a poorly developed argument about why I don't care about you

I have this troublesome steaming pile of energy inside me that is just not being useful. I can't reign it in to get anything done. I can focus it enough to make it productive. I'm just waiting to explode. Even my creative outlets are failing me. Troublesome, indeed.

The other day I was hanging First Friday fliers around SVSU and ended up visiting an old prof's creative writing class. They were discussing what legitimate literature (art) is and how to determine what is and isn't and whatnot, and the talk turned to folks who write super personal pieces, what to do with that? Not that all art isn't personal in a sense, but some certainly verges on Dear Diary territory, stuff about break-ups and feeling oh so alone. The prof asked me, "You write professional pieces, but you also write personal ones, like the White's Bar poem [referring to a poem I wrote in class called "I Fucking Hate White's Bar" which I won't share, because it's not that good, but was basically about hating that place because it reminded me of too many horrible love/hate relationships. It almost got me laughed out of the room, and a classmate compared it to a Bob Seger song.] Can you do that?" My response, barely missing a beat, was, "You can do it, but no one has to care."

And why SHOULD anyone care? I have a hard time backing memoirs and even a lot of creative non-fiction because I feel like I'm overwhelmed with life stories every day via social networking, reality television, cell phones, etc. I can follow the careers, relationships, and everyday details of my friends, famous people, fictional characters, and total strangers via blog, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Livejournal, and on and on. It's beyond a crave for attention, it's not enough for people to notice, people need to be interested. Self-involvement and self-reflection and self-absorbtion has so permeated every aspect of culture, that I just don't think it's interesting.

That's not to say I'm not 100% guilty of everything I've just ranted against. I have profiles on Myspace and Facebook with way more "friends" than I would ever go out of my way to talk to in real life. I text people for reason other than my own boredom, despite whatever may be going on in their own lives. I have a blog (obviously) which is the highest form of imposing your self-involvement onto other people. I mean, it's essentially your brain and your day for everyone to see. It's like tacking your journal pages onto street lamp posts (to varying degrees, of course. The degrees of which people share themselves online is a whole other rant). But if I take it back to the literature argument, I think it gives me an even stronger case against people who write poems and stories about shit in their lives and expect it to be received as art.

feelin' good, breakin' promises

When I changed my preferred blogging venue from Myspace to Blogger, I promised several times that I would use less of my time mentioning Shia LaBeouf. Well, I lied. It only took 3 entries to break my promise.

Here's the thing about Shia: I have a rainbow of celebrity crushes because, 1. I am pop culture obsessed and 2. They are better looking than any real boys I know and 3. I don't have to get to know them, but he is by far my current #1. I get a lot of shit for this for a myriad of reasons like the fact that he used to be on Even Stevens or that he's sort of a drunken douchebag. Nice tries, but Even Stevens was an awesome show and everyone loves drunken douchebags (also, I'd like to point out that maybe if you really wanted to talk me out of it, you should use some sort of argument like "um, he doesn't know you and you'll probably never meet him" instead of feeding my delusions. Although, if you don't feed my delusions, I won't want to be your friend. Classic catch-22). Not that I need to explain our romance to any of YOU, but for the sake of argument, let me justify my love.

1. He's very self-deprecating. If you didn't hear about the Walgreen's incident, let him tell you.


2. He's beautiful.

Notice how I made that my #2 justification. It should be #1, but I'm trying to appear less shallow.
Adorable.


Even in his MUGSHOT!


I guarantee most mugshots are not that adorable.

3. His movies sort of suck, but I'm okay with that. Eagle Eye was kind of cool, and Transformers had it's moments, but they aren't exactly Oscar-worthy. Even Stevens was hilarious, but that was another life time. So what? A person's career does not define them. If I fell in love with a McDonald's employee, I wouldn't dismiss him just because he uses too much salt on the fries. I'm just saying.

4. He's funny. I realize he didn't write this, but he plays creepy very well.

Wearing a paper bag to evade the paprazzi is pretty funny. I wish I'd have thought it up first.

5. He skateboards.

I think that's reason enough. I mean, people have fell in love over less. And I'm sure I've dated worse boys. My next step is to write a blog on reasons Shia LaBeouf should be in love with me. After that, track him down and show it to him. And after that, figure out how to circumvent the restraining order.

