21st Century Self-Fashioning

What if the rift between who we are to the rest of the world and who we are when we're, say, home alone suddenly collapsed?  Ever wonder what might happen if anyone else in the world could see the inside of your brain, to listen in the perpetual, several dialogues and/or narratives that move endlessly every moment of our lives?  Do you ever think about the fact that the person sitting next to you at school, the one who drives you mad with her ridiculous blue hair and bright pink lipstick and jaw that doesn't move, could actually be a neurotic, emotional disaster zone who thinks secretly about the manner in which she might kill her husband/boyfriend/significant other?  What if when she's alone, she actually moves her jaw to talk, and what comes out is baby-babble to her cat about what a cute little pookie-baby she is?

I have to wonder about these things at times because it prevents me from being entirely cynical and so consumed by my sense of ennui that I cannot like anyone or anything.  This does not prevent me from generally rolling my eyes at the overblown hipster affect of such people, however.  

Since my freakout entry about the reunion website, which I'm still unnerved by, I have been thinking more and more about what it is that I find uncanny about the whole matter.  It's this: we are only ever who we are at any given moment.  That sounds simple, of course, and it is, but when I'm home alone it looks something like this: I'm wearing a Grand Canyon tee shirt with various stains on the sleeves, peach and white striped pajama crop pants that are too big and have to be tied at the waist, ratty blue slippers from Old Navy with my hair in a million little clips to keep it out of my eyes, wearing old glasses, no makeup (or worse, remnants of yesterday's makeup smeared about), eating Special K cereal, and talking to my dog to the tune of "Bubbie-boo, how are you?  Should we go outside for a potty?" (<--note here that this is also done in a bizarre and unflattering baby-talk voice) and "who's the cutest bubbie in the whole wide world?  It's you.  It's you."  (<--this one's actually a little song that I find revolting even as I type it.  Is this who I am when I'm Professor Chris?  No.  Professor me (at least at Metro) is reasonably put-together, has applied the What-Not-To-Wear rules of straight-leg trousers or a-line skirt, tailored tops and structured jackets, has applied hair product en masse, makeup, jewelry, and has things organized in folders and copied handouts and a class plan.  This person uses words like "juxtaposition" and "discourse" as if I speak this way at all times.  In fact, I often wonder who my students think I am when I'm not with them.  

Student Chris is sarcastic, cynical, often unpleasant to all except those who merit being on the short list of people I won't kill when the high-powered-rifle-from-the-clocktower moment arrives.  Student Chris is harried, frazzled, often unkempt, regularly burdened with a heavy bag, lack of energy, and the general inability to suffer fools, which looks something like doodling in a notebook and taking account of every stupid thing I hear other people say.  It does not occur to Student Chris to note nor consider that she may in fact be a perpetrator of stupid things said.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that we all quite consciously do this - we are different people at different times, and as we get older, I think we learn how to quite literally fashion ourselves into what we think we should be, or what we hope we are perhaps.  I think about this in relation to my previous entry, and how the one thing I fear most is that the artifice will somehow be exposed - that who I really am is a badly dressed mom who baby-talks to her dog and longs to run away to Europe and consume nothing but wine and good chocolate forever. 

Let's see how far we've come

I saw Meridith for coffee this afternoon with bubbaloo Jack (gimme a break, willya?  He's cute as hell and baby talk is rather in order, I think), and among the many things we talked about, she mentioned that there is a website for our high school's graduating class rounding up folks for a 20 year reunion.  It goes without saying that I am shocked and horrified that said anniversary is less than a year away, but more disturbing still was my visit to this website.

For at least the last half an hour, I've been utterly speechless.  Without words.  

Despite the fact that in my adulthood, I've opted to live in Northglenn again, a mile from my parents' house, and I can see the high school I went to and graduated from whilst standing quite literally in my front yard, I never process this in any real way.  I walk my dog around the baseball field and can hear the drum line of the marching band practice in August and up through October.  My daughter attended the same schools that my siblings did, and will go to this high school next year.  I admit that it's cool that I have such a sense of place in the world at this point in my life and I find the aforementioned comforting in an abstract sort of way.  I still have friends from those teenage years (in fact, people like Charly go back to the 8th grade; Meridith, 10th), it feels like an entirely other life that I have to force myself to remember and most times cannot.  Said website has my senior picture, and when placed next to my current one, like the one on this very site, it is impossible that these two are or have ever been the same person.  The revelation is that they aren't the same person; not by a long-shot.

