Me and my personal shredder

I sometimes find that I can't summon the appropriate emotions for certain occasions. I worried about this during my flurry of wedding-induced panic attacks; I was worried, yes, but I wasn't have nearly as many deep thoughts as I suspected the occasion warranted. I wasn't looking up to see dove's flying, and I wasn't subconsciously weaving bread dough into love-knots and I couldn't make my mind equate rings with dramatic symbols of unity. And for someone whose mind has been so warped by a stiff liberal education that I think Thomas the Tank Engine is a symbol of industrialization, this was a very low point.

I was considering this emotional stagnation at my sister's high school graduation over the weekend. I was sitting with my family in the summer sunshine, shading my eyes with a free program as the wind blew majestically (read: coldly) through the millions of balloon bouquets on the field. The kids were marching in time to the band, and the outfits that I remember as stifling seemed regal from afar, but even sandwiched between the tears of my older sister and mother I was sort of thinking: what crap.

Obviously I was not thinking "what crap" at my little sister, of whom I am very fond. I was directing my malice instead toward the do-gooders making speeches all about the unity of 2009, kindergarten besties, and the scary ledge of adulthood on which they all stood. I was wondering whether these kids (alright, these girls) could really muster this much emotion and hyperbole over graduation.

It's not as though I wasn't nervous about high school ending, I spent many weeks prior to leaving for college being upset that I couldn't get a clear mental picture of what my life would be like so that I could worry properly about it. I packed consciously for my dorm room (gargoyle bookends, personal shredder). But I didn't bath myself in happiness on the day of graduation and embrace the world anew. In fact what I remember worrying about most is how stupid I looked in my mortarboard and taking it off directly following the ceremony, photo-ops be damned (sadly I worried about the same thing at my college graduation and pushed nervously at it to the point that it fell off my head as I was jostled crossing the stage).

So I'm not sure if I envy or mock you, high school girls with real emotions at the ceremony. On one hand I wish that I was moved to tears by the idea of closing epochs and the exchange of friendship necklaces. But on the other hand (surely the more evil one) I wanted to take each of those girls by their Hawaiian lei and shake them until they realized that in a few years the majority of their high school classmates would become a reason to switch lines at the Walmart to avoid awkward conversation.

Embarassingly long, embarassing in general

I wrote this about a year ago to antagonize my sister and thought better of posting it. But the re-awakened Twilight vigor surrounding the second movie trailer has been reminding me of everything I hate in the world. So here you are:

At first I hated Twilight mostly for the entertainment factor. A few deprecating comments about the series would turn a mundane conversation with one of my sisters into a pleasant shouting match. One well-placed snip about the Twilight jack-o-lantern on the front porch would rankle even my mother’s pleasant demeanor. Later, as I read about riots in Hot Topics (who knew anything could counterbalance the sludge of apathy and fishnet tights in a Hot Topic?) around the U.S. during the Twilight publicity tour, I started to hate Twilight because it made people slightly more obnoxious.

I won’t have people saying that I’m a literary snob (as my sisters already have) and that I rail against all trendy books because popular things are inherently stupid. You skeptics should know better. I gobble up the refuse of popular culture. I grew up on books with raised-print titles and bikini chicks riding dragons on the cover. As an intellectual I have already earned my sell-out stripes; whether I got them in getting lost in London last year after standing in line for HP and the DH, or that time that I admitted to actually liking Memoirs of a Geisha is debatable.

Regardless, I’ve earned my right to discuss Twilight.

But until recently I didn’t really feel much reason to. Recently, however, the issue became personal in a way that all of my sisters pre-buying tickets for opening night hadn’t made it personal. All because someone brought up Buffy.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interview with the director of Twilight in which she was asked how she thought the protagonist of Twilight measured up against the iconic Buffy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The director claimed to have never seen a second of the long-running cult classic and denied any comparison.

For some reason I felt myself becoming irrationally angry.

“Check out the names," I urged anyone who would listen. "Buffy is spelled B-vowel-double consonant-possible vowel. The Twilight chick, Bella, spells her name B-vowel-double consonant-vowel. That’s some seriously plagiaristic bullshit.”

How could someone directing a movie about vampires and teens not explore this staple of angsty vamp mythology? And screw professional thoroughness, what sort person hasn’t heard of Buffy? I didn’t have cable growing up, but I never missed an episode.

As I pondered this throughout the day (and boy can I obsess over things once I get started) I began to realize that there were some distinct similarities between the two works. Both feature a teenage girl as the heroine who happens to be in love with an immortal vampire. However, what is more important is the poignant differences in themes and representation of young-adulthood.

