lot of fish sticks and hot dogs and macaroni and cheese--but we were kids; that was what we wanted to eat. soon, though, he discovered the miracle of the stir fry and nearly wore a hole in our wok with his zealous efforts to create an entire balanced meal in a single, easily washed pan. this tactic is the cornerstone of my culinary existence to this very day.

when he could get work, he took it, no matter what it was or how far from his ideal situation the description ran. for a while he worked on a semi-freelance basis refinishing hardwood floors. when that dried up, he took a position in the snack bar of the local kmart. at night he still made dinner and fussed over the (very fussy) baby and never said no when i asked him to play a board game or read a book. if he felt stressed about the life he'd found himself in, it didn't show. my mother was a crackling mass of nerves who'd snap like a too-tight guitar string if i left a stray sock on my bedroom floor; my dad never raised his voice, never complained, never said he wished anything were different. he did what had to be done, and then he went to bed and woke up the next day and did it again. my sister and i were incredibly happy kids, because that was what my dad, in his utterly unexpected role as our primary caretaker, had decided we would be. i didn't realize my family had been poor until i started working myself and came to understand how little you can get with a minimum-wage paycheck. we were shielded from the entire experience. even after he found a steady day job, he still came home and helped me practice my multiplication tables or my softball swing, let my sister put makeup on him so they could pretend they were princesses, made sure we were clean and had everything we needed for school the next day, and never made us go to bed without a story. being a good parent isn't something that just happens, and it isn't an innate skill; it's a choice. and my father chose it every day, because family is, to him, the most important thing. if it calls for sacrifices, you make them, and if it demands that you give up a little more after that, well, you do that too. because if your family can't count on you, nothing else you accomplish or obtain will be worth a fistful of sand.

when my dad's mother went into the hospital last december, he drove an hour into boston after work every night for two weeks to sit with his father and his younger brother and sister in the visitors' room at the end of the hall. he didn't stop going when his mother lost consciousness, or a few days later when it became clear that she was unlikely to regain it. on christmas day, he stayed home with us while the rest of his family gathered in that hospital room, because he wanted us--not himself, really; just us--to have a good holiday. and when at four o'clock that afternoon, while my mother and sister and i were standing in the kitchen in our coats preparing to head out to the car so we could join everyone else at the hospital, my uncle called to tell us that my grandmother had passed away, my dad said to us, "i'm sorry this had to happen today. but at least we had a good christmas morning together." he spent the rest of the night calling relatives. he made all of the funeral arrangements alone, because his family couldn't pull themselves together enough to lend a hand. he paid for everything himself because no one else offered to help and he didn't feel right asking under the circumstances. i stayed at my parents' house for the two days of the wake and the service, and i didn't stray far from them over that time. my grandfather and aunt couldn't do anything but cry, and my father tended to them like they were his own wounded children. not once, in those two days, did i hear anyone ask my father how he was.

nothing improved in the months following the funeral. my aunt and grandfather seemed to have made some sort of unspoken pact to exist in a state of grief-stricken suspended animation. my grandfather is barely mobile and physically unable to care for himself completely; everyone seemed to agree that the best thing would be for him to move to an assisted-living facility. my father had all the necessary papers drawn up for the sale of the house and admittance to the residence, but when he gave them to my grandfather to sign, they sat on a table and were eventually lost in the clutter that accumulated around and on top of them. my uncle lives with my grandfather, my aunt lives not fifteen minutes from him and sees him nearly every day, but in a year none of them has been able to cancel my grandmother's newspaper subscription, or even throw away a single newspaper. with two capable adults in and out of the place on a routine basis, my grandfather refused my dad's offer to pay for a meals-on-wheels program because he's afraid that if someone saw the inside of his house, he wouldn't be allowed to live in it anymore. and every time my aunt leaves the house, she calls my father to ask him why he isn't taking care of it, what kind of son he is to let his father live that way. this is one of two reasons she's had to call my father in the past year; the other is to cry, late at night, about how much she misses her mom. she has still not asked my father how he is.

this past saturday, my dad called his dad to ask if he wanted to come to my parents' house for christmas, rather than sit in his sad, dirty living room surrounded by his wife's never-ending newspapers. and he said yes, in fact, he would like that very much. because my grandfather can't drive anymore, my dad called his sister to ask her to please bring their father over for christmas, because there was no way to make the day less sad, but they could at least be together. and she said no, no, no, no, no, she couldn't do that, she couldn't do anything but crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head, how could he expect her to do anything at all after what had happened to her. but my dad believes that what matters is coming through for your family, so he asked her once more, very gently, very calmly, to think of their father and what would be best for him, to think of what their mother would have wanted them to do.

