If you were never so much a watcher of Sex and the City, and you’re around a clique of women who are, and they start in with that, “Which character are you? Which character am I?” game, they will always, always tell you you’re Miranda.

Oh, you organic gardener/librarian/tax consultant/drummer, you. You’re practically just like her.

The drive back was so dark. Through the swampy woods driving back north, up that spindly road with its spindly yellow line, I clutched so hard at the steering wheel and let everyone pass me. And gradually, another feeling overtook that one. I felt so alive as I drove up to the garish fluorescence and McDonalds and ordered a cheeseburger and fries. So grateful for my own agency and for the dollar bills in my own wallet and for the hunger in my gut, and for my ability to chomp down the flavor and texture that that corporation has tricked my body into associating, elementally, with my own childhood.
But what does it mean, that entering a house of death and then leaving it again should renew one’s own zest for living? How cheap? Because I had called the girl’s mother and asked to come over. And I left, feeling the proximity of all of us to the edge; blade-sharp fear, and the night full of black and forest sounds felt bigger, maybe, than some witless Me could handle. Until the rotting, living smell of that river air, which, coming up and through the windows as the car scaled the slope up to the bridge hit me like a gift, because the girl had been denied just that, that night, and here I was, experiencing it, and felt close to tears for that reason but also, shamefully this, superior. Like I’d done something right and so been chosen. Which is not true. I'll have my own day. But I feel like I’ve stolen her fire. I was dull and unable to smile for weeks before that night, and I’ve been unable to stop, since.

I said Goddamn,
Henshaw, I ain’t even taken off my apron, yet. But this record’s burnt an unholy hole right through all that pork grease in the heavenlyfried pork chop/cornbread/tater/green bean supper that Esmerelda cooked us tonight, and alacri-fied me right up.

It’s been hours. It’s been days of legs pedaling, to and from campus, or sitting uncomfortable at sweaty, polluted intersections with the heat rising in waves, and weeks of sitting and working silently at the library, and listening to the morning news in concentrated silence, knit-browed, and working silently here at home, or silently at school. "Concentration" and "dread for my country and yours" can pretty much sum up the time since I wrote last. [God. Horrors and nightmares. Story from canvassing last Sattiday: Woman our age calling down from her porch, in a chummy sing-song: “You knooow Obama just got the nomination because of affirmative action!” We kept walking: step-step-step, then I hissed to my partner: “What did that even mean?” “It meant she’s racist.” “Oh.”]

And I’m so glad to have to have all this split wide open, finally, by Jenny Lewis’s new album, of all things. Yes, really. It’s called Acid Tongue. I don’t even know it well enough yet, to describe individual songs to you, just to say: Holy Hell-!, let’s rejoice; she’s put out a barn burner, left that last, tame and tiny rickety Thing that was that last Rilo Kiley album behind to eat her country-bluesy dust, fellas. She’s got Elvis Costello singing with her on one song, and the Watson Twins, too, on some, but the main deal is that the songs are just good. There’s like, some Dusty Springfield, and even, dare I say, some Joni Mitchell up in there. But mostly, you’re just thinking, “Oh, good song.”

Because, sorry to whine, but it’s just been so long since I’ve been caught up that way by anything new.
Everyone’s talkin’ ‘bout, well, say, the Fleet Foxes this and that, and they’re…fine. They’re pretty. No, they don’t remind me of CSN&Y, though yes, they’re clearly a bundle of talent; but there’s only so long I can marvel honestly at your perfect playing-card tower construction. “Wow, so flawless and towering. Such nice right angles.”

Gimme something clumsier. Something greasier. Thank you.

Love ‘n Euskara for dummies.
Just saw Lars and the Real Girl. It was so sweet it made me choke right up, and feel all wistful and wishfullike inside the way these movies do—and I’d definitely recommend it to you, Henshaw. Because it was well done and believable. And because, when it is well done, I love the idea that social-misfit weirdos can find true love.
I love-! It-! And you know. Um, it’s springtime.