It's a classic love story, kids. Sit back and enjoy.

those dying dreams

When you get older, and we are all getting older, you start to take stock of your life and what you have/have not accomplished. Lucky for me, a lot of the dreams I've had over the year have died of natural causes before I got too much chance to try and fail to achieve them. Here are some highlights:

Become a successful children's book author
I wrote constantly when I was a kid. I had an overactive imagination and always made up stories and as soon as I could write, I started putting them down on paper. Obviously, I still do write often, so this dream isn't too far off. Until you read the stuff I've written in the past few years. I've developed a distinct style that involves a lot of profanity, drug references, and dark humor. So unless kids think death is as funny as I seem to think or there's a market for "Baby's First F-Bomb" type kid lit, I'm probably not the next superstar of pre-adolescents.

Marry a Greek boy
I wanted this before "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Greek people are awesome. In high school, I knew this Greek kid...well, I didn't really know him, he was a friend of a friend's boyfriend, but I knew him enough that I tagged along to his graduation party. As with most open houses, the food is the real draw, so our first stop was the buffet. I sort of poked around the weird looking Greek stuff until the grad's grandpa came over and snatched the paper plate from my hands. "You want some of this?" he asked, scooping a giant spoonful of something I couldn't pronounce if I tried. "Uh, no thanks," I replied, except he had already plopped it on my plate. "You eat it. You like it. It's Greek" and we repeated that routine until my plate was buckling under a massive pile of Greek weirdness. Well, that weirdness turned out to be delicious and even though I had to throw about half of it away (I weight 110 pounds at the most back then. Where was I going to put it all?) I've got mad love for any culture who loves food that much. Also, Greek people are really loud. I decided I wanted to be Greek. Unfortunately, the grad was the only Greek kid I knew (and I think he's gay...Elaine, is he gay now? Seems like we decided he was) and I haven't met any since. So, I guess this dream doesn't really have to die, I just have to figure out where Greek people hang out.

Fall in love with Jonathon Taylor Thomas/Ben Affleck/Travis Barker
Trav got a little too ghetto fabulous for me, Ben got married to Jennifer Garner, and I'm pretty sure JTT is gay. Whatever, Shia LaBeouf and I are very, very happy.

Be the first woman in the NBA
I don't think too many people realize how much I love basketball and even fewer know how much I obsessed over basketball in my pre-teen years. I literally spent hours watching, playing, or talking about basketball. I could rattle off stats for Seattle's starting lineup and most of the bench (the Sonics were my team), plus I could school yo' ass on the court, so while most girls were starting to daydream about the cute boy in math class, I was daydreaming about setting up plays and alley-ooping to Shawn Kemp. Yeah, I was that good. In my head. Then the WNBA came along and killed that dream. You would think a professional women's league would have been the dream come true, but I didn't want to be one of the hundreds of women in a league, I wanted to be the woman in the league. No one becomes a folk hero for doing want a billion other ladies can do. Soon after I begrudgingly decided to be a superstar of the stupid WNBA, and for a myriad of reasons I don't entirely remember, I quit playing basketball. The last time I remember picking up a ball was about 4 or 5 years ago when I used to play with some Japanese guys in Ryder (Asian folks are obnoxiously polite. These dudes would apologize after stealing the ball or scoring on someone. Takes a lot of the fun out of trash talk). I've haven't even watched any b-ball lately, maybe 5 or 6 games in the past year. And when I do catch a game, I get this feeling of guilt, like running into an old friend you haven't bothered to call since the last time you randomly met up.


Be a rock star
This dream has been the hardest to let go. I love music more than anything, but my attempts to make a career out of that feeling have been consistently disappointing. My high school "band", The Seemonkies, is legendary, but never really went anywhere. I had a guitar that I swear I tried to play, but the only songs I learned were "Maggie May" and one Jewel song. I've overcompensated for my failures by falling madly in crush with any boy I see playing guitar/bass/drums/ukulele, etc. etc. Those have also been consistently disappointing. I guess I could have gone the route of music journalism, or management or something like that, but being so close yet so far seems like it'd be even worse.

It's weird to think how things you might have wanted so badly at one point seem completely ridiculous now. Weird and depressing, but sort of puts a few things in perspective, like looking at photographs of yourself with really bad hair.

Anyone out there have any nutball dreams to share? Or photos of yourself with really bad hair?

