Carrick's Blog

Why I give a shit about poverty

2009-10-16T23:52:00.004+01:00

There’s a certain stigma about “doing good”. (At least I feel there is; is it just me?) There’s something unbearably “holier than thou” when it comes to talking about “giving” and “doing more”. It invokes, for me, the image of Minnie Driver playing that over-privileged naïve girl in An Ideal Husband, going on about the charity she’s involved with in one breath and the boys she’s been flirting with in another.

Live 8 and other such fundraisers, featuring celebrities with oh-so serious expressions speaking in hushed tones and slow-motion shots of starving children with Enya on the soundtrack are so easy to roll ones eyes at. They’ve become so common that they’re cliché.

Maybe I’m just insensitive. I know this sounds disgustingly Ayn Rand-ian of me, but in high school, I was involved in community service activities not because I actually cared, but because they would look good on my college application—and I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s how most people felt. After college, I felt that it was rich people who should give—not me. I felt that my living conditions (at the time, I was living with my parents) were the bare minimum of what was humane (lol), and I was struggling to maintain even that. It was the people with ten houses scattered all over the world who should scale down a bit for fuck’s sake.

I related all of this to my step-uncle, who changed my entire perspective in a single conversation. (The next time you think arguing with someone is pointless, who knows: you may be laying the seeds for future ruminations and profound change.) He told me about a documentary about two different high schools: a private school with the wealthiest kids in the city and a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods.

Although revealing how “the other half lives”—juxtaposing, say, rich kids getting upset about their cars with the poor kids coping with violence—was fascinating in and of itself, the real kicker was the documentarists’ decision to show footage of the poor kids to the rich kids. Even though the rich kids were legitimately touched by their plight, the documentarists asked what the rich kids would be willing to give up in order to rectify the inequality between the two groups, and the rich kids answered, “Nothing.” Not their Mercedes, not their houses, not their private school education. And their reason? Because other people were so much richer than them.

Hm.

I’m sure you’ve seen that thing online (The Global Rich List) where you enter your yearly income and it tells you what percentile of wealth you’re in compared to the rest of the world. And of course, you look at it and marvel at how you’re actually in the top 3% when you feel so poor, and wonder how billions of people could possibly live on less than $3000 dollars a year, let alone $300, and you pity them for a second, but then you go ahead and buy your lunch for $15 and make your car payment of $232 and buy that $75 pair of jeans because you simply have nothing to wear. And why not? Everyone else is doing it. Everyone has a car. No one’s walking around with holes in their clothes. If we did, we’d look stupid. We have to keep up with our peers, right? And that’s exactly the line of thinking of those rich high school kids.

So I started asking myself that question: what would I give up in order to rectify this vast inequality of wealth that clearly exists between me and much of the world? And I began demanding of myself that the answer cannot be “nothing”. If 97% of the world can go without X, then I should be able to go without X, too. I’ve started to buy as little as possible of anything not completely necessary to my survival and donating everything left over to charity. (If any of you had started to wonder why I’ve started to look like crap, this is why.)

I know that thinking about how badly off people are to gain “perspective” is cheesy, but I think it’s less so when it has practical consequences: thinking about how there are places even in my very own city where dozens of people live in the same house makes me a little more forgiving of my apartment, which I share with a roommate and is in close quarters with my ten neighbors. It gives me less of an impulse to run out and get a one-bedroom apartment as soon as I can afford it, or that I should even find a smaller or shittier apartment so I can free up more income to give.

Maybe this sounds a little like “hair shirt” charity, like I’m taking it a little too far, and I know it’s not exactly a tantalizing selling point (definitely not brought up on Live 8—“Get a shittier apartment!!! WOO!!”), but it’s the one that works for me. For me to think that I should get the most I can afford is a logical fallacy that will only perpetuate never, ever giving to others, no matter how rich I get.

To me, this has nothing to do with sympathy or sob stories or Enya; it has to do with fairness (which, luckily, makes it much less goody-two-shoes). Just as it’s not fair that some people travel all over the world, live in lavish mansions and go yachting around the Mediterranean while I have to work at a tedious, mind-numbing job every day, it’s not fair that I actually have my own apartment and my own car while billions of people all over the world live in shacks and eke out a meager existence doing hard manual labor. No matter what Ayn Rand says, I find all of this tremendously unfair.

And yet, it occurred to me that just giving wasn’t enough. I’d heard somewhere that tons of aid to Africa, for instance, gets siphoned off to warlords who use it to buy palaces and weapons and shit. Why the hell do we let that happen?! What are the root causes and systemic problems that prevent the alleviation of extreme poverty in spite of billions of dollars of aid? I decided to solve global poverty right there and headed to the font of all knowledge: Wikipedia.

It was there that I discovered something I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of before: that many impoverished countries—the same ones we’re told to send all this aid to—are billions of dollars in debt to the World Bank, the IMF, and random private creditors. Something like half of every dollar in aid goes towards paying off this debt. It’s like, excuse me?? I’m supposed to give money to these people so it can end up in some banker’s wallet?? Or I’m supposed to help these people so they can keep working on their farms to make money to give to these bankers?? How is that any different from medieval kings living off the sweat of their serfs? In a horrifying twist on the gap between rich and poor, some of those same fat cats tooling around in their yachts aren’t just hoarding all their wealth: their wealth actually COMES FROM the very poor people they should be giving to!!

Lest you think that it’s the poor people’s fault they got into debt in the first place and that they shouldn’t get out of their obligation to pay it off, there are multiple reasons why this is untrue, which I won’t bother to delineate here, but which are thoroughly explained at the website of Jubilee USA, one of the primary organizations campaigning to have all this debt canceled. But really, it’s common sense: bankruptcy as a legal concept exists for a reason: so that people won’t be slaves to their debt their entire lives, but can rather start again from a clean slate. Why isn’t there an international equivalent, by which we can grant the same thing to countries, particularly those whose citizens are suffering so intensely??

So forget Live 8. Forget Bono. Forget even the Red Cross for a moment. Getting these ridiculous loans canceled is the FIRST STEP towards ANY progress in the third world. Anything else will just serve as a band-aid—a badly needed band-aid, but a band-aid nonetheless.

These are the lines of thinking that get me to take action: justice and common sense. It’s not that I have no sympathy; of course I do. That part in Seven Samurai when the guy picks up the rice grain by grain with a quivering hand because they’ll starve to death without it makes me desperate to run to the kitchen and get him a big ol’ bag of rice. And stuff like that is happening all over the world. Right now. But if I’m not willing to make sacrifices and challenge what I deem a “necessity”, sympathy is all I will have to give.

Moreover, the whole situation is so complicated that it demands more than just throwing money at it; it’s about figuring out the best angle, determining what the roots of the problems are so we can get the biggest bang for our buck and our time.

And there’s nothing goody-two-shoes about that.

How I responded to my health insurance company's survey

2009-10-02T22:37:00.002+01:00

(I'm SURE you guys are sick of me talking about health insurance reform, but unfortunately I won't be sick of it until it's DONE.)

My health insurance company, CIGNA, actually asked for feedback today! One of their non-multiple-choice questions was: "Please tell us how we could improve our service." And so I did indeed take a moment to tell them. Here was my answer.

Tip #1: You could include information as to whether you cover yearly physicals or not CLEARLY in your policy materials.

Maybe you already do include such information, but I read through the ENTIRE policy AND website and could not find anything on it, so either it's not even there, or it's worded in such fine print or so vaguely that it's easily overlooked. This is what necessitated the call in the first place.

Tip #2: You could cover yearly physicals.

Your motto starts: "Think well. Live well." Presumably, being a health insurance company, this refers to the health of your customers. And presumably you "care" about the health of your customers, since your other motto is "A business of caring." Well, did you know that preventative care is crucial in preserving one's health? Doctors recommend yearly check-ups in order to catch problems right when they start so they don't have a chance to become major problems. I'm suspicious that you actually may not "care" whether or not your customers catch health problems before they become debilitating or, god forbid, fatal.

Tip #3: Your customer service representatives could admit to the real reason behind not covering yearly physicals.

I actually said to your customer service representative, "What ever happened to preventative care?" And she merely responded, like an automaton with only pre-programmed answers, that you could "only cover what the policy covers," which obviously doesn't even answer the question. The correct answer is: "We don't cover yearly physicals because if we did, it would eat into our profit margin." I would have been much more satisfied had I gotten the truth from your "representative" rather than a canned answer.

Cut to: the poor survey statistics person who has to read this. They roll their eyes, thinking "not another one" and click "delete".

Some thoughts from tabling at the Hollywood Farmers Market

2009-08-17T03:37:00.004+01:00

1. Know who your representatives are!!!

I swear to god, of the thirty or so people I asked who their congressperson is, only ONE knew!!! I’m sure that anyone reading this doesn't fall into this category, but it’s a great wake-up call: we need to make sure our friends and family are cognizant of the people that run our country!!! The powers that be! The people who determine YOUR FUTURE!!

People, we should be bitching to our reps far too often not to know who they are—let alone remembering who the hell we VOTED FOR. A couple years ago, I bitched to mine like EVERY DAY about wanting to see Bush impeached. And these days I'm bitching every single day about health care reform. There’s gotta be SOMETHING on the federal level that infuriates you and that you’d like to see changed. Look up who to bitch to, and do it!

2. I wish crazy people didn't have the right to vote.

Okay, I know this will never happen and should never happen because it’s a damn slippery slope, but seriously, I cannot believe that lunatics actually have the right to vote. You come across them every now and then when you’re canvassing. Today, some crazy lady said she didn’t support health care reform because “Obama himself hasn’t read the whole bill!” and “No one read all of NAFTA! And look at the mess we’re in now! You know who did read all of NAFTA? Ralph Nader!” (I walk away.) This woman, I’m sure, has the right to vote, and unfortunately, probably exercises that right.

Here’s another gem from a guy I got into a conversation with: “You dealt with all three of my alter egos really well!”

Can there be, like, a crazy test before one gets to vote? Actually, there should be a basic knowledge test, too. I know, it’ll never happen, but it’d sure be nice...

A few questions for a girl I reached while canvassing for health insurance reform.

2009-08-11T05:31:00.003+01:00

I almost didn’t write this. I thought, it’s only going to prolong my rage, no one’s gonna read it or if they do, they'll just be fellow Democrats already anyway, I have so much else to do, etc. etc. But at the end of the day, rage won.

So, as some of you may know, Obama's campaign's grassroots efforts, which did so much to get him elected have persisted into his presidency in order to garner support for his various issues--probably the most significant of which thus far is the current one: his push for health care reform. This being one of the issues I am most passionate about, I have joined the fight.

For instance, I started literally been e-mailing my representatives every single day about it. And finally, this evening, I was able to force myself to do a little phone canvassing--I’m pretty introverted, so doing so always petrifies me--and sat down with my cell and my phone list and started dialing.

Most of them were wrong numbers, mercifully, but strangely enough, the last call, just before my phone died, was the one where I actually got to speak to someone.

Kimberly. 21.

The purpose of these calls, as stated in the phone banking materials, is firstly to see if they agree with the three principles of Obama’s intended reforms. Kimberly agreed to the first two, but after I read the third, she demurred.

The third is: “Ensure that quality, affordable health care is available to all Americans.”

She responded that she couldn’t agree with that because “...I went to private school....”

At this point, I assumed she was gonna say something like, “but a lot of my friends went to public school, and it sounded awful,” i.e. things run by the government are crappy.