Still, it makes me consider again this tv/film phenomenon of the socially unsalvageable lad whom some perfectly adjusted gal rescues for no clear reason. You know: 40 Year Old Virgin did it, and Knocked Up—and it’s not just Judd Apatow. Consider, too: Garden State, Everybody Loves Raymond and on and on. And sure, we all heard, like, TV Guide, jibber-jabbering away about the “fat guy/hot wife” sitcom phenomenon (“ho, ho, ho”) a while back as though it were some sort of isolated outcropping, the Basque language of that second’s pop culture.

But, please. What’s with the “2005”-labelled shrink-wrap on this phenom? This weirdo, supremely unhealthy notion that the best men are special cases who need to be nurtured back to emotional health and ushered gently into the world by their women is really nothing new. Girlfriend as mother, all that; not new. I mean, gah, consider the entire decade we call the '70s. Nor has it died now that we’ve tired of talking about it temporarily. And, it doesn’t, it does not help men or women in the real world.

So then, what’s with the movie rec, if that’s how I feel? Well, because: competing synapses. Because nurture, too, and not just nature, works on all of us. What if they’d made Sir Main Character Guy really physically unattractive? How much then would I still be rooting for him and how much would I have been forced to confront my own little urge to jump his bones and then make him casserole?

Maybe I’m just disturbed by that. And, by how much that scene of Lars and that girl on the date at the bowling alley? The one where he’s just sighing a lot and rolling his eyes heavenward just trying to think of a good response to her innocuous conversational volley? While she sits there with a damn expectant grin plastered to her face? Reminded me exactly of someone I once dated.


Meanwhile, big, big changes sharp and bright going on, it seems, with friends far and wide. Time for upheaval, Miraclegrow, all that. Carmelita and Ginger are planting all sorts of new things out on the veranda, so this might really be the year I overcome some of my infamous black-thumbage. Also trying to get some friends to start playing the rock together; currently = all I can think about. Ah, spring fever.
Anyway, take care, ya’ll. Get out there in the sunshine.
(now playing: “Imperial” – Unrest, though, in general, lots of “Ceremony” by New Order. I blame those NPR music buttons between news stories for this.)

Dear Alice,
“I’m on the pill and now no one in his right mind would sleep with me!”—and more!

The following incident might-could have some adverse effect on the supreme powers of a teacher as unquestionable authority figure previously closer in bearing and appearance, from student point-of-view, to some Creative Writing Deity than to an ordinary mortal:

Not that the above is me. But if it were.

Say said-teacher were teaching a poem. An ordinary Monday. Mid-morning. None of the students are responding except the same faithful, eager one or two. But then even they begin to flag and look down at their coursepacks and doodle fake notes in their notebooks.
“Okay, so the speaker compares her current place in life to being in a rowboat without oars(“September,” Jennifer Hecht), here. What could that indicate?”

Dead silence. Teacher reminds class of their participation grades. Asks what’s up. Sighs loudly. Looks around the room and feels a beady-eyed desire to slap all her students in turn, even the nice ones. Makes an effort not to show that through her voice.

“Okay, well, if your life feels like—”

She stops then, because she tastes something—salty—on her lip. More. Puts her hand to her face and realizes that the zit she covered in 1. Zit Begone Stuff, 2. SPF 15 Moisturizer, then 3. Makeup, earlier this morning, is bleeding down her face onto her upper lip, there in front of her class seated around this small table. Bleeding great, big weeping drops.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I have to go to the Ladies’ Room, now.”

When she leaves she considers never returning, but she does.

I hate birth control pills.
Every time I’m on the pill I have Breakouts Like it’s 1999. Which was, actually, another time my skin was so crappy because I was on the pill then, too. I was never so pimply in real adolescence, only during the weird fake-variety instilled by birth control pills.

Even the brand purported to *control* acne actually has the opposite effect. My facial skin freaks out completely, shouts “Hormones? What hormones are these? Why are there so many? I must make you ugly! And give you pain, too!” These are never ordinary blackheads. They’re big, aching, red pimples with lovely white caps. Giant zits that last for days. All over my face.