and my aunt started screaming. flat-out screaming. screaming about how cold and heartless my father was to call her up and make demands when she was still struggling just to hold on after what had happened to her. screaming about how she was the only one who was doing anything to try to keep that family together, since clearly no one else gave a damn about them. screaming about how my father had no right to talk about what their mother wanted, because he hadn't even cared enough about her to be with her when she died. and then she hung up on him.

when i left my parents' house tonight, my father was gathering together the gifts that he planned to bring over to his sister the next day. because a good man looks after his family.

now, either i'm a no-good woman, or my father doesn't have the strength to draw the line--or maybe there's one more option. my mother and i don't care at this point if my aunt does crawl into her bed, pull the covers over her head, and dissolve into bubbles and foam. my uncle is a useless mooch, but he knows it and makes no claims to the contrary, and he's never asked anyone to feel sorry for him. still, i resent his uselessness because it has created so much unnecessary work for other people i love, and if he disappeared my heart wouldn't break. i'm attached to different threads, i'm bound by different knots. my aunt and uncle are family, but it's different blood, its thickness lessened by its being once removed. my father thinks this runs contrary to every value he's ever tried to instill in me, but i think it's just the opposite.

how you love someone is a choice--but whether or not you love them is out of your hands. my dad will go on quietly cleaning up messes and carrying three other people on his back until his father passes away, and i pray that that will be the last time he'll ever let himself rescue these selfish, helpless, imbalanced people--but i don't believe it will be. because my dad throws things at me when i insult the president and tells me i'm a weak-willed despot lover who would have raced out to greet the wehrmacht with flowers and pfefferneuse, he says my senseless insistence on a human contribution to climate change only proves how ignorant i am about the scientific history of the earth, he has threatened to disown my sister for letting immigrants change the oil in her car, and he chooses to walk past the composter and carry on for another twenty yards to throw leaves and lawn clippings into the woods rather than put them in that stupid barrel--but i'd stop speaking to every one of his relatives today for nothing more than their inability to express a modicum of gratitude for his efforts, and if any one of you said an unjust word about him i'd very contentedly set you on fire.

because if your family can't count on you to have their backs, you're nothing.

year-end meme

the girl in camouflage recently posted an entry consisting of the first sentence of her first post for every month this year. she was disappointed in her results, and that's too bad, but i like the idea. it's like reading your diary to see if you've made any progress, which is something i always used to do when i kept a diary. sometimes i came away from it feeling pretty good, and sometimes i slammed the book shut while choking back a scream. as this crazy green monster is the closest thing to a journal in my world these days, i figured i'd give it a go and see where i stand. so here are my openings, in order from january to december:

best holiday album: the jingle cats' meowy christmas.

my instinct on this day is always to dive into an excoriating rant about the soul-crushing evil that is the talent vacuum known as andie macdowell, but the sun is shining and my cup of coffee is exactly the way i wanted it to be, and if this winter's temperatures are going to hover around 50ºF like they've been doing then i don't care if it goes on forever (i'm no less troubled by the unseasonable warmth than i was a few weeks ago, but if the weather were the same all year long i'd feel that things were balancing out), so instead i've chosen to paste together a collage in tribute to our nation's most fleetingly beloved rodent, the groundhog.

oh, my muffins, my lovely little moppets, how i have missed you.

oh, muffin.

not with the car, i hate the car; my heart belongs to the pinch.

yesterday i read in the local newspaper that chuck palahniuk would be visiting the brookline booksmith, one of my favorite local stores, to read from his new novel, haunted.

here's a quote from a june 9, 2006, interview that aired on book-tv sometime around 1:00 AM this morning, spoken by my glib hero/antagonist in reference to the new yorker's (apparently) eagerly polled readers: "ninety-nine percent of the people say they read the cartoons first, and the other one percent are lying."

on august 4 joon called comcast and said, "i would like to transfer my service from my current address to a new address. i'm going to take my modem and whatnot with me, so all i need you to do is turn off the service at this address and turn on service at the new address. i'd like you to do both of those things on august 25."

mcdonald's succumbs to hedgehogs' needs (associated press, september 1, 2006, 12:37 PM edt)

so, the move, as you may by now have surmised, was a success.

for months i have been frequently fleetingly befuddled by sony's ad campaign for its bravia flat-screen television, the tagline of said campaign being, "the world's first television for men and women™."

dear califone: thank you for making roots & crowns.

hmmm. that is unsatisfying. all i'm getting from it is that i like the word "muffin" and do not like many other people and things. and maybe that's all there is to know. but i bet i can make it a little more interesting, if not more revelatory.