However, she continued: “...and I didn’t like that my dad had to pay for [no no, please don’t tell me she’s gonna say what I think she’s gonna say....] so many people to go to public school.”

I have a few questions for you, Kimberly.

1. Really? You don’t even believe in public school? What are you, an anarchist? Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Republicans believe in public school. The argument is so over that I’m not even going to waste my time defending fucking public school here. Does this mean you don’t even believe in charity, since that, too, would just be your “dad’s money going to other people”?

2. Your family was affluent enough to send you to private school. You escaped having to go to public school, with all its gangs and shitty teachers. And you’re begrudge the unwashed masses for getting even that???

3. What EXACTLY do you wish you’d been able to spend the extra money that Daddy instead paid in taxes? I figure it must be something like a yacht or a pony: since your family was affluent enough to pay for private school--for roughly the cost of a new car per year--I figure they had the basics like a mansion, a Mercedes, a maid, etc. already covered.

Wait, hold still, let me yank that silver spoon out of your mouth and make you THINK for a second with that over-privileged brain of yours--which is worth about 12 new BMWs more than mine. I'll try to ascend to your level in order to explain taxes. You know that country club you’re a member of? Well, Daddy pays a very expensive membership fee for you. And you know how nice the country club is? With its flowers and pristine pool and tennis courts? Well, all the members’ fees pay for all that. See, those country club membership fees, well, they’re kind of like taxes. Taxes pay for roads and schools and the police and such so that we have a nice, civilized society.

Here’s another thing that’s similar between your country club’s membership dues and taxes: they are not a la carte. You can’t tell your country club, well, I hate swimming, so I’m never gonna use the pool, so you can just deduct that from my membership fee, kthxbye! It doesn’t work like that, honey. So just because your parents elected of their own free will not to put their kids in public school system doesn’t mean Daddy gets to opt out of paying for it. Because ironically enough--sadly enough both for you and for them--the people who are incapable of paying for it are the ones who need it the most—the people who can’t afford the ritzy education you got to have. (btw, there's a great website I found recently of rich people who actually WANT to be taxed more for social services because they actually understand this concept: Wealth for the Common Good)

Obviously, I really, really, really wish I’d been able to say all these things to her, but as anyone who’s gone canvassing knows, you’re advised not to argue and instead to just move on--i.e. that your energy is best spent finding the people who DO agree with you. So instead of all the above, I simply said cheerily, "should I put you down as a 'no' then?" And she said yes.

But I think that at some level, we also need to educate each other, to maintain a dialogue to continually challenge and push our beliefs. Which is, I suppose, why I'm writing this after all: putting my few drops in the bucket for that cause so that by the time a canvasser does roll around, the people on the other end of the line or on the other side of the door don’t spout off like fucktards.

A Glossary for Apartment Hunters

2009-07-07T20:39:00.004+01:00

When you first start apartment hunting, you quickly pick up on the fact that there is a very specific terminology associated with this niche of life. All are euphemistic. They were almost certainly delliberately chosen by landlords and realtors to evoke a glamorous image instead of whatever disadvantage it represents. Some of these euphemisms represent a small, incidental component of that image, but in some cases, they bear absolutely no resemblance.

I know, landlords in the business of selling apartments, so I'll begrudge them the attempt to slap these random labels on, but come on. Once everyone knows what these terms really mean, they become just as undesirable, don't they?

Anyway, I've become so fluent in apartment-rental-ese that I thought I'd share my knowledge. Well, okay, my bitter analysis, to be more precise.

Bachelor: This, to me, is the most insidious of them all. The term evokes a swingin' pad, as though the apartment comes furnished with a leather couch and a rotating bed. But it in fact means "this apartment doesn't include a kitchen. Hope you have a hot plate!" WHAT?? Oh... because bachelors don't cook...? Okay.... I'd like to question the humaneness (or usefulness, or desirability...) of not having a kitchen, but okay, go ahead and bother to continue making apartments like that. It kind of sounds like a sexist remnant from the 50's, but sure, let's keep calling it that. After all, it's so much shorter than "no kitchen".

Loft: Once again, this evokes, I dunno, a majestic, high-ceilinged place, like the actual lofts at the Brewery, where they have such high ceilings so they can bring in massive canvasses. And while lofts actually do have high ceilings, what this translates to in practice is that there's a staircase in the apartment that leads up to the actual "loft", i.e. a tiny patch of floor that most places rent out as a bedroom, even though there's no door and the "wall" is in fact no higher than a banister--i.e. absolutely no privacy.

The only way I can see this being desirable whatsoever--and probably the original purpose--is if it's a one bedroom apartment, i.e. there's no need for privacy, so it's more like a studio (that term's coming up soon) that happens to have an elevated sleeping area. But to have bedrooms AND a loft?? I don't get it, other than that people are desperate to have a lower rent--the same reason why people are willing to rent out or live in the space that's supposed to be the living room. *shudder*

Luxury Apartment: Anything that isn't a complete shithole. Take a look around your apartment. Are there no cracks in the paint all over your walls? Is your carpet actually fastened to the floor? Are the stairs leading up to the front door not crumbling in decay? Then heavens to betsy, thank your lucky fucking stars: you live in a luxury apartment.

I'm assuming that landlords are using this term in a very global-conscious way, i.e. they've all spent some time in the third world, where anything a step above a corrugated metal-roofed shack is a luxury. Wow, that just put my apartment hunting--yea, my whole life--in perspective; thanks, landlords.

Patio: You know, call me old fashioned, but when I hear the word "patio", I think of, well, an actual patio. I suppose my platonic ideal of a patio is something like a wide area with lawn chairs and whatnot. I think there's a certain point whereby as the square footage decreases, it ceases to become a patio and becomes nothing more than a ground-floor balcony, just as a room becomes a closet if it reaches a certain size. And yet I have now gone to two places where the "patio" is nothing more than a small balcony-sized patch of concrete cordoned off with a dilapidated wooden fence. Sorry honey. That is not a patio.

Studio: The glamorous image this term inaccurately evokes is, of course, an artist's studio. The real definition, of course, is that there is no separate living room, which sucks almost as much as not having a kitchen. I cannot for the life of me figure out how "studio" became synonymous with "no living room". My only guess is that these kinds of places were always inhabited by starving artists...?? Anyway, thanks to the appropriation of this term, while you're having dinner or parties in your bedroom, you can fancy yourself a daring young artist in the middle of Paris. Put up some half-finished paintings on easels to complete the illusion. (For anyone who thinks I'm being snobby, I can't even afford a studio.)

[International travel note!: In England, studios and bachelors are called bedsits. I haven't come up with any convincing reasons as to why. Because all you have room for is a bed to sit on?]

Tandem parking: Hahahaha. Oh, the joys of tandem parking. I was woken up nearly every morning at 6:30am to move my FUCKING car for WEEKS--for a roommate who in our initial interview insisted the tandem parking was never a big deal since she could always find street parking when she came home from work. And she then proceeded to NEVER park on the street. (But as some of you know, this is the LEAST of the problems I've had with my roommate.)

When I initially heard the term, I thought it meant the parking spaces were side-by-side or something. (Shows how great my vocabulary is...) But alas, it does not. The term should really be "one long parking space where two cars can fit, so you'll have to keep asking your roommate to move their car." What is the point of this?!?! You may as well not even pretend you have two parking spaces. You don't. You have one. These things should be BANNED. I will never. EVER. EVER. Rent a place with this monstrosity again. I don't care HOW beautiful or inexpensive the place is. (Although I suppose it also could be yet another sign that I should give up my car...)

Townhouse: This evokes the image of, I dunno, a cute little house with wood sidings. Not in the country, not in the city, but in a quaint little town, and it's distinguished from your country house, where you "summer". But no. The true definition of this term is... wait for it.... It has a staircase that goes to an upper floor. And I don't mean the way a mansion has two floors--I mean even within one APARTMENT, there are two floors. I took a wild, stupid guess as to how this came about, and according to Wikipedia, my hunch was correct: in "town"--i.e. any area with a relatively dense population--space is more restricted, so landlords found a way to squeeze even more people onto their plot of land. For instance, I suppose my old dilapidated apartment in Berkeley was a "townhouse" because there were a couple bedrooms in the ATTIC--a space which otherwise would not have extracted much more money from tenants.

But even crazier, the rental ads emphasize "townhouse" like it's a good thing!! The only positive spin I can put on this is that you'll get some random exercise into your day.

Of course, in addition to this specific terminology, there's a whole litany of other types of "rental ad speak", such as the over-usage of the word "adjacent". It's not Pico-Robertson--it's "Beverly Hills adjacent". Yet, strangely, absolutely NOTHING is "Palms adjacent". Interesting; I didn't know Palms was an island. And EVERYTHING is near the Grove. And many ads say things like "minutes away from Santa Monica and downtown." WHAT??? Are they assuming I have a helicopter?

I know I must have forgotten some... If any others come to mind, post them in the comments. :)

Conservative bias in my brother's government textbook

2009-06-29T06:22:00.006+01:00

This weekend, my brother tried to pawn off on me his old government textbook from this last semester (not the one pictured), but of course I refused (wtf made him think I would want an old government textbook?). Later, he happened to mention that he didn’t want to keep it because it seemed to have a strong conservative bias. Now shocked and fascinated, I leapt over to him and the book, begging for an example where the bias was noticeable, as bias of any kind is blasphemous to the entire idea of a textbook.

The following are a few excerpts that exhibit this bias, which I was pretty surprised to find were as strong as my brother purported:

from “How a Bill is Passed”:

“First, a Democrat suggests something retarded. This idea, or bill, then goes to committee, where Republicans try to make it a little less retarded.”

from the glossary:

“Affirmative Action: something the Democrats came up with as a way to suck off their minority constituents.”

from “Prayer in School”

“This is a wonderful opportunity for children to express their faith in the Lord, but the Democrats, who worship Satan, have been trying to do away with this time-honored tradition, since whenever a prayer is uttered in their vicinity, they experience the sensation of acid having been thrown in their ears.”

I was, understandably, immensely offended and horrified that the school would allow such a textbook, so I’m thinking of writing them a letter in protest.

My "Show Us Your Trash Challenge" Results!

2009-05-21T17:42:00.003+01:00

On Fake Plastic Fish, one of the life-greening blogs I’m addicted to, Beth, the blogger, threw down the gauntlet and ordered everyone to save their plastic for a week-—not a challenge to use less plastic than normal, but to gauge exactly what “normal” is for us at the moment.

In my smug hubris, after weeks of trimming away plastic in my life, I was sure that my pile of plastic after the end of the week would at least somewhat resemble Beth’s—-i.e. a few plastic windows from envelopes, maybe a random plastic bottle from pre-uber-green days—but I was shocked to find that I was compiling tons of random things.

But, of course, this is the whole point of this exercise: to realize what areas in particular we have left to improve on.

3 of those tiny coffee creamer things
I usually keep milk (that comes in a glass bottle) at work for my coffee—for environmental reasons but also because it tastes so much better—but I had run out the day before and gave into a craving.

“Inspected by” sticker
I just bought a Kleen Kanteen-type water bottle (which has a plastic lid and rubber padding on the bottom, btw), and this sticker was on the underside. At least the tag on it was made out of recycled paper, I guess.

Toilet paper wrapping
My roommate insists on getting this particular type of toilet paper—which isn’t made of recycled content—and which comes in a large wrapping of plastic, and within that huge thing of plastic, every 4 rolls are packaged in their own individual plastic wrappings. Sigh. When I went to get a new roll, I took the last of a set of four, and thus was left with the remaining plastic.