My friend Ginger’s going through the same thing, only with uncontrollable, frightening-to-her mood swings. She’s not like this normally. Only on the pill. So what does she do, now—go to a psychiatrist to get some antidepressants and then pick me up and swing by the damn dermatologist’s?

That’s three medications, three different doctors, a heeuge pile of change and drugs all so we can, what, have sex? (If. We even. Feel like it.)

You have to take it the exact same time every day. If I forget a pill and have to take two the next day, I spend the morning puking. If I forget too many pills, I get pregnant. Because I have no health insurance, the pill costs me $40 every freaking month.
I am very, very typical.

In college, I could get the pill for ten dollars a month, and many college students were still paying about that, but then last year Congress passed a bill that sapped Medicaid’s budget and that cost skyrocketed to $40 or $50 even for college students and Planned Parenthood customers like me. (Even if you could still get them for ten dollars a pack, our school’s student health center was all booked up for the year for pelvic exams by the start of this month. Dear Exorbitant Student Fees--thanks! Love, Over Half Your Population.)

The whole deal just blows: the pill sucks, but it’s the best we have. And now it’s getting tougher to get our hands on? Did I hear someone over there saying something about “the best country in the world”? You, over there? Great. Hoist that flag a little higher on the left. It’s a tad crooked.

It sucks enough that women have to even deal with pelvic exams every six months or year because we’re the ones who deal biologically with the horrible effects of HPV. (Most people have HPV, but it more or less only shows symptoms in women, “symptoms” meaning cervical cancer.) The fact that HPV affects women inordinately is no one’s fault. But I’m running out of fingers to count my women-friends who’ve had to go through excruciatingly painful, expensive procedures because of catching the shit too late due to crappy or nonexistent healthcare.

Birth control’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rather unpleas- the ridiculous oceans of shit women go through, having to do with our reproductive parts. But every time I look in the mirror lately, it’s the one that really gets to me.

My head just might explode the very next time I am forced to hear the phrase "deceptively simple." Especially as applied to writing. You, sir or madam, are the one who is deceptively simple.

The youth. And: Not freaking out.

I haven’t written here in a while. I am writing, mind you, only it's mostly gems such as these, on my students' papers: “What’s the larger significance of writing about this acid trip? It seems like it could possibly be one layer in a larger story, but as it stands now, I’m left wanting more.”

“Your grandfather’s death is a great concept for this essay. What would make it even better: Some scenes. An exercise to try: Sit down and consider just one scene during this five year span you cover here.”

Truth: I’m not left wanting to read anything more about anybody’s drug trip, dead grandfathers or the puddles of tears “I could of swum in” tears and more tears dripping, dripping to the floor at their “pint sized feet.” Truth? I just want to be left alone. I think this is Phase Two of grad school. Phase One is a head-snapping adjustment period. Phase two is Leave me Alone with my Thesis. I think Phase Three might involve the acquiring of an eating disorder, or perhaps psychosis. Worth the thousands in loans a year by itself. Because those experiences sell books like mad.

There's terror in paradise.
There’s this awful movie called Snake Island that came before Snakes on a Plane, about this island, see, and these cruiseship people who get trapped there, and, well, there are these snakes.
Tricky plot.
Well, it was while watching this movie that my friends and I were able to define the classic answer to the horror movie question of Who gets killed next? The answer is always the people who deserve it, because they’re either:
A – Having sex. Sex that’s enhanced visually onscreen with saline or silicone, and, more to the point, sex that’s frivolous and naughty, because we Puritans love to see the frivolous sex-havers getting their due.
B – Complaining. Tacky mustachioed whiners are always the second to get killed by the snakes. Followed by all other brands of whiners.

So, to warn one another that we were about to start bitching and therefore probably deserved to get bitten by all manner of serpents, our shorthand became, “Okay, this is totally Snake Island territory, but…”

So, it’s Snake Island time. I've warned you.

