enid = kendra

I knew this girl in college - I'll call her Kendra - who was an archetype, a total iconoclast. She had black hair that she cut into a severe bob, really pale skin, and she was always dressed in vaguely masculine, proto-military outfits: white t-shirt, black t-shirt, grey t-shirt. She was straight, but she wasn't feminine at all, at least not in the way people mean when they use the word.

Her bearing matched her appearance. Kendra was intelligent, and she had a great sense of humor, but she was the most moody person I ever knew. Most of the time she was really bitter and sarcastic, which I enjoyed since it wasn't generally directed at me. But because you never knew when the knives were going to come out, being around her was always like walking on eggshells. A complete control freak, and wound extremely tight, all the time, except when she was drunk. (When she was drunk, the dam broke. I will never forget one night of extremely drunk karaoke when she sang Reba McIntyre's "Fancy" as if she were channeling Nina Hagen.)

I actually haven't thought about Kendra for awhile, but tonight on IFC Ghost World came on, and it hit me: Enid = Kendra. If I had seen this movie before I met her, I would have thought she was a Thora Birch fan gone wrong, but actually Kendra's style predates this movie by more than 10 years.

Wherever you are now, Kendra, I wish you well:

Mama washed and combed and curled my hair
And she painted my eyes and lips
Then I stepped into a satin' dancin' dress that had a split on the side clean up to my hip
It was red velvet trim and it fit me good
Standin' back from the lookin' glass
There stood a woman where a half grown kid had stood

apathy list

I've been kicking around the idea of an apathy list. This would be a personal list of things currently in the news that I don't care about, despite the daily (hourly?) insistence of the media pimps that "you really really must care about this." But I have two problems with the idea: first of all, I don't know where to stop. For example:

Why did Michael Jackson fire his defense team? Who is his new lawyer and what is their strategy? Is Richard Clarke telling the truth in his book? Did Condoleeza Rice really make a freudian slip and refer to the president as her husband? Is the president "too" Christian? Is the president a big pussy for only agreeing to appear before the 9/11 commission on the condition that it not be under oath, not recorded, and that he could bring the vice president with him? When is Google's IPO? Will Anthony play in game 5? Is American Idol racist? What are the latest poll numbers in the presidential race? Is Ted Koppel a patriot or a lefty for reading the names of the war dead on Nightline? Why did that woman drive her dead mother to a Florida Wal-Mart? Why did Bob Kerry and Lee Hamilton leave in the middle of the president's 9/11 testimony? Should John Kerry take communion?

See what I mean? And there's new stuff every day that I don't care about.

The second problem I have with creating an apathy list is that it's an oxymoron. If I claim to not care about something then I shouldn't be writing about it, but if I create an apathy list then doesn't that mean I care about it enough to write about it, and therefore doesn't belong on the apathy list? So you see my dilemma.

kerry needs to grow a pair

I've written before about how useless Bush can be, so know that I'm not writing this as part of the Republican Attack Machine.

John Kerry is a spineless douchebag.

I was really hoping for better from the Democrats this year, because I love a good fight, but let's face it - it's not going to happen. Between Richard Clarke's book, escalating violence and casualties in Iraq, the clear impossibility of meeting the June 30 deadline to hand over power back to the Iraqis, the dreadful press conference, and the Dick & George Puppet Show, Bush has had a truly awful April.

But despite all that, Bush's poll numbers have increased since this time last month! It's likely that part of the explanation is that Americans usually throw their support to the president in war, but it's also because Kerry has no message, no agenda, and no compelling vision to offer except that he isn't Bush. Ask yourself whether you can complete this sentence: "John Kerry's vision for America is..." No? How about, "John Kerry's plan to revive the economy is..." Still nothing? Try this one: "John Kerry's strategy to combat terrorism is..." Me neither.

Instead of a vision, what Kerry has in spades are explanations.

1. "I threw my medals over the White House fence as a protest against the Vietnam War. No, wait, I didn't throw my medals, I threw my ribbons. No wait, I did throw medals, but they weren't mine, they were someone else's. I'm not contradicting myself, you're just part of the Republican Attack Machine."