I suppose I could buy my own recycled, non-plastic toilet paper, and add that to the list of items we have two sets of around the house because of my green endeavors (e.g. she has liquid soap, I have bar soap).

Not depicted: straw
The old story, one which I had not yet encountered as my anti-plastic self, as I hardly ever go out on the town: I ordered a soda and totally didn’t see the bartender throw in the straw. I thought about returning it, but I was like, she’s probably gonna throw it out anyway, so I may as well take it. And then I forgot to take the straw for my stash. I’m clearly new at this saving plastic thing.

Milk cap
So, I drink a LOT of milk, due to my addictions to tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and cereal. I buy the kind that comes in a returnable glass bottle (the dairy reuses them!!), but they come with (of course) a plastic cap. I wonder, really, if the amount of plastic in that rather large cap is the same amount of plastic used for coating on a carton and the plastic tops cartons use these days.

I would drink homemade soymilk, almond milk or hemp milk instead—and actually, each of these is lovely in cereal—but they’re just wretched in tea and coffee. So until I get a cow, I suppose I could cut down on the amount of tea, coffee, and hot chocolate I drink, which aren’t very localtarian anyway. (No coffee plantations in Southern California? Oh.) That, however, is going to take a LOT more willpower than I needed for switching from paper towels to cloth. I wouldn’t mind, however, getting a hemp milk maker for cereal (if hemp seeds don’t come in plastic, rrr).

Bread bag
I’d gone without bread for a long time because I’d been on a more paleo-type diet for fitness reasons, but now that I’m going to swing more vegan for ecological reasons, I figure I should probably get back into bread, or else my diet may lack sufficient variety.

But with bread comes plastic—unless you make your own, of course. But I didn’t want to go through the trouble of getting a bread maker and making bread until I proved to myself that I was actually going to eat it. But I did (every day, actually), so I think I will get a bread-maker after all. So we can check this one off the list for the future.

5 Brush Picks
My dentist suggested these as an alternative to flossing, which I hate, and they work just as well. I’m using them until I run out and then switching to a metal, rubber-tipped gum stimulator, which works just as well.

Kashi cereal bag
I’ve started buying cereal in bulk at my local co-op (the “hippie store” as my brother calls it, haha), but late one night I was starving with nothing to eat. The hippie store is all the way across town, not to mention closed by that time, so I walked a block to the local Ralphs and bought my favorite cereal. I gotta stock up on the non-plastic hippie store stuff for such"emergencies".

Hydrogen peroxide mouthwash
Geez, this list keeps getting bigger and bigger!!! I bought this at the hippie store as a more natural alternative to regular mouthwash, but notice that it’s ALL plastic. I think I read somewhere that it's impossible to find hydrogen peroxide that comes in anything else.

I don’t even think I really need mouthwash, but hydrogen peroxide is also a more environmentally friendly alternative to bleach and antiseptics. So… should I count this as an excusable use of plastic?

Yogurt container
Ironically, I bought this so that I could make my own yogurt so I could eat yogurt without plastic. I guess you have to break a few eggs… Anyway, I should never have to buy a container of yogurt again… unless I’m unsuccessful in making yogurt that doesn’t suck….

Sunkist orange sticker
I did not buy this orange. My mom bought this orange, and it had a little sticker on it, as conventional oranges are wont to have.

Envelope window
While I returned the rest of my junk mail, this contained my absentee ballot for the California “special” election, and I couldn’t very well return that.

Not depticted: Plastic spoon
This came from a similar situation to that of the straw. I am hardly ever in this position: there was ice cream passed out at work at a birthday party, and before I realized what I was doing, I had reached for a plastic spoon.

Jam screw top
This was for the pb&j’s I made with the bread mentioned above. Most of this is metal, but I assume that there’s plastic under that there top. I know canning is the answer to this one, but that would only save some glass—not plastic, as even in canning, you’re supposed to toss the small circle tops (which have a ring of rubber on them) when you’re done with them.

However, reusing glass is always good, so I intend to getting into canning as soon as I can find a used canning machine…

Lactaid seal
I didn’t buy this myself, but I drank a lot of milk at my mom’s house, so I figured I was partially reponsible for it (I guess I should have taken the whole carton…). I would urge her to do some non-plastic alternative, but see the above milk dilemma…

Not depicted: Netflix seal cover thing and extra tyvek flap
If I were in any other industry but the entertainment industry, I’d be fine with canceling my Netflix subscription. But since I am, it’s like a duty to my career to watch as much as possible.

I will try to watch things more often on the internet or rent from the library or Blockbuster (although I think someone calculated that Netflix is actually more environmentally friendly than Blockbuster, in spite of the Tyvek), but sometimes Netflix is the literally only place you can find something.

Band-aid
I used this when I scratched a scab open. Is there such thing as non-plastic bandaids? Is the only alternative gauze wrappings? Will investigate.

Not depicted: Liter bottle of Squirt
I almost completely forgot this and did completely forget to save it for my pile o’ plastic (how convenient). My brother got it for me as a surprise, since I’d mentioned the week before that I loved Squirt. Yes, I drank the whole thing myself. Within an hour. :D

I’m not sure what the total weight of all this is, but I think it’s probably around 6oz. (I was only able to weigh my pile three-fourths into the week, which at the time clocked in at 3.5oz.) But I figure that even if I were a complete saint, I still would have had at least 1 or 2 ounces.

Here’s a useful breakdown for me, in order to figure out why these things happened:

Number of items used in the pursuit of cutting out plastic: 2
Unintentional: 4
Things to change: 5
(Seemingly) unavoidable: 5
Using up from pre-anti-plastic days: 1

As I mentioned, I sucked at this way more than I thought I would (no guilt, Beth! Just the truth!)—and I am now in awe of Beth’s weekly tallies, which typically weigh like 0.5 oz, but let’s look at how much plastic I WOULD have had—PER DAY!!—had I not gone through my my anti-plastic efforts:

-2 plastic wrappers from Balance bars
-plastic-coated hot chocolate packet (let’s not comment on my diet at the time, shall we…)
-plastic packet of coffee grounds
-plastic to-go container
-1 or 2 soda cans (Jesus, my diet was crap)

And this is just the stuff I remember. So I know for sure that I’ve greatly improved in the last couple months.

But as I am not yet at saintly status, I have my new to-do list cut out for me:
1. Try to find paper-wrapped recycled toilet paper
2. Remember to ask not to get a straw
3. Get a bread maker
4. See if I can get hemp seeds in anything other than plastic
5. Cut down on coffee, tea, and hot chocolate (ha!)
6. Stock up on non-perishable food from hippie store
7. Use the library more often for film rentals
8. Check out bandaid alternatives

I think it’d be really interesting to do this exercise again after having made all these changes to compare the difference...

My good deed for the year: saving sea turtles at the LA River

2009-03-30T23:14:00.003+01:00

The other day I did probably one of the most goody-two-shoes things I’ve ever done: pick up litter. Voluntarily. Not to serve a community service sentence. Not with a volunteer group. Of my own volition, I grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and went out to the LA River near my house, where I knew that every branch of every tree on the banks would be flying our new national flag, the plastic bag.

Why? Why would I do such a ridiculous thing? I’d actually thought of doing so before just because it’s such a disgusting sight, but never did because it’d be like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. But as with most volunteer efforts, this one was inspired by a good ol’ tugging of the heart-strings. It wasn’t enough just to hear about the Pacific Garbage Patch, in spite of its being twice the size of Texas. It wasn’t enough to hear a blogger mourn over so many dead sea animals. No, it was the plight of one sea turtle that did it—of course, as human emotions are more attuned to the specific than swaths of statistics—the far too mockingly dubbed “Mae West” turtle, who had grown up with a plastic ring around its middle, and thus grew up accordingly contorted. And so a certain line of thinking kicked in—the one like that story about two people who come upon a shore covered in hundreds of beached starfish, and one of the guys tosses one of the starfish back into the water, and the other guy goes, well, that’s hardly making a difference; there are still hundreds of starfish that are gonna die, and the other guy goes, it made a difference to that starfish.

So down to the LA River I went.

The LA River is widely mocked as a concrete, mostly empty canal that epitomizes modern urban blight, particularly that of LA—like, it’s such a fake city that even its river is manmade and not even really a river BLAH BLAH BLAH. As with everything LA, I will defend its river as well—but that’s another blog entry. The part of the river that's close to my house actually looks like a real river: it’s wide and deep and its banks are covered in bushy trees—I suppose because it runs through the Balboa Lake (i.e. city park) area. It’s actually quite beautiful (if you don’t look closely at the water, which, yes, looks like brackish sludge). My favorite place along its course is under the bridge that Balboa Blvd. runs over. It has a cozy, child’s secret place feel to it. So that's where I went to start cleaning up the world.

Even along the way, I couldn’t help but stop and pick up some crap I spotted along the way, just dumped over the fence of the Balboa Lake area. And as I picked all this crap up—soda cups, ripped up Christian literature (interesting story behind that, I’d wager, but even that doesn’t justify its being littered), and, of course, plastic bags—I couldn’t help but become steadily more and more enraged. Did people seriously just chuck this stuff here? Or was it all from honest mistakes? Someone forgot to take their soda with them, someone dropped their papers, someone’s plastic bag blew away from their trashcan… This is the only explanation I can understand, because I seriously cannot fathom people just not giving a shit. Why would they wreck their own neighborhood? Do they figure “someone” will pick it up? How can they think that if there’s clearly old litter all over the place? As I was picking it up, several people passed by, and I wondered, if any of them were chronic litterers and if any of them even noticed, which reaction they had: a twinge of guilt over how they’ve contributed to such filth or a reinforcement of their belief that “someone” would pick their shit up. God, please tell me it was the former.

When I made it to ground zero, there were, indeed, plastic bags stuck in every branch. When it rains, anything and everything from the streets (that assholes have chucked there) flows into the river, the river swells, and when it stops raining, the water subsides and leaves all that crap all over the trees. Amazingly, however, I didn’t even make it to the trees. There was enough shit just on the ground. In fact, there were plastic bags EMBEDDED in the dirt. I’d see a scrap of plastic peeking out of the moist dirt, pull on it, then keep pulling and pulling until I had an entire plastic bag—one time even a whole sign like from Taco Bell or something.

There’s actually another reason I didn’t go near the trees, however: as I approached them, I noticed a tarp tied to a tree: clearly not the work of the rising or falling tide. Some homeless guy had set up camp in a little thicket, and I clearly wasn’t gonna go near that. And actually, as I pulled plastic bags out of the mud, I got mad at him: talk about not giving a shit about your own neighborhood; this guy lives here and he doesn’t bother picking up anything. I suppose that’s kind of a stupid thing to think about a guy who lives on a mudbank, but still. I actually think I passed him as I went home: I was carrying four filled mud-plastered bags down the sidewalk and this pretty grungy looking guy coming the other way clearly figured out what I’d been doing and said something like, “Good work, babe!” I was like, yeah, you’re welcome. Some of what I was carrying was probably his own trash.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I filled FOUR bags worth of crap. I’d actually only brought one plastic bag to fill, but I was able to fill it so quickly and I found so many intact plastic bags that I figured I’d just use them for more gathering.