Whatever I devote my attention to, I feel guilty; I should be doing something else. Whatever I’m doing becomes diminished in its importance as the responsibilities I’m not turning my attention to loom up and, just outside the corner of my vision, become these huge, amorphous shapes, impossible to gauge and harder still, to overcome; there will always be more.
I should be grading papers, I should most definitely not be grading papers; I should be writing, but writing what? Is it for my thesis? No? Well, then I should be doing research on my thesis, but that feels like nothing but noodling around on the internet most of the time. (And just what has this or that particular goofy little article to do with my focus, anyway? If the answer's not immediately clear, I'm wracked with anxiety.) So, soon I’m back to working on the paper due Wednesday instead. It’s cut and dry; six pages. Thesis, paragraphs, conclusion, all assigned, all straightforward, all utterly forgettable.

When I was in nursery school, I got this evaluation from a teacher: “Alice gets utterly absorbed in whatever it is she’s working on, but has a hard time moving on to a different task.” This was my problem as a reporter, too. I like working on one thing, not twelve. Grad school is like being a reporter, only on acid. No, I don’t know what I mean by that. I need to get back to work, now.

Corollary. See: “Rule.”:
…except where it’s supposed to be.
There’s a bar, see, where an ancient copy of the above poster is screwed to the wall, and there it has observed the pool players and drunken dancing girls in halter tops for ages from behind its dusty layer of plastic. The image was originally supposed to be all sex, sex, sex, but it just gives my friend Ginger the willies.

“I hate that thing!” she shouted again one night, and finally I asked her why.

In response, Ginger set her drink down, walked up to the poster and pointed to that weird space. The crevice. Which, the more you stare at it, becomes more crevasse than crevice. “Look at it!” she said, pointing to the faded, overexposed copy of poor Emmanuelle’s chin. “What is that? What is it supposed to be?!”

She was right. It was weird. Some sort of second mouth. A strange landscape where colonies of tiny people could dwell. No, X never was like this, I don’t think.

Rule.
If you want one web address, but accidentally type in another, you get porn.
If you want one 800 number, but accidentally punch another, you get porn.

Porn is lurking around every false turn in the Land of Communication. (I'd originally typed "nook and cranny" and not "false turn," there, but contextually, that makes no sense. Nook and cranny sounds way more pornlike, too.

There's something terribly wrong with me.)

On popcorn, and perhaps also, on larger problems Alice tends to muck herself up in.
White cheddar popcorn is supposed to be one of those snacks you savor somewhat, oh, I dunno, daintily, I guess. The shape of popcorn demands a one-at-a-time consumption if you’re not to look like a complete slob. Not that anyone actually does this.
No. Listen. I’m serious.
Popcorn is served in such venues—movies, fairs—that call for this carefree, devil-may-care sort of enjoyment, right? An air of, “Oh, I’m not really eating this for sustenance. I’m eating this for the Victorian (or possibly, Edwardian) wonderment that we might partake of this popped corn for the sheer amusement of it all. Ho-ho!”

But instead of carnivals, I always seem to end up eating popcorn, oh, on my break at my hourly-waged job in the break room underneath the fluorescent light, when I’m really hungry. I tear open the bag and—the problem of Slobbery, it’s compounded by the fact of this dusting of cheddar cheese and quite possibly and probably, MSG—I start really enjoying the taste and the texture and everything about the popcorn too much, and instead of taking small, genial bites, I’m soon grabbing these craven handfuls, loading my mouth. I get dissatisfied with those moments between the popcorn-in-the-mouth moments. I become completely greedy, ugly and white-dust-spittley-fingered. Someone who hopes to God that no one else will walk into the break room while I’m making such a raging fool of myself, eating this popcorn. Someone whom, at any rate, they certainly wouldn’t want for their friggin’ popcorn ad.

Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,
for I’ve been absent. I know. But really, what’s been going on in la vida mia is not a glut of emailification. Instead, it’s been some seriously hot nose-on-grindstone action for me: at work and moreover, preparing for MFA program application. Every second I’m not at work, I’m working on my writing samples or my statement of purpose or figuring out how many transcripts each of these schools wants or sending bags of fancy coffee to the nice, nice folks writing recommendations for me or studying ALGEBRA for the GRE. Actually, I didn’t study that much Algebra, since what I’m lookin’ to return to school for is writing, not the quadratic equation. So I studied just enough to giggle at my complete ineptitude.