2. "I voted for Helms-Burton, the 1996 legislation that further tightened the U.S. embargo on Cuba. No, wait, I actually voted against it. Well, actually I voted for its conference version. I'm not contradicting myself, you're just part of the Republican Attack Machine."

3. "I voted for the war. No, I voted against the war. No, I voted for the war but against how the president was handling it as a procedural matter. I'm not contradicting myself, you're just part of the Republican Attack Machine."

4. "I flew my hairdresser to Meet the Press to touch up my coif on Sunday at a cost of $1000. No I didn't. Well, yes I did, but she used my wife's private jet, not my official campaign plane."

Holy shit, I hate this scumbag. Grow a pair! Take a stand and don't change it! Be wrong on the issues, but at least be consistent! Would a Kerry Administration be this indecisive and weak? At least you can count on Bush to say the same thing every day, even if it's only because he has Condoleeza's arm up his ass. Bill Clinton must watch him on TV and think "what an amateur." Even the Village Voice thinks Kerry is a loser, and that's wicked bad.

barbershop vortex

I went for my $10 haircut today, like I do every other Saturday. The guy who cuts my hair is in his eighties, wears thick horn-rimmed glasses, has a hilarious toupeé, and is one of my favorite people in the world. He knows everything there is to know about Denton, including where all the skeletons are buried. He tells great stories. Trust me on this.

Anyhow, I was in the chair listening to a story about how Gene Autry was from Tioga and he paid $2.25, secondhand for his first guitar, when another old guy comes into the shop. (I'm guessing that most of my barber's customers are 2 to 3 times my age, so another old guy coming in is not unusual.) He's wearing a yellow polo shirt, denim shorts and boat shoes with no socks. Bald, but bearded, he looks kind of spiderlike because his arms and legs are really skinny, but he has a large potbelly anchoring everything in the middle.

When he comes in, one of the stylists, a 40-ish woman with unrealistic blonde hair, greets him with a big hug:

"Well hi, honey! It's so good to see yeeeewww!"

He returns the hug, pulls away slightly, and looks down at her chest. "DARLA," he yells, "HAVE YOUR BOOBS GOTTEN BIGGER?"

Darla is not fazed. "Oh, yeeewww! I'll talk to yew later."

Old Yeller comes over to my barber and sits down to wait. My barber says to him:

"How yew doin' today, Yeller?"

"A GOOD WOMAN JUST GAVE ME A FULL BODY-PRESSIN'! IT DON'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THAT." He pauses, looks over his shoulder at Darla, and adds, "AS LONG AS I'M NOT EXPECTED TO FOLLOW THROUGH."

"Is that right?" my barber asks.

"AT MY AGE, FANTASY IS BETTER THAN REALITY." He looks at Darla again and then gets up and comes over to us. He's close enough to whisper now, and I'm hoping he will. My ears are ringing already. But no.

"AND I THINK SHE PRESSED HER COOCH AGAINST ME TOO."

And with that announcement, the entire shop breaks up. Entirely unaware of his volume, Old Yeller goes back to a chair and sits down again. In seconds (I mean it, in seconds) he's asleep.

hooligan

One of the "buzz bands" at SXSW this year was Franz Ferdinand. I'm not normally a big fan of bands who get a lot of buzz, but these guys are great. FF are from Scotland. I'm not sure why they named themselves after an assassinated Archduke of Austria, especially since they met in art school. But whatever.

They kind of sound like what would you might get if you put the Strokes, Interpol, and stellastarr* in a sausage grinder and sent the resulting extrusion to Joy Division school. I know that's really record-store clerk of me, but I don't know how else to describe it. It makes me want to play air guitar in my underwear. It makes me want to drive too fast. It makes me want to be a soccer hooligan. It makes me want to eat haggis and like it. Get it!

On another musical note, The Shins are playing at Stubb's BBQ on June 9. If you have any sense at all you will buy tickets.

fisking sullivan

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting post today regarding an initiative in Michigan that will apparently give doctors permission to refuse treatment to anyone, on grounds of moral disaproval. That sounds bad, right? As if a doctor could say:

"Gluttony is a sin, so I won't treat your diabetes," or

"I don't approve of smoking, so I won't treat your lung cancer," or

"I don't approve of your homosexual acts, so I won't treat your AIDS."

