sharpstick’s Neighborhood

It's not a very bad cold. In fact it's one of the milder illnesses I can remember... My sinuses are about 40% stuffed up. My throat is just vaguely scratchy. I'm more tired and achey than usual, but not by much. Nonetheless I am taking the cue and lounging on my couch for the 2nd day in a row, swaddled in blankets, books, and handkerchiefs.

Sometimes when I'm sick I will do a juice & tea fast for the day - to keep myself hydrated and let my body concentrate on killing the virus, rather than digesting complicated foods. So today I've had emergen-c, water, yerba mate, and vegetable juice. And I really must not be all that sick, because I am STARVING. I think I will get some extra-spicy thai food for dinner.

And then perhaps I will watch the Dr. Who xmas special AGAIN! I can't believe it's the 2nd-to-last episode starring David Tennant.

I got a copy of The Talented Miss Highsmith for xmas (Patricia Highsmith's new biography). It's sort of fascinating, especially considering that the author seems to hold a certain amount of (justified) disdain for Highsmith. Apparently she was a racist and anti-Semite. Her personal life was chaotic, despite her solipsistic tendencies (it is even referred to on the inner flap as a "Pandora's Box"). She was an obsessive list-maker and left behind 8,000 pages of journals when she died. Her life is a rich territory. Still, this bio is a bit cumbersome... Mostly I'm interested in reading about writers' writing habits.

Being sick is dull. More tea!

It's been a weird year. I put together my photo "yearbook" in iPhoto yesterday and titled it: The Waiting Area; 2009 never happened. Because that's what this year has felt like. Limbo. I don't know if this feeling is specific to the year - will things suddenly start moving again when I peel open this year's wall calendar from my uncle? Probably not. But that's what we always hope for, right? That the new year will change something, and we can simply leave behind the things we don't want.

Moonmallow (the adorable plushie above) and I hope you and your loved ones have some very happy hollydays this year. ^___^ I've been busy with buying pressies for my friends and family, wrapping the pressies, and sending out cards to people over the past few weeks. Everything seems like a blur-- but a very happy blur!

I'm sending many warm thoughts your way. <3

I am a sophomore at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, Washington. I have friends from all walks of life and believe that I would be perfect for your panel. I do not play any sports, although I had a brief stint with the lacrosse team my freshman year. I am a big fan of the entertainment industry. I have very diverse tastes in TV, movies, books, theater, and music. I cannot say no to quality entertainment, whatever the genre. I am obsessed and fascinated by pop culture, and I love reading the newspaper and magazines.

That's the beginning of an essay I wrote in 1997. I was fifteen, and applying to be one of USA Today's 'teen panelists'.

The world of teenagers is very different from how it was in the fifties and sixties. Most males are concerned only with sex and drugs. Females seem mostly concerned about how to avoid them. Of course, there are the few lonely souls who dare to be different, but they are labeled as 'weirdos' or 'faggots' and are generally ignored. To be popular and successful as a teenager, one must be willing to conform to what the media and their peers tell them.

It's utterly horrific, obviously, and the most surprising thing about it is that I got the panelist position. Based solely on the 'strength' of this essay. I was one of USA Today's go-to teens for like two years outta this. Shit's still on my resume.

Looking back on my panelistship (complete with overly artsy photo shoot), I sort of built up my essay in my head. Like, it must have been good for the journallati at USA Today to send me from Pacific Northwest obscurity to their gossamer pages, right? I must have expressed something incisive, or creative, or clever. Or at least grammatically fucking correct.

In this age of single parents and families in which both parents are working, the role of mother and father begin to mean less and less. Oftentimes parents would like to be home with their kids, but can't, because they have to work a double shift so the aforementioned children can keep ordering pizzas and watching cable.

It's genuinely terrible, and it only gets worse from there.

Maybe the scariest thing about modern technology isn't the triviality, or the ubiquitousness, but the permanence. If this essay wasn't saved on a 12-year-old hard drive, I never would have read it again. It could have remained, in vague worthwhileness, in my head and my nostalgia.