on august 4 joon called comcast and said, "i would like to transfer my service from my current address to a new address. i'm going to take my modem and whatnot with me, so all i need you to do is turn off the service at this address and turn on service at the new address. i'd like you to do both of those things on august 25." my instinct on this day is always to dive into an excoriating rant about the soul-crushing evil that is the talent vacuum known as andie macdowell, but the sun is shining and my cup of coffee is exactly the way i wanted it to be, and if this winter's temperatures are going to hover around 50ºF like they've been doing then i don't care if it goes on forever (i'm no less troubled by the unseasonable warmth than i was a few weeks ago, but if the weather were the same all year long i'd feel that things were balancing out), so instead i've chosen to paste together a collage in tribute to our nation's most fleetingly beloved rodent, the groundhog. oh, muffin. mcdonald's succumbs to hedgehogs' needs.

dear califone: thank you for making roots & crowns. for months i have been frequently fleetingly befuddled by sony's ad campaign for its bravia flat-screen television, the tagline of said campaign being, "the world's first television for men and women™." yesterday i read in the local newspaper that chuck palahniuk would be visiting the brookline booksmith, one of my favorite local stores, to read from his new novel, haunted. not with the car, i hate the car; my heart belongs to the pinch.

best holiday album: the jingle cats' meowy christmas. oh, my muffins, my lovely little moppets, how i have missed you.

here's a quote from a june 9, 2006, interview that aired on book-tv sometime around 1:00 AM this morning, spoken by my glib hero/antagonist in reference to the new yorker's (apparently) eagerly polled readers: "ninety-nine percent of the people say they read the cartoons first, and the other one percent are lying."

so, the move, as you may by now have surmised, was a success.

there you have it. have i progressed? hardly. but my time-wasting abilities have improved at least forty-fold--and it's all thanks to you, loyal readers; it's all thanks to you. you've driven me to new heights of procrastinative ingenuity. without you and your enduring faithfulness, i might be compelled to write consistently good, sensible, meaningful posts about issues of depth and consequence. so pats on the head all around, my fluffy muffins. at the very least, you've helped me hone a skill: rejecting the notion of "skill."

and i love you for it, i swear; really i do. here's to onward and upward in '07.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the anti-punch issue

i won't pretend that nothing made me ball up my tiny fists and flare my nostrils this week; glenn beck is, after all, still on the air, and his desperate plea to return america to its lost, puritanical, shame-driven state of yesteryear didn't ring all that tunefully in my ears. porn addiction, like all addiction, is troubling, but a little porn here and there, provided it was made by consenting adults (and don't assume no one wants to be involved in that sort of thing; am i the only person willing to admit to regularly watching the girls next door and being enthralled by the glossy, caricaturish mountain of crazy that is bridget marquardt?), can be a fine thing. the more we castigate people for being human, with all the attendant human instincts and urges, the more we fuel the seedy, deviant underworld that beck so fervently wishes to eradicate--but of course i wasn't counting on him to approach the issue rationally. and then there's this guy, and, as ever, this guy, though to a lesser degree; as distasteful as i find him, when it comes to his limp-wristed swats at malcolm gladwell i'm generally content to leave sailer to his sophomoric, colbert-esque nailedjagasms and move on to more deserving subjects. but if one more person tries to convince me that it's more offensive and exclusionary to say "happy holidays" than it is to say "merry christmas,"* i swear i don't even know what i'll do . . .

it is the holiday season, though, and my heart is ablaze with the giving spirit, so i've chosen to focus this week on things that inspired a sensation opposite that which makes me want to open up a fresh can of whup-ass. i don't know what the opposite action is, exactly, but i think it involves clasping my hands together and doing that little squat-bounce move that small children who haven't figured out how to jump up and down do when they're very excited. that's a mouthful, though, isn't it? let's call it the yippee dance. the truth is, for all my moping and whining, i do that dance a lot; sometimes it's about personal, somewhat senseless things (e.g., my cat just lay down on her side and tucked her perfect feet up under her chin), and sometimes it's about still personal but slightly more reasonable things. i find it prolongs the effects to ignore the universal merits of the origin and just take the little cloudbursts as they come. and i'm in sharing mode, like i said, so here are some things that made tiny irridescent stars swirl around in my head on saturday.