I read others' accounts of "life in the last 19 years" and I have no idea how to account for this kind of time passage; furthermore, I'm not sure I want to.  In high school, my internal world was so consumed with self-loathing that I don't even know that I was entirely aware of until more recently.  The inside of my head told me I was fat, ugly, unimportant, foolish, naive, etc. and I remember being so utterly shy that I couldn't speak in class, and when called on I often fumbled and once I even cried of embarrassment.  I always felt certain that I was at best average and at worst destined for total failure; I never considered myself intelligent or funny or particularly good at anything.  I so desperately wanted to be liked I tended to mimic others and do my best to blend in.  So much of what powered my life in my twenties was an extension of this lack of self-worth, and I suspect now that this happens to us all, but there are defining moments in our lives that we can never forget - things that so often drive our existences for too long and shouldn't but do.

Mine is fourth grade in Morgantown, West Virginia, when a new school was built and the two small elementary schools were funneled into the new one.  Kids on "my side" of town were normal, lower or middle class, and the kids from the other side were doctors' and university professors' kids and they had money and spoils that I never knew about until that moment.  Up to that point, I didn't know that it wasn't cool to get clothes at the second-hand store, or that Trapper Keepers were necessary, or that Nike tennis shoes and Izod shirts would be all the rage.  Up to that point, I had been reasonably happy and never considered my status in the world.  Then I met Kelly England.  That's her real name.  She was pretty and fashionable for the time, lived in a huge house and her parents had expensive jewelry and nice cars; I know this sounds like a freakin' John Hughes movie and it basically was, but the fourth grade version.  She pretended to be my friend because we had the same folder - I remember vividly that it was shiny and had a watermelon on it - and the next day at recess asked me to play with her.

Just so she and her stupid friends could put caterpillars down the back of my shirt.  Yes, that was a plural caterpillars.  I cried, and when I asked her why she did that, she replied, "because you're fat and stupid and I would never be your friend."  I admit that as an adult a part of me hopes that she grew up to be a fat, drunk, moo-moo wearing woman who lives in a shitty trailer in the middle of nowhere with 18 kids and an abusive husband who spends her time playing lotto and bingo and smokes two packs of generic cigarettes each day.  But I've never thought about it.  Really.  Kelly proceeded to make my life a living, daily hell in just such a manner for the following three school years, the pinnacle of which was in seventh grade when we had to change clothes for gym class and she made it a point to make cattle sounds every time I shed an article of clothing in the locker room.  Ah, good times.

But how that statement haunted me - still haunts me.  It doesn't matter how many good friends I had after that, because all I ever heard was that I was fat and stupid.  I know it affects me still because no matter how many years I teach and how many students I've affected positively, and no matter how off-the-charts my student evaluations are on a regular basis, it only takes that one student who hates me to say it, and I'm spiraled down into a pit of "what's wrong with me?"  But my skin is getting thicker; I no longer read those stupid things and there are at least two years' worth of unopened evals in my desk drawer as we speak.  Ever heard, what you don't know can't hurt you?  There's something to that statement.

But I digress.  I hate who I was in high school in a nutshell.  I am in no way still that person; so much so that I think I've repressed a great deal of the experience.  So much so that I don't want to bother explaining to any of these people (except for those who already know, of course) who I am now.  I don't want to reminisce or relive any part of it, not even the good stuff.  Even looking at the website, I feel that fat and stupid girl with the bad hair gasping for air under the heavy pile I've buried her in.  And all this while I thought she was dead.

Sending out an SOS

What is it with The Police anyway?  Everywhere I go lately, every place I find myself sitting or running or driving I can't escape their music.  Don't misunderstand me; I like this band, always have, but come ON, how many times can we hear these same damn songs over and again?  Here's an example: Laura and I were at Starbucks, and we heard "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and I mentioned that I can't stand this song because it finds its way into the feedback loop of my brain and refuses to give up until I feel I'm going perfectly mad.  She said hers was "Message in a Bottle" and less than an hour later, there it was, playing at the gym.  There are many songs like this of course, and my most recent nemesis is "Unwritten" from the Pantene commercials.  I don't know who sings this song and I don't care because I've never liked it, but it gets into my head and won't stop.  

