g.d., J.D.

J.D. Salinger died, at 91, out in Cornish at his hermit house. At first glance it didn’t seem like that big of a deal – I’m not one for stalking authors personally and I always avoid reading about J.D.’s personal life in particular because the accounts are so controversial. But as the fact sunk into my infamously dense understanding, I realized that it is a big deal. It’s a big, goddamn deal.

Now I’m not trying to be cute and Salinger-y by throwing around the curse words. I am just trying to get at, in a round about and too conversational way, the fact that Salinger’s works are very important to me. Not Cather in the Rye specifically, though I was overjoyed to hear a coworker mention the novel as the most pretension novel in their name-dropping arsenal. I am more enamored of Franny and Zooey (to don my hipster cap) and Nine Stories and the craziness of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters with the Tom Collins and the deaf uncle and the terrible, giant paragraphs of Seymour, An Introduction.

I love Salinger’s descriptive passages and his perfectly chosen details. I would rather read Salinger’s description of a chicken sandwich than some other jerk-wad’s impassioned tribute to the Sistine Chapel any day. Salinger was a recluse, a religious flip-flopper and a hotly debated pervert but there is no one, alive or dead, who knew as much about chicken sandwiches and glasses of milk. And don’t get me started on his descriptions of very wet cocktails.

So here, unresearched and unrehearsed, I give you a list of my favorite Salinger moments off the top of my head:

- The scene where Mrs. Glass surveys the bathroom cabinet in Zooey and dumps cigarette ash into the empty wastebasket.

- The passage in The Laughing Man where the narrator says that he has only seen three immediately beautiful women in his life, one of whom threw a lighter at a porpoise from a cruise ship.

- When Franny orders the chicken sandwich at the French restaurant in Franny and Lane thinks about being in the right place with the right-looking girl.

- Anything about Just Before the War with the Eskimos, except when the brother picks food out of his teeth with his fingernail and ruins the romance for me. Another excellent chicken sandwich scene; another great tennis jacket.

- When the whole party comes back to Buddy’s apartment in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Buddy mixes drinks, gets drunk and lies to the deaf uncle.

- The incredible narrative self-indulgence of Seymour, An Introduction. My favorite line: “Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”

And since I doubt that I can muster up anything worthy of following that line, I guess I’ll close here.

Worse than construction/landscaping noises

I want to write about sleep today, but not because Kevin overslept and I got up heavy-eyed and yawning after a solid 8 hours nestled atop my Sleep Number. The idea of sleep, or rather the idea that I should put some thought into sleeping, occurred to me on Saturday when I woke up at 9:30 and gave going back to sleep my best effort. I wasn’t able to – my brain became too alert on my trip to the bathroom, rushed though it was to preserve that sleepy state – and I was a little depressed. It wasn’t that I was amazingly tired; I just wanted to be able to sleep the prolonged, joyous sleep of a teenager again.

The sleep of a teenager is blissful. I don’t claim to understand it (something about the exhaustion of growing or utter laziness) or to be an expert on it, since my latest sleep-ins pale before the more serious exploits of my 1 or 2 p.m. friends. For me it was usually a solid 10 or 11 a.m. and while that is not particularly impressive, I still remember the wrenching feeling of waking up, the reluctance to roll over and face the sunshine. I also remember the way that my meddling parents would open my door and let my dog in to wake me up if I slept too late. The strategy of turning best pals against each other (or me against her, she wasn’t phased by my wallowing her with a pillow) is rivaled only by the frustration of waking up to construction/landscaping noises.

I’m not exactly sure what I miss about teenage sleeping. I don’t think that it is the sleeping in – I have come far in valuing my weekends since my school days. I think it is the way of sleeping more than the length of the sleep. As a teenager and in my earliest years of college I always went to sleep right away and slept all through the night with my mouth slack and drool pooling on my pillow. I think that the reluctance to get up has more to do with that state of extreme relaxation than with laziness or growing pains.