And thus I arrived at my theory (to follow), The Power of Normalcy: Why Buffy is Superior to Twilight in Turning Out Well-Adjusted Teens with Healthy Morals and Good Self Esteem or (the working title) Shut the Hell Up Everyone.

PART ONE: They Have An Episode on Buffy For People Like You

I guess I should start by wheeling out the well-used popular conception of Buffy as a metaphor. Excuse me if I sound a little bored, I’m just used to reciting this every time I trick my boyfriend into watching a few episodes. The basic premise, as paraphrased from Joss Whedon, is that high school is a terrifying place, where many kids feel confined and ostracized by their uniqueness. So he gives us Buffy, a girl who is irreversibly unique, and battles daily against monsters. She eventually falls in love with Angel, a vampire with a soul and drama ensues. The series begins when she arrives at a new high school after being expelled from her previous one, for reasons (and here’s something every teen can sink their teeth into) that weren’t her fault. She eventually falls in love with Angel, a vampire with a soul, violence and drama ensues.

When I attempted to find a metaphor in Twilight for the high school experience, I was appalled by the implications. In many ways the vampire teens of Twilight can be read as the stereotypical popular crowd at any high school. They are mysterious, good looking, well-dressed and their guardians are in the professional class. Bella, a girl indistinguishable from her peers, leads a mundane life until she is saved (literally and metaphorically) by Edward and embraced by his family. It is only after Edward becomes interested in Bella she becomes noted in society and her life is given a purpose. Unsurprisingly, Bella desires to remain with Edward and to eventually become a vampire herself, thereby assimilating into a superior group. Her destiny, and later her identity (in a human vs vampire sense) is dependent on her boyfriend and his pals.

Throughout the series, Buffy maintains an endearing (and prototypically adolescent desire) to be normal. Although she questions her physical superiority because the responsibility it creates separates her from her peers, she recognizes it as integral for her calling. Although Buffy’s individuality in undeniable, the show emphasizes the importance of close relationships with “average” people as a more important factor in her successes. The third season features Faith, a rogue slayer who provides a reflection of what Buffy would have been like without the influence of her friends. Faith believes that her superior position as a slayer places her above rebuke and she seeks companions who she feels are similarly powerful, disdaining the value Buffy places on maintaining normal friendships. At the close of the season when Buffy throws the deceitful Faith off of a building, it provides a message exactly opposite from that of Twilight. Buffy’s power is inherent, but her abilities are increased through her everyday relationships. On the other hand, Bella remains powerless, but at least she has the really popular kids to protect her.

If you are comparing Buffy and Twilight there is no getting around discussing the merits of Angel versus Edward. Not only is there an unavoidable similarity between the two as undead pieces of eye-candy, forever brooding in shadows and scamming on minors, but both have devoted followings. While not denying the complexity and narrative length of these relationships, I would like to bring up a single point. I think that it is important when talking about Buffy/Angel and Edward/Bella to remember who in each pair is responsible for taking the “humanity” of their main-squeeze. Buffy’s sexual assertiveness is the cause of Angel’s loss, but the sacrifice is mutual since she unwittingly loses her companion in the same act. Bella’s humanity is also lost to her as a result of sexual actions; she becomes pregnant with Edward’s child and it is destroying her weaker, human body. Edward, always the deciding factor in Bella’s life, turns her into a vampire not in response to her numerous requests, but because of her innate inferiority. In short, Bella is finally on equal ground with her boyfriend and will never get old and ugly. What a message for the kiddies.

As a matter of trivia, I would like to point out that there is an episode in the first season of Buffy that deals with teenagers who want to become vampires so that they can remain young and beautiful. The real vampires kills these teenagers and plenty of laughs are had at their expense. So as a blanket statement to Twilight kiddies, mom's and the like: stop blathering on about this crap. There was already an episode of Buffy that encompassed the entire 8-billion page plot of Twilight, and that was cerca 2000.

The font looks weird to me...

While driving home yesterday I invented a new micro-paranoia for myself: crashing my car because of temporary sneeze-related eye closure. Strange, but probably not unheard of. If I felt like validating my claims I might just look up a statistic about it, but as usual I would much rather just make irrational and unfounded statements.

