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My Blatant Overuse of the Word (and Letter)

by cari | March, 2008

I post on this blog, ergo, I am self-centered. That and if you count the number of times the word, “I”, “me”, “my” or “mine” are used, it’s appallingly high.

In my defense, it’s not like I want to be a self-absorbed, self-involved, self-serving, egocentric, egotistical narcissist. Let’s just say I am attempting to address the issue.

Really, it’s all borne of growing up shy, introverted and socially maladjusted. I was certain (as certain as one can be of anything: gravity, french fries, bastards) that I should take great interest in myself because no one else on god’s green Earth was going to. Except for my family. And my friends. But NO ONE ELSE.

The upside is, I immensely enjoy time alone. The downside is, for some reason other people like to receive equal time and attention.

A perfect example (if I may say so myself): when I was younger, I viewed asking how people were as one of those obligatory social niceties, indicative of people’s shallowness and, as Holden Caulfield would say, phoniness (never my favorite work by Salinger, even as a teenager). See, because someone asking how I am doesn’t really care how I am, it’s just something reflexive you say, to the point that sometimes it goes like this:

Hi, how are you?

I’m fine, how are you?

Good, how are you?

Dollars to donuts (as my geology professor used to say), you’ve had that exact conversation. (He also used to point out that if there were an earthquake this minute, all of the people in the back row would be dead. After awhile, no one sat in the back row.).

And I can ask how you are but I’d rather know if you read that Malcolm Gladwell piece about racial profiling in the New Yorker or if you’re hungry and want to get something to eat or do you have that TPS report because Suzanne is asking for it.

What I have learned is, you have to respect the gesture behind things. Yes, you are supposed to answer “Good” or “Fine” (no matter what) when people ask how you are. But someone making an overture is not necessarily going to launch into a conversation about the genocide in Darfur.

The other key factor of my seeming self-absorption is my inability to small-talk, and I don’t mean “small-talk” pejoratively.

I went to a Waldorf school (i.e. private, humanities oriented) for 13 years, kindergarten through 12th grade. Many of my classmates were also “lifers”, so we literally grew up together. Those who weren’t lifers were still quite close. There were 30 people with whom you’d spend a minimum of four years, only separating for language and art classes. So cool kids, dorks, outcasts, cliques all overlapped and intermingled.

The basketball team was also the cello section of the orchestra and most of them got straight “A”s. My friend Kelly demanded that she be allowed to play on the boys’ soccer team if there weren’t enough females interested to form a girls’ team. (She used to get so frustrated because when people asked whom she fancied she’d say “Kirk Hammett” [of Metallica] and invariably we all thought she’d said “Kirk Cameron” [of Growing Pains and now Evangelical Bullshit] and it would take at least five minutes of confused conversation to straighten it all out. [No one actually used the word "fancied", I just fancy saying it.] Also, we teased her about her Canadian accent).

They eventually let her on the soccer team though some Christian schools subsequently refused to play us. They all thought we were Satan worshippers anyway. We LOVED that. Gosh, you don’t know how much you’ll miss being mistaken for a Satanist until it’s gone.

Football and cheerleaders were despised. The one “cheerleader” we had didn’t even go to our school. He was a gay raver kid who just liked to cheer.

So, with all of this time together, these were kids around whom I was not shy. I never really learned to just shoot the shit. Because why would you talk about the weather with someone you’ve known for 13 years? Why wouldn’t you talk about something more pertinent and interesting to all?

I’ve been working on my social skills, truly I have, but I still catch myself sometimes. Someone will say, “How are you?” and I’ll say (nicely), “Good. Do you have that TPS report because Suzanne is asking for it.” Then I’ll remember to stop and ask, “How are you?”.

Lob, return. Lob, return.

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Anagrammatic

by cari | March, 2008

I view myself as imaginative and for the most part unconventional and artistically inclined, but with an analytic mind. For the most part I strive for a balance but sometimes, taking after my father, my thinking becomes too concrete.

I’m also an extremely visual person, which explains why, of the five serious boyfriends I’ve had (’serious’ being exclusive for more than a year), three were involved with filmmaking and one was a painter. The other was an actor who taught me a lot about, yes, film. (In any given room, I can find the filmmakers and the non-single men based purely on whom I’m attracted to and who is attracted to me.)

It’s not that I don’t understand nuance or undercurrents or subtext. It’s just that I’m generally too clumsy and too direct to engage skillfully in such sophisticated maneuvers. Instead, I admire it greatly in others. And in films. And novels. It’s not that I can’t project ahead or anticipate or deduce, it happens that I am occasionally hyper-aware of what’s actual.