i got up extra early to meet my ex-roommate (who's a lovely girl, despite her unfortunate passion for violent, destructive hookbills) in the south end for the 2006 bazaar bizarre, a craft fair for the city's underserved eccentrics. i lusted after all kinds of beautiful things, like a sock zombie that was crocheted to look as though it were drooling blood (from pepperberry) and this dish by ambrosia porcelain, but at this point in december i'm on a strict purchases-for-others-only diet. it was tough, but so am i--at least, i was, until i found chad walker, whose sweet, strange, misshapen cartoon characters stole my heart so swiftly and completely that i almost had to sit down. i did buy two prints and a button for a friend, but i folded and bought two prints for myself, as well, because they were so perfect, and perfectly me, that the yippee dance overtook me and i couldn't say no.
































the captions don't show up here, but the one on the right reads, "portrait of earth-like planet . . . you can tell it's not earth because there are less jerks." the second says, "for a moment we both feel better--rescued beetle." i didn't hug them in front of chad, because that might have made him uncomfortable, but i have hugged them several times in the privacy of my own apartment. carefully, mind you; i wouldn't want to crease them. the realization that somewhere in some other part of the world one person whom i had never met had been sitting at home being sad and pensive about all of the same things i'm sad and pensive about when i'm sitting alone at home--it's deeply mobilizing, in a way. suddenly i want to double down on all of my efforts to change those saddening things, because i was just one and now there are two, but if there are two there must be millions, millions of us with our one voices fading into the static and buzz swelling up around the jerks on this planet that is earth and not earth-like, and we're all waiting for someone to do the little bit more that will tip the scale in the direction of enough. the odds are maybe not in favor of that someone ever being me, but one never knows. i could imagine never being so angry with anyone again. one other person on the planet thinks there is grace in saving a beetle, and suddenly i am filled with hope.

so i came home with my swag and ate a sandwich and prepared for round 2 of my happy, happy day: going to see the lemonheads at avalon. you likely do not remember, and no one would blame you for that, but i also saw the lemonheads on december 16 last year. evan dando and i have a lifelong habit of falling into anniversaries. between 1996 and 2000, i was able to see evan every year within three days of my birthday, and twice the show started the night before and carried over into my birthday, and it was like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain. then there was a brief transition period where things were a little less consistent (although in 2003 i did get one last rock and roll birthday), but in 2004 i caught him on december 17, and now we've established a shiny new pattern. i do love me a pattern.

what i do not love is driving to lansdowne street and paying an arm and a kidney to park in a garage for three hours, so i decided to take the train. how hard could it be? i wondered; i take the train everywhere else, and fenway park is the draw in this city. getting walking directions to it from the train stop ought to be the easiest thing in the world, and what more reliable source for public-transportation-related directions than the massachusetts transit authority web site? it's got "authority" right there in the title, after all.

NO! the transit authority told me to turn right when i had to turn left, because it assumed i would have the sense to leave the subway through the exit on the other side of the street, and even though i was almost a hundred percent certain that i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign, i carried on, and on, and on and on and on . . .

it's no one's fault but my own that i was too embarrassed to walk into a convenience store and admit that i had lived in boston for four years and had no idea how to get to fenway park from the t stop two blocks away, but i was, and so i wandered back and forth through the boston university dorms and under the overpass and up and down commonwealth ave. for an entire hour before i finally convinced myself that i really was sure i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign. and then i only had to walk for about four more minutes, because of course the avalon was right there.

by the time i got inside i was chilly and sore and very upset with myself, and the club was packed and the lemonheads had already been playing for ten minutes, and that made me feel about four dozen times worse. i picked a spot against a wall and shifted from one stiff hip to the other, scowling. but two and a half songs later i was already forgetting that any of that bad stuff had ever happened, and when evan played his genius, ballady cover of the misfits' "skulls," which i love and don't get treated to nearly often enough, i actually did the yippee dance right there in the middle of the club, and an hour later when the set ended i was so blissed out and permasmile stricken that i would happily have jogged all the way home with the transit authority's web master on my back. it just proves what i've been saying for the past fifteen years: evan dando fixes everything. if we piped bootleg recordings of his acoustic numbers into diplomatic meetings around the globe, the world might be a very different, and much improved, place. thank you, evan's wife, for making him so happy, and thank you evan for making me forget what wanting to sock a pundit feels like. i hadn't known it before, but i think there may be no lovelier thing to fail to remember.

there may or may not be punch blogging next week; it's christmas, sure, but that means i have to spend the day with my family . . . i won't worry about it yet, though. for now i'm going to delight in these tiny things that i've found, and i'll deal with the rest of it if and when i must. you find a tiny thing too, and if you're smart you'll carry it with you everywhere you go.