Last night, for example, I went to bed rather early (11:15) and slept fine until 4. After waking up at 4 I spent the next three hours in the state of semi-awareness that is frustrating and simultaneously pleasant; waking up every few minutes and glancing at the clock always assures you that you have so much time left to sleep but the waking up so often makes the sleep pointless. It's always a little unnerving, like staying awake too long after taking cold medicine. My dreams during those brief patches are almost always about work; I used to have the most stressful dreams about scrolling through Word.

I never experienced the half-awake state when I was sleeping the drenching sleep of a teenager. My brain never buzzed with worries about work and fragments of songs left in my head. I just slept and my first thought on waking up was always when I would have time to take a nap.

Lofty Aims (and not the messenger)

Today I was writing on the topic of romantic preoccupations and the way that they are used to shield us from actually getting any work done and I had a most unpleasant realization. I was typing cheerfully, tongue-in-cheek, brutalizing the foolish ideas that I held as a youngster about artistic work and it occurred to me that I had just finished a romantic shielding ritual of my own.

I was about to sit down at my computer (after several little procrastination techniques: g-chatting with the b.f., reading the news, orange juice) when I reached, almost subconsciously, to grab a book of essays that I had left on the table and quickly finished the one that I was reading. This was only a lapse of about 15 minutes but I find it very unnerving in hindsight and so will discuss the miniscule event at length. Here I am, writing about the way the way that I used to fixate on finished-product fantasies to avoid the terrible fear of getting started on anything, and I actually put off working on my essay by reading another essay – a finished essay by a skilled writer. That is a finished-product fixation if I’ve ever heard one.

So what is the point of this diatribe? Mostly I am writing it to blow off the steam accumulated as a resulting of finding that although I am writing about the foolish habits of myself in tones of haughty self realization, I am exhibiting the same unproductive behaviors. The problem with the finished-product fixation, of course, is that you never start anything and therefore you never realize the finished product that you have long fantasized about. It’s a technique for eluding the obnoxious parts of reality, the possibility of failure and ect.

I read an article on grit once (Is it a learned trait? All of the richest people in the world have grit in abundance!) and I’m pretty sure that I don’t have it. I’m an alright person; I have somewhat lofty aims and a good enough work ethic when I work for someone else but I’m not amazingly ambitious or driven. Because of this I have to be on my guard against unproductive habits like the finish-product fixation.

And to close, something entertaining, because I’m sure no one clicked on this link in hopes of seeing my personal procrastinator demons laid bare. My main squeeze and I hung up a clothesline in our kitchen because we want to feel like a early 20th century immigrant couple living in a tenement apartment. Lofty aims, indeed.

Warning: I feel time-capsule-y

I was planning to write about my random hygiene-related musings in this blog entry (every Tuesday and Thursday, have you noticed the pattern yet?) but I have decided to give it up for a better, more conversational, topic. If anyone feels cheated by this change, I have included my bathroom musings down at the bottom of this entry.

My new, debatably more interesting subject is the joy and whimsy of a first apartment. This topic is not wholly arbitrary; I spent time over the weekend helping or rather, watching other people help, my sister move into her first apartment. She had all of the signs of first apartment glee. She didn’t seem to mind lifting or cleaning and her knickknacks were arranged long before the furniture was assembled. After hours of exposure to this, my live-in friend and I (two jaded apartment dwellers with too many books to view moving as anything less than torture) both felt compelled to reminisce about our first apartments. We talked about it all the way home and on Monday at work when I overheard a customer giving a familiar Davis address I nearly jumped out of my skin.

As the man backed away from the counter folding his receipt, I rushed forward to take his place.

“I used to live there,” I burst out, already cataloging the stories that I could tell, if politely prompted, about my years there and the Hong Kongese restaurant across the street. My exclamation met with little reaction and no inquiries so I attempted to throttle back my sense of cosmic rendezvous.

“I mean,” I clarified with no small amount of effort. “I used to live in that guy’s complex.”

Bad roommate experiences aside, I think everyone – even content roomies who just signed another year’s lease in the soul-suck suburbs – is a little nostalgic for their first apartment. My live-in companion grew misty-eyed talking about his; he discussed drinking 6-packs of snooty beer while watching French films and I cringed, thinking of our daily fare of orange juice and sitcoms.