Concrete + Visual = difficulty seeing beyond what’s in front of you. This is why I’m awful at chess. Why I will never be a world-class multi-tasker. Why I spell slowly if I must do it out loud instead of on paper.

My last serious boyfriend and I used to joke sometimes that I was the guy and he was the girl because he would be dropping hints left and right and I remained oblivious. Also, he used to cook me dinner. My self-centeredness aside, he was at times far too subtle for me and I wished he could be more direct and assertive. One time I complained that he was “playing anagrams with me”, i.e. handing me a jumbled assortment and expecting me to make sense of it.

For the record, I adore crossword puzzles and Scrabble. ADORE THEM. But I suck at Boggle (he was really good at Boggle!) and, yes, anagrams. Any anagram longer than six letters, I have to sit and think for a while. My solving time decreases by half if I can use a pencil and paper.

My point is, please don’t hand me a jumble of letters; please hand me a word or a desire or a request or an opinion. If all you have is a jumble of letters, you should say so and we can figure it out together. I’m okay with sentence fragments or half-thought thoughts.

With crosswords, frequently when I’m stuck there is a wrong answer in the mix and I’m unable to imagine around it. Once I erase the wrong answer, several answers to other clues immediately occur to me. It’s like my mind was so tethered to those wrong letters it blocked out those other answers who were eagerly waiting in the wings. Even if I told myself to ignore what was written and think of any possible answers, regardless of whether or not they fit with what was there. I became more aware of this probably common phenomenon when I started doing puzzles in ink. For the most part I can work around the wrong answers, and then write over. But I still solve much faster with pencil.

[This is, by far, more boring information about me than you ever needed or wanted to know, but no one is forcing you to read this blog. Or if they are, I’m sorry and I hope you escape soon. Run towards populated areas.]

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Dream Two — This One Has An Eagle! And Ends Horrifically!

by cari | March, 2008

I’m in a house in the suburbs. No one is there except for my pet eagle, whom I’ve neglected to visit and he’s not been let out of his cage in at least two weeks. The cage is too small and full of poop and he is all bunched up inside. The top of his head has been rubbed bald by the ceiling of the cage. At first, he kind of looks like a purple version of Sam the Eagle from The Muppets, except cute instead of scowly. And he’s so excited that I’m there, you know like how dogs quiver when they are trying to contain their excitement. I feel really guilty about not letting him out for too long so I take him out of his cage. Then, because the cage is so gross, I decide that no, someone had grown so disgusted with the smell that it had been cleaned recently. So now the cage is clean.

As I’m looking at him, I notice there is a strip of transparent tape on his forehead, with maybe two centimeters overlapping onto his eyeballs (he doesn’t have eyelids. They look like a stuffed animal’s – two big white ovals with blue irises and black pupils towards the bottom). So I am freaked out and want to get this tape off of his eyes, and I slowly and carefully begin to peel the tape back (imagine trying to remove a stamp without tearing or damaging it so you can re-use it on another envelope). But even though I’m being as careful as I can, the tape pulls a tiny tear in the side of his eyeball (kind of like if you had a slice of hardboiled egg and tore it a bit). And his eye begins to collapse a little like it is just a flat oval with nothing underneath.

I think, Okay, okay, this is a dream. I changed the cage I can fix his eye. But it doesn’t work. So I think, maybe if I stay calm, it won’t hurt him. Maybe in this dream it’s no big deal if your eyeball gets torn a little. So, I’m holding him cradled in my lap with one arm and with the other hand I am flipping through the Yellow Pages for the phone number of a vet. But as I’m looking I realize that I’m in the suburbs with no car and no public transportation. Even if I could call a cab, I have no money. I also have no carrier in which to transport him. He starts to fidget a little and I flip faster. Then he begins to struggle and I try to hold onto him so I can call the vet. I should have just let him go so I could make the phone call but in my dream I was afraid to, that he would die if I did. So now he is flapping his wings and his wingspan is like five feet across and I can’t hold him but I can’t call for help either. We’re both panicking and I know he’s going to die no matter what I do, but mostly I’m so sorry that he’s suffering so much because of me. Then I wake up.

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[Okay, firstly, the puns in my dream: the bald eagle and the "tear" (drop of water) in the eye; but secondly, the guilt over neglecting something that depends on me (or myself); thirdly, the danger of uncovering one’s eyes and how painful it can be and that what you ultimately see can overwhelm you; fourthly, the panic of trying to keep contained something that is wild and hurt and enormous (emotions); fifthly, inflicting pain on something you love; and lastly, the despair of having your attempts to save something thwarted by the something you’re trying to save.]