* three cheers to the united states postal service for rolling out six holiday stamps this year, including this one:


so pretty! at least john potter still believes that it takes all kinds.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear dr. max lûscher,

you're a fucking genius! the color quiz is far and away the most accurate measure of a person's emotional and mental state in the history of psychological inquiry. i take the quiz every now and then just to pass the time, and it's never once been wrong. i can't even begin to tell you how impressed i am. seriously, i'm just, like, agog. probably you don't need me to tell you this, especially since you're, you know, dead, but let me illustrate my point with an example anyway.

for a while now i've been following this brutal, circular, wheel-spinning debate about things like racism, and whether it's worse to say people who don't know they're exhibiting a racial bias are exhibiting a racial bias than it is to say it makes perfect sense to overcharge certain racial groups for merchandise, and whether a business's offending a portion of its consumer base by overcharging in such a manner could or should be perceived as rational, and whether it makes sense to attempt to justify or rationalize a person's unscrupulous behavior when engaging in it has helped that person attain a self-serving goal . . . crazy stuff. stuff i couldn't believe there could ever be two evenly split sides about. i just got angrier and angrier, and more and more depressed, because every time someone tried to make a case for fair and decent behavior under any and all circumstances, someone else would call that person an economically ignorant ninny--but i didn't want to turn my back on the dialogue, because i felt like it was really, really important to keep trying to make that case. i did what i could to make calm, methodical arguments, but away from the maelstrom i was having stress dreams and couldn't finish my lunch, and then finally, on the eleventh day, someone said that anyone with less information than someone else not only will be but should be ripped off every single time he or she can be, and i had an aneurysm and ran away crying. i felt like cindy lou who after she'd accidentally wandered into quentin tarantino's remake of glengarry glen ross.

so, in an effort to stop thinking about all of that awful stuff and think, instead, of nothing at all, i popped on over to the color quiz to stare at meaningless, uniform sqares of bright, silent, morally neutral color. and guess what color quiz reported about my mood?

Your Existing Situation: Not only considers her demands minimal, but also regards them as imperative. Sticks to them stubbornly and will concede nothing.

Your Stress Sources: The situation is regarded as threatening or dangerous. Outraged by the thought that she will be unable to achieve her goals and distressed at the feeling of helplessness to remedy this. Over-extended and feels beset, possibly to the point of nervous prostration.

Your Restrained Characteristics: Quick to take offense. Sensitive and sentimental, but conceals this from all except those very close to her.

Your Desired Objective: Needs release from stress. Longs for peace, tranquility, and contentment.

Your Actual Problem: Depleted vitality has created an intolerance for any further stimulation or demands on her resources. A feeling of powerlessness subjects her to agitation and acute distress. Tries to escape from this by relinquishing the struggle, and by finding peaceful and restful conditions in which to recuperate in an atmosphere of affection and security.

holy fricking cow. that is the BEST. QUIZ. EVER. it knows everything. it's also fairly effective therapy; i guess i'd rather not be the kind of girl who chooses to escape her problems by giving in to her adversaries. i mean, i haven't been yet. and while i'd also rather not succumb to a nervous breakdown, at least when i finally do lapse into frothy madness i'll be able to do it with a clean conscience. or a conscience, period.

so brace yourselves, foes; from this day forward, for me, it shall be ever once more unto the breach.

thanks again, dr. lûscher. i don't know how you figured it out, but whatever you did, it's pretty rad.

your embattled fan, who is once again prepared to wade out into the center of the thunderdome and hold up her fading daisy,

juniper

iran, iran all night and day . . .

mahmoud ahmadinejad embodies an evil of such monstrous and surreal proportions that it's hard to believe he isn't a fictional character dreamed up by someone on staff at marvel. "mad" may not be his middle name, but it is right in the middle of his name (a handy way to remember the appropriate spelling, if you need one). who would be surprised by his desire to host an intellectual fete debating the reality of the holocaust? not me, and i bet not you either; what i am shocked by is that he's found close to seventy people from thirty countries around the world who want to sit in a room with him and tell him how right he is. my shock is, perhaps, the result of my own naivete and desperate desire to believe most people are not insane and would like to be good; of course, the fact that there's a historical record of something like the holocaust taking place within the last hundred years shakes that belief to its very foundations, so i suppose i shouldn't be as surprised as i am. eugenics was viewed favorably in many countries in the early twentieth century, and scientists in the united states praised 1930s germany as "perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit." everybody everywhere didn't throw themselves in front of tanks in an effort to stop the holocaust the second it began. still, i'd like to think that, as a whole, humanity has progressed since then. but then i hear things like this:

If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?

