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Memorial day

Sun, 27 May 2012 16:53:34 -0400

It’s easy to influence the past, dummy. Use your head.

My dreams tend not to be prophesies. They tend to be epilogues.

Sat, 26 May 2012 15:55:00 -0400

He was a small, pale creature—something between a boy and a man. And very rich, too. Almost mortally wounded by his own wealth.

“I’m worried that you will only love me because of my money,” he told me.

You wish it were that simple, I thought.

What l said was: “Money has nothing to do with it.”

Old masters

Sun, 20 May 2012 12:26:10 -0400

A coworker was late this morning because a person jumped onto the tracks at her subway station. The guy was struck by a train. He didn’t time it right, though, and was alive when my coworker (and, coincidentally, the paramedics) arrived. The paramedics screamed at the man not to move. It turned out that he had stabbed both of his parents to death earlier in the day.

There seems to be a lot of parent-killing in the news this month: grown children going off the rails and murdering their parents with knives, guns, or lengths of cable. In theory, patricide is the most motivated of all crimes. Regardless of the particular relationship between child and parent, there is no person for whom a child could potentially have more reasons to kill than his mother or father. Think about it. The number of grievances a child might accrue against a parent is literally boundless, both quantitatively and in an ontological sense.

This doesn’t make patricide sympathetic or reasonable; it just makes it interesting. Nothing is more boring—more stupid and dismal— than an unmotivated crime.

Groms in paradise

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:18:10 -0400

With one boyfriend I went to Todos Santos. The first night he drank too much and got hammered in a cabana. I tried to stroke his neck but he pushed me away, so I went downstairs to the beach and walked around, looking for a surfboard. There were chairs in which to sit and look at the fluorescent-lit sand and the black waves. The cushions were a plastic wipe-off material and I thought about all the things that had presumably been wiped off of them. Upstairs my boyfriend was prone and unresponsive, which was a dynamic that would repeat itself many times, though only twice more in the cabana.

The 21st century is pretty good so far

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:38:56 -0400

My skin is fragile; bruises easily.

“Maybe you have scurvy,” Alice says.

Maybe I do.

Interspecies peace treaty

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:27:23 -0400

My favorite rhetorical move is the one where incredible animal feats are translated into human terms in order to make them more intelligibly amazing. If you’ve ever watched a BBC or PBS nature special, you know what I’m talking about.

Here’s an example:

The tiger beetle can run at a speed of 5.6 mph, which, relative to its body length, is the equivalent of a human running at 480 miles per hour.

The mantis shrimp uses its front legs to punch through the shells of prey with a force 8,000 times that of gravity. If a human boxer had the same capabilities, his punch would have the same force as a gun.

Now, here is the task. Is there a specific name for this maneuver? And if not, who will come up with one?

Fiction

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:04:50 -0400

In summer not even your insides are discernible from your outsides. Blow a stream of air at your wrist and it’s no warmer or cooler than the atmosphere, just different.

At home in the summer I work in denim shorts, my feet resting on a rubber pig that Nick insists we keep beneath the kitchen table due to its ugliness.

When he gets home, Nick tells me about his job at a city agency. Often I contribute observations that sound stoned or demented, and he calmly explains how the government devotes entire swaths of itself to the inevitability of its own malfunction.

“Oversight is something-something-something,” he’ll say, voice disappearing into the closet as he unspools his tie. “But it winds up being part of a larger self-correction geared towards achieving as little reform as possible while still satisfying the demands that led to its creation in the first place.”

“Which are what?” I ask.

“Popular outcry,” he says. “Fear of crisis. I love you.”

Lightly salted peanut

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:31:00 -0400

On Sunday I had a dream that I was trying to climb a hill so steep I physically couldn’t do it. That was the whole dream: I couldn’t walk up a steep hill. (Nice allegory, brain.)

After waking I lay prone in bed for a moment, wanting an Ibuprofen for my legs, which hurt from trying to walk up the hill. They stopped aching when I identified the experience as a dream. Total time elapsed between waking and legs-not-hurting: thirty seconds.

