Lucky, Good, Etc.

So the Lakers won last night, if you weren't paying attention, by three points, on a non-call on a foul by Derek Fisher on Brent Barry. The only reason I know it's a foul is because the TNT guys told me it was, otherwise I wouldn't have known. Also they told me that Barry didn't deserve to get the call because he didn't dive into Fisher and he didn't sell the foul and he put the ball on the floor.

Anyway, I don't have a particular problem with the non-call because, as Phil Jackson pointed out, the shot clock should have reset for the Lakers on an earlier play and then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Also, the Lakers played a lot better than the Spurs, and if the Spurs had played a little better we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But still I had flashbacks to that one game a while back against Sacramento where the Lakers got bailed out by the refs, and my friends, Lakers haters to a man (or woman), rode me unmercilessly about it.

I think I spent the aftermath in that game pretty much in denial. I wanted to believe that it was completely fair that the Lakers won, that they deserved each and every one of those calls.

It's been a few years, and I demand less of the world around me. I'm prepared to admit my team got a few calls, a few lucky bounces of the ball. I still kind of have an internal issue thought. Would I rather the Lakers win in a non-heroic kind of way, does the win mean that much, or would I rather they not win? How about if they didn't win in a super-heroic way? Would I rather root for a team of martyrs, or a team of plutocrats?

I don't know. It doesn't matter that much. I hate goddamn Tony Parker, though.

Sex And Anxiety: Essential Connection?

When I learned years ago that anti-depressants sometimes fuck with people's sex drive, the first thing I wondered was, "Hm, is that because anxiety and sexual interest are somehow related?"

I've thought about this off and on but never really came to any conclusions. And I've never been on anti-depressants so I don't have first-hand experience. And I know some of the newer drugs are less of a problem for sexual interest, and more of a problem for orgasm, which at least complicates my question.

But it's always seemed kind of plausible to me that there's something here -- that maybe to be really into sex you have to feel kind of anxious. Or nervous. Or something.

Two items of interest:

1) The classic aphrodisiacs are stimulants, and being stimulated is a little like being anxious.

2) Going through withdrawal from heroin, from what I understand, makes a person want to have a lot of sex -- or at least a lot of orgasms -- since it's the only relief from the agony.

There's something about being totally relaxed that feels so, I don't know, self-sufficient. And if you feel self-sufficient, you don't need anything, right? And what's sexual desire without a feeling of need?

I realize "un-depressed" and "non-anxious" do not equal relaxed. Still, they do seem connected to self-sufficiency and non-need. So I don't know.

If there is an essential connection between these, it fits my general view that what is good in one way is often bad in another, and vice-versa. But maybe that view is idiosyncratic. I don't know.

Dreams, The Retelling Of

So I'm sick, sort of. I'm more post-sick, right now, in the same way some people describe themselves as post-feminist. That means I have a lot of very colorful phlegm with trace amounts of blood mixed in, and that I sleep poorly, which I've been doing anyway because I have this new job and it's taking a lot of psychic energy that works itself out into dreams of mastering the computer system over and over and over again.

By the way I'm typing this post on a computer in a hotel lobby, which means that it will be short and distracted.

Anyway, being sick and being under psychic stress meant that last night I had some very gripping narrative-oriented dreams and that I wasn't sleeping so soundly that I couldn't remember them.

When I was in my 10th grade English class, one of the exercises the teacher wanted us to do was to keep a dream journal. This is only one of a number of points where I was told to pay attention to my dreams, to the details of them, that they had all this information to offer. The idea, in that class, was that eventually we would write poetry based on those dreams. Or, you know, one day make short films about them. Who the hell knows.

Maybe that's a growing up in L.A. thing. Either way, I feel like you're told to pay attention to what's going on in your dreams. There is, you're told, meaning there. But the other thing you learn as you grow up is that other people will find being told your dreams intensely boring. Unless, of course, they're in the dream, and then you should really only tell them about it if there's something flattering to their presence in your dream -- you should probably avoid it if in the dream they were eating donuts or something similarly mundane.

People are waiting for these computers, and I don't really have much more to say about it, except that I find those two strands of focus on dreams a little funny and strange.

INXS

There are a lot of things that Noko Marie's most recent post makes me want to say, things about the urge toward some kind of condensation of all your past experiences into one compact burst of pure montage-style-striving-for-perfection, otherwise known as nostalgia. But I'm too punch-drunk and dazed to say those things now.