This thought was brought about by two developments related to moving, the first being a new, more congested commute, and the second being a weird influx of allergies. I have had someone suggest to me recently that the allergies in this region are a form of chemical warfare perpetrated by the snooty stay-at-home yoga moms in an effort to keep anyone who doesn't have a shnaz SUV with a built in humidifier the heck out of their glistening Nugget Markets, but I must say this seems slightly far fetched.

So yesterday I was driving with my usual caution (three car lengths away from my kindred dirty cars, four car lengths away from aggressively clean cars) and I must have sneezed about 82 times. Each occurrence found me with hands locked at 10 and 2, wriggling my nose and straining to keep my eyes open.

As creepy guys on car insurance commercials are consistently telling me, it only takes one sneeze-sized second to total a person's beloved hatchback.

Pocket watch for ladies

Unsurprisingly (dare I say predictably?), I am very fond of solving all of my problems with a certain kooky-named search engine. That trusty engine failed me today, however, when all of the searches entered with a combination of the words “graduation,” “coming of age,” and “gift” fed me links of bar mitzvah DJs and L.L. Bean embroidered hand towels.

I was in the midst of a gift-giving crisis concerning the pending graduation of my littlest little sister from high school. I was torn between wanting to select a gift to convey the gravity of the situation and the contrasting suspicion that (18 year olds being the scourge of the earth that they are) she would rather me just purchase an umbrella with the Twilight guy’s face on it.

What do you give to a person graduating from high school when desire to discourage kids in high school from thinking that their lives (transported through cyberspace in a mass of fragmented texts and twits) are important? All I recall from my graduation party is wearing some weird Bugs Bunny shirt and threatening my mom with suicide if she attempted to enforce an event theme.

But let us return to the topic of gifts. Because I am melodramatic, I was leaning toward something Victorian and metallic in nature. A gold watch or a locket with a snippet of my hair inside would have suited my mood perfectly. But my main squeeze assured me that pocket watches are for men, and that since I would never afford the female equivalent (one set of sterling silver soup spoons) I decided to widen my search.

I provide below for your enjoyment a list of gifts considered and rejected for my sister’s graduation during one tour of the mall this afternoon:

• Lave lamp,
• Locket with Jesus etched on the cover (to be presented if purchased with visage pointing away from receiver , since sister is known to be very intimidated by religious symbolism and cries when forced by wayward religious relatives to attend services),
• Single soup spoon,
• McDonalds money,
• Hospital scrubs,
• Large, yet cheap, oil painting,
• Netflix subscription,
• Candles shaped like happy faces that burn lopsidedly (remember when these came briefly back?)
• Cool sneaks,
• A kimono,
• Vintage-covered copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Wasting paper on the internet

I think that there are few things worse than journals with the word “journal” on the spine. This in inexcusable, even when the cover itself is old and leathery looking and the clasp might be made from an authentic arrowhead from the French and Indian War.

I admit to being a little emotional about paper-goods at times. This derives partially from my overwhelming and completely groundless nostalgia, and partially from my own heady and youthful desires to be a writer.

In my mind (and this is the mind that seriously considered looking up butter churns on amazon earlier) writers wrote in stern leather-bound books with ribbons for bookmarks. And no writer of my imagination was very silly enough to want the word “journal” embossed sloppily on the spine in Century Schoolbook font and so I’ve felt compelled to disdain this idea myself.

This tirade might actually have a point. So lately I have been trying to write in a more serious sense, and failing very miserably. I feel drastically unmotivated after getting home from work, and then I just have fits over not accomplishing anything. Really, it’s quite a drag. And I weirdly (okay, hypocritically) despair over how I was so productive in college, when all day long I curse college kids and their term-paper style melodrama and their Snow-Hoes and Eskimos parties.

“If only they knew,” I think to myself sitting in traffic. “When you become a working person there is no such thing as a free newspaper.”

And so I find myself being falsely motivated by the sirens of the paper world. I think to myself that maybe if there was a journal that wasn’t totally obvious about being a journal that I would buy it and become instantly more motivated and prolific as hell and my handwriting would probably be improved by sheer proximity to the thing.

But I know that if I were to find the perfect journal I would still be flakey and my handwriting would still be sloppy and the lines would start curving down and wasting expensive paper space before long. Hardbound journals are the most depressing thing in the check-out aisle of Barnes and Noble.

I blame those sad seeming dragons

On Thursday night, as I stood in my bathroom trying to floss while reading about defeat of corrupt gods by righteous sorcerers, I realized I have been doing some fairly atrocious regressing over the last week.