Except that the truth is more complicated. Sullivan says, "...the sweeping nature of this bill is clearly aimed at allowing doctors to refuse care to homosexuals."

"Clearly"? Really? I went to the Michigan Legislature website and found the entire text of the bill. It doesn't mention homosexuality anywhere. It does, however, list three specific exceptions to the conscientious objector provision:

1. If the patient's condition requires immediate action (i.e., emergency care).

2. If it's a public health emergency (i.e., someone attacks the U.S. with bioweapons).

3. Your objection can't be based on race or on a specific disease.

It also says, "If a replacement is unavailable and the health care provider cannot be excluded, the employer may require the health care provider to provide or participate in that health care service."

So in any of the examples I listed above, it seems very unlikely that anyone would actually be denied care. Especially since the whole reason doctors go to medical school is to TREAT PEOPLE. Now, god knows I'm not a lawyer or a legislator, so maybe I'm naive. But it's not clear to me that this bill is about gays at all. I think it's more about preventing doctors and pharmacists from being sued for refusing to dispense "morning after" birth control pills (Arguably, that's stupid too, but that's not Sullivan's point). It's a little bizarre that Andrew Sullivan would address this so lazily; normally he's much more thoughtful than this. But what the hell, we all have off days (which includes most of mine).

leg dimples

I just got back from another business trip. I stayed at a different hotel this time; it turns out we get a special corporate rate at the only really nice hotel in town so the cost was the same as the usual Embassy Suites. Unfortunately, this place had some significant disadvantages, not advertised on their website.

First of all, your only parking option is to valet ($25 a night). Second, this place has no gift shop where you can buy bottles of water, so your only options there are to raid the minibar ($8 for 12 oz.) or walk down the street to the drugstore past the bus stop where the homeless people like to hang out and ask for money from skinny white boys like me. Third, the rooms have no coffee makers, so again, it's either room service coffee ($17 per pot) or walk down the hall, bleary with sleep, to the coffee station (!) in your pajamas. Fourth, the curtains on the windows, while nice looking, were terrible at blocking out light from outside, so even at 11 PM when I tried to go to sleep it was bright as hell in there. Now I'll be the first to admit that this is all very Princess and the Pea of me, but for the love!

On the bright side, the bed was the most comfortable I've ever slept in. I was farting through silk all night.

Speaking of farting, while I was there a couple of my colleagues took me to this German restaurant where the waitresses (no waiters anywhere in evidence) wear lederhosen and pigtails. (Let me tell you, lederhosen over cellulite is so hot. This one chick? I wanted to fuck her leg dimples.) There was an immense amount of beer and sausages consumed that night. Hence all the farting.

hanson gets it wrong

Victor Davis Hanson, who normally isn't given to hyperbole and pessimism, accomplished both today with his column on National Review Online. Here's the big finish to his complaint that American opinion on the doctrine of preemption is not exactly monolithic: "...if we are paradoxical, self-incriminatory, and at each other's throats, our enemies most surely are not. They know precisely what they want from us - an Islamic world of the 8th century, parasitic on the resources and technology of the 21st, by which all the better to destroy a supposedly soft and bickering West. And if the present chaos here at home continues, they are apparently on the right track."

Two quick points: "at each other's throats"? The last time I think we could accurately say that this country was literally at each other's throats was from 1861-1865. It's true that we get into spirited arguments over the best way the fight terrorism, but not over whether we should fight. This is suspiciously close to saying that if you don't agree with the President's methods, you're in Osama's pocket. Well excuse me, but that's bullshit.

Second: "they are apparently on the right track"? Really? The Taliban is destroyed, bin Laden is on the run, their comrade-in-arms Saddam Hussein is in American custody, Gaddafi is giving up his WMD programs, and millions of dollars in terrorist financing has been disrupted. (These are all arguments that conservatives like Hanson usually make.) If these are signs of islamofascists being on the right track, then shouldn't we all be wishing them continued "success"?