This is a superfluous and nilly rant, of course, but the popular music canon is one that irritates me almost endlessly.  As I mentioned, I like The Police, and I don't mind Sting most of the time, but I simply cannot fathom how they are considered one of the greatest bands in rock history.  Their songs sound all vaguely the same; they're simple and reggae-ish, and obviously catchy - but does this make them part of the elite?  The answer to this calls into question larger issues of this distinction, like why Led Zeppelin gets the honor of being the greatest band ever when I cannot suffer even two minutes of any single one of their songs.  Robert Plant is screechy and incoherent, and I simply don't get it.  I've tried, but I don't.  I also don't get the status of a band like Nirvana either, now that I'm on the subject.  Of course I like them and always have, but theirs, like the other aforementioned bands, are never on my top ten playlist, or even my top 100.  Their place in the rock and roll canon baffles me; I understand that bands such as these are groundbreakers and changed the music scene in some key ways, but just because they did it doesn't create legendary status in its own right except for this fact.  I can think of a dozen bands that came after Nirvana that I like considerably more and just because Nirvana may or may not have paved the way doesn't make them inferior any more than it makes Nirvana kings of the hill.

The same argument can be (and has been) made about The Beatles.  I grew up on this music, love it, appreciate it, but even my adoration for these records does not permit me to think of them as the greatest band in the history of music.  Maybe most influential, but we can't ignore the fact that a reasonable percentage of the Beatles' library of tunes is just plain weird or even terrible.  

But it makes me smile anyway when I hear my daughter going about her daily life humming "Dear Prudence" or "Across the Universe" like they are her own.

You're playing you now

I suspect that my writing in this space will increase exponentially as my to do list becomes more daunting this term.  Case and point is the fact that I've completed four entries since school started only two days ago, and here I am again.  It's easy to find something to write about when no one is grading it, when there isn't a deadline, and no one expects you to be smart.

Today is a grouchy day; not rage-filled, but simply testy.  As usual, there is too much to do and not enough time to do it, and the only difference now for me - and what will keep me sane until summer - is that when it comes down to what doesn't get done, I'm starting with school stuff.  I've learned one thing in the last six months or so, and that is not to neglect myself first every time the going gets tough.  Things are certainly in a different perspective now, and in case I need an instance later to which I can refer, here it is:

Monday, the first day of the new quarter at DU brought with it the usual first-day business of meeting the class, talking about the initial readings, and what have you.  I went into my advanced seminar in Fiction and Theory (sounds thrilling, eh?) with some trepidation because of several previously traumatic factors: (1) the last time I took an "advanced" seminar, it was my first term at DU and with a professor who is simply mad as a hatter and even less pleasant to deal with.  At the time, I felt intimidated not only by her, but by the program itself, as I am one of those people who regularly feels like a fraud - as if at any moment, I will be discovered as being unworthy of a position in a Ph.D. program, the mistake in accepting me will be realized, and I will be run out of the department on a rail.  I never said these thoughts were rational.  (2) The "theory" thing always makes me bristle because I hate it, don't believe in it, generally shun it, and in a room with a bunch of folk who wield it like sword pulled from the stone, I never feel like I have anything to say; and (3) modernism and postmodernism are not my forte by any stretch - talk to me about 16th and 17th century literature and we're money; Henry James and I, on the other hand, are but stilted acquaintances from long ago.

Upon my entrance, however, I noted that the other ten people in the room were comprised of first- and second-year grads, most of whom I do not know even their names, and something happened to me at that moment.  I realized in looking at most of their faces that THEY were intimidated, still posturing as if they knew everything, pretending to be pretentious so they could fit in, and I had to give myself a quick giggle and mutter "amateurs" under my breath.  And not in a mean way, either, but simply with the acknowledgment that I am no longer there - no longer in fear of sounding stupid, of not fitting in, of being liked or validated in any way, etc.  I simply don't care because I've developed the kind of hard outer layer that deflects the tiny cuts of being a newbie in this kind of environment.  Damn; that feels pretty good too.  