So let me raise this instead: why do I find excess, in and of itself, fun? Because I do. That kind of drastic listing to one side, rather than the other -- I like that. To the extent that there are certain bad habits I never toyed with, it mostly has to do with knowledge of my own propensity for drastic measures.

Example. When I get sick, here, to the extent I can, is what I do/did: I cancel any and all appointments and obligations. I drink a gallon of Gatorade. And I sleep for 24 hours straight. I was 23 years old before it even dawned on me that other people dealt with sickness differently. Other people, I gradually realized, took things slower. They did not cancel everything. They drank more fluids, but they didn't go all nuts. They ate normal meals.

I experimented with this, and realized that yes, I could have a cold, and still live a mostly normal life. It was a stunning realization. And, also, being sick became a lot less fun. Who wants to be sick if it's just like normal life only feeling crummier? Whereas being sick in that super-dramatic "I'm dying of consumption kind of way" struck me as, in some way, enjoyable.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of all that.

Pretension; The Past

Let's not lie to ourselves; I was totally the kid who wrote poetry and submitted it to the school literary magazine. I watched foreign movies (I am not as bad as one friend who insisted that Alphaville was the perfect movie for New Year's Eve), mostly French ones. I tried to listen to jazz -- it never really stuck, but I had this cool Thelonious Monk record. I was really into Paul Klee. Everybody I knew was really into Paul Klee. We could quote passages from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

(If you're sitting there sneering, reflect on the things that you were obsessed with at seventeen, ok? And if you genuinely think that your culture obsessions were cooler or at least more interesting than mine, go jump in a lake. You may be right; it's not a nice thing to think.)

For a while I was super-embarrassed about this. It seemed like insincerity in part, because it wasn't clear that I entirely liked all the things I was pursuing and extolling, and also an exposure of a painfully sincere desire to be other than I was, to be the kind of sophisticated person who Bob Le Flambeur would really speak to. And that embarrassment is correct in the sense that I grew up to be someone who's not really so knowledgeable about art and music and poetry, although it's not like I'm anti.

But it's also kind of less embarrassing now, for two reasons. One is that some of that stuff that I pursued to seem smarter and more sophisticated stuck, stayed with me in an attenuated way. I like buildings more because I went through an architecture phase, which was prompted by the sight of a super-cool architecture magazine in an expensive book store, with fancy black and white photos. Because I thought that would be a cool thing to get into, I read some books and pretended to know more than I did, but also I started paying closer attention to the buildings around me. I looked at them harder and I liked them more, and while I know almost nothing about architecture, I guess I would say that going through that phase increase the pleasure I take in the world out there. Which is hard to argue with, as results go.

The other thing is that I thought of my pretentious period as a phase, but the older I get the more it seems indistinguishable from the other parts of my life. You decide to read things or do things based in part by an aura around those things, because until you've read something or done it you don't know if you'll like it or not. Very few things do you stumble across in some kind of immediate way -- nobody puts a gun to your head and says, "Read Jane Austen." You do stuff because you think it will impress people that you like or because you think it will make you cooler or happier or just because it's there. And then you like it or you don't; it sticks with you or it evaporates or it mostly evaporates but leaves odd pockets of knowledge behind, which is how I can still recite from heart "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening."

At the end of the day, I guess I'm just grateful my whole poetry-writing phase was pre-internet.

I got back to L.A. in the rain, which is kind of funny, but I kind of enjoyed, because it rains so infrequently in L.A., that if I had missed all of the rain I would have felt left out of a seminal area experience.

Women In Love

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a while, but I've been reluctant. Mostly because haunted by a suspicion that what I see as a phenomenon is only my own little rorschach test, reflecting back my hopes and fears.

The topic is this: How often a discussion of a famous woman of the past involves her unhappiness and failures at love, usually of the embarrassingly unrequited variety. If I were a certain kind of person, I might have clipped and copied the articles and books and so forth that struck me as bringing this home, but mostly I just read them with a certain amount of discomfort and worried what it said about me that I was so struck by their failed and unhappy love lives, rather than their triumphant achievements.