So the deadline looms now, for school #1, a place I’d really like to go. Oh, how it looms. My writing prof from last spring looked over the only writing sample I haven’t finished—I won’t bore you with details, but it’s an essay. Anyway, she returned it to me today with the advice “to put it away for a few days,” before tearing into it once again, to which I felt like screaming, “But there’s no tiiiiime!” Except I couldn’t, really. Because she’d written this in a note, which she’d stuck in her mailbox along with my critique. I think she planned it that way on purpose. But she’s right. I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with the essay’s narrator for a couple weeks now, and I can’t even tell who’s seeing what, anymore. To coin a really bad turn of phrase. But I’m allowed to do that here. Ha and HAW.

And so, yeah, that’s the real reason for this rambling, Mr. Henshaw. I just had to write something else tonight, something I could write while not really thinking, without proofreading even once, with Wolf Parade at full blast through headphones: the surest route to deafness. I really should make the most of this night of Not Really Working: Watch this Harry Potter movie my coworker lent me three months ago. Eat a few gummy pounds of red licorice, enough the glue my jaws together, and my digestive tract, too. Turn the heat up to a money-bleeding extreme and take a shower with the bathroom door open, rock and roll blaring. Shave my legs. Sigh.

Anyhoo, thought I’d pop in and see how you’re doing, Mr. H. Drop me an email, why don’t ya?

I like when my friends get on me about not posting for a blue moon. So, thanks, ya’ll.
No, I haven’t lost my weak little mind or gone away permanently into my Morrissey corner. I was simply having one of those really, really bad days. It actually turned into a good one later on, but who wants to read extensively about someone's great day? Anyway; basta, pasta.

Baby, it’s cold outside.
The weather is like October’s supposed to be: brisk and truly chilly. Lentil soup weather. Leaves blowing around and sounding like Connect-4 plastic coins rattling down to the table-weather. And apparently, procreation weather.

In the last month, three (count ‘em!) of my female friends have told me that they’re either pregnant or trying. Frankly, I’ve been considering not writing about this here at all, for fear of looking like someone who’s saying, “She’s blissfully pregnant and her life is about to change forever. But, more importantly—How does this affect MEEE?” I am truly psyched for my friends; all three of ‘em will make wonderful mothers, their husbands, wonderful fathers - and I am really looking forward to watching the people I love become parents and all that goes with that.

It also makes me feel a little sad, a little left-behind. Already, my one friend has a lot more to talk about with our mutual friend who’s a mama than with me. That may sound whiny, but hey, it’s gut feeling.

blueprint.
While I know that having a child is not a necessary adult rite of passage and while I’m not sure it’s one I ever want to undertake myself, I can’t help but feel really wistful when I talk with people who are going through it. A pregnant woman becomes like a passenger on a canoe just tethered to the shore where you stand. Even when you’re spending time together, she is never really there, never really present. You’re shouting to each other across a gulf of understanding and hormones and preoccupation.

My sister told me that she is still careful not to get holier-than-thou with me on the baby-thing. Never have I heard a, “Just you wait. It changes everything,” from her; although I know it changes everything. I know it sets you apart. I’m 27. By the time my mother was this age, she was pregnant with my eldest sister. She’d been married for two years and she is married still, to the same man. My eldest sister was trying to get pregnant by the time she was my age. This is the blueprint I’ve always known: You get married in your 20s, then you have a baby and you own a house and you are stable. This has caused rifts with boyfriends who didn’t believe in marriage and rifts with my own damn self since I don’t really know whether I believe I want a baby.

And I know I don’t want one at this stage in life. I still like to go dancing, now and then. I think I’ll always go to rock shows, always listen to music, loud, in my car. Nor do I believe these traits to be evidence of some lack of maturity, some lack of character, some sign that I’m not ready for parenthood.

So Says the White American Lady.
The sign that I’m not ready for parenthood is simply that I’m not. It’s that knowledge and that knowledge alone. I’m more interested in devoting time to writing, to learning new things; hell, to having more than a thousand dollars or so in the bank. And of course, back in there somewhere, there’s the thought of What-Right-Have-I, with all we one-percenters squandering the resources of the other 99-percenters?