My parents sent me a whole DVD of Word files they excavated from my old hard drive. They all have the original file names, but I'm starting to think I should just label them Cringe1, Cringe2 and onward, to mortifying infinity. There's one called 'White Racial Identity' that I'm thinking about just deleting.

We forget the extent to which we construct our childhood from input far more diverse than its actual events. History, movies, other people's recollections, aborted friendships, it all gets folded into the way you think you had it when you were a kid. These pictures and texts from my childhood seem like some sort of alternate reality to my 'real' upbringing, the one I keep in my head. It's easy to forget that it's actually the other way around.

My goals for this year are pretty simple. I want to get my licence (drivers) and get the heck out of this hell-hole we fondly call Nathan Hale, and the dungeon we fondly call High School. I am sick of all the b.s. politics, the pandering, the social ladder, and assignments intimately describing myself to someone I hardly know.

Accomplishing these goals will involve drivers-ed and Running Start [that's the early college acceptance program I left high school to go do the following year].

The only thing that will make this year any different from last year is that there will hopefully be less creeking. [I got thrown in the creek behind our school. A lot.]

That's from another essay I found, another 'describe yourself' exercise that I was apparently getting sick of. I've only made it through about three of the files--bad writing is so much worse when it's you--and the main thing that strikes me isn't the thudding cliches or the inorganic metaphors, it's the deafening bitterness. I had completely edited this trenchcoat-mafia shit out of my adolescence.

Looking back, I had it pretty great. I had friends who liked me, teachers who challenged me and parents who went to bed way before my curfew. Why was I so eager to get away?

I liked it better when 'youth is wasted on the young' was just a cute saying, and not a conclusion supported by 48 megabytes of Word Perfect files. I don't know if I'll make it all the way through them, but the only thing I keep thinking is, 'Thank God I didn't keep a diary.'  

 

 

 

She's ninety and it's hard for her to see. Glaucoma has made her world blurry and the only way she can look at her gossip magazines is with a lighted magnifying glass. The glass can't help her to read though, those days are over.

Her nails bother her and the kids joke that she shouldn't let me near them - I cut everything too short.  But she does want me near them and she asks if I will trim them for her. I'm nervous about this, the last thing I want to do is injure her and I don't have my reading glasses with me. I'm at the stage where I can still read my watch and a menu without glasses,  but I won't sign a contract without them and I probably shouldn't pull out splinters or go after eyelashes unless they're on. I really should start to carry them with me.

Glasses or no, she wants me to help her, and I can't say no. I pick up her cosmetics bag and find her nail trimmer and nail file. "Do I have an emery board?" she asks doubtfully. Yes, sweetie, I've got it.

I gently pick up one hand and cut the end of the nail, careful not too cut it too short. She tests the length against another finger, then her cheek. "That's perfect." Carefully, slowly, I cut and file the rest of them.

Together we examine the polish and decide her nail color is still pretty - no need to repaint. She feels all of her fingertips one by one and thanks me in a more heartfelt manner than I deserve. This chokes me up a little. Small pleasures. Small gifts. Little things that matter.

At the airport, I am overcome with the same feeling I always get when I leave her. What if this is the last time we see each other? Have I made her feel loved enough? Does she know how much she matters to us?

Cassandre starts to tear up at the airport, looking at a carved stone heart "made in Utah." She wants it to remind her of this trip. To remind her of her great-grandmother. I remind her that she'll be back next month, she'll see her again soon. She nods solemnly and asks me again to please buy her the necklace. She promises to pay me back. (Who could ask for the money?)

At home Cassandre picks up the ancient candlesticks my grandfather sent to my grandmother from England right before he was shot down and killed over Germany in WWII. I am responsible for taking care of these precious memories, but I have not washed them lately and they are tarnished and dirty. Cassandre wants to clean them and together we take them apart, piece by loving piece. We wash and dry each one, noting where the silversmith has encoded "A" "B" "C" and "5" "6" "7" so we know exactly which part goes back where. Soap and water make good progress, but not enough. We buy some polish to bring the shine back.

It makes us feel connected to do this work. Hands on labor to restore some dignity to something so precious. We don't try to make it perfect, just better.