As I did so, a couple people were working out on the bike path that runs under the bridge—seemed like a personal trainer and her trainee—and they were running back and forth in different ways, and I couldn’t help but think about my malaise about working out: if you think about it, it’s completely ridiculous to spend money on a gym membership to burn calories, where the gym expends god knows how much energy on electricity, A/C, etc., when you could save the earth that energy and use your own energy doing something actually productive. In a way, it’s completely bizarre that someone would hire someone else to clean their house or tend to their garden, and then go and work out in a gym. Is the gym really that much more fun??? I doubt it, with so many people always whining about how they either don’t want to go to the gym or how they never do. So I reflected (smugly, of course) on my secret reason for picking up shit at the river: I wanted to put my calories towards a worthwhile cause rather than running around in circles like the people on the bike path. My shoulders certainly got a workout as I trudged back home with the four muddy bags stuffed with at least a hundred pieces of trash: I had to stop like ten times from fatigue.

Even so, I bet if you'd taken before and after pictures, you'd barely notice a difference.

But as far as I’m concerned, I just saved a sea turtle.

On Kids and Old-Timey Days

2009-02-11T09:00:00.001Z

In one of the episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks (not every day I get to start a sentence with that) that I watched at the age of eight or so, the Chipettes are being babysat by this old lady they don’t like because she’s strict and not “hip” enough for them. Although the Chipettes bitch about having to be with her and revolt against her every command, they finally find a common bond through song: it turns out the old lady liked music in her day, too, and the Chipettes and the old lady give a bouncy rendition of “I Wanna be Loved By You.” Moral of the story: even old-timey things can be fun.

I remember even as a kid cringing a bit at the awkward schmaltziness of that episode, but that’s not what really strikes me about it. About ten years after seeing that episode, I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time and was astounded to find that contrary to what the Chipmunks episode implied—-that "I Wanna Be Loved By You" was a saccharine piece of shit--it was in fact a seduction barely appropriate for kids (especially with the blush-inducing, practically see-through dress she’s wearing), making it way more badass than the Chipettes could ever make it seem.

Of course, Marilyn Monroe could even make the Happy Birthday song sound raunchy, and I haven’t heard the Helen Kane version, but I bet it’s more in line with the Chipettes’ and is probably actually the version the old lady knew and loved. But that’s beside the point. The creators of that episode chose that particular song—-out of all songs they could have chosen—-to represent the old-timey days, and they chose one of the dorkiest songs ever (if the Helen Kane version is, in fact, as dorky and obnoxious as the Chipettes’ version), making the “old-fashioned things are fun!” message all the more sugar-coated and unconvincing.

The fact that it’s apparently necessary to sugar-coat the old days to make them seem “more entertaining” is clearly because most kids are resistant to anything created prior to their birth. My sister vehemently refused to watch black and white movies until she was about eighteen. My brother has actually insisted on wanting to only watch something made in the last ten years. I have never been able to understand this, having never been resistant to anything from any age (except the Middle Ages—-they sucked!). It wasn’t a matter of having been more disciplined or tolerant, or even convincing myself that old-timey things could be fun—-it’s that I don't see them as "old-timey". Yes, they were from long ago, but I just see them as different as opposed to quaint and laughable. Because as much as external things change, human nature never does (at least not yet, Isaac Asimov). Therefore, if Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” was sexy as hell in the 50’s, it’s still sexy as hell now.

How is this different from the moral of the Chipettes? It’s the difference between some idiot saying “LEARNING CAN BE FUN!!” and dressing up a math book with all sort of colors and shit, and saying, no, I like my learning straight up, please. Because in that case, it’s the learning itself that’s fun—-not that all the crap around it is fun in spite of the learning. To me, the idiot saying “Learning is fun” actually serves only to convince me that learning is not, in fact, fun, as if it “protests too much”. Of course, I say this having grown up on Sesame Street and Square 1 TV, whose sole purpose is edu-tainment, but I suppose the difference is that they’re actually effective: they bury the hidden intention to educate so deeply and so skillfully that it feels more like an entertaining show that happens to include educational things-—because why not? The whole world is educational, really. Here’s an example: that famous thing on Sesame Street where they “Brought to you by the letter G” or some other number or letter. Strangely enough, I totally didn’t get that it was a parody until just recently when I happened to randomly think of it, but even if a kid doesn’t get that it’s a parody, they know that many shows say “brought you you by”, and this particular show happens to be brought to you by letters and numbers instead of products (hence this is also an example of Sesame Street’s extraordinary double-layering of humor for both adults and children—-as well as the fact that it’s, mercifully, public instead of commercial television. God, Sesame Street rules!).

I had to confront the horror of “Learning can be fun” head on when I was teaching the SAT to high school students.

The director of the program twice told me that according to the surveys they gave the kids, the area of teaching I was most deficient in was motivating the kids to learn (although even in that I still got about 4 points out of 5). My attitude was like, motivating them to learn is their own damn responsibility! Which is of course exactly why I failed to motivate them. The director’s suggestion to me to solve this problem was to make the class more fun. And I was like, it’s the SAT—-it’s fun already! (Hahaha.) Apparently the director’s concept of fun was doing word games like hangman with the vocabulary words for that week. And I was like, a) how can hangman teach anyone vocab?? and b) that’s not fun. Apparently I was the only one who thought b), because the kids actually did seem to enjoy it the most out of everything else we did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through round after round of hangman (and other word games), bored out of my mind, and not because I was the teacher: I’m sure I would have felt the same way as a student, too.

As far as I can tell, by the time you get to the SAT, the time for fun is over. By that time, all you can do is really learn the test. It’s all the learning on the way to sixteen that can possibly afford to be fun, because fun takes time. I so badly wanted to take those kids to plays and get them listening to NPR and reading books on subjects they were interested in instead of random excerpts that were often snoresville even to me, but with a hundred vocab words a week to memorize and the test a semester away, we couldn’t afford to go the organic route, so hangman was all we had. (Not that learning a hundred vocab words a week is a great idea anyway or would really help you on the SAT. Surely there must be some pedogogical theory against it, like there is against cramming.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most kids hate the old-timey days and learning, and that this completely baffles me. I once had an argument with a kid I was tutoring over the necessity of algebra: you know, the age-old crap about how “I’m going to be a rock star; I’ll never have any use for algebra,” and while I gave him the age-old answer of “you never know,” all I was really thinking was “why wouldn’t you want to learn it just for fun?” I know this seems really goody-two-shoes, but that's exactly the problem I'm talking about: because authority figures ram learning down kids' throats, actually genuinely being interested in something is seen as being "goody-two-shoes". And since when did kids do things based on practicality, anyway? I bet that kid played video games hours a day, which (unless he wanted to be a video game designer) was just as useless to his supposed future career as algebra.

But here’s what I wish I could have said—-to him and the kids in the SAT classes: curiosity is a sign of intelligence. You are not curious—-in fact, extremely INcurious. This is a syllogism. But since you don’t know what that is and have no desire to find out, I guess you’ll never know what I meant by that.

(By the way, this essay would not pass muster for the SAT graders.)

What I wish I learned in college—car accident fatality edition

2009-02-10T19:19:00.002Z

A lot of people bag on their college education—-they’ve forgotten everything they learned, being able to analyze To the Lighthouse never helped them get a job, blah blah. Now I’m not going to that far. I actually think I’ve actually used my English degree in my chosen profession and even my day job—-and NO I’m not a teacher.

But there are a few aspects to real life that I felt woefully unprepared for upon graduation. For instance, there really, really, really should be a Health Insurance 101. And it should be a requirement. I also wish introductory classes to finance and economics had been a requirement, since there was no way I was going to take those classes of my own volition and take away time from my novel reading, and since I now feel completely lost in regards to economic issues and had to flounder around with my personal finances at square one.

But those aren’t the classes I want to discuss today. Today I would like to discuss the necessity of using education to prevent people from dying in car accidents. Or having them in the first place. And I’m not talking about some lame-ass DARE-type program (although I actually loved DARE, haha) where you see gory pictures of people in car crashes, although I’m sure that helps to an extent. No, I’m talking about evasive driving courses.

Oh sure, evasive driving courses exist, but they cost a shitload of money and no one takes them. And oh sure, you have to take driver’s ed, but that just teaches you how to drive, not how to evade a car coming right at you. At the same time, do you know what your likelihood of dying in an accident is? If you’re in your twenties, it’s the most likely way for you to die, higher than every single disease or other type of accident. Almost every time I get into my car, I feel like I’m stepping into a death trap. I should probably take public transportation more often.

Anyone ever heard of Jacqui Saburido? She’s one of those stories to scare you into never drinking and driving, since she was in a car hit head-on by a drunk driver. And maybe there’s nothing that could have prevented that, even with the most skillful driver at the wheel. But who knows: maybe if the driver had taken an evasive driving course, they would have known what to do and would have avoided the accident, or at least it may not have been as bad as it was (the driver and front seat passenger were killed instantly).

For that matter, I don’t see why colleges (or better, high schools) also don’t mandate courses in Krav Maga. That’s a mixed martial art form developed by the Israeli army that’s the only martial art I know of that actually takes guns into account, making it actually applicable to the modern world. It’s designed for last-resort situations where someone’s going to kill you whether you act or not. Doesn’t that seem like something you might want to know??

You know why they don’t already teach these courses? Other than lack of desire, it’s also, of course, lack of funds. Ritzy private schools, however, have no excuse.

No one wants to think about this stuff. Whenever we have to go to our office’s safety orientation, we kind of chuckle and roll our eyes. But in the middle of a fire, it’s not going to seem so funny. I sure would have like to have taken a “what to do if the ship sinks” course before getting on the Titanic. In light of disasters like that, such training doesn’t seem so quaint.

But it would also be a pain to take all those courses, wouldn’t it? All that time we’d be spending on evasive driving and Krav Maga is time away from what we really want spend our time (and money) on (like plasma screens and WoW). Fatal accidents and attacks happen just rarely enough that they don’t seem worth preparing for—-the same reason a lot of people in Los Angeles don’t bolt down their furniture in case of an earthquake. But we do have enough foresight to have health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, disability insurance—-although a lot of that is—-surprise!--mandated by the state, or else we’d never do it. So why not require training to minimize the risk of ever making a claim on our disability or life insurance in the first place? Who even knows how to do CPR?? (I don’t.)

That said, am I now gonna run out and take such courses? Hell no, I don’t have the time for that. But it sure would have been nice to have done it in college. If I had to.

Doubt--a review

2008-12-19T21:09:00.005Z

I’m aware that I will seem completely biased against the movie since I saw the play first, but let me try to deny this bias: about a year after I saw the play, I read the screenplay, and was just as thoroughly riveted. The movie, however—greatly changed from the screenplay I’d read—was a massive disappointment.

Kenneth Turan is absolutely correct: John Patrick Shanley (or Scott Rudin?) was so busy trying to make the movie not seem like it was based on a play (not to speak of the fact that no one should ever let Shanley have a camera ever, ever again) that it ended up being merely weighted down by a bunch of miscellaneous, irrelevant things shoved in there (but OUTSIDE of the location where the play takes place, so that makes it a movie!). The worst crime of all that doing so committed was distracting you from the phenomenal speeches that held you transfixed even when it was just a guy standing in one place on a stage. Oh, but “movies” can’t be like that; that would be too boring for the stupid audiences. Really?? It worked for Dangerous Liaisons, for only one example. In that film, Glenn Close delivers a whole speech from a sofa while the camera merely pushes in on her. But Shanley didn’t trust his own damn words, and so completely destroyed the pull of, for instance, the priest’s first sermon, by cutting away to practically everything but the priest every two seconds. This is not MTV, Mr. Shanley. Teenagers are not going to see this movie anyway, so you may as well have plunked down the camera in front of the actors My Dinner with Andre style and let us focus on your beautiful, beautiful words.