Look: American pluralism is a source of our strength. It's never been a sign of our weakness. To the extent that our enemies have a united front, it's for the same reason that Hitler or Mussolini were able to summon huge rallies at a moment's notice; no one dared refuse.

vortex alert

Vortex alert: a guy on a motorized skateboard has been going up and down my street for the last 30 minutes. That's not only vortex-worthy, it's annoying. A two-fer!

noggin

At work today one of the jefes asked me to try to figure out a better way to do something. That's pretty much my job description, so no big deal. But the way he asked me caught me off guard.

"...so can you put your noggin on that?"

He must have taken my silence the wrong way, like he thought I didn't want to do it, or the request pissed me off, because he started backtracking right away.

"I know you're trying to get this project wrapped up, and I'm sorry to pile on like this..."

"No," I said, "no problem at all. It's not over until it's over, right?" I smiled. All the while, I'm thinking, 'noggin?' what the fuck? who do you think you're talking to, a 5-year old? captain kangaroo motherfucker.

"That's great, thanks. If you could put your noggin on that, I'd really appreciate it. "

He then went on to say "noggin" 4 or 5 more times before the conversation was over. I think this is another example of family life bleeding over into work life, with unpleasant consequences. This guy obviously had used that word on one of his kids recently and kept compulsively saying it when he got to work, like some kind of pediatric Tourette's Syndrome. Or maybe he read in Management for Breeders in the Happy Talk chapter that it was a good way to relate to employees. Or maybe I'm just blowing this out of proportion and I shouldn't be so sensitive about someone talking to me like I'm still in diapers.

Later in the day, I emailed my analysis to him. The start of it reads, "Who wants to know my recommendation? Is it you? That's right, you do! You do!"

subservient chicken

It looks like Burger King is going for the underground internet ad approach, like the Quizno's spongmonkeys. Don't know if it will work (it doesn't make me feel hungry - just strangely dirty), but it does make a great timewaster. I haven't figured out how to get the chicken to do anything objectionable. Let me know if you have any luck.

must have more

Here's an amusing timewaster.

electroclash week on queer eye for the straight guy

Boy, I really pissed this day away. Why? Because last night, Travis, Tim, Lisa, Nate and I went to see a couple of acts play at RGRS - King Cobra and Tracy and the Plastics. Whoo.

From looking at their website, I thought King Cobra was a trio of vaguely androgynous punk rock guys who played in their underwear. Cool, right? But no. Actually it was an angry drag king who played drums and sang (using air quotes there - maybe "ranted" would be better?) and a guitar player of indeterminate gender who wore a dog mask over his/her head. The only problem with their 30-minute set was that it was 29 minutes too long.

Tracy and the Plastics was 2 parts performance art to 1 part music. The idea was cool - she sings in front of these 10-foot tall video screens onto which are projected 2 more versions of herself, one blonde version, very Nancy Sinatra, and a brunette version with glasses who reminded me of the secretly kinky librarian who'll take down her hair when the right guy comes along. Or girl, in this case. Anyway, the 3 Tracys sing harmonies together and exchange snappy banter (well, banter, anyway - it was loud so I can't vouch for the snap). All the instruments are prerecorded, and the music is very Mario Brothers meets I Am the World Trade Center. Interesting, but I'm not sure I'd want to see it more than once.

Although the music was so-so, the crowd was very entertaining. It was like Electroclash week on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

So between the wine at dinner and the big gulp-sized Shiners at the show, I was feeling no pain by the end of the night. Later on, however, the spins kicked in and my stomach went into reverse in spectacular fashion. Hence, pissing the day away. "Well," my grandmother said when she called and woke me up at noon, "I hope that taught you a lesson."

happy easter

For Christ's sake, you have to believe me when I tell you that Denton is a vortex:

On the corner of Eagle and Carroll this afternoon, on the way to Home Depot, I saw a guy kneeling on the sidewalk. He was supporting a 10-foot cross made of railroad ties over his shoulders. When I got a little closer, I could see that he was wearing a white t-shirt decorated with fake blood. Drawing closer still, he was wearing a crown of thorns with more fake blood dripping into his eyes and face. Printed on the t-shirt were the words "Happy Easter!"