Then I got dressed, packed my backpack, and went to JFK to catch a flight. By the time I landed in Los Angeles I was sleepy again.

At my hotel room I went through all the little rituals that mark the beginning of a work trip. First, survey the room to see where I will work. Then turn on all the lights, hang up dresses, write some perfunctory note on hotel stationery (“Print receipt”), line up shoes, scan TV Guide, arrange toothbrush parallel to sink, make a cup of coffee, discard coffee after a sip, write another note on the stationery (“Coffee”) and open all windows, if windows will open.

I did all of these things and then went outside. The hotel was full of families in wet bathing suits, pushing elevator buttons and dripping. I felt like a valence electron bouncing between atoms. (Neutrally incomplete.) It was seventy-something degrees, which feels like the exact temperature at which human beings are designed to walk around. You can be alone in LA and the weather is hospitality enough.

Hey, we’re in a recession

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:20:00 -0400

It’s hard to tell whether the troops are men or boys. One of them is nicknamed Ralphie, another is hypnotized by a Greek yogurt commercial with a slim, yogurt-covered woman in it, and a third can’t stop referring to his wife (not present) as “retarded”. I get a soda and sit down at the table, where they start asking about my job.

“You should write about sex,” one suggests. “Or Forrest Gump.”

“Why Forrest Gump?”

“Have you SEEN the movie?”

They are giddy with story ideas: Khloe Kardashian’s marriage, lingerie football, and a legendary regional sandwich called the Fat Dyke, which contains mozzarella sticks, a cheeseburger, chicken fingers, French fries, and your choice of sauce.

One of them proposes an experiment in which I try to be a lesbian for thirty days and then write about it. It’s hard to say no to a person whose face contains parts of an IED.

“Maybe,” I tell him.

“You need to broaden your horizons,” he says.

Photo

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:45:18 -0400

LEADING MANNEQUINS

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:47:00 -0400

Velvet suits! Payola! Secrets of Ryan Gosling!

I went deep into the styling industry for GQ. Read it HERE.

Photo

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:17:00 -0400

Nice work

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:34:52 -0400

I was listening to NPR in the car with Lily. During a dispatch, she pointed to the radio and said, “Oh, I know this reporter.” Then she smiled. “He told me that whenever he’s reading his radio script, he imagines that he’s reading it to a specific person.”

“Who?”

“Well, whomever he has a crush on at the moment,” she said. “You can hear it in his voice.”

We listened.

“A lot of reporters do the same thing,” she said. “I think.”

Photo

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:05:59 -0400

Hold that thought

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:13:35 -0400

One night I walked down Sunset Boulevard to a Mel’s Diner. What attracted me was the idea of pancakes for dinner, on the one hand, and Mexican waiters on the other. I feel like a baby floating in amniotic fluid whenever someone calls me mija, especially if that person bears pancakes. Maybe it’s a California thing.

The Mel’s was empty except for three goths and a middle-aged man in a suit. For some reason I sat in a booth directly next to the man. He offered me a few sections of the LA Times, which was dismayingly heavy in Reuters articles. It’s possible that he offered the paper as a way of signaling that my sitting too close was not an imposition. I might be projecting.

Anyhow, I ordered from the waiter and then settled in to read an Op Ed that touched on several of the disasters facing California. Two waiters arrived a few minutes later with six plates: two plates of pancakes, two plates of bacon, and two plates stacked with extra butter patties. The man looked at me. “We ordered the same thing,” he said. And we had. Ha ha! We laughed and so did the waiters. Cute.

The man finished his copy of the meal faster than I did, and he stopped at my table on his way to the cash register. “If you like the pancakes here, you should order the trout,” he said. “I know it sounds funny, but the trout is excellent. I was surprised. If you want a lighter meal.”

I thanked him and said goodbye, and then had a flash of hope that he might pay for my meal. That happens, right? People take pity on solitary women and do gallant things unbidden?

No. The man left and the waiter brought my bill. “You are fucking embarrassing,” I told myself. I licked some butter packets clean in a disgusting way, partly to prove to myself that I did not think I was in a Raymond Chandler novel.