When we began talking, I noted that every time Eric (the prof) looked around the table for answers to his queries, most of them looked down, pretending to be busy taking notes (I know this because Tyler knows this, haha), and I ended up being one of only two people in the room who had the slightest clue what we were doing in there.  I even enjoyed the class, enjoyed being the one who spoke up, who understood the theory and how to apply it, and hell, I even surprised myself that I had become this person and didn't even know it.  I am not afraid to sound stupid, to have the wrong answer, or to admit to that which I do not know (which is plenty, frankly), and that is strangely freeing rather than limiting.  Facades are hard work and pretension even harder and who the hell has time for it anymore?  These folks I speak of here will discover this, I presume, and will one day sit in this room under similar circumstances with the same epiphanic moment.  I hope.

Oops, I did it again

I've watched South Park off and on since the beginning of the show, and while it still makes me laugh out loud, I find it to be hit-or-miss in the larger scope.  Episodes like "Cow Days" and "Critter Christmas" still top the list for me as being enormously funny, but lately it seems that the guys who write this show can't quite figure out if the show is ultimately extreme biting satire or shocking for the sake of shock value.  Perhaps they mean to do both, but again, sometimes this works for me and sometimes it just doesn't.  Often I find myself scratching my head and wondering why I'm still watching it fifteen minutes in.

However, two episodes I've watched recently stand out to me as being distinctly different from the often self-indulgent gross jokes and over-the-top lampooning of popular culture.  "Scott Tenorman Must Die" is one such episode that the average viewer might disregard as simply disturbing and not terribly funny but simply terrible.  Even I didn't realize it at the moment I watched it, but it is clearly a modern interpretation of Titus Andronicus.  This is no revelation, of course, and lots of people are aware of this, but I have to wonder what in the world Trey Parker and Matt Stone are doing invoking Shakespeare on a show whose primary demographic - if the commercial spots sold during the prime time premieres of new episodes suggest this - is a bunch of 18-22 year-old guys who drink too much cheap beer, watch ultimate fighting championships, and think the Blue Collar Comedy Tour is the greatest achievement in a good laugh they've ever seen and have "Git 'R Dun" on bumper stickers plastered on their lifted Ford trucks.  The simple response to this is the fact that Parker and Stone, despite their penchant for toilet humor and a preoccupation with anal cavities, appear by all accounts to be quite bright and certainly capable of such literary allusion.  I have, in fact, incorporated this episode into my regular classes when I teach Titus, to the delight of most students, and - I'm certain - the horror of the English department powers that be.

In any case, whilst watching the show two nights ago, I saw an episode about the great Ms. Britney Spears, in which she appears in South Park under "Britney Watch" a la TMZ and the boys try to get her photo by telling the security officers that they were her kids.  Britney is dazed, vapid, confused, and her performance on MTV in which she was criticized for "phoning it in" and being "fat," appear in the episode after the cartoon Britney blows her head off and becomes a wandering, babbling, headless Britney incapable of speech.  Of course it was South Park-style, completely overblown and taken to the extreme, as if the Britney debacle/spectacle could be taken any further.  Not only is the episode a stinging social commentary, but by the end, it also accomplishes something entirely more literary.  Here, at the locus of shocking television and even more shocking reality of a fallen pop star, the final part of the show reveals its brilliance.  

Rene Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that in sacrificial cultures (which can be applied subsequently to acts of this in literature), that a "purifying violence" (51) is necessary "to protect the entire community from its own violence" (8).  Thus, by choosing a pure, beautiful specimen to sacrifice, it vicariously purifies the desire for violence in the larger community - a kind of losing one to save the many kind of idea.  At the end of the Britney episode of South Park, it is discovered that everyone involved with her - agents, promoters, the public, and even the citizens of South Park itself - have "chosen" Britney for a sacrifice for the harvest time.  Since it's "uncivilized" to continue the public spectacle of the murder, they have decided that the sacrificial person should kill herself and this is accomplished by driving her to madness.  While this is clearly hilarious and socially relevant, it's also critical on a much higher order than one might expect from the likes of South Park.  It's downright impressive.