No, it wasn't Mel Gibson. Wow, I love this town.

toilet trained at knifepoint

This won't surprise anyone who's known me for more than 5 minutes, but I was toilet trained at knifepoint. You know how in the movie Carrie, Carrie's mother has her so freaked out by her bodily functions that she has to sneak into a dark, locked, soundproofed room decorated with crucifixes to take a crap? Well, that's exactly how I feel except without the religious imagery.

I'm bringing this up because the bathroom situation at work is getting intolerable. I'm coming to the conclusion that most of the guys at work don't, in fact, have toilets at home, because every time I have to take a leak, I open the door and I'm immediately assaulted by this god-awful green stink. It's like a Vietnam movie:

Blowflies hum through the air as I stumble to the urinal. My eyes and nose run despite my best efforts to hold my breath, because I haven't figured out how to get in, pee, wash my hands, and get out all within 30 seconds. As I stand there with my dork in my hand, weeping over the stench, a symphony of gasto-intestinal distress blasts through the room from the closed stalls, all of which are occupied. Nothing is visible except the rows of VC feet, contentedly sitting in their own crapulence. As wave after wave of fresh effluvia fills the air, I pray I can escape in time.

Now, I confess that on one or two occasions, under extreme duress or the threat of explosive diarrhea, I have had to visit the charnal pit too. I have actually run from men's room to men's room looking for one that was empty. And if someone comes in while I'm in mid-poop, my sphincter literally closes up like a fist and baby, nothing's coming out of there until I have some privacy. Likewise, I can't leave the stall until everyone is gone, because I don't want anyone to know what I just did. Then I have to wash my hands for 10 minutes before I can go back to pretending this never happened. Okay?

This never happened.

i hear the squeak of stroller wheels in my nightmares

You know, I have to say I'm getting tired of expending energy and money on my work friends every time one of them experiences a "life event", as HR calls it. Let me explain.

Like many, I work in the maw of the corporate beast, where being a good team player is the highest value. What that means, among other things, is that you have to pretend that the people on your team are your best friends. If you think I'm exaggerating, listen: the Gallup organization, the same one that polls people on their political preferences, is also used widely in the corporate world to measure employee satisfaction. One of the questions they ask is whether you have a best friend at work. If your employer, like mine, scores low on that question, then you can look forward to spending the next year developing and executing an action plan to raise the score on next year's survey. I always give the lowest possible score on that question because, although I actually like my job, I think it's stupid to confuse work with real life. Friends and family are real life; work is what you do to make real life possible.

So anyway, that's a tangent. The point is that there's lots of pressure to keep up this pretense, right? So what happens every time someone gets married? That's right, you have to kick in money to the kitty for the shower. If someone gets pregnant, same damn thing. If someone has a baby, same goddamned thing. Then when that baby gets old enough to join the girl scouts, you have to pony up again to buy the fucking cookies. If you stay in the same department long enough, you could literally have to "celebrate" the same person's "life events" 4 times, each time with a cash outlay. I've heard that if someone dies (god forbid) you have to kick in cash for that too. In some places, "cradle to grave" refers to governments. At my company it refers to wage slaves like me.

What brought all this on is that for the third time this week, a recently pregnant woman brought her newborn to work for enforced cooing-over. So you had a baby. Great. He's so cute. No, I don't mind her screaming while I'm trying to attend this conference call, who could mind something like that? Yes, please stay here and tell me about your c-section while I try to meet this deadline. No, don't worry about the spit-up on my report.

I hear the squeak of stroller wheels coming down my aisle in my nightmares, and I'm sick of it.

love you long time

It's completely understandable if you didn't see the Juno Awards last night. The Juno Awards are Canada's equivalent of our Grammy; the winners included Sam Roberts (who?!) Shania Twain, and Nickleback. That's right, Nickleback. Plus, giving Shania Twain an award for her music is kind of like giving Taco Bell an award for Best Mexican Food.