But this is the data set that I'm thinking of. Nancy Mitford, whom the Wikipedia article describes as carrying on a "largely one-sided affair." Emily Dickinson -- at least according to my recollection of an introduction to her poetry which dealt heavily with her embarrassing enthusiasm for some local worthy. Charlotte Bronte's love for that Brussels teacher. Emma Goldman: there's a book out covering one of her relationships and showing that, according to one review, "[d]uring this passionate and stormy relationship, Goldman lectured in public about free love and women's independence, while in private she struggled with intense jealousy and longed for the comfort of a secure relationship." New Yorker articles on Lucinda Williams and Sylvia Plath (Al Alvarez, who I think turned it into a book, castigates himself for not fucking Sylvia Plath when, he says, she wanted him to, blames himself for her suicide, and talks about how disgustingly dirty her hair was) and Simone De Beauvoir (the crucial quote: "Though her affairs, for the most part, were love affairs, it is plain from almost every page she wrote that she would have given them all up if she could have had Sartre for herself alone").

There are probably more I could think of. Even so, it's a scattered and random group, hardly even deserving the term "data set". Possible thoughts: as noted earlier, this is my private psychological issue and my own prurience is responsible for my alarm at these articles and books and coverage. Or you could say yes, these particular woman had issues with love and desire and stability and the fact that those aspects of their lives are covered and discussed is just our natural fascination with the inner lives of our culture heroes -- the same articles would be written in the same tone if they were men. Or you could say that the fact that all these women had these issues suggests that some kind of odd pressures exist on women, pressures that drive them both towards and away from domestic happiness in striking ways.

Or you could say that we as a culture are particularly obsessed with the successful domestication of women, that we see that as a central focus of any woman's life in a way that we don't when looking at men.

(But maybe this is all me. Maybe Henry James is treated as much as a cautionary tale as Emily Dickinson; certainly his failure to partner was discussed in some pretty goddamn prurient ways.)

I don't know. I've talked about it with friends, but mostly only female ones, I think it's a real thing.

Even if I'm right, I don't know what the thing that I'm looking at is; I don't know what it shows. There's some kind of uneasiness there, about women and their private lives and their public lives and their more or less successful domestication, I think. Even if it's all in my head, we can at least establish that I personally am uneasy about those issues, and I, like Mrs. Pearce, am a woman, which could be the start of another data set.

I don't know.

Some Brief Thoughts On Makeup

I have been going through a mildly pro-makeup phase, recently. Wearing lipstick, buying perfume, the occasional mascara experiment.

This is not, despite my stated goal of dressing neutrally, the first time this has happened. Every now and then I get this image in my head: some cream eyeshadow, a brick red lipstick, something that strikes me as tremendously appealing which I go out and purchase and play with.

Usually I give it up after a couple of weeks.

The main reason I usually wind up giving up is a feeling of self-consciousness about the whole experiment. I get overwhelmed by the sense that I am saying to the world: I look better this way. I smell better this way. I think this is a good thing to do. And I imagine a phalanx of people looking at me, shaking their heads, saying to themselves, "Is she out of her mind?"

If your clothes don't, at least on the surface, seem to be striving for anything, nobody can ever confront you with your failures.

It seems even harder, or more intimidating, to strive for femininity; I feel like I'm on the brink of exposure as a fraud.

(Written down it seems neurotic.)

You can avoid this fear, and sometimes I have, by making your clothes a deliberate provocation. You wear the brightest lipstick. You wear a hat. You wear elaborate jewelry. You tell the world that this is a light-hearted game, that you are in on the joke.

I am still not entirely sure what drives me into my pro-makeup moods in the first place. Another unknowable impulse.

Repetition Induces Comfort

So because I spend too much time online and reading magazines, and because sometimes I get desperate and read things that I would not otherwise read, I have now read three separate interviews with A.J. Jacobs who has just published a book about how he spent a year trying to live by biblical precepts despite the fact that he is not a religious person.

I have not read this book; I do not plan to read this book.

I am simply struck by the fact that in every single interview, he gives this exact quote, about the positive effects of wearing all white: "It lifts your mood. It's hard to be in a bad mood when you're walking around looking like you're about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon."

The first time I read it, I thought it was a kind of funny thing to say. By the third time, it kind of got on my nerves. It's funny to bring up Wimbledon; it's not that funny to bring it up in this precise context every time somebody interviews you. Because what's funny is it's got this quirkily spontaneous feeling about it, and when you realize it's just his pre-packaged response it gets a lot less funny. The air goes out of the room.

But I, of course, do the same thing constantly. For a year my main recourse for conversational lulls was to bring up how much better the world would be if law firms hired young lawyers on an NBA draft model. I have a handful of anecdotes that I repeat constantly. And all these things are designed, more or less consciously, to show me at what I consider to be my best. Either in my wit and charm, or by exposing dramatic and interesting aspects of my personality. And road-testing is what helps you decide if these topics/phrases/anecdotes actually put across what you want them to put across. If you get a good reaction once, you feel more comfortable using it again.