I think that it is that possibility, the possibility of chugging 6-packs and watching your own weird shit, which makes your first apartment so glorious. When I talk about my first apartment in this context I skip three years of in-room roommates and get right to the nitty-gritty. (Because having a roommate is a perpetual state of compromise or involuntary socializing – a special state that you never realize that you are in until you have left it forevermore.) When I had my first single-room, indifferent-roommate apartment I didn’t drink 6-packs of beer; I ate egg sandwiches at my computer every night. I rented period pieces from the video rental place; I read novels with my feet propped up on the walls for hours at a time.

There is nothing that keeps me from having an egg sandwich (dripping the delicious crumbs into my keyboard tray or into the novel that I keep pushing open with my elbow) but it wouldn’t be the same. There is something special about having only yourself to please; that’s why I love having an evening to myself to read novels and eat cheese whiz, though I would classify myself as mildly codependent.

I remember the acute joy that I got from tidying my room when I knew that I was going to have someone over. I would straighten my bookshelf, set my rented DVDs neatly on the desk (most impressive DVD faced outward, of course), and leave a few tea cups lying around to show how hard I’d been working. The whole thing seems amazingly time-capsule-y at this (admittedly reflective and melodramatic) moment.

PROMISED THOUGHTS WHILE BRUSHING MY TEETH:

- I wish I was coordinated enough to apply deodorant while brushing my teeth;

- I wish that my hair didn’t fall so often into the range of my toothpaste spit; and

- I really enjoy it when I have lots of bathroom supplies stockpiled under my sink. Extra razors make me feel so prepared.

On being (and seeming) learned

In my sparest of spare time this week I have been reading Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris and I am almost certain that I like the collection of essays about loving books and the side effects thereof (correcting typos on menus). However, reading this collection has awoken my old nemesis/pipedream. The particular nemesis that I am referencing (for my nemesis-es are only outnumbered by my groundless fears in the census survey of my imagination) is my struggle to seem well read and well educated in conversation. I can throw out a large word or a mildly cultured quip, if pressed, but when confronted with the actual intelligentsia I have no doubt that they would quickly discover that the majority of my vocabulary comes a vigorous spelling test in the 10th grade and most of my quips are lifted straight from sitcoms.

Anne Fadiman is well read and well educated and she also scores well in the bonus round of “flaunting it.” I’m not trying to be mean (if I were you would certainly know it and think less of me), merely honest. The essays are great but this chick – and she would almost certainly protest that familiar mode of address – spoke of reading the poetry of Virgil as though it was no great feat. Moreover, she actually knew other people who had read Virgil and wanted to talk about it!

I was envious of Fadiman’s educated social set while reading the first few essays but when my ego regained the upper hand in my cerebellum I regretted my wish. I, a snob in my own right, think that Virgil is a great name for an animated eccentric scientist and I don’t want anyone discussing him in any other light in my presence.

Blaspheming aside, there is a large part of me that wishes that I had a solid grasp of the classics. I have a decent basis in English and American literature but the antiquities are lost (ha…ha…) on me. I have a tenuous understanding of how to use the word Platonic when one isn’t trying to explain a messy break-up, but the other poets and philosophers meld together in my mind, forming a large toga-wearing mass of wisdom. I’m not even sure if I could use the phrase “existentialism” in a way that would make me seem awesome without some serious premeditation.

To add insult to injury (not that Fadiman did anything specific to injury me besides being downright scholarly), I was stumped several times today while watching Cash Cab in a sandwich shop. An elderly couple on their way to a steak and shrimp restaurant knew gobs more about late-‘90s politics, McCarthy-era theater, and Mexican holidays than I did.

Cripes.

I fall into the bipedal train wreck category

Anyone who knows me is aware that I have certain masochistic tendencies when it comes to movies and television. I only like things that are either absolutely fantastic or incredibly, heart-wrenchingly bad. I am completely indifferent to things that are so-so; I could live without shows that are mildly touching or occasionally funny and movies that worldly but so boring that people actually notice the soundtrack. My tastes are suited for either a masterpiece or a train wreck and nothing in between. (As a personal note, I also apply this philosophy to my friends and associates. Now look within your heart and decide whether you fall into the category of sublime humanity or bipedal train accident.)