An introduction to my sick attachment to pop culture

(Nick, I apologize. This is not even remotely the topic I chose for BLOG WARS. But you've known me long enough to realize I have the attention span of a 3-year-old and am not so great at following rules.)

Let me take you back, back to a year we called 2000. Turn on the radio in 2000, and you were smack dab in the middle of the teeny-bop and crap rock boom when "artists" like pre-breakdown Britney Spears and pre-rehab Creed ruled the charts. It was a year of monumental artistic achievements like Will Smith's "Willenium" and Lou Bega's "A Little Bit of Mambo." I was 15 years old and listening to mostly punk rock and its various wussy incarnations. I spent most of my time listening to bands like The Vandals or the much wussier New Found Glory and causing innocent mayhem with my two best friends. At some point, we formed a band called The Seemonkeys (after a teacher walked by the three of us sitting in the hallway and called us the "see no" monkeys. You can see already how painfully clever we were). The band's artistic vision was to be a combination of Blink 182 and Josie and the Pussycats, which mostly meant that we wanted to play music with minimal difficulty and lots of sex and fart jokes, but also to look pretty doing it. Sure, we didn't actually own instruments and couldn't actually play them if we did, but we wrote several songs full of entendre and swear words and had a fan club who gave us money to support our shows that never happened.

Also in the year 2000, No Doubt released “Return of Saturn” named for the astrological theory of Saturn’s return: your 29th year, the year you become a productive adult. What sort of stake did I, in my mid-teens have in that sort of album? Not much, except that I religiously listened to “Tragic Kingdom” and not so secretly wanted to be exactly like Gwen Stefani. I didn’t take to it immediately. I think I, like most No Doubt fans (I assume other fans felt the same, the album wasn‘t nearly as popular as the band‘s previous…or maybe even latter. But who exactly were No Doubt fans? I imagine them all as teenage girls, but that’s only because I was a teenage girl. The wonderful/horrible thing about adolescence is that you don’t notice any demographics outside your own. I’m not sure if at 15 I even noticed anyone other than myself and the occasional cute skater boy) expected “Tragic Kingdom 2.” What I got was a different Gwen-slowed down, smoothed out musically, and lyrically introspective, conflicted, and maybe a little depressing. There were no girl power anthems like “Just a Girl” or songs about Disneyland. Instead, Gwen had turned into a pop-rock Sylvia Plath, singing about the perceived dichotomies of womanhood: can you be a badass independent lady and still want to get married? Can you be pretty without using it as a shield? Can you admire other women without turning into a jealous bitch? Why do the good girls always want the bad boys? She begged the questions I wasn’t prepared to ask at 15.

I can’t pinpoint the moment I returned to the album, or the moment it clicked in my consciousness, but I’m sure it was some time post-high school, post-9/11, likely around the first time a boy put a dent in my heart, but well before my Saturn return. I started to feel the relevance of lyrics like:

If you bore me then I'm comfortable
If you interest me I'm scared
My attraction paralyzes me
No courage to show my true colors that exist
But I want to be the real thing
But if you catch my eye can't be authentic
The one's I loath are the one's that know me the best

The sort of anxiety you can only feel when relationships start to last and be meaningful. Holding hands at the football game is easy, bearing your soul is excruciating. And the closer you get to knowing the real you, the harder you are to share. Or:

Now all those simple things are simply too complicated for my life
How'd I get so faithful to my freedom?
A selfish kind of life

The contradiction all women face growing into adulthood. If the Saturn return theory is right, I still haven’t made it to functional adulthood. Maybe the key word there is functional. I’m past the age of thinking I know everything, but not quite to an age where I can prove I know anything. For a woman, that moment in time is particularly difficult because it‘s one more gap in a life defined by gaps. At 15, I would have told you I was a fiercely independent woman who never needed a man for anything and would be a dynamo in any field I so chose to rule. At 25, I will tell I am a fiercely independent woman who realizes aspirations take work and worries that I’m not up to the challenge, and worries even more that the hours and dedication will ruin any chance of love or children or all those things I can’t ever be sure I want. At 25, I struggle more with my identity than I ever have. At 25, I take the time to contemplate where my relationships go wrong. At 25, this album is indispensable for me.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about how music/film/books/what have you sort of trace the course of our lives and I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a 25 year old female college grad with a blank slate of a future. Expect to read more on both.