When I was seven or eight, I told my mother that God punished me whenever I felt too happy. For example, I tended to fall down the stairs whenever I got giddy about something. “What’s probably happening,” my mother explained, “is that you get all jacked up and stop paying attention to your surroundings.”

Agreed. Why do I even bother to think of myself as rational person?

Give him an inch, he'll take an inch

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:33:49 -0400

I was talking to an editor the other day when he mentioned that he met Mitt Romney while reporting a piece. “He’s a weird dude,” the editor said. “Not bad, just weird.”

“On-the-spectrum weird?” I asked.

“Yes. He made a speech the other week in Michigan and opened with a comment about how the trees in that state were exactly the right height.”

I laughed.

“And you know, that’s a weird thing to say. People were interpreting it in different ways.”

[Important to note: It was also the second time Romney had gone on record about tree height in Michigan.]

“Thing is,” the editor went on, “I think Romney was being straightforward. He’s a dude who believes that there is a correct height for trees, and that the trees in Michigan meet this benchmark.”

We moved on to other topics.

On the way home, my mind turned back to the anecdote, and then onto the subject of management consulting. When you think about the ideal management consultant, you think about someone who is detail-oriented, analytically-minded, and obsessed with optimization. It’s an amazingly rational field. Emotions don’t enter the picture.*

This is why Mitt Romney can be inadvertently funny, and only ever inadvertently so. It’s also why Romney doesn’t make sense until you quit evaluating his behavior on any scale relating to emotions. Romney doesn’t care about trees; he’s just satisfied that the Michigan species aligns with some internal metric regarding tree height. It was an empirical comment. The trees were optimized, and this pleased him.

Apparently this is a deleterious quality for a candidate to have, and it is easy to understand why. But it’s also a shame, because the Romney style could, in theory, provide a great antidote to the hysteria and frivolity of campaign politics.

Credit where credit’s due!

*I should say that there are a couple of ex-Bain / McKinsey / CFAR people at my job and they have normal human emotions.

Why is it so hard to draw this from memory?

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:12:23 -0400

Why is it so hard to draw this from memory?

Fat cats

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:50:50 -0400

I like how the loathsome “finance culture” of 1912 involved sitting quietly with a tabby cat on your lap.

People are still dancing

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:17:00 -0500

There were two women for one man: each woman blonde, bored, and not eating. They sat on either side of an alert-eyed figure in a blue paisley suit (I wish I were inventing that detail, but I wouldn’t dare.) He was forty-five-ish; his dates nineteen or twenty years old.

One of the women was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that allowed her to wear a lumpy gray sweater and a frown and still earn all sorts of stares in a room filled with people who try not to stare. The other date was not beautiful but had long platinum hair and youth, which can fill the same purpose on a short term basis. None of the three spoke, and I wondered why the man had paid for two dates if he couldn’t generate enough conversation for one. But then, maybe that was the point: three silent people are noisier than two silent people.

They sat a few hours, and as the younger woman sipped her wine she warmed up to the man at her side. She touched his hand and whispered in his ear. He looked at her, then around the room, then at the silent date, and then the cycle repeated.

It was important that this ritual unfold in public. If you hire people to be your evening companions, there’s no uncertainty about how the night will end. And because certainty is not arousing, you have to find your stimulus elsewhere while you wait: in fussy food or in a succession of wines or in what you imagine other people are thinking about you.

The feeling isn’t specific to dates with escorts; in fact, half of the married couples in the room were probably enacting a similar routine. (Alleviating boredom with complicated food items.) It’s the way things tend to go for everyone eventually, unless you manage to find a person who consistently surprises you.

As dinner progressed, the beautiful date continued to sit mute and shiny-haired with her arms pinned to her sides. She didn’t smile, laugh, or even pick up her fork. It was like watching an animal conserve energy for vital tasks in winter: no unnecessary movements. At one point she got up, crossed the dining room, looked out a window for a minute and then returned without explanation. Other than that, her boredom was focused entirely on the table in front of her and on the two strangers sharing it.

Photo

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:50:00 -0500