The above paragraph, like most of things that I say on this blog, is really just a fanciful disclaimer for what I am about to reveal. Over the last week I have watched – somewhat regularly but always while multitasking, I assure you – a time travel period piece that did a serious molestation job on Pride and Prejudice.

I know, I know. I take any chance that I can get to make jokes about Austen acolytes and here I am hypocritically streaming an off-brand miniseries. Give me a break, it’s not like I’m reading those saucy P&P continuation books, the main purpose of which is to explore the sexual inclinations of the dynamic duo. Actually, I just searched for some of these sequels on Amazon to make sure that I was right about the saucy thing and I discovered one called The Darcys and the Bingleys: The Tale of Two Gentlemen’s Marriages to Two Most Devoted Sisters in which Darcy gives Bingley a copy of The Kama Sutra. Win to me.

In spite of this saucy Austen gunk, no one with a fondness for awful period pieces could have turned down something listed as “Lost in Austen.” Add time travel complicated by the fact that the travel is transporting the character into a fictional realm (another favorite convention of mine) and I couldn’t stop myself.

I guess that’s enough quibbling. I watched the damn thing and it was a marvelous, horrible experience that touched the evilest parts of my soul. The main chick, let’s call her Present-day Austenite, is in love with the fictional Darcy and her strong emotional connection with the novel opens a portal in her bathroom into the world of the novel. (Yes, this is explanation that is given. No pseudo-science or mysticism. Just pure, icky, emotions.)

Things only got more awesome. Present-day chick and Elizabeth Bennet switch places and Present-day chick is able to live out her fantasy of being in love with Darcy. There is an erroneous marriage (resolved eventually through a mysterious lack of consummation) and the obligatory time-travel recovery scene, where the Present-day chick finally becomes acclimated to the time period and learns to use a fan properly. [Fans are the go-to social barrier for time travel movies. Is there a male equivalent for this? Is it sword fighting?] Darcy then travels to modern times, where he is confused by television and anyone who isn’t white!

I won’t gush anymore about the hideousness of the entire affair but I will spoil the ending. The Present-day chick stays with Darcy and the movie closes on a time travel make-out scene (exactly identical to her frequently-referenced fantasies) in front of a mansion. Bam! Time travel neatly concluded, with no discussion of how the alternate reality came to exist or whether she should return to her own time and family.

I can only think of one way that this miniseries could have ended better. If the make-out scene turned into a woodcut illustration and the camera zoomed out to reveal that the woodcut was actually a page in P&P, I would have wept with joy. You can just imagine the rest; the pages would flip in some imaginary breeze and the cover would slam closed on the greatest time travel/alternate reality, low budget period piece ever told.

Wishing that "drang" was a word

It may not come as a surprise, but I am definitely lame enough to make New Years resolutions. (I am realizing, belatedly, that I will be posting this directly above the “Best of” list, a sure indicator that I both think of, and geek out over, the end of a year.) My resolution this year was to be more productive, especially in my writing, but also in my overall lifestyle. And until today, I was doing alright.

I won’t jump out onto any limbs here and say that I was doing awesomely but I was doing alright. I was getting things done, waking up on time, and writing my required 1000 words a day. I was even endeavoring to read about grammar in the evenings. I wasn’t proud of myself, mainly because no one should be proud of themselves for achieving the basic thresholds of productivity, but I also didn’t want to punch myself in the face. And then I woke up this morning.

This morning I got out of bed, felt no usual fatigue or hunger and sat down at my computer with good intentions and the remainder of the burrito that I had for dinner last night. But despite my aforementioned good intentions, the words wouldn’t come out properly. This can be attributed in part to my lack of forethought; I like to know what I am going to write about the night before so that I can give it a good subconscious mulling over. But once I had settled on a mildly promising topic I couldn’t get more than 500 words down. My brain felt absolutely gluey and I conceded that today would be the day that I felt less-than-dandy about the results of my resolution. The words came slowly; the came sentences incompletely, and the corrections seemed insurmountable.