Because of all the new, meaningless material, the movie had me sitting back thinking “get ON with it!” while the play (and the screenplay) was so taut that it had me on the edge of my seat practically every moment. It was enough to make me wish that instead of Shanley, in spite of being the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of the play, those adaptation masters Christopher Hampton and/or Stephen Frears had gotten their hands on it.

[By the way, the rest of this review really isn’t going to make sense if you haven’t already seen it.]

There’s another reason why the suspense was completely bereft from this incarnation. In the play, the scenes between the head nun and the priest are like watching a duel between master swordsmen. You’re contintually wondering: did he do it? Did he not do it? Is she really just overly suspicious? Or is her paranoia actually correct? However, Shanley, oddly, answers those questions for us, when those questions are the entire point!!! Guilt is written across Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face in practically every scene. Thus, instead of the question being “did he do it?” the question becomes “is she going to make him admit it?” which sort of detracts from the whole “doubt” theme, doesn’t it?! It may as well be called Certainty for all I can tell. The guy I saw on Broadway, on the other hand, was absolutely convincing in his denial, which greatly contributes to the gloriously frustrating question as to or whether he did it or not.

I wonder, actually, if casting PSH fed into the perception that he obviously did it. Although I was initially excited to see him in the role, halfway through I realized that casting him was a tremendous mistake: I’m sorry, he just LOOKS like a perv. And I’m not the only one who’s ever thought this! Think of all the times he’s played sketch characters, most notably in Happiness. The guy on Broadway, by contrast, was this beautiful, broad-shouldered, leading man type—the kind of guy a lawyer would point to in a courtroom and say to the jury, does THIS look like the face of a child molester? I’m not saying that means that all pervy-looking guys are child molesters, but just dramatically I think it helps reinforce the ambiguity. I’m also not saying the Broadway guy was a better ACTOR—I’m just saying that his type and the way he was directed made for a stronger contribution to the whole point of the play.

On the other hand, Amy Adams was a welcome presense compared to the god-awful Jena Malone on Broadway, Meryl Streep delivers a typical crazy Meryl Streep performance, and Viola Davis was rightly HIGHLY praised in both Ebert’s and Turan’s reviews. Turan calls her the heart of the movie, and she is so especially because she pulls at YOUR heart. Almost the moment you see her, you completely get the immense weight of what it is to be a mother wanting the most for her son and worried that he’ll never get it, and the rest of the scene only gets more and more unbearably heart-breaking. And I’m pretty sure I was NOT as affected by that role when I saw it on stage.

All in all, massively disappointing. I recommend that everyone see or read the stage play instead of seeing the movie, and while I initially had it on my Best Picture shortlist, it has now been bitterly struck from that highest of tiers.

How much I hate shopping

2008-12-18T00:54:00.001Z

Everyone who knows me knows that I defy the stereotype that girls love shopping. I know, can you believe it? But to my mind, HOW could anyone POSSIBLY love shopping?!?!? Why the FUCK would I enjoy parting ways with my money that I took no small pains to earn for something that I might not end up liking in a few months, when instead I could be putting it in an account to earn 3% interest for things that actually might be important in the future (rent, car payments, etc.)??

I suppose this may seem to mean that I’m just naturally frugal, but I’m actually not the cutting-coupons type; I’m actually kind of bad at that sort of stuff. I suppose I just think it’s easier not to buy something than to have to take the trouble to buy it for less. And so I spend money on those things which I absolutely need to (e.g. gas), or things I try to resist but can’t help myself and buy it anyway (e.g. the occasional latte). I think this comes from when I was growing up, when we were so poor that I hardly ever got what I wanted (including violin lessons, which most (rich) parents would be thrilled for their child to actually want), and I suppose this got ingrained in me, along with contempt for all of consumer society (could that just be a way of sugaring the bitter pill of deprivation, thinking that it’s not that I CAN’T participate, but that I’m too ABOVE it to want to? Possibly, but if so, I don’t want to be disabused of that illusion.).

Anyway, the downturn in the economy has, not surprisingly, exacerbated this tendency, and there’s a specific example that has even me sort of horrified. So, I’ve had a job for the past month that requires “business” wear, which means wearing my only slightly bearable office-setting-appropriate heels. And every day I think about buying some comfortable flats, but every day I balk at the notion of plunking down any amount for shoes when my job is only temporary, I still have Christmas presents to get, and the economy could make my situation even lousier at any moment. Essentially, I’m trying not to spend money on anything I can actually resist, and even though I’m a girl, I find shoes and clothing of any kind eminently resistible (just ask anyone who’s seen my ridiculous array of drab outfits).

This may sound like I should just shut up and not get them, but meanwhile I can only hobble like a block in the heels I’m wearing. One of my ankles has started hurting. I don’t even know what bunions are, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting them. And this is where long-term and short-term thinking come in. Who knows: I could actually be slowly injuring myself with the shoes I have and end up paying more to a doctor than I would have if I had just bought some damn shoes. And yet I still adamantly refuse to.

It’s even more than just a refusal, actually: it’s almost a physical AVERSION to it.
I’ve tried. Recently, I walked into a shoe store, started looking around, and when the salesman asked if I needed help, I bolted. I suppose this is an issue for another blog entry, but I hate, HATE salespeople. They act as though merely your entering the store is a promise that you’ll buy something, and if you don’t, seem utterly offended. You haven’t noticed this? Then it’s probably just my proletarian projection of guilt. But it’s more than that: it’s that the whole process of making someone fetch shoes at your bidding reeks of the hierarchy of a capitalistic society.

I’m sorry for elaborating on such a seemingly banal circumstance, but I think it illustrates how far I’ll go these days to avoid shopping, in spite of my girlness. :P

The Tragedy of Underrated Performances--specifically, Jason Butler Harner in Changeling

2008-12-09T20:28:00.004Z

Helen Mirren rightfully won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Queen. However, there was another performance in that movie that was COMPLETELY overlooked: that of Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. This will undeniably happen again (as Sheen himself has ironically commented) in Frost/Nixon, where Frank Langella has the zanier part of the two, but where it was Sheen who completely transfixed my attention when I saw the show on the London stage.

It just goes to show you what a freakin’ marketing machine the nominations process is. If the studios don’t think you have a chance, they don’t invest in you, and thus NO ONE notices how excellent your performance is. Because, I mean, it’s one thing for Sheen not to have been nominated, but to not even get any buzz in town for it???

This is an extremely roundabout way of getting to my main point, which is that Jason Butler Harner totally ROCKED Changeling. I mean, it’s a tour-de-force performance. TOUR DE FORCE. (One which made me peg him immediately as having come from New York theater, so I looked it up and—ka-ching!—yep: NY theater actor. HA HA! I can totally call these things, just as I totally called Eddie Redmayne (from The Yellow Handkerchief) as having been trained in England, because American actors his age are just not that good. On another note, it looks like I actually must have seen Harner in The Cherry Orchard a couple of years ago, but I only vaguely remember him. Clearly not as memorable a performance.) It’s the kind of performance from an unknown that makes you go, “Who IS that???” (As everyone did for Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.)

However, which actor from that movie is the one getting the Oscar buzz?? Fucking Angelina Jolie. Not that she isn’t good in it—she is (although I agree with the New Yorker that “Angelina Jolie stays perfectly in character (too perfectly—her performance is dull))—but he’s the one with the UNBELIEVABLE performance. So why isn’t he getting any attention, in spite of adulation from the critics? According to Ebert, “The film's most riveting performance is by Jason Butler Harner as the murderous Gordon Northcott. The character could not be adequately described on the page. Harner's mesmerizing performance brings him to sinister life as a self-pitying weasel specializing in smarmy phony charm. He doesn't play a sick killer. He embodies one.”

Meanwhile, film.com doesn’t breathe a word about him as a Best Supporting Actor contender. Instead, they mention James fucking Franco. Not that he didn’t do a decent job, but he practically had NOTHING to do!! He doesn’t stand a chance. Even the far too comprehensive list at InContention.com leaves Harner off. Not that these sites are definitive oracles of the Oscars (I’d never even heard of them prior to looking this up), but I think they are actually a good barometer of who’s getting buzz and who isn’t: they validate my sense that no one in town is talking about him.

And I think that’s tragic. Just like it was tragic when Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was completely overlooked for ANY nomination, when I—and anyone who’s seen it—found it one of the most ingenius movies I’d ever seen and in a just world would have at LEAST been nominated for best screenplay. I’m not saying that the Academy Awards are the end-all and be-all of determining what a good performance is, but it’s nice when a brilliant performance gets exactly as much attention and acclaim as it deserves. Who knows, maybe in these last few weeks, Harner will pull ahead in the ridiculous horse race that is Oscar season, although surely, Heath Ledger will be the one to attain the laurel for his own portrayal of a murderous psychopath. But you can’t help that. I just don’t get why he’s not even in the running.

Yay Obama--NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

2008-11-06T09:28:00.002Z

Yes, yesterday was an incredible day—one which I had been so doubtful would ever happen.

But as Obama said, this is only the beginning of the road to change. Right now, we have a rare, rare moment in which both the executive and legislative branches are in Democratic control. The last time we had that was over a decade ago, in 1993, and the Democrats fucked it up and nothing changed before the Republicans regained control of Congress. That could easily happen again this time around. With this massive loss, the Republicans are no doubt regrouping, figuring out where they went wrong, and will strike back at us harder than ever. That means that we have to make sure we make the most of what may end up being an all-too-short window to effect change.

It means we all have to write or call our representatives. To tell them which issues are most important to us and that we expect them to tackle those issues in this precious window of time. We have to find out which bills in Congress we want our representatives to support or oppose and tell them so. To join a group whose beliefs are most closely aligned with ours—the ACLU, NOW, the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, whatever—so that we can join an even more powerful choir of voices to make sure we are heard. And remind our fellow citizens—friends, family—to do all of the above as well.

As easy as it would be to lay back and hope our elected leaders do the work, we have to make sure to push them to make them live up to the promises they made us. This democracy is founded upon the ideals born in ancient Athens, where the citizens were involved in the political process on a constant basis, and as we saw last night, our democracy functions best when we do the same. In the words of that great fictional president in The American President, “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship.”

So pop that champagne, but after you finish the bottle, we gotta get back to work.

An ode to a ruined Halloween and to parental genius

2008-11-01T04:18:00.004Z

When I was a really young kid—maybe five or even four—it was pouring rain on Halloween and my mom refused to go out trick-or-treating. I remember screaming and crying with crushing disappointment, until my mom, in her infinite maternal wisdom, decided to “play” trick-or-treating with me. My mom would go behind the various doors in our apartment and I, all dressed up in my costume, would knock on the door, and she would, of course, pretend to be a friendly neighbor and give me candy.

Even though I was fully aware it was only playing at trick-or-treating, for some reason this was actually enough for me—the tears disappeared immediately. It was as if the actual act of going to strangers around the neighborhood and getting candy from them specifically was not the point—it was merely the physical process of trick-or-treating and actually getting to eat candy that I wanted.

I guess the thing that amazes me the most about this is my mom’s solution to my misery. I am not nearly as good with kids as she is, and I can just imagine that if I—and most parents, probably—were in the same situation, I’d just be like, too bad, kid, buck up or go to your room. I wouldn’t have even THOUGHT of pretending to trick-or-treat, and even if I did, I’d probably just assume it wouldn’t work. I think I once asked my mom how she came up with such a brilliant stroke of genius, and she could only answer that, as with every stroke of genius, it just came to her.