And who says I'm no fun to watch television and films with?  

Pretty much everyone...

All the salt in the world couldn't melt that ice

As I begin yet another quarter at DU, I am faced with a particular bitterness that I cannot overcome, despite my general improvement in mood.  I'm sick of taking classes and with all I'm doing this term, I have no idea when I'm going to have any time to work on my dissertation or anything else for that matter.  So far my classes seem doable; I have one I'm excited about but not excited about the prospect of working in a room of undergraduates - it's just plain awkward at this point because the space between us is not only age but education and I never know how to negotiate that territory.  Oh, and one of my students is in this course, which I also don't know what I should do about - it seems like conflict of interest but I can't say for certain.  I've also been a teacher for so long now that being in a room of - literally - kids makes me want to be in charge and I have to resist that urge.  Strange.  The other course seems better perhaps because it's at least a graduate seminar and it's something I haven't studied, but again there's the issue of disconnect for me.  I've been on student sabbatical (research hours) so far this year and now I'm back in a room full of people I don't know and honestly don't really care to at this point.  I look around the room and there is only one person from my year with whom I've ever only had a cool relationship, and the rest are mostly first-years.  I'm disappointed that so many of them appear to be thus far the same old pretentious stand-bys that I'm accustomed to.  I had hopes after my own year of people that such a tide was waning but perhaps not.  Sigh.

I feel bitter when I see certain people around the halls who have made my life of late quite nightmarish where the program is concerned and I feel like I need a serious attitude adjustment or I need to drop out.  I refuse to be that person who hates everything - you know the one - and yet I feel like rolling my eyes at nearly every classroom comment that isn't mine.  One of the tenets of Palahniuk's Lullaby is that "people still think that knowledge is power" and I have to say this resonates with me today; I also have a good friend who once warned me that the more you know about your world - the more education you receive - the unhappier you are in it.  I never believed this and I guess on a larger level I still don't, but damn; there are days like today when I wish so desperately that I could be a soccer mom who didn't go to college, has a man who pays for everything, cleans house, and organizes PTAs and play dates.  I don't demean anyone, by the way, who lives this life nor do I condemn them as being less intelligent, but days like these I hate that I know I'm too smart and too hyperactive to ever find that life fulfilling in any meaningful way.  I hate that I know I have to finish this degree or I'll never get where I want to be in my own life; I hate that I can speak the entire "to be or not to be" passage of Hamlet, all of the "tomorrow" speech in Macbeth, that I have millions of words in my head that need stories and essays to live in, and most of all I hate that I know all of these things.  Whoever said ignorance is bliss had the right idea.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day

Half a lifetime - or at least until I was old enough to actively protest - of going to church every Sunday and Wednesday certainly evokes a particular kind of guilt that can only result from programming.  But I thought that Meridith's posting to my MySpace page (the title of this entry should explain it all) was hilarious despite the "I'm going to hell" laughter it creates.  I never thought of the story of Jesus rising from the dead as being akin to my beloved zombie narratives but it quite clearly falls into this category.  Formerly dead guy with the strength to move a boulder proceeds henceforth to create a following of fellow zombies who sing songs in a building twice a week and - while they don't physically consume your brain - they certainly attempt to do so in other ways.  Very subtle, these zombies.  The knock on doors with sweet smiles and threaten you with hell and damnation, etc.  In all honesty, though, if heaven is populated with this bunch, what's the incentive to get there anyway?

I say this with some facetiousness, of course, so don't write to me to tell me you're offended.  For the third time in two weeks, however, I've had visitors at my door in the name of Easter.  Saturday it was the elderly churchies who meet at my neighbor's house twice per week and they're Jehovah's Crackpots, which I won't even pretend to understand.  A polite woman stood at my door to offer me literature and an invitation to her church because "Easter is such an important occasion we must all acknowledge and celebrate."  She said it like some kind of mantra, and all I could think about was "His name is Robert Paulson.  His name is Robert Paulson."  I'm sure this group aims at us because the neighbor knows that my hubby and I are "living in sin" (can you imagine - we have different last names, according to the postal carrier; this was apparently quite the scandal upon our arrival to the 'hood) and have occasional low-key parties but have tattooed, liquor-swilling, hot-rod driving, smoking attendees at said parties.  They don't even wave when they're out in the yard, and we're generally friendly with the others around us, even though the retired guy who smokes two packs a day and talks in a raspy, cliched New Jersey accent thinks Jamison is the worst guy in the world because I shovel our driveway when it snows.  Truth is, I like it and it's exercise, but New Jersey always hollers across the street to ask "where my husband is" and to tell him that "he can borrow my snow blower if he wants" - I can't borrow it, but my husband can.  I wonder if he thinks I should be in the kitchen and barefoot instead.  Ha.