"let us throw the jews into the river!" cries manouchehr mottaki. "if they float, they are guilty! if they sink, they are also guilty, but they will no longer be a concern." and seventy people from thirty countries around the world have rushed to his side to defend him.

my country started a war to, as the rhetoric has gone most recently, depose a dangerous dictator. and hussein was a terrible man; under his lead, close to a million iraqi kurds were displaced or killed in the 1980s--when the united states was supplying iraq with weapons, even after hussein ordered the mass gassing of kurdish towns. after the khmer rouge conquered cambodia, killing nearly two million people in three years, the u.s. government directed money and aid to pol pot for half a decade because it thought his "government" was at least a little bit better than vietnam's. in 1994, when the hutus in rwanda started to really find their groove, the united states and the u.n. evacuated all of their personnel and then did nothing more, aside from carefully refrain from referring to the tutsi massacre as a genocide--a categorization that would have necessitated intervention. and now ahmadinejad has thrown a little party and dared his guests to come up with one good reason between them why he shouldn't erase israel from the world map, and we're, you know, we're watching him. we're talking things over. and wouldn't i love to run so far away, but that's been the problem all along. there is a sucking void where modern humanity's moral compass ought to be. too many people would rather not dirty their hands with all this unpleasantness; at all costs, we must defend our beautiful minds.

what if i told you my beautiful mind has decided that war is a genius population-control measure and thinks we ought to start them everywhere? isn't it a fact that every problem the planet is facing right now would be solved by a stiff reduction in the human population? less pollution, less environmental degradation, fewer food shortages, less burden on health-care and social systems, slowed spreading of contagious diseases--all those fears could be placated. and we clearly don't have a problem with wars; the ones we're in are noble and just, and those we choose not to involve ourselves with can be whatever they like, so long as they keep it off of our land. do you think i could get seventy people in a room to weigh the pros and cons of that? does that idea have more or less merit, in your opinion, than the one currently under discussion in iran?

who wouldn't recoil from an idea like that? no one; because we don't want to kill millions of people. we want to be good. at least, that's what we naively, desperately tell ourselves.

so why aren't we?

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

allow me to preface today's column with a run-down of what has been my average day for the past two weeks, which have been dedicated to turning a collection of eclectically formatted ms word documents of variable quality into a reputable fifty-six-page academic journal of highly saleable quality:

1. thwack alarm clock with undue force; roll over and proceed to oversleep by approximately forty-five minutes

2. run around apartment, run to car, drive (read: idle/inch for close to an hour along fifteen miles of highway) to work

3. copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit

4. lean head against desk for three minutes to prevent retinal detachment and further disintegration of capillary network in left eye

5. proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread

6. become suddenly aware of profound hunger and mild wooziness; wash down b-complex supplement with last of cold coffee; dream distant, laughable dream of hot, healthy meal

7. repeat steps 3 through 5

8. spend drive home thinking of a) the five other journals i am responsible for and have not been able to work on and b) the two new journals i have not yet begun to work on, as i have not received any articles to work on, and which my advertising manager keeps telling people will be coming out in february

9. cry softly into slice of unadorned bread that i am now too sick with hunger to ingest

some words of advice to all fledgling editors: do not take that senior staff position at that small, semi-new publishing company, no matter how flattered you are that they've offered it to someone with as little experience as you have or how much better it seems than the job you had expected to be offered. they are offering it to you because no one with more experience or half a brain would want it. take a job at a larger, better-established company, where you will have a boss. you want a boss. you think that you don't, but you do. you have your entire life to stagger and sweat under a mammoth load of impossible deadlines and inaccurate communications and unreasonable demands; for a year or two, work under someone else who is more responsible for shouldering that load than you are, and learn what you can from that person's mistakes and successes and zombiesque stare and gutteral animal cries of despair. then, when he or she plummets off the winter river bridge, you can assume the position with your eyes wide open and not at all bloodshot or burning; enjoy this ocular nirvana, as you will be experiencing it for perhaps the last time in your life.

i'm tense, is what i'm getting at, and i am ashamed to admit that i haven't always managed to deal with my tension in the most mature or becoming fashion. as a result, this week's hook to the temple is directed right at me.

i pride myself on being one of about fourteen routinely decent drivers in the great, rotary-freckled commonwealth of massachusetts. as a result, i am frequently honked, yelled, rudely gesticulated, and menacingly scowled at. these things happen when i refuse to blow through an intersection after my light has turned red, when i refuse to make an illegal turn when doing so is clearly prohibited by obvious signage, and when i choose not to endanger my life by attempting to gun my tiny car around and in front of a bus that has begun to pull away from the sidewalk. a lot, is what i mean; they happen a lot. and like the endless drone of traffic on a busy street or the shrill, piercing yodel of the upstairs neighbor's faulty smoke alarm, they have become, over time, a thing that my consciousness just barely perceives.