History Repeats Itself: A presidential election in Upton Sinclair's Oil!

2008-10-27T05:48:00.002Z

I read Oil! a few months ago because, of course, of There Will Be Blood, and it is, of course, wildly different from the movie, particularly in the second half. (I promise the following won’t ruin anything for anyone who actually intends on reading it:) It ends with what is practically an apocalyptic orgy during the presidential election returns, which the conservative candidate—Calvin Coolidge—who represents the interests of Big Oil, wins. It’s especially effective when juxtaposed against his dire descriptions of the poverty the poor live in, as well as their often fatal attempts to form unions.

I know that Obama is in the lead right now, but I felt that the following excerpt was an appropriate reminder of how important this election is, displays how this election could turn out if it goes the wrong way, and also has freakish similarities to today, in spite of taking place in 1924.

"There would be election returns read, more of those triumphant, glorious majorities for the strong silent statesman; and a magnate who knew that this victory meant several million dollars off his income taxes, or an oil concession in Mesopotamia or Venezuela won by American bribes and held by American battleships—such a man would let out a whoop, and get up in the middle of the floor and show how he used to dance the double shuffle when he was a farm-hand; and then he would fall into the lap of his mistress with a million dollars worth of diamonds on her naked flesh, and the singer...would perform the latest jazz success, and the oil-magnate and his mistress would warble the chorus:

"What do I do?
I toodle-doodle-doo,
I toodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-doo!"

Tales from Phone Banking: Bothering the Electorate

2008-10-26T02:34:00.001Z

I just got someone on the phone while phone banking who angrily stated that she just voted for McCain for the sole reason that his campaign didn’t hound her with calls.*

I’m sorry, but this is probably THE most irresponsible action I have EVER heard of—yes, almost as irresponsible as leaving your infant in your car on a hot day. You’re going to choose your fate—and the fate of the nation and, unfortunately, the WORLD—for the next four YEARS, if not all of history, because of a few annoying phone calls???? Are you kidding me???

Sure, vote for McCain because of your misguided economic theories, but because of his less aggressive marketing techniques? Excuse me, but this is a democracy. I’m sorry, but it is. Should we overhaul it and set up a monarchy so you WON’T BE BOTHERED??? Well, maybe that’ll happen one day, but at the moment, this is a fuckin’ DEMOCRACY, lady, and democracy is about PARTICIPATION, and I’m sorry if that PARTICIPATION has resulted in your being BOTHERED by fellow voters, but that shouldn’t affect your decision as to who you feel represents your views the most!!

The idiocy of the people I’ve contacted confounds me. I’m actually this close to wanting a monarchy, as well. :P

*Yes, I know that she could have just been saying that, but given all the other craziness I've encountered through phone banking (e.g. "I'll just decide who to vote for when I get in the polling booth") that I'm really apt to believe her.

Leonardo DiCaprio: Serious Fucking Business

2008-10-21T01:12:00.002+01:00

I gotta hand it to DiCaprio: he's worked with some of the best directors in the world and is seemingly adamant about not appearing in stupid big-budget action movies like even the best actors in his echelon do (now watch, he's gonna get attached to play the villain in Spider-Man 4). He clearly takes the craft extremely seriously, and I respect that.

Nevertheless, he's essentially picked the same part to play for the last several years: these sort of earnest-yet-tough do-gooders in The Gangs of New York, Blood Diamond, The Departed, and now Body of Lies, albeit each with a different accent. And from what I can tell from the trailer of Revolutionary Road, he plays pretty much the same character in that, too.

That's all well and good--clearly he's doing exactly what he wants to do--but it just seems to me that he's unintentionally type-casting himself. I haven't seen the Aviator, so I suppose this analysis isn't exactly fair, but come on, he hasn't done anything remotely light, for instance, since Catch Me if You Can. Would it kill him to do a comedy? Not some stupid Adam Sandler thing; maybe something like the Coen brothers. I'm not saying I'm just dying to see Leo in a comedy; I just find it odd to see him year after year in the exact same role, especially since we all know, mostly from movies long ago (Gilbert Grape, Basketball Diaries, Total Eclipse, etc etc etc) that the guy's got an amazing range.

Favorite Wikipedia quote of the week

2008-10-21T00:08:00.002+01:00

This is in the article on "Germanic strong verbs" (I was curious about the irregular verbs with the past participles ending in -en). I suppose it's unfair to take it out of context, but the context doesn't really change anything, trust me.

"Possibly in some cases the a may be an example of the a-grade of ablaut, though this is controversial."

Nothing more controversial than the a-grade of ablaut.

Introduction: How I Became a Democrat

2008-10-18T22:02:00.003+01:00

Last weekend I went out to Nevada to canvass for the Obama campaign—which was great, I recommend it to anyone, check out barackobama.com for info on volunteering these last few crucial weeks. The standard policy for canvassing is that you do one of three things, depending on what the person you encounter tells you: if they’re already for Obama, you ask them to sign up to volunteer. If they’re for McCain, you say thanks and get the hell out of there. And if they’re undecided, then and only then do you try to tell them the facts and get them to sway to the Obama camp.

The line of thinking as to why you don’t try to convince the McCain people is that it’s a waste of time: they’re rooted in the way they think and it’s more effective to galvanize undecided voters rather than to get into a screaming fight with McCain supporters. I would also add that a McCain supporter is just gonna slam the door in your face anyway, so you won’t even get the chance to argue.

Now, this strategy seems absolutely logical when it comes to canvassing, but what about in general? What I mean is, what was it that made those people become McCain supporters, and what life experiences or thought processes would have made them otherwise?? I.e. what makes someone decide to have one political belief instead of another (and therefore, hopefully, what can help us change people's minds)? A lot of it seems to be culture, especially ethnicity and religion, but even within those confines, there is a lot of gradation.

And what about undecided voters??? As the Daily Show has depicted, people are facepalming themselves over how the hell someone could be undecided this late in the game. I’m even gonna take that a step further and say that I don’t understand “swing voters,” probably because I just don’t understand why someone reasonable enough to vote for Democrats would ever even consider voting for a Republican.

But I’m gonna get into all of that later. Right now I’m just going to introduce my latest series in my blog that no one reads. I want to get down and dirty into the nitty gritty of what forms people's political opinions. Because we can throw around insults all day, bickering over who said what and Bill O’Reilly this and Keith Olbermann that, but at the end of the day, we’d be shouting for and excusing precisely the opposite people if they believed what we believed. So I just want to talk about what we believe, getting down to the very atoms of opinion.

And of course, this is not going to be a scientific or psychological process by any means. This is an examination by a layperson to all fields (hence a philosopher? HA!), merely an anecdotal and biographical examination of the development of political opinion. And where best to start but with myself, with how I became a Democrat.

The Bailout

2008-09-30T18:25:00.008+01:00

So... the bailout. When I first heard about it, it seemed reasonable enough: the demise of a few banks is gonna destroy the whole economy? Well, then sure! Bail them out!

But then, of course, all the counter-arguments came to the fore. Why should we bail out the Wall Street fat cats, who were just as irresponsible as the mortgage holders, instead ? The answer, of course, is that the fat cats are the ones in control of those deciding to bail out the fat cats. This has nothing to do with "morality" or "the right thing to do". It is merely a function of the Golden Rule: the one with the gold makes the rules.

But isn't it, objectively speaking, good to save the economy from crashing and the country from lapsing into The Great Depression II? (And we all know how the sequel is usually never better than the first, World War II and Godfather II being the few exceptions.) Well, yes, that is good, but why is the entire economy so dependent on the banks in the first place? Why do we have this system whereby the government enjoys none of the profit, but all of the loss?

The funniest thing about it, though, I think, is that it exposes a cornerstone of conservatism in such a way that reveals what the Republicans really are. This cornerstones is the idea of the free market: the government should not be involved with business because it increases competition, which makes the businesses as efficient and as much of a benefit to the economy as possible--and ALSO, if one fails, then too bad. It didn't win. Survival of the fittest, and that business was not fit to compete.

Now, under this CONSERVATIVE theory, AIG should have just been allowed to die. Oh, but no, we can't have that; that'll destroy the economy! Well, according to the above theory, we SHOULD let the economy be destroyed. Just extend it to a world view: not only are businesses in a dog-eat-dog world, but so are countries; countries are in competition with each other as well, and if one country's economy implodes, well, just too bad for that economy.

It's ridiculous, isn't it? But isn't that why we're not bailing out the "irresponsible" homeowners who couldn't pay their mortgages? You couldn't pay? Well, too bad. Why couldn't the government say that to AIG? You fell apart? Well too bad.

The difference of course--apart from the Golden Rule mentioned above--is that we have a gun to our heads. AIG (and others) is so big, that we (supposedly) can't afford for it to fail. We'll be plunged into another Great Depression if we don't. The American taxpayer has just been taken hostage by corporations, and we paid up.

Then again, why couldn't we use that $700 billion to give to the homeowners to just start paying back the loans on their houses? But no, we can't reward them for being irresponsible. Oh, wait...

An honest Republican argument (for once)

2008-09-29T23:50:00.007+01:00

The only argument I'd believe as truthful from a "Rockefeller" Republican would be something like this:

"I'm a billionaire. I like my money. It allows me to travel wherever I want all over the world in my private jet--whenever I want, for as long as I want. I hate dealing with the riffraff I unfortunately sometimes encounter during the rare moments when I actually walk on the street, and cannot stand the notion of my money--which I could instead be using to buy another yacht--going to these disgusting, undeserving people."

Now, I find a lot of things about this argument objectionable and even unconscionable, but at least it's honest. At least every objective statement is true (e.g. the fact that he's a billionaire, he owns a private jet). But no one could win a campaign on such an argument, could they? Instead, they have to swaddle this greed in arguments warped in such a way so that it seems as though their greed is actually good for the disgusting, undeserving masses.

No argument is a better example of this than "trickle-down economics". What a fuckin' lie. A flat-out lie. You want an example of "trickle-down economics"??? Go to Saudi Arabia, where 5% of the population is mind-blowingly rich while surrounded by the other 95% in devastating poverty. You tell me how well it looks like that money is "trickling down". Want another example? How about every single monarchy in the history of the world? Oh, those don't count because they don't provide the opportunity for the individual entrepreneur that red-blooded, democratic, capitalist America provides?? Well, take a look at the demographics of every single reign of a Republican president in the last 50 years: in each one, the gap between the lower and upper classes has widened.

The only thing that ends up "trickling down" in a "trickle-down" economy are the individuals in the middle class, trickling right down into the gutter.

Short story: Perfect

2008-07-14T05:43:00.003+01:00

Hi everyone,

I just submitted this short story to a few literary magazines, got rejected and am collecting a new round of targets, but in the meantime, I figured I'd post it to get feedback from all y'all, and to ask that if you know anyone in the short story/publishing community, or even just know of a good short story magazine, let me know!!

If you need any further convincing to read it, check out a review I got from a random reader: "'Perfect' is, if not perfect, a damned fine piece of writing."

***

"Perfect"
by Carrick Bartle

A bunch of extras had piled into the van, stickying up the air with their sweat, when a lanky PA, complete with headset and clipboard, ordered everyone out. The extras groaned and did so. I thought nothing of it, as orders were changed and people were shuffled around all the time—when Eric Hanford jumped into the backseat.