But then I also worry that one day I will wake up and be entirely a creature of tics and tropes. No more raw humanity, no more blurting out of sordid revelations. Just a smooth bundle of pre-tested material. It's appealing to the same degree it's troubling: it has certain things in common with my dream of a world in which I always want to hear all the songs on my ipod and in which I wear the same clothing every day.

Sometimes I Run Out Of Quarters While Doing The Wash

Do we really have to do things the right way?

The money is starting to run out/slow down to a trickle here in Los Angeles, even with the cigarette savings, and the job hunt is heating up. The preseason is over, you could say.

Today I applied to two jobs. I was almost done with the second application, when I realized that to upload some relevant documents I would need first to reduce those documents from hard copy to something a little more malleable. I could have figured that out with a couple moments hard thought before I started the process. But instead I left my computer screen sitting there and went tearing through the streets of L.A. in search of a place to get them pdfed. And then I got lunch and then I came back and then I had been timed out of my application session and then I tried to log back in and it didn't recognize the password that it sent me in my email when I hit the "Forgot Password" button and it thought I answered the secret question wrong, which would mean that I don't know my grandmother's first name.

So I ate my lunch and started the whole process again. And in fact, magically, it had saved all my earlier-entered information, so I didn't have to tell them again whether I had received a commendation for working well with others in any of my previous jobs. And then I tried to upload the documents and then it told me the documents were too big and then I split them in half and then they were the wrong format and so on and so forth.

The whole thing took me a good hour and a half. And the whole time hovering in the back of my mind was that secret guilty knowledge that if I had done things right, if I had prepped my documents and read the instructions it all would have gone better and faster and smoother and I would right now be running through the fields instead of having a pounding headache to go with my sense of disaster narrowly averted.

This is something I run up against a fair amount. Sometimes I do things, but I just do them, I don't think them through properly. Now that suggests that I should try not to hold it against other people when they don't go along with my half-assed attempts to alter the situation. But assuming I don't blame others, and assuming I do what's needed to fix things, is it bad to behave in that flailing way?

I'm voting no, myself.

A Night Of Revemption

It is very hot this week in Hollywood, California. I came home one night to find a neighbor in the courtyard, shirtless, smoking, and whirling around a set of nunchucks. This sort of thing, in the wrong frame of mind, can make the world ominous and unpleasant.

Tonight I went to the Valley to watch Cal's first football game. On my way to the subway this guy driving an old woman around rolled down his window to ask me where the Crossroads of the World was. Fortunately, I could tell him.

The game was against Tennessee. Last year Cal lost to Tennessee; this year Cal's coach kept saying "It's not about revenge; it's about redemption." After the first gin and tonic that became revemption. I will not confirm or deny any rumors that Doug Flutie, appearing on the halftime show, was called Doug Cutie. If it happened it would have been wrong and bad.

At the orientation for UC Berkeley I attended many years ago the student leader types kept talking about Cal. This bothered me. I had never heard of such a thing. What the hell is this? I thought. At the time I believed that the institutions of marriage and high-level college athletics had peaked, and would entirely disappear within the next fifteen to twenty years. It turns out I was wrong.

I have some Cal sports fan credentials. In my sophomore year I had season tickets to the basketball team; I can still churn out a credible "grrr rah" kind of noise when the spirit moves me. Just yesterday I saw an Abdur-Rahim jersey and it took me back. I do harbor a genuine distaste for Stanford as an institution. Plus it's easy to fake predictive ability with a Cal sports team. If they are expected to do well they will fall apart in a critical game. I like that.

But am I really a Cal sports fan? I am, inasmuch as I am an admirer of anything, an admirer of the UC system and of Berkeley in particular. It's a nice thing, a genuinely good thing, the public university. And I spent a year in a Big 12 city with a very serious college football obsession, which is a good way to develop a certain enthusiasm for even the least likable of the Pac 10 schools. By the end of my time there the USC students (televised at the football games!) started looking like hippies to me, people ready at any moment to dart up a tree for a sit-in.

And I have kind of a fan-like personality. I like rooting for things. I like watching a team I identify with win. It makes me happy. I'll do some fist-pumping. I hugged strangers during the Lakers run in the playoffs against Phoenix a couple of years back.