while creeping up mass ave. on thursday morning, i paused at the edge of a break in the median, instead of rolling forward to the car in front of me and blocking the intersection. i always try to do this, and i am always so disappointed when i look behind me after i have moved forward and see that the cars behind me have obliviously and indifferently blocked the intersection that i had so carefully preserved the integrity of. intersection clearance doesn't benefit from the pay-it-forward phenomenon like letting someone pull out into traffic can; it is an instinct that some of us possess and some of us do not. when i am not exhausted and defeated and weak with self-pity, i can accept this and let it roll away from me like beads from the snapping strand of my social awareness. but thursday i was all of those things, so when the driver of the red pick-up behind me tapped once on his horn after i had stopped, i, um . . . *sigh*. i kind of lost my mind.

all alone in my little car, i yelled and flapped my arms and glared into the rearview mirror and made sure that if that son of a bitch in that ugly-ass truck was looking at me, he damned well knew that i was losing my mind. i even stayed right where i was for about thirty extra seconds after the traffic in front of me moved, just to put him in his place, and when he didn't honk again and instead gazed blankly across the median and into the opposite lane, i thought, that's right, bitch; won't make that mistake again.

as i stepped on the gas i glanced behind me one last time, just for closure, and noticed that the truck's left-turn blinker was on. the truck wasn't turning left, though, because a steady stream of traffic was pouring toward it from the opposite direction, blocking its progress. this stream of traffic had come into existence about eight seconds before i had driven away from the intersection. for the several minutes that i had been stopped at the intersection, ranting and raving about the obscene self-interestedness of the driver behind me, the passage had been crystal clear in every direction. i had quite possibly ruined an innocent stranger's entire day.

sorry, dude in pick-up. a hook and a jab to bad, bad juniper pearl, who apparently can't notice anything about anything that isn't in twelve-point font and less than two feet from her face, which, as is its due, is receiving a sound roughing up this very instant.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear jon stewart,

i know that this is way, way overdue, but you really rocked the wang back in october. i was the girl to your left in the orchestra pit who "woo hoo"d when you said your home computer was a mac (thanks for the subtle point in my direction in acknowledgment; for the record, i know next to nothing about graphic design, but i'm proud to have been able to provide you, at least in part, with an opening for a joke). it was the first time i had seen you live, but it was far from the first time i had seen your stand-up act. everybody knows that story, and i really wouldn't tell it again, but it becomes hugely important in the context of this letter; i'll try to inject some new life into it.

in what i'm almost entirely certain was the late spring of 1992, a portion of your act was aired as a segment on the mtv half-hour comedy hour, and the only joke from that segment that i remember in its entirety is the one about the inanity of the u.s. military's refusal to allow gay men to enlist. at the time, the DOD's policy on homosexuality was receiving a fair amount of coverage, the freddie mercury tribute concert had been playing on a loop for weeks, and i had recently become close friends with a shy, slight boy whose sexuality was frequently called into question in a none-too-tactful manner by the population of our small-town high school. i was pretty young, but i was already beginning to adopt the strongly liberal stance that has since become the cornerstone of all my daily dealings (i'm surprised anyone can even read my letters, given how smudged and obscured the writing is once my pink, pink heart is finished bleeding all over it). it may be why that joke stuck, or something about your delivery may have made it especially resonant, leading to its longevity in my memory and thus influencing some portion of my social and political development. whatever the case, the moment lodged itself, and i have loved you ever since because of it.

and when you told it again, word for word, at your show this fall—god, i didn't even know what to do. i wanted to squeal and stand on my seat and cry and throw a brick through a window and buy you a state-of-the-art video game console and run out of the building and into the woods and renounce society, because it was my joke, it had been my joke for almost fifteen years, and i hadn't heard it since that first time, and there you were, not fifteen feet away, telling it in person—and because it was my joke that i had heard for the first time fifteen years ago, and you could still tell it and get the same reaction as you had gotten the first time you had told it, because nothing had changed.

this year the u.s. army dropped its recruitment standards to the lowest permissible levels in an effort to meet enlistment targets, which they've been missing by margins greater than any since the 1970s. they're willing to accept recruits who have failed aptitude tests, who have criminal records, who have drug or alcohol problems, and who have health issues that could interfere with their performance; they are not willing to accept healthy, competent, sincere men with spotless records who refuse to lie about who they are. while daniel goure, vice-president of the lexington institute, has said that the main requirement for the army is a high school diploma, only 81 percent of the newest recruits have one. the military feels fine about actively recruiting autistic teenagers, but they'll discharge anyone who's openly gay, regardless of his or her performance, on the grounds that homosexuality is an irredeemable defect. i think that's nonsensical. i think that's INSANE. i know you're with me on this, jon, but while misery may love company, this particular misery is incapable of taking solace in the number of people in its corner, even when one of them is you.