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Barack

by cari | March, 2008

Understand that I loved Bill Clinton. He had a lot of serious flaws, though I could give two shits about his sex life, but he was extremely intelligent and had a solid grasp of domestic and foreign policies and issues, unlike the fucking pig-headed imbecile in office now.
Hillary has become embittered by the decades-long attacks by the conservatives . It has made her too defensive and reactive, with an “Us or Them” mentality. I’m really sick to death of Us or Them. It’s a false dichotomy and it is hurting our country. What we need is rational, intelligent discourse and a pooling of ideas and opinions. We do not need shouting matches or pissing contests.

That’s why I really love Barack. I know he was attacked for saying he would be willing to meet with anti-American heads of state. You know, this whole Cold War mentality of building impenetrable political fortresses doesn’t apply anymore. The world doesn’t operate like that and the Silent Treatment doesn’t work. Look at Cuba. How long has the embargo been in effect? Have the people revolted and overthrown Castro? NO. Snubbing our enemies is ineffective and childish, it undermines our interests. We, as a country, need to learn how to disagree like adults. We need to remember how to reason and persuade, not convolute or coerce.

Right now, we’re like a socially awkward misanthrope who tries to make people like him at gunpoint. We are unable to support our irrational, poorly considered decisions with coherent arguments so we make a lot of noise to cloud the issues and attack people’s characters or histories instead of their policies or ideas.

Granted, we all need shortcuts, code words and summaries or we wouldn’t be able to get through our days, but we cannot live by shortcuts alone. We have to remember that beneath the sound bytes and slick designs and synopses is the real, complex, meaty and difficult world. There are complicated and messy issues at hand. We need to let go of political absolutes and polarities. Nothing is entirely good or bad. We are not fighting EVIL. We have to acknowledge that sometimes opposing things can be equally true and yet we have to try to make informed decisions anyway.

We need to be rational and to listen. Empathy is a powerful tool, it means you understand another’s perspective enough to effectively negotiate and accurately convey your own needs and desires. Barack has been criticized for his inexperience, has been accused of making pretty but hollow speeches. I believe he can thoughtfully and intelligently effect real change. Not by himself, but by beginning the process and the dialogue.

I’d love to see this country shake off its apathy and complacency, to change the status quo, the ingrained ruts in which we go around and around, and to help mitigate the income disparities (and lack of necessities like health care) that are dividing our country far worse than race. Worrying about policies or ideologies is a middle-class luxury, just like philosophy and political science. We can’t move forward until we figure out how to better care for the citizens of this country.

Lastly, I was just so impressed with how he responded to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. At long last, someone in politics is talking about what has historically been swept under the rug. At long last someone refuses to talk down to us, but rather, expects us all to rise to the occasion.

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No Country for Old Men — Contains Spoilers

by cari | March, 2008

I can’t remember the last time I was as scared for a character as I was during the scene between the gas station owner and Chigurh. I so wanted to warn him because he had no idea what he was facing. “Friendo, run away!!!”

I love that Carla Jean refused to call the coin. That she died on her own terms and rightly put the onus back onto Chigurh. As she said, “The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.” Someone once asked me why I thought he had killed Carla Jean after all. It’s because he checked his shoes for blood on the porch.

Some people were frustrated that there was no stand-off between Sheriff Bell and Anton Chigurh, but the words that literally came into my head when the credits began was “Of course.”. And no, I didn’t see “The Sopranos” finale.

Several people have said that the movie should have ended with Chigurh
 walking away from the car crash. While I can see their point, for me, I love Sheriff Bell describing his dreams at the end. They really spoke to his feelings of loss and helplessness and being “over-matched”, as he said to Ellis earlier. But also a sense that everyone has a place to go in the end. There is a measure of comfort in that.

Something about the stillness of his fear and the calmness of his horror made it feel like it ran so deep and so true and that it was for all of us, on our behalf. In that stark bare bones landscape it is just Chigurh, this timeless unstoppable force of Nature against all of humanity. Against what makes us human.

It reminded me a bit of the ending for “Fargo” when Marge Gunderson is driving with Grimsrud in the back of the patrol car and she says:

“So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there? And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd.

And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?

And here y’are. And it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.”

And she looks so sad that anything like this could even exist.

Then she goes home and is happy for, and supportive of, Norm getting his mallard on the three-cent stamp.

That’s the ballast, the world righting itself.

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