And of course I’m lucky, to live right now and right here in that this is even a choice for me. If I didn’t have access to the fullest range of birth control, I would have had at least one child already; there would be none of this, “But what about my writing??” business.

"You just do.”
So, how do you know, then? Thar’s the question, me’laddies and lassies. The They who know tell me it’s like a light, it’s like that episode of Laverne and Shirley where Laverne becomes a nun but can’t feel the Light of God and the other nun is like, “You just know,” and then at the end of the episode, the same beatific spotlight shines down on Laverne, too, and tells her to take off her nun-garb; she ain’t no sister of the cloth.

So far, I’m Laverne. But not even that, since I've received no Great Message either way.

"You just know."
They tell me it’s like that, these mothers or mothers-to-be I know. They’ve always known they want to help a ten-year old with her spelling words, to teach a fifteen-year-old to drive. It’s supposed to be like that spotlight, something holy, not from you but from some mixture of the heavens and biology and personality type.

I’ve been told I’d make a great mother, but that’s not the same as knowing that’s what I want to do. I mean, I also have great skill at Super Mario Brothers, but you don’t see me doing that for a living. There are a thousand and one reasons, but it just comes down to: not right now.

And Half a Year Later...
I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain movie, lately. A movie nearly everyone I know just swooned over about six months ago and still recalls with fondness in their voices at parties. A little movie called Garden State. When I first rented Garden State, I was visiting my grandmother in eastern North Carolina a few months ago. And I liked it. The first thing I liked about it is the fact that the protagonist’s father creeped me out, right away.

"God, that’s some effective acting," I thought. "But why is this man giving me the jim-jams? Why do I not trust the way he skulks around the house and sneaks up on his son, Mr. Main Character – as if he’s been in that house for eleventy-seven years? Like his mind has been poisoned by the desire for something....a ring, perhaps? A One Ring...?" And then I realized: It’s fricking Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins is Andrew Largeman’s dad!

All LOTR-dorkiness aside, though, I came away from Garden State thinking it to be mostly a sweet little movie. My friends and I are all in the midst of all that career-life-trying to get some cognitive-confluence-goin’ struggle, so it feels poignant to see that played out onscreen. Even if certain aspects of the movie that did not sit quite right with me, simply will not leggo, months after I saw it. There’s the obvious Graduate-style plug for The Shins. If you haven’t seen Garden State--Well, if you haven’t seen it, you probably haven’t even read this far, who am I kidding. But anyway, dear Mr. Imaginary Henshaw, I say to my pretend reader, there’s this scene right near the beginning, when Guy meets girl, and her first Cute Bold yet Endearingly Insecure Move, is to slap her headphones over his head and say, "You’ve gotta hear this. It’s the Shins. It’ll change your liiiife!" Boom-! Soundtrack time! And it’s sooo clumsily done. This is Point A that suddenly I want to throw something at the screen. It’s funny: I go from being pretty much with this movie totally, to irritation, with that one simply turn of events: "Cute movie, cute movie....augh! Selling Me Things! Screw you!"

The rest of the movie, as I said, is fine. You have cutesy Girl Who is Flawed (capitol letters there on purpose) and Pensive yet Cute Guy Who is Flawed. And they’re hanging out, doing random things together in his hometown (where bafflingly, they’ve never met before), when all of a sudden, they meet a couple who lives a quirky life together in a trailer, it rains, and Guy has his cathartic moment for no reason I can fathom. But the cinematography is kind of pretty and there’s music too, I think, so this works all right for a movie. But it would never, ever hold together well as anything else. If Garden State were written as a short story, say, for this class I happen to be taking now, say, it might get some serious criticism on the no-build-up and then sudden, unexpected and unplanned-feeling climax. Just say. And yeah, I know you all probably read criticism of this movie months ago, when it was actually in theaters, so sorry for standing here holding up my index finger in this six-month-later "Eureka!" But I had to say it.