But I'm not sure I like Cal as a football powerhouse. I don't like it being nationally ranked. I don't like the idea of alumni who give money to support the team. I don't like the idea that rooting for Cal actually means something. If Cal loses to San Jose State every year, you can split the difference between being a real fan and being a jokey fan. That's not really true these days, at least before the inevitable mid-season collapse.

On the upside, it's the best marching band going, so there's at least that.

Cal won the game. I got a ride back into Hollywood; we passed all the kids lining up for the nightclubs. A different neighbor was standing in the courtyard smoking wearing those pajamas that are flannel and plaid, but shorts and short sleeves.

Choose Your Own Adventure: You Find A Skeleton In The Woods

Today, in the spirit of not smoking, I went for a walk. Although I refuse, as a matter of principle, to call my walks anything other than walks, this was a walk that could maybe have merited a more grandiose terminology. Maybe it rose to the level of a hike. The scratches on my arm and my stomach, and the poison oak that will emerge in a week, certainly suggest as much.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of this walk, before I found myself dangling from a tree branch and screaming like a small child (I was maybe a foot and a half away from the bottom at that point, lest you imagine me in actual physical danger) I found a skeleton. A vertebrae. I actually found myself trying to pick it up, at which point the bottom half fell off. It was only a little bit later (after the dangling from the branch) that I found myself contemplating the hygiene implications of picking up the skeleton (it had to have died of something, right?).

I have no idea what kind of skeleton it was. Probably not human. (I didn't find the whole thing, only the vertebrae.) Anyway, I don't know what the protocol is for skeletons found in the woods. Are you supposed to report them? What if it was human? Etc.

This happens to me a lot -- I never know how interventionist to be. By nature, I'm pretty anti-interventionist. If I'm crying on the bus, I want to be left alone, etc. So when I hear shrieking coming from a neighboring apartment building I assume it's kids playing or something similarly innocuous. But then you read the stories about the woman killed in full view of her neighbors and editorialists writing about how come nobody did anything and then you worry that maybe you should become one of those people who asks people if they're all right and calls the police and steps into conversations. I don't know.

I Picked The Wrong Week To Quit Sniffing Glue

I was very excited about starting this blog with my distinguished colleague. I could almost taste it. Then I decided to quit smoking. It's been 19 hours. The smart money is still on me rushing out to buy a pack in the next 24 hours, but that's neither here nor there. The point is the following may surprise you with its incoherence, and I blame that on precipitously low nicotine levels.

Good. A week ago, I stumbled across this blog. And was immediately gripped. It's the story of expats and bar owners in Thailand, with contributions from readers who live or are regular vacationers in Thailand. And spend a lot of time having and paying for sex.

Sample quote: ". . . back in the states and when I was younger I would jerk off if the wind changed directions but in Thailand I feel like self-love is almost a sin. Like I am wasting it when I could be out sharing myself with others."

My favorite detail is when one of the bar proprietors, searching for a copy of Michel Houllebecq's Platform (a great book; also could be described, in a gross oversimplification, as a book about sex tourism), discovers that the bookstore has placed it in the "Thailand Section."

So the blog is, intentionally, gripping on that level -- the encounter with a world of which one knows nothing, the gradual transformation of that world into a semi-familiar place with rules which you, the reader, come to understand (there are all kinds of acronyms like TG, LT, ST that you struggle with but over time, become familiar; you start to recognize the names, etc.). In that way, not unlike Harry Potter or Moby Dick. They're pretty good writers, and, while it's often about sex (and not recommended for workplace viewing per se), it's rarely pornographic. And there's a thrill in mastering (or believing yourself to have mastered) a foreign subculture in that way.

But a lot of what makes it gripping, for me at least, is the whole paying for sex issue, paired with periodic rants about what's ruined American women. Which, apparently, ranges from Oprah to chick flicks and crosses feminism and unattractive lesbians en route (with disclaimers attached about not disliking women).

As an American woman, and a feminist, the latter obviously makes me queasy. And I guess it makes me queasier about the first part as well. In the abstract I'm not sure I think there's anything wrong with paying (a consenting adult) for sex. But when it coexists so closely with contempt for women they consider inadequate as sexual partners, then it seems a little stranger. Women that they don't find attractive don't simply fall into a category of people who are not sex objects (like, say, other men) -- they become objects of derision and anger.

I don't know. I keep thinking I'm going to come to some conclusion about the whole thing. But instead I just seem to bring it up to everyone I know.