in defense of its new tactics, the army issued a statment affirming that "good test scores do not necessarily equate to quality soldiers . . . test-taking ability does not measure loyalty, duty, honor, integrity or courage." but who you sleep with does? can they honestly believe that? what do they think's gonna happen?

well, you know the answer to that question. and i just wanted to thank you for shining a floodlight on it, then and now. sometimes i can't muster up any hope about the masses finding a way to approach ideas like this with a modicum of logic. but i think maybe you can't, either, and you haven't let that stop you from begging them to do so for the past two decades. so i'll soldier on alongside you, because the folks on the other side were never adorable in my eyes, and they only grow less so with time.

that's it. my best to your family, including that cat with the nine recta and your vomit-slurping pooch. thanks for standing up, and thanks for your dogged, unswerving moral clarity. i don't know how you feel about being a role model, but i feel inexpressibly fortunate to have you as one.

your always-devoted fan, who knew that was you in the rollerblades in that steve martin movie with the christmas tree,

juniper

sobriety: responsible choice or divisive barrier?

today we should all take a moment to offer thanks to the stoic americans who quashed the temperance movement, leaving the door splintered and dangling tenuously from its hinges for us to make any occasion to drink a national holiday and any national holiday a prerequisite for getting wringably sodden. despite the nation's growing ire regarding its influx of mexican immigrants, no one seems to have any problem knocking back a sixer of corona on cinco de mayo. maybe the idea is that if we take the occasion to remind them how strong and free of frenchmen their own country is, they'll go back to it. but perhaps it's a sign that our society is preparing to turn the corner into a more tolerant age; after all, it was the festive air of st. patrick's day that finally drove american business owners to take down their "no irish need apply" signs in the late 1800s--well, that and the growing numbers of jews and italians. happily, the new enemies also became friends, when we realized pizza and bagels were awesome and that after a couple of glasses of wine they were happy to admit that even they didn't like mexicans. and soon we will embrace the mexicans as well, because they have given us an excuse to get blindingly drunk without having to wait the full ten weeks between st. patrick's day and memorial day (here in massachusetts we have long since granted ourselves the mid-april reprieve of patriots' day, but that only whets our thirst), and because they are not muslims. who could ever expect us to forgive a religion that forbids alcohol? it's an insane request that will leave the islamic public forever on the fringes of this great nation. the rest of us, though, can always, and perhaps only, band together in hatred--crazy, bleary-eyed, liquor-soaked hatred.

anyway. today is also my beautiful part-syrian, part-jewish, part-portuguese mother's birthday, and i'm sure my irish-catholic dad is drinking something stiff in her honor or just for the hell of it, because he knows that americans fought for his right to do so, just like they fought for his right to be a blindly nationalistic bigot. please think of my mum fondly when making your toasts today; her saintly patience has prevented countless wars and probably a fair amount of bloodshed, and if repeal day is what it takes to remind the people who know her that there is more than one important day in december, well, i'll absolutely drink to that.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the office issue

my office, that is. i'm sure plenty of you are living placid, sociable lives in which you never long to kick down a cubicle wall and assault a co-worker. but i'm not you. wrote a song about it--like to hear it? here it goes:

1. "i can't understand why people in massachusetts won't come to their senses and do something about those awful democrats. they're ruining everything."

2. "i got a cv today from dr. beaver [prurient snicker]. he really missed his calling, not becoming an ob/gyn [full-out chortle]." this speaker is about seventy years old; this joke shouldn't be funny to anyone over the age of twelve.

3. "my dentist is an asian woman. she has a really good sense of humor, which is unusual for asians." this comment was also made, verbatim, approximately three weeks earlier.

4. "is shelby a democrat now?"
"well, she's in college; need i say more? she's being exposed to all kinds of horrible ideas."

5. "mark wahlberg is the LOVE OF MY LIFE. but i refuse to watch boogie nights, even though i own it."

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear califone,


thank you for making roots & crowns. i would never have believed that anything could make me wish that my drive home from work actually took longer, but interrupting this album's hugely varied yet somehow seamless offering of plucked and bowed strings and raspy vocals, hypnotic percussion and dirt-farm-philosopher lyrics, horns and vibraphones and chimes and field recordings—well, it just tears me up, every single time i cut the engine. you've given me a sound i can't get enough of in a world full of things i can't bear to hear, and for at least thirty minutes out of every weekday, and four times that long on the weekends, my heart beats in grateful, tenderly synchronized rhythms.

yours, period,

juniper