I know that these problems are always problems of perspective and not actually insurmountable, but it’s still a substantial drag. And like most drags (as in outmoded slang for “lame” not dressing in drag), this one stresses me out. Not accomplishing enough during the week stresses me out because without doing so I do not feel entitled to my weekend, and lacking that feeling of entitlement, I can’t relax outside of the burning glare of my own…um…glare. And stress makes me worry that I will soon get grey hair. (Really: I almost thought that I saw some the other day. Thankfully it was discovered to be stray sour cream.)

Moving away from melodramatic exclamations and toward our usual fare of uninteresting personal tidbits, I was considering whether I should write this post as a sort of grateful farewell to the holidays, which to my dismay having rather taken center stage around here lately, for yet another year. Of course I decided against that in my eagerness to air my discomfort regarding my New Years resolution, but it was a strong contender.

I suppose it makes me finally a full-fledged adult to admit that the holidays are stressful and not just a blur of fun and sticky peppermint fingers. But now they are over and we can retire our company smiles, our tinsel, and our special seasonal ulcers for another year.

As a note of general interest, I have written 532 words in the above paragraphs, only slight more than I would have needed to write earlier in order to fulfill my dream of being a semi-productive member of society. What, I repeat, a g.d. drag.

A year in haphazard review

I hereby present KEVIN AND WHITNEY’S OFFICIAL “BEST OF” LIST OF 2009.

[I have excluded any categories that could be construed as offensive to any party likely to encounter this blog (including those that are likely to get me excluded from any party) and those that the esteemed judges termed “Unanswerable.”] PS: Answers that are bolded are links. Screw you, impossibly hard Internet!

Person of the Year (nonspecific): Lisa, the semi-insane masseuse

Runners up: Spoon, Red Robin “Special Sauce” Girl

Best TV Show: The IT Crowd

Runners up: The Tudors, How I Met Your Mother

Food of the Year: Homemade Pizza

Restaurant of the Year: Carmelita's

Runners up: Red Robin, Sandwich Spot (Rancho Cordova)

Catch Phrase of the Year: “Fair ain’t fair.”

Runners up: “Tough kittens.”

Enemy of the Year: Ex-supervisor whose name I am required by classiness to omit

Runners up: Tree cutting neighbor; that mean golden retriever down the block

Obsession of the Year (nonspecific):

Kevin: Tim Fite

Runners up: Joy Division, stretching, Fugazi, woodworking, Dan Malchoir, the financial collapse, Mark E. Smith

Whitney: William Somerset Maugham

Runners up: The Clotheshorse, the potential health benefits of yoga, making bread, Willa Cather, The Duchess of Duke Street

Blog of the Year:

Whitney: Whitebrook Farm

Runners up: Put This On, Apartment Therapy, The Clotheshorse

Kevin: Bridge Tunnel

Runners up: You Look Nice Today, But Does it Float?, Robert Ebert’s Journal

Musical Obsession of the Year:

Whitney: Bright Eyes (sad old albums)

Kevin: Tim Fite (old gangster albums)

Hot Date of the Year: Eating La Fiesta and eavesdropping on some high school kids who were evacuated due to “bad tar smells” and then going to Target

Runners up: Watching Mall Cop at the mall, Leonard Cohen (Katie and Kevin)

Movie of the Year: The Giant

Runners up: Big Fan (unseen), Quadrophenia

Celebrity Crush of the Year:

Whitney: The guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun

Runners up: James Dean, Alan Alda

Kevin: The girl from Marketplace

Runners up: Ellen Page

Thing That Got Too Cool So We Dropped It: twitter.com

Service Employee of the Year: Androgynous girl at Safeway

Runners up: Spoon, suave guy from Carmelitas

Cold hard fact of the year: hosting parties is expensive

Runners up: Spending money is totally awesome

Worst Meal of the Year: Completely organic falafel place located at Sunrise and Madison

Runners up: Marie Callenders on a Sunday

Worst Medical Decision of the Year:

Kevin: Upper Cervical Chiropractor

Whitney: Taking expired cold medicine

Pipe Dream of the Year: Des Moines

Runners up: Getting a teardrop trailer