I decided to stay in Seattle for the holiday after much hemming and hawing and then more hemming and a little waffling. I feel bad about it. I would like to see most of my relatives, but not in conditions that are hostile to sanity. So I'll be spending a quiet week in (and out of) my quiet apartment. Here's what I plan to do:

• Catch up on laundry
• Read Proust, Rorty, and Murdoch
• Write my year/ decade - end lists, analyses, etc.
• Find some new music to listen to
• Clean the bird cage
• Vacuum
• Go to a movie (which one? dunno)
• Watch the 2 Netflix I've had for 6 weeks
• Re-order my Netfilx queue
• Send a holiday letter to my uncle Phil in Sweden
• Drink some brandy & eggnog
• Do yoga
• Sell some books
• Make a mix CD to give to friends
• Plan a quick trip to Portland next week
• Go to my ex-husband's xmas-eve punch party
• Go for a run or 3
• Make myself a nice meal
• Figure out what I'm doing with my life

Well, that last one may extend past this week...

'Avatar' is James Cameron's James Cameron-est movie, if you know what I mean. The only thing clunkier than his machinery is his dialogue, and he's always been more interested in the non-humans in his stories than the humans.

'Avatar' is the purest distillation not only of the Cameron approach to filmmaking (lots of non-human character development and 'how it works' scenes, not much zoom on the human population), but also his worldview. During most of the movie, when I should have been shock-n-aweing over the visuals, I was thinking about the narrative. A few things struck me:

• With all the talk about the 'next generation of special effects', it's funny that they ended up being a delivery device for a storyline that was so retro it could have starred Steven Seagal. There hasn't been an 'Anglo dude infiltrates the natives and finds himself entranced by their simple ways' plotline in a Hollywood movie for decades.
  
  
• James Cameron's ideas of indigenous peoples seem to be informed entirely by corporate diversity training videos and 1980s National Geographic photo captions. They speak with mother earth! They thank the animal for its spirit after the hunt! Their g-strings match their spears! I was pre-emptively cringing in anticipation of the scene where we find out that they use every part of the horse-beast after they kill it.
   
  
• The movie's not remotely interested in the way that complexity expresses itself in indigenous societies. Some of the best movies of the past decade have explored they way that idealistic concepts like paradise and love let us down. The savages aren't always noble.This was, perhaps not coincidentally, the decade where James Cameron took a break from movies to go scuba diving.
  
  
• Not only is 'Avatar' collectively retro, it's individually retro too. Cameron obviously still thinks in Bad Guys and Good Guys. It's not enough that the jingoist soldier destroys a benevolent civilization. He has to say 'drinks on me, boys!' as he copters away. Cameron's not interested in the evil we do when we're driven by good intentions, or poor priorities, or keeping our jobs. In Cameron's world, indigenous people lose their homes because America, and the corporate interests it proxies, hates them.
  
  
• It's also rare in a movie to see a team of good guys motivated almost exclusively by doing the right thing. No one is motivated to save this planet because they might get famous out of it, or rich, or published in Nature. No, they want to save the Navi because, like, we're all connected, man.
  
  
• I take this aspect of the movie seriously because I deal with real-world examples of this phenomenon all day at work. Some of the most abundant mineral deposits in the world really are underneath indigenous populations, and we as a species haven't come up with a just or acceptable way of dealing with this.
  
  
• Of all 'Avatar's' retro elements, the ending may be the one most at odds with reality. If an indigenous or local population in, say, Bolivia rose up against the oil companies operating there, would the companies just shrug and say 'oh well, we'll get the oil elsewhere'?
  
  
• A company in that situation would throw everything it had at the community. The movie got that right. But a company that fails with helicopters on Monday will be back on Tuesday with tanks. And on Wednesday with planes. And so on. In a fight between two entities, one with profoundly more power than the other, the guy wearing the g-string doesn't win in the long run. 
  
  
• And that's the central lie of 'Avatar': That all it takes is rage, willpower and a white guy for indigenous peoples to rise up and resist the capitalist forces trying to uproot their lifestyles. On the planet we live on, though, the bow and arrow loses to the helicopter every time.