Though I know it’ll sound petulant, I can honestly attest to having avoided fantasy novels for a solid couple of years. Sure, I’ve carted their familiar pastel covers with raised lettering and buckling spines from apartment to apartment, but I haven’t actually indulged in some time. It’s not entirely that I’m too ashamed these days to go around with a sci-fi book sticking out of the front pocket of my overalls (read: my adolescence), though that is a hefty portion of the reason. The other slimmer, but more legitimate, reason is that I truly do enjoy reading what might be termed as “classic literature” and as an added plus I feel as though I’ve earned my plastic-rimmed glasses and poor attitude when I’m through.

For example, when I spend the day lying on the floor chronically re-reading Willa Cather, I consider it a day well spent. When I spend the day lying on the floor reading fantasy novels, however, I feel sort of like washing my eyes out with soap and writing really mean anonymous comments on Tolkien fan fiction sites when I regain my vision. And yet, I can’t stop.

It’s terrible, actually. It all started last week when my main squeeze brought home a book rejected by the library. It was a hefty tome with a giant dragon face on the cover and an incomprehensible title; outwardly I joked about the inexplicable fondness of fantasy writers for bisecting names with apostrophes but inwardly I was mighty curious about this sad seeming dragon. My main squeeze laughingly suggested that I might want to read it, and I laughed to in a furtive sort of way.

Unfortunately, I barreled through the dragon book in a few days, and then immediately took solace in another (less commercial, if that is any more defensible) fantasy novel.

To be clear, I know that fantasy novels are crap. I even make a point of reading them quickly because I’ve fond that oftentimes the 300-page subplots about warring amongst the dwarfish people are completely irrelevant to the overarching (and it’s way overly arched) storyline. But there is something strangely endearing about them.

The problem is this: when I read lines of convoluted passages made up of the words “fate,” “empire,” and “moonstone” strung together in 20 different ways, I will snort sarcastically and roll my eyes but this doesn’t seem to deter me from continuing through that book (or its inevitable sequels).

My only hope is a resurgence of my equally unappealing George Elliot phase.

The only cardinals I know are birds

A few days ago my live-in-fellow interrupted one of my fairly routine soliloquies about the detrimental effects of technology on the youth to assert a certain humbling fact.

The object of my tentative attack was the ever-more-common GPS unit, and I was pondering (vocally) that perhaps the prevalence of GPS units makes people less apt to be aware of their surroundings and to develop a sense of direction. As we pulled away from the grocery store I was really hitting my melodramatic stride, mourning cartography and suggesting passionately that maybe we should learn to navigate like sailors using stars and the mating calls of whales as reference points.

At this point my main squeeze (a google-mapper for life and quite ironically driving me around at the time) interrupted me mid-rant to remind me that I (sans GP-anything) am wretched at finding anything, even places I have been to many times before. I was aghast at his statement, but could offer no argument. I am indeed shitty at finding my way while driving; however, that fact had never distinguished itself from the many other things about driving that I am incapable of doing sufficiently to grab my attention.

I’ve been thinking about this since but try as I might, I can’t really blame myself for this appalling fact. I’ve been shamefully enabled into a very inattentive, if charming, passenger.

The foundation for my disability was laid early in life during long car rides to and from my grandparent’s ranch. I spent these car rides with my nose jammed into various cheesy tomes of historical fiction and trying to block the smooth sounds of Journey from my ears. I never attended to the scenery, most commonly I would look up bleary-eyed, surprised and somewhat disappointed whenever we arrived at our destination.

My parents are the sort who are incapable of leaving a social event before darkness has fallen, and so many of these long drives home were made in the dark, four sisters and various quadrupeds stuff into a smelly blue-and-white GMC tank. On the occasions that we drove home after dark, my dad would allow me to use a flashlight to read in the backseat, provided that I remembered not to shine it in his eyes while flipping the pages. I remember on one occasion demanding the attention of my whole family and reading a scandalous passage aloud in which a family on the Oregon Trail ate pancakes after bugs had flown into the batter; my mother craning her head around from the front seat and attentive all the while.

So if today I can’t find my way back to a restaurant that I’ve been to twice, I blame the hours of sitting in that wretched suburban and worrying about dysentery and oxen rather than bothering about the cardinal directions. Unfortunately I don’t get much time to read in the car anymore (only at long stop-lights, hella yes), so I’ve had to make due with convincing people that they enjoy driving me around, or letting me follow them.

I’m hoping that I can continue to sell myself as an endearing and helpful passenger (license-plate game, lock the doors when I see teenagers in the cross-walk) to the point where I’ll never have to invest in a GPS.