Nevertheless, I don't celebrate Easter even in the pagan sense; vernal equinoxes are of no import to my aura, don't affect my chi energies, and since I don't generally believe in Christianity either, I can't see the point in being false about the whole matter.  My mother still goes to church regularly, and berates my father into attendance, and they asked us over for Easter dinner.  Dinner I can do; bunnies and eggs and Zombie Jesus I can do without.  Mom gave up quite some time ago in the quest to get me to attend church.  She still offers from time to time or tries to lure me with musical events or guilt me into how she has trouble going it alone (she has MS and walks with a cane), but I've noticed a significant drop in her discussions.  But last evening over dinner, we were talking politics, which I often try to do with my parents because they are woefully uninformed and grew up in 1950's America when the flag meant something and Republican did not equal being in bed with Satan and Saudi Arabia.  When I tell her I like Obama, she asks, "but doesn't it bother you that he was raised Muslim?"

I spit my drink back into my cup and looked at her wide-eyed; my response was, I couldn't possibly care less.  I told her that having leaders of this country who call themselves "Christian" sure as hell haven't done us any favors, so I don't see how that counts for shit.  Furthermore, I reminded her politely that the Koran was written centuries before the Bible and that in the grand scheme of religions in the world, Christianity is just a toddler when the rest of them are collecting social security.  And this is from a person with whom I share genetics.  What should bother us all far more is that despite the tenets of our beloved country that we have separation of church and state, we have never truly had such separation.  I want someone to explain to me why the leader of our country cannot worship in any way he/she sees fit?  Or not at all?  This does not alter this person's ability to be a good leader and international citizen.  In fact, a lack of religious ideals in the White House might actually help our global situation.  Normally these things don't bother me but W - Mr. Uber-Christian, Mr. Moral Values - wields these things like weapons.  He's actively participated in the stigma of Muslim, even though most muslims are peaceful people and what we should be afraid of are the fundamentalists.  My mother is evidence; she doesn't like W and votes democrat, but the poison of this point of view has still reached her fairly naive ears and registered.  I suspect she also gets some of this vitriol - of saying "muslim" like it's a dirty word - from her churchies, but it's out there and guess who actively promotes this belief?  But W doesn't tout that we should be afraid of fundamentalist anything - Christians, Mormons, whatever.  He won an election by pulling out beliefs on gay marriage at the 11th hour because, after all, "God hates fags" and this is an easy sell.  How people who claim any religious belief in the bible can regularly speak for God without fear of being turned to salt pillars escapes my logic.  If the bible I read is the same one - which it supposedly is, being God's Word and all, even though there's a store in Ft. Collins called the Bible Superstore that has so many different bibles that I have to wonder how anyone divines what God's Word may be at this point - then what I get is that God doesn't hate anyone.  IF and that's a big IF, being gay is a sin, and all sins are the same, then aren't we all truly in the same boat?  My favorite commandment is "thou shalt not kill" because we mete out capital punishment in the name of this one, but I think even in the original language, there is no specificity there.  The commandment doesn't say "don't kill other people"; it simply reads not to kill in general - wouldn't that include then anything that lives?  Plants, animals, spiders, bugs, the earth's atmosphere, our natural resources, etc?  We're all killers of something, and at the genocidal level.

Woof.  That was a tangent.  Don't even remember where I started.  It's Monday morning, the coffee is mud - can you tell by the intense verbosity of this entry - and it's the first day of a new term at DU.  I don't want to go; having the whole place out of my system this last week has provided many deep breaths and some great sleep.  I guess it's back to anxious tossing and turning again.