Freddy P. is always captain of something

For someone who loves chatting, I’ve been having my fair share of telephone issues lately. And not even the sort of phone issues that I am accustomed to having because I am at heart a spazzy and destructive person who decimates cell-phone civilizations with a single searing glance (read: I often drop my phone out of two story windows, or into toilets) but a more emotional variety of phone distress.

In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.

In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.

To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.

As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.

I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.

See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.

She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.

SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.

And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.

And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.

Social network name dropping.

I divide my internet free time into three clean categories: stalking via blogs and social networking, reading liberal slant publications, and looking up horses to buy on craigslist. I have found, much to my utter disdain, that lately two of these have been overlapping beyond my level of comfort.

I won’t leave you guessing any longer than it takes to build a rudimentary level of suspense (A horse with a blog? Craiglist has a twitter?). I mean of course, that social networking sites have been gaining an alarming degree of legitimate mention in the press. I’ve been reading articles as of late that take great pains to praise Facebook as a serious and useful social networking source (the counter-argument being that it’s an unbelievable waste of time disguised in charming blue and white) to call out Facebook-outsiders as making a grave and damaging social statement. And when I happen to chance across an article that doesn’t list Facebook as subject matter, it often commits a more grievous crime by quoting a status-change or a twitter post as news.

To be clear: I love wasting time on the internet and when I’m not harping on about nothing on twitter I’m subduing my general angst with the calming blue-and-white of Facebook. But perhaps that’s why I find this sudden shift toward popular acceptance by what I would term “adult industries” like journalism so very disconcerting.

You see, in my prime Facebooking (I can verb it, I’m fb old school) years there was nothing legitimate in the least about social networking, beyond the sheer egotistical satisfaction of wracking up friends and drunken photo tags. In those days (let’s call it circa 2005) anyone over 25 on Facebook would have been branded an automatic creeper.

“Get back to myspace, you skeeze-bag,” the collegiate masses would have shouted metaphorically, rejecting this aged friend request with a practiced click.

Now, however, the actual news sites are covering the introspective quandaries of Facebook while I’ve got friend requests from three uncles sitting in my inbox. Man do I miss my youth.

So here’s the clincher for me, Facebook is a subject for satire, not for actual news because it’s damn ridiculous. Maybe I’ve penned too many “Caterday: Drink on Saturday” Facebook invites and spent too many hours perfecting my “Buffy Fandom” score to respect anyone who can reference it with a straight face. And I hope any journalist quoting twitter winces every time they attempt to sign in and get the little cartoon birdie proclaiming “Opps, technical error!” in its cutesy font.

Ask yourself, ladies and gents, whether you’re really taking a suped-up chat-room with photos and a “Poke” option seriously. If you aren’t interested in being taken seriously, just contact me using the Build-Your-Vampire-Army application, because I'm always looking to pad out my friend list.

Do people still send memos?

Memorandum to all rockabilly kids:

Stop putting cherries on everything that I want to buy. It's really freaking me out.

This space pod seats four.

I’m going to preface this entry by warning you (yes, you, oh boundless internet) that it might seem at first like I’m going somewhere meaningful and sentimental with all of this nonsense. I assure you, without the smallest shadow of a doubt, that I am not.

Somewhat deep people are always jawing on trying to define all manner of loaded, biblical-type words. Specifically I’m thinking of such arbitrary concepts as “right” and “wrong” or (to their friends) “good” or “evil.”

Lately I have been assaulted repeatedly with these terms over the pressing issue of wedding-reception-invitee-etiquette. [I feel by just typing that phrase my blog is going to get twice the hits. Internet fiends watching bootlegged anime are nothing compared to the sheer googling prowess of the prospective bridal class.]

Certain members of my family, being left nameless out of gaping obviousness, seem to feel that the rules of wedding attendance are so fundamental that they are completely warranted in using the cliché (and yet, so effective) guilting phrase: “Do the right thing.”

And to this I apply a basic theorem. There is nothing so serious in the implications of inviting to people to eat cake on your dime to provoke such severe language. I’m not perfecting the guest-list for the last space pod leaving earth as a fiery-hot comet draws increasingly near.

In my perception there are good things in the world (the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small being available to stream online) and also bad (attentive salespeople).

So unless it’s about the crack-fiends at the mall, the BBC or the aforementioned space pod, I don’t want particularly wish to be saddled with the fate of personal morality.

No automated cursor here.

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than obsessively reading the blogs of emotionally stagnant teens (Please, no more white backgrounds and personalized cursors, you dreary little punks), it’s reading the same material in a vaguely early-modern format.