Now, Eric Hanford wasn’t even close to being a respectable actor in my book. So I was annoyed to find that I was nervous—the same sort of nervousness I would have gotten around someone I truly idolized, like Robert DeNiro. I quickly rationalized that it was unusual to see any star in real life—even in LA, weirdly enough. And I felt that awkward clash between the illusion of feeling as thought I knew him intimately, having watched him in movies for years, and the fact that he was seeing me only for the first time.

I pulled away from the crowd of confused extras and drove in silence. I wanted to ask why the hell he was in my van instead of the limo he was no doubt accustomed to being escorted around in, but doing something like that was STRICTLY VERBOTEN. On your first day on set as a mere peon—an extra, a PA, a driver—the assistant director gives the lot of you this big lecture on proper conduct on the set, a main bullet point of which is, regarding the stars of the production: “DON’T BUG THEM.” No autographs, no photographs, no questions. So even though it was a reasonable question that I would have asked a normal person, asking him would have clearly meant I was a crazed stalker.

But I couldn’t help but glance at him in the rear-view mirror. It seemed safe to do so anyway: he was dozing, his head slumped back over the back of his seat.

I pulled up to the drop-off point, and he groggily got out, slammed the door, and joined the black-garbed PA who had been waiting to escort him back to his trailer.

I turned the van around to go back where I came.

***

When I showed up for work the next day, some PA came up to me. “Hey, Rick,” he said, and then promptly stiffened and stared off into space.

I waited. I’d already experienced PA’s abruptly stopping conversations to listen to the voice in their earpieces, but it still weirded me out. It was as if they were drones in the Borg collective and had suddenly been frozen in stasis to receive a message from their queen.

“Okay,” he replied to the collective, and then turned back to me. “So, you’re driving Eric Hanford today,” he said, snapping back to his clipboard.

“Again? Why?” I exclaimed.

The PA shrugged. “He liked the van better than the car. Bigger or something.”

How environmentally conscious of him. “Okay, whatever,” I said.

This new assignment consisted of a lot more waiting around than the other one. While there were always truckloads of extras and crew to escort, Eric Hanford only needed to go back and forth between set and base camp a few times day. You’d think it would have been a bit more cost effective to have me transport everyone else while Eric Hanford relaxed in his trailer, but the van and its driver had to be immediately accessible at all times.

I cursed Eric Hanford for not at least warning me to bring a book or something. A group of bored extras were lounging around in camping chairs, reading magazines and chatting. Grips and gaffers, who looked like battle-scarred carnies, strode by, hauling one apparatus or another. I tried out my pathetic Spanish on the caterers. They laughed at me.

Finally, it was crisis time. Eric Hanford was on the move. When I saw him walking to the van, his cell phone to his ear, I jumped up from my plastic chair. I wondered if I was supposed to open the door for him, but no; it was a fucking van, and I wasn’t his fucking chauffeur.

“Going to set?” I asked in my most professional, not-bugging-him voice.

“Yeah, dude, that was crazy,” he chuckled into his phone, and swung open the door to the back seats.

The back seats. Whenever there was only one extra or crew member to drive, they ALWAYS sat in the front with me to minimize the chauffeur effect. So by going into the back seat, Eric Hanford had CLEARLY delineated the situation. I got it. I was his fucking chauffeur.

When I got into the driver’s seat, he was stretched out not in the seat right behind the driver, but rather the very back row of the cavernous four-row van, as if specifically to get as far away from me as possible. He had hooked his knees over the back of the seat in front of him. As I drove to set, he kept chit-chatting his inane conversation on his cell.

What I thought was going to be just a one-day anomaly turned out to be the MO for the rest of the shoot. I would wait around reading plays with roles I would never get, that day’s sides, and, when times got really tough, Sports Illustrated. And I’d spend a few minutes of each day watching Eric Hanford lounge over the full breadth of a seat.

I would marvel over how we were literally just two guys sitting in a car yet inhabited such different universes. To be sitting where I was and to be sitting where he was wasn’t just a matter of seven feet; it was the result of years and years of different series of different happenstances. And even though we were about the same height, same weight, and the same degree of intelligence as far as I could tell, he was in a caste so far above my own. Of course, he was more attractive than me; while most people have a blob of a face, his looked sculpted. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that only a plastic surgeon could have molded such perfect, waxy cheeks.

The other major difference between us was that he was dating Amy Parker. My god, to act in the leading role of a major motion picture all day and then go home and fuck Amy Parker.

***

“Hey, are we going to the park or the baseball field?”

My eyes, having finally gotten permission, flicked to his in the mirror.

“The park.”

And back to silence.

“So how’s the driving going?”

“Pretty boring,” I said.

“Yeah, I feel ya.”

I felt the floodgates to my questions weaken and shake under the strain. What was it like to work with Al Pacino? What’s it like to be insanely successful? What’s it like to actually achieve your dreams? How did he just magically, automatically know how to act? Had he REALLY never taken acting classes before, or was that just what his publicity agent told him to say because it’d be more impressive? I would have felt completely natural asking something like “How’s Amy doing?” as if we’d been buddies for years, but that option was clearly out.

I allowed only the most innocuous: “How’s filming going?”

“Good. I’m Eric, by the way,” he said, as if I didn’t already know.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

I was left only with the usual small talk options, like “nice weather we’re having”, but that seemed way too unimpressive.

“It’s so nice out today,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I had to find some way to tell him I was an actor. Not to ask for a role or something, but just to raise myself above the level of “driver”. I was “talent” just like him.

“So have you seen I Speak of Evil yet?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the passing strip malls of LA outside the window.

“Like it?”

Eric scrunched up his beautiful, beautiful face. “It was all right.”

“Yeah, same here. But Michael Caine is, like, amazing.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty awesome.”

“My acting teacher always talks about his work,” I deftly segued.

His eyes shifted to mine in the rearview mirror, actually looking pleasantly surprised. I’d actually half-expected him to roll his eyes, as if to say “oh god, not another one,” as if actors came up to him all the time brandishing their headshots. Instead, it was almost as if I’d revealed we were long-lost brothers. “You’re an actor?” he asked, seeming surprised.

I smiled the requisite embarrassed smile. “Yeah.”

“Sweet,” he said. “What have you been in?”

“Uhh…” I was actually surprised that he asked that; it was something only a lay-person would ask, but which we actors knew not to act each other, since most of us would only be able to answer by blushing and stammering that just because we’d been paid to act only twice in our lives didn’t mean we weren’t actors. But then I realized that he had never learned not to ask that question: most actors he had ever met had probably gladly rattled off their extensive filmographies.

I whipped out my padded resume answer: “A guest spot on CSI”— featured extra, actually—“a few short films”—undergrad student films—“a couple commercials”—you know those local commercials shot on video with a guy yelling in front of panning shots of used cars?

“Cool,” he said.

I don’t know what I expected—I guess, in all honesty, I had expected that we would launch into a full-blown discussion of acting in which he would impart astounding words of wisdom to me, but instead the great oracle fell silent, and we pulled up to set.

***

I leaned against the side of the van, squinting in the sweltering sun, reading a shitty original play I had an audition for that weekend. PAs scurried in and out of the house they were filming in with bottles of water and whatnot, and trunks of equipment waited listlessly in the front yard. And inside, Eric Hanford was working his magical wonders.

I found myself walking toward the house. If anyone noticed me, I would have been thrown out or even fired, but I didn’t care. I had to see what I had been pursuing for almost my entire life but which life had perversely denied me. My legs walked up the wooden stairs. A PA glanced at me, but bustled on up ahead. I grabbed the nearest thing to me—an apple box—to use as an excuse, as though someone had asked me to bring it in.

Turned out I didn’t need it. Everyone was so focused on their job or I was dressed so much like them—in a natty, faded T-shirt and jeans—or I looked just familiar enough that no one gave me more than a glance. It gave me the peculiar sense that I was allowed to be there, that they had accepted me—that I truly was part of the crew.

And there was the locus of filming, the queen bee of the hive. The dinginess of the rest of the room was blotted out in this corner, illumined magnificently where all lights were focused, as if a stage on Broadway. The camera stood at the outer ring of light, with a couple of guys tending to it. Only one person stood in the sphere of light, illumined in his seat at a table. It was clearly Eric’s stand-in. You could tell because he was about Eric’s same height, same weight, and same hair color, but was much, much uglier.

I finally spotted Eric himself, in the shadows, drinking from a water bottle as some make-up girl adjusted his collar. His huge blue eyes stared into space as the light from the set touched the curves of his face. Someone said something to him, and he and his ugly stand-in swapped places. He smiled and said hello to a woman—some actress who looked vaguely familiar—who sat just out of the light across the table, and she said something quietly that made him laugh.

Someone—probably the AD, but who knows—yelled, “Okay, picture’s up, quiet on the set!” an announcement that echoed into the distance by PA’s like the baying of wolves. A sound guy hoisted a boom up onto his shoulders.

Then someone said, “Action.” It was so weird that they actually said that.

There was absolute silence. Eric showed no perceptible change, as if he hadn’t heard them call action. I looked at the video monitors that were a few feet away, which were facing a couple director’s chairs. In one of the chairs, some guy—ostensibly the director—with huge headphones on was watching the flickering screen with his chin in his hands. The monitor magnified the change in Eric’s eyes like a microscope: they were filling up with tears.

I looked back at him in reality. It made me feel like I was in acting class, as if I could evaluate his acting more effectively that way. He started talking to the actress—some cheesy as hell dialogue, but what he was saying didn’t even matter. He cried, he laughed, he was unsure of himself… I mean, I happened to wander into the middle of the fucking Oscar clip. He looked at the actress with such passion and hope that I felt my own eyes tearing up and my heart surging with profound remorse.

Someone said, “Cut.” Eric stood, his face drawn as if still immersed in the intensity of the moment, and took a bottle of water from a PA.

I staggered out of the house.

***

That night, when I drove Eric back to base camp after they had wrapped him, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. He was a composer of symphonies while I could barely play the chopsticks. It sucked that now I’d have to defend him whenever my friends bagged on his acting.

It was his last day of filming. When I’d heard that that morning, I had been somewhat dismayed that I’d be back to less reading and more driving—driving crazy extras no less—but now I felt like a privilege was being ripped away from me. I had been driving a very force of nature, a snow white Bengal tiger among hyenas, and now was being thrown back to the great unwashed.

He wasn’t even in the very back seat this time, but instead in the one right behind me. “Hey, so it was nice meeting you,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, you too,” I said.

“Hey, if you’re not doing anything tonight,” he said, “me and a few buddies are going out to a bar around here.”

That had me, annoyingly, shocked and quivering with flattery. He still wasn’t my favorite actor by far, but still: Eric Hanford wanted to hang out with me. Maybe he just wanted to enlist me for his entourage, but even so, at this point I considered even that an honor.

He added: “And then you can drive me home afterwards. I wanna get trashed.”

Fuckin’ A. He really did think of me as his fucking chauffeur.

“One last drive, huh?” he goaded.

“All right, sure,” I said.

That night I was wrapped many hours after he did, but I was able to catch up with him and his entourage. We sat in a freakin’ VIP section of a club—a club I surely would never have been able to get into in my life, let alone the VIP section. The members of his entourage were predictably rambunctious. I recognized a couple of them as those actors you always see in supporting roles. I just sat there as they caroused. I just wasn’t one of them. They regaled each other with the most mundane shit, yet managed to make it sound cool, while the only thoughts that came to my mind seemed dry and factual in comparison, so I withheld them for fear of going against their jovial grain. The focus of the gathering, however, was clearly Eric. Even though he was sitting off to the side, not even saying a whole lot, everyone’s energy was somehow directed towards him, like rubies complementing an enormous diamond. It occurred to me that if this was the charisma that it took to be a star, it was no wonder I’d gotten nowhere.