The best part of the show had to have been musical has-been Alanis Morissette, who attacked American "censorship" and made a brave statement about the importance of free speech by stripping down to a...leotard. To be fair, it was a leotard with fake nipples and pubic hair, but still - what a great way to point out that Canada is "a land where we still think the human body is beautiful and we're not afraid of the female breast."

Really, Alanis? Then why the leotard?

Really, Alanis? The human body is beautiful? Have you walked around outside, lately? Do you ever see anyone at all aside from emaciated, plastic-surgeried x-rays in the music biz? 'Cause I got news that you, you, you oughta know: most human bodies are fucking nasty.

Really, Alanis? Not afraid of the female breast? Not even barbell-studded 40-year old saggy breasts with ninja throwing stars pasted over the nipples? I'm sorry, but some things are best left unseen, and if that makes me a censorship whore then I am now accepting American Express and I love you long time.

Frankly I think it's funny that Canadians criticize us for our so-called "censorship," when I found this story in about 3 seconds. Apparently Toronto's York University is beset with Jew haters and the faculty is doing nothing about it. Is all free speech equally acceptable, Alanis?

Can I share some free speech that I feel confident the U.S. government will not try to suppress? Gather 'round, kids: Alanis Morissette is a stupid cunt.

clearasil, internet dating, and one for a renaissance fair

X was home for the weekend, so Friday night we went to see Hellboy. I don't have much to say about the movie but the crowd was excellent. We didn't realize it was opening night, and since this is a comic book movie, the theater was filled with young and middle-aged men who all looked and sounded (did I mention the smell?) like the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons:

"Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world."

Plus, the ads before the movie were the most market-specific I've ever seen. Normally they're all Coke and internet sites where you can buy movie tickets. This time, they were all Clearasil, internet dating services, and one for a renaissance fair, I shit you not.

Last night a bunch of us got together at Tim and Lisa's. Originally the plan was for us to go see an act called the Yee Haw's at one of the local venues here in the vortex, but our organizer, who may have been in a pot fog, got the night wrong. So instead we drank lots-o-wine and played Imagine If, which gets progressively more fun and truthful as your drunkeness and exhaustion increases. The group's Imagine If consensus on me seems to be that I'm manic-depressive, mouthy and jackbooted. Go figure.

cheney's hand

I was going to write about this story from Knight Ridder, in which the president and vice president remind me of two teenaged girls who won't go to the bathroom without each other. Or maybe it makes me think of the president as a marionette who can't talk or think without the vice president's hand jammed up his ass. Or, yet again, maybe it reminds me of one of the cardinal rules of interrogation - you never, ever question two suspects together, because then you can't pick out discrepancies between their stories.

Unfortunately, the awful Maureen Dowd beat me to the punch and I don't want to be on her side. So never mind.

I finished Prague, by Arthur Phillips. It's quite good. The basic story is about 5 American and Canadian ex-pats who meet and form a sort-of friendship in Budapest in the early 1990's, shortly after the fall of communism. Most of the book is a funny and bitchy narrative of how the five of them fall into a particular pecking order over the months they spend together. All of them are guilty of obsessing over what they don't or can't have; money, love, importance, understanding. There is a lot of navel-gazing but the author's affectionate detachment keeps the lint from making you sneeze. The city of the title is a metaphor for this obsession - being in Budapest, they imagine Prague as the place where they might find what they're looking for. None of them ever set foot there throughout the course of the book, which tells you everything you need to know about whether it has a happy ending.

The last third goes off the rails a little. It turns into an account of how two of the characters, Charles and John, concieve and try to execute a plan to take over a historic Hungarian publishing house through less than ethical means. The outcome of their attempt, though, at least fits the book's internal pattern of desire denied.

The satellite characters are the best part. There's an amibsexual skinhead photographer named Nicky who goes into hilarious rages. There's an ancient jazz club pianist who spellbinds one of the major characters with her stories and lies. And there's a Hungarian publisher whose personal story is told with real depth and respect.

All in all, very impressive. Go read it.