I recently finished reading The Coquette after having put it off for some time because of an irrational fear that someone might think I was reading a saucy novel in my cube on my lunch break. However, I have lately whittled down the unread portion of my main squeeze’s collection to only novels with compromising names (current furtive cubicle read: Sons and Lovers) and so after a few suspicious glances at the cursive-handwriting font of the title, I started in on The Coquette.

It saddens me to even make this comparison, but the periodic letter format full of romantic drama and parental reprimands was delightfully similar to the electronic epistles of some of my favorite teenie-bloggers. Get it? It’s like teenie-bopper. I’ve just made it up, but mark my words, that media-savvy new president of ours is going to be dropping “teenie-bloggers” before long to prove his groovy vocab.

So where was I? Yes, indeed. The Coquette was what a teen blogger would write, if teen bloggers where clever and well-spoken. Also, it was what a misery-blog would be if blogs had morals, which perhaps they should.

To prove my point and show my earnestness, I’ll tack the same moral onto this one as was slightly more obviously tacked onto The Coquette.

Don’t go around rejecting pleasant clergymen just because you are charming and used to be engaged to an old fellow. Relishing autonomy and sexual freedom will only end in one way: dying in a shabby roadhouse birthing your illegitimate baby while your mother and god-fearing friends sob into embroidered handkerchiefs in parlors across the eastern seaboard.

Out of practice, in a hurry

If I ever got it into my head that I was going to write some scathing and hip-ish novel about the real suburban youth, I would have plenty of terrible scenes to pepper it with.

Not that I’m not tired of people trying to tell me (statistically, artistically, televistically) that the ‘burbs are about the roughest place to live. I recently fled my midtown apartment for the suburbs, and let me tell you: it’s not nearly as hard-core as the WB primetime teen line-up wants you to believe. Another lie from that stupid dancing frog with the top-hat (Am I dating myself a little much here? Viva Roswell. )

These people aren’t plotting and adulterous; these people have garages. And people with garages have plenty more to do than enable their druggy, inevitably promiscuous and so terribly jaded teenagers. They can stand in their garages. And I simply won’t believe that anyone who can wash their clothes without having to hike a few blocks could really be unhappy enough for any real wrong-doing.

To return to my point (and make a quick exit to more sociable waters), I have the perfect scene for my scathing hipster comedy. Within this scene the protagonists go down to the drug store and hang out, wandering down all of the aisles and feeling the shoe-inserts.

Whatever spazoid came up with Napoleon Dynamite wishes he’d thought of that one. And probably also wishes that his lasting legacy wasn’t a bunch of twenty-something’s in ski boots over emphasizing the word “Gosh.”

I almost used an exclamation mark in this sucker

Sometimes I am a bit overwhelmed by my general resistance to change. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go plowing through what laugh-tracked sitcoms might call my “issues;” I just wanted to revel in my dogged love of re-reading crappy books.

I just finished reading Under the Volcano by M. Lowry, which was a challenge, since I usually tend to zone out during swirly, multi-consciousness passages that lack quotation marks. I have been disappointed several times by my inability to stomach stream-of-consciousness modernist writing. Generally I start to waiver and then rebuke myself with a stern slap of pretentiousness. Surely the book isn’t boring, pointless, or a crack dream. It’s obviously art, and I’m obviously a moron.

To return to my point, if I can indeed claim to have one, I read Under the Volcano for two reasons. One is that amazon told me that I might like it. The second is that it is referenced rather frequently in another book, Second Hand that I somewhat regularly re-read. I like Second Hand; it’s obvious and pop-y and the main chap wears tweed pants and suffers from “emotional hang-overs” after embarrassing events, which is certainly something I can relate to.

I liked Under the Volcano slightly less. I like things to be conclusive, and although it ended with plenty of carnage, I didn’t get the feeling of any real catharsis. I like things neatly concluded (tragically or not), which is perhaps why I spent yesterday afternoon holed up in my apartment watching It’s a Wonderful Life and eating spaghetti from a Tupperware. Now that is a firmly concluded story.

Speaking of things referenced, one of my favorite bits of Under the Volcano was when the brother laments being served tea as a sailor because he had read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. I read The Sea Wolf recently (during my London phase, closely documented on THIS VERY BLOG) and it was a real naturalist ringer. Full of stabbings and hard-tack and people who try to burn the boat down after they’ve been presumed in a coma because they are plumb crazy atheist sailors with hands like shanks of meat.