As we approached closing time, the entourage dispersed, and I ended up sitting next to Eric alone on the couch.

He was resting his elbows on his knees, fingering his drink.

“I think I’m gonna ask Amy to marry me,” he said pensively.

That was weird. When the hell did I become his BFF? “That’s cool,” I said.

He smiled fondly. “Yeah. She’s great.”

“Yep,” I said. God knows, I would have loved to talk about Amy Parker all night, but probably not in the way he’d want to hear. Besides, I was never going to see him again; I had to pry open that head and find out his fucking secret.

“I caught one of the scenes you guys shot today,” I said.

“Yeah? How’d it look?”

“Really great,” I said in total honesty—in fact, even trying to water down my now freakishly fervent admiration for him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Can I ask you, like, an acting question?” I asked.

His eyebrows jerked in surprise, but he said, “Shoot.”

“Well...what’s your technique?”

His smiled, almost rolling his eyes; I realized that he must have been asked this a million times. “I don’t have one.”

“I mean, seriously. Honestly. I’m not gonna, like, run out to the tabloids and divulge your tricks of the trade. Frankly, they’re probably a lot more interested in what’s going on between you and Amy than your skill as an actor.”

“Seriously, I don’t have a technique.”

“Well, then what’s your thinking process? When you get a script...what do you do?”

“Uhh...I read through it.”

“Right, yeah.”

“And then...I just get ideas about it.”

“Like what?”

“Well...like the scene you just saw today. After reading through it a little, I realized that my character was sad.”

“Right, so...you decided to just...be sad?”

“Yeah.”

“But... you can’t play emotions. You’re supposed to think about objectives and all that crap.”

“Well, I guess that happens subconsciously or something.”

“So, what, the material just subconsciously connects with something sad that happened to you?”

“Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know your life. Like a dead dog or something.”

“I never had a dead dog.”

“Well, you know what I mean. A dead anything. Anything sad.”

His sapphire eyes narrowed in thought. “Give me another example.”

I started laughing, but he only looked at me in confusion. I stopped laughing. I thought he had been playing dumb, but it was clear now that he wasn’t. “You can’t think of anything sad that’s ever happened to you? I could probably name you ten sad things that happened to me TODAY!”

He shrugged, seeming only mildly amused at my shock, as if he hadn’t revealed the most fucked-up thing in the world.

I just looked at him. He could have been lying, but why would he? I would have hidden such a bizarre, psychotic fact.

“Are you okay? Do you have amnesia or something?”

“No.”

“So, what about when you didn’t get the Academy Award? Didn’t that make you upset?”

“Are you kidding? It’s a meaningless popularity contest. Even Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture.”

“Well, have you ever been turned down for a role?”

“Yeah, but that was usually because it wasn’t the right fit, and I shouldn’t have done it anyway.”

So he was either insane or incredibly well-adjusted. “But what about girls? Haven’t you ever been dumped, or had a girl not love you back or something?”

He thought for a moment, as though running through all his romantic dalliances. “No,” he concluded, as if he’d never realized that before.

“What?!” I shouted. “Well...hasn’t there EVER been ANYTHING you’ve really really wanted, but then failed to get???”

“I don’t think so.”

My eyes narrowed in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”

He shrugged.

“But even when kids get anything they want,” I continued, “they still find things to get upset about, even more so than completely deprived kids. Movie stars get upset when they don’t get the right kind of Perrier!”

“Yeah....”

“So, if you don’t get the right kind of Perrier...what do you do?”

“I wouldn’t ask for Perrier.”

“You know what I mean. Okay, I’m a PA. Sir, what kind of water would you like?”

“Uh...Evian.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any Evian. We only have this Aquafina shit.”

“Okay.”

“That’s what you'd say? ‘Okay’?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure because it’s never happened to me.”

I sighed in exasperation. “I don’t mean exactly that scenario. I mean things like it.”

“Yeah, I know. Never happened. I’d just get the Evian.”

I looked at him in incomprehensible shock. This wasn’t actually, physically possible, was it? “So...what are you, just this…magical Golden Boy?”

“I guess.” He looked at me somewhat bemused to see what to him was a simple fact about his life having an effect on me.

“But…if nothing bad ever happens, aren’t you just completely bored all the time?”

“No, it’s not like I don’t have emotions. Like, I can be happy.”

“But how do you know what happiness truly is without anger or sadness to contrast it with?"

“I dunno, it’s just what I feel.”

“So...you’re just happy. All the time.”

“No, not just happy. Interested, excited, thoughtful...”

The illogic of it all suddenly struck me. “But you’re a fucking actor! You have to have experienced all emotions in order to act properly! It’s like you’re playing a violin with missing strings!”

“Does it seem like it?”

“Well, no, but then how does it WORK? How are you able to cry in scenes?”

“I dunno, I’ve seen people cry before, so I just do what they do.”

“So...you’re like this robot that records human behavior and then just duplicates it?”

“Isn’t that basically what acting is?”

I looked at him; he was partly right. “So you’re an outside-in actor,” I answered wryly.

“I guess so,” he said.

“What about when you’re imitating someone crying: do you experience sadness then?”

“I don’t know.” He thought for a moment. “I guess it just feels like I’m concentrating on what I’m doing.”

“My god,” I breathed. “But…aren’t you missing out on basic human experiences—even part of what makes us human?!”

“Well, maybe. But from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t seem like I’m missing much.”

“From what you’ve heard?!” I slapped my hand to my forehead. “From what you’ve HEARD; that’s fantastic!”

I wanted to yell at him, call him an emotionally stunted lobotomy victim—but what I really wanted to do was punch him in the face, yelling, “I’ll show you what sad is!” But I found myself unable to. Even as implacable ire rose inside me, I couldn’t imagine smashing that beautiful face up. I liked the bastard. That fucking, unfeeling, friendly, wonderful bastard. And I began to suspect how it was that he had been exempt from experiencing anything horrible.

So I just looked at him.

He took a swig of his beer.

***

I drove him to his place as we had agreed. He even sat in front right next to me.

To get to his house—in the mountains above Beverly Hills—you had to punch numbers into a gate and go up a long, winding driveway that led to a spectacular two-story, like, villa. I was sure it was only one of many such properties of his around the world.

“Thanks, man,” he said casually. It was obviously of absolutely no consequence to him that this would probably be the last time we’d see each other in our entire lives.

“No problem,” I said, feigning the same. I felt a sudden pang of remorse. I had probably grilled him too hard, and he’d been taken aback by my overly persistent inquiry into his fucked-up perfect life. I felt like an idiot. Who knows, if I’d played my cards right, I could have been admitted into his entourage, but instead had lost the most amazing person I had ever met because of my usual retarded social bungling.

He slammed the door shut and walked into the house. I just sat in the car. I couldn’t bring myself to drive off.

I realized that Amy Parker herself might have been within a hundred yards from me, waiting for Eric—if she wasn’t somewhere in the world on location. I leaned over to look at the house through my windshield. A huge window on the second floor revealed a blue expanse of the living room ceiling, illuminated by the shifting light of a TV set. And then Amy Parker stood up into the blue. From my angle, I could only see the soft underside her jaw and part of her profile, but it was unmistakably Amy Parker’s profile. She was smiling, speaking to someone—most likely Eric. I watched their silent world through the glass of the window.

Then Eric appeared. He kissed Amy hello and dropped out of view, presumably having flopped down on the couch, having a completely normal evening being Eric Hanford with Amy Parker. She moved away from the window disappeared as well.

I drove away.

I Won't Grow Up

2008-06-15T02:47:00.003+01:00

When I was a kid, every now and then I would see an example of the mythification of childhood—in a TV show or in some adult cooing about how great it was to be a kid—and I couldn’t understand it. From what I could tell, childhood just plain sucked. You have to fight with your siblings, you can hardly do or get anything you want, you have horrible nightmares—even taking a bath is an ordeal. I wanted to be an adult BADLY. I once made a homemade driver’s license, modeled after my mother’s, and walked around with that and plastic keys. I found it tremendously unfair that kids didn’t have the right to vote. Far from Peter Pan’s stubborn cry of “I won’t grow up” and wanting to be forever irresponsible and carefree, I would have gladly traded in whatever carefreeness I had for the responsibility of adulthood.

All that might seem like a build-up to a sudden shift: that when I DID grow up, I had a sudden desire to regress back to childhood. But in fact, I actually got and enjoyed exactly what I wanted. I LOVE being an adult. I love being able to go wherever I want. I have loads of fun with my brother and sister. My nightmares consist of things like being stuck at work instead of escaping from skeletons.

Of course there are bad things about adulthood: your mind is closing to new skills like languages, you have to work (often at a boring job), you have to pay bills, etc. But sometimes when I pick up my keys and my wallet—these symbols of adulthood that I coveted as a child—I can’t help but be glad that I have the power and independence of adulthood.

But now there IS a shift: unlike my childhood, when I look ahead to the future, I do not find myself wanting to rush ahead and grow up any more than I am now. It’s not just that I don’t want to get old—who does?—it’s that I don’t want the additional responsibility of marriage and kids. But so many of my friends are getting married that I’m literally feeling peer pressure to do the same—and that there’s something wrong with me if I don’t. After all, everyone feels pity for that one aunt who never got married or had kids and instead has an empty life with her dead-end career and her cats.

But in the meantime, I feel like I am, in the words of Miss Jean Brodie, in my prime, and I’m miffed that I have to leave it so soon. I mean, I just got here! Forget childhood; I wish I could stay in my early twenties forever. Oh, sure, they’ve been rocky and confusing—figuring out how the hell to get my finances in order, to get a job and all that crap—but they’ve been FREE—probably the most free anyone experiences in one’s whole life. You have the independence of adulthood without being constrained by responsibility to anyone else. If there were a Never Never Land for 20-somethings, I’d fly there immediately. And I am not familiar with this sensation. Instead of pressing on the accelerator as hard as possible as I’d previously done my whole life, now I’m slamming on the brakes and finding that they’re broken.

Am I just being selfish and just wish to prolong my selfishness? Why not? Women especially have the more drastic shift when children come along: sexual revolution or not, they’re the ones who are expected to—and in most cases even want to—subsume their careers into their children. Why would I want to do this at the exact time my career is finally taking off?

I know the happy mothers out there are nodding knowingly at me. Once when I was a kid, I looked at a sulking teenager and thought: I’ll NEVER be like THAT. And lo and behold, when I became a teenager myself, I became the sulkiest there ever was. You can always count on age, society, and hormones to make certain behavior inevitable. But until the desire to settle down fully takes over, I won’t grow up.

More from the Lost Secret London Diary

2008-06-15T02:25:00.003+01:00

December 19, 2006

Steph, Sam, Chris, and I chilled out around the dinner table talking. Chris and I talked about Angels and Demons, which Chris just finished. Chris reads a LOT, apparently, which surprises me; he didn’t seem the type. I told him my Dan Brown multiple choice novel thing; he laughed.

Then Phil came home and hinted that he wasn’t going to eat any of tomorrow’s Christmas dinner, which Steph got furious at, and she DEMANDED that he eat the dinner that they spent like 80 pounds on (out of the household money, btw).