Sunday Top Ten: TAGGED

It'd be way cooler if we had to physically tag people for these 8-facts-memes (I don't know what that word means, actually, I just know people toss it around the webbernet like it's candy from babies or whatever). It'd be way way cooler if it was like Flag Football, where you had to wear the little tags on some velcro hooha around your waist and the other kids'd try to yank your pants off? Luckily, I wore long winter underwear (in the winter) and boxer shorts (year round), so no one, unfortunately for them, ever caught a glimpse of my ass via surprise "flooring."

Carlytron obvs tagged me for this 8-random-facts thing. These are the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

This seemed like it'd be super easy, but um, I've already published about 8 million words describing random facts about myself in the most long winded way possible, though usually I try to sugar-coat my self-centered ramblings with "themes" or "universal truths," but this's just like, supposed to be straight up hard core ME.

OK, I just stared at the screen for like, ten minutes. How am I supposed to just write random stuff about myself? I need a theme. "Random" is not a theme. Random is the anti-theme. Seriously, I keep fighting thematic urges. Is "Things I haven't already mentioned 10,000 times" a theme? "Deep dark secrets?" Yeah, As if.

Sunday Top Ten:
Eight Totally Random Facts About Myself! TOTES RANDOM!
and Two Totally Expected Not-Random Facts!

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10-8. "You're the worst kind. You think you're low maintenance, but you're actually high maintenance."

I don't really look like I put much effort into my appearance. In fact, it may appear as though I wear the same thing every day and've had essentially the same haircut for ten years.

I get weekly manicures, but I get my nails painted black, and I wouldn't need manicures if I didn't bite off the sides of my fingers like a little rabbit except with fingers instead of carrots. My hair's dyed/highlighted ... but I go way too long between appointments and usually sport ridic roots ...

and I've never had hair longer than shoulder-length. Ever.

9. I don't have my ears pierced ... but I have my bellybutton pierced, and a tattoo on my thigh.

8. All I know about makeup application is how to put on eyeliner so it looks like you just emerged from a beamy sweaty all night rave, but I hate going anywhere w/o eyeliner, even to bed.

My daily wardrobe is really boring, but I really hate going out if I'm not in SERIOUS COSTUME.

Etc.

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7. The Loner's Manifesto

My Mom enforced "Night-Light Time" for me from 8:30-9:30 every weekday evening when I was a kid. This was important time for me to write my girls' sports team novels. She wanted me to learn how to have alone time, but by then I think I was already craving it and needing it regularly, always escaping from crowds to hide in corners, under tables, in bathrooms, on the floor behind potted plants.

Or maybe it's 'cause I don't like other people that much, or I find myself so annoying I'd rather not subject anyone else to my thorough investigation of every item for sale at Forever 21, four-hour missives at Barnes & Noble, sociopathic train habits (book/ipod/etc), lame "work-outs" or whatever.

I used to go see lesbian movies alone, like I was some stealth dyke in a dark veil in the 50's, like Boys Don't Cry, Lost and Delirious, Girl Interrupted (not a lesbian movie, but come on, seriously), but really, I've seen probs 50 movies alone, usually documentaries or indie movies -- my favorite going-alone theatres are Two Boots and the Angelika and I won't do it in the suburbs, only in the city, and I don't like going alone to big-ass theatres with stadium seating and loud noises.

I want to make a joke about that footsteps in the sand poster about walking with G-d, but I won't. But isn't that poster funny? It makes Jesus sound like a stalker.

Um, ha. Ha.aha.as.hahhahaha. Ha.

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6. I Believe!

Speaking of footprints in the sand or whatevs, I believe in G-d. I just do. I had my Bat Mitzvah, even though they put me in Badass Hebrew Class for all the misfits, where we'd go through a new earnest teacher at a rate of about one per month. Back then, Hebrew School was just a place to get sent to the office and get bad grades, but I took Hebrew again in college 'cause I genuinely wanted to know. So, about four years ago, I was almost fluent in Conversational Hebrew. Now I'm like "Yofi."

I add this as a "random fact" 'cause no one ever expects that I do. After all, I'm cynical and doubting and half-gay, and I curse all the time, and I make jokes about Jesus and I KNOW Evangelical Christianity is the downfall of American society. But I've never ever not believed in G-d. It's just something I've always known and never doubted.

Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.
(Abraham Heschel)

For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,
and incontinences,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting place.
(Thunder, Perfect Mind )

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5. And Also, I Want to Have Babies.

Never doubted that either. Yesterday, Heart the Dog was all like "Yelp yelp Yelp!" and all up on our shit [Haviland/Carlytron/Riese World Revolution Meeting] and I looked at her and said, deadpan: "Heart. Seriously?" and just gave Heart the stare-down and Heart totally sat down and stopped being a hyperactive urination-station for a minute. Haviland was like: "I can totally see you in the future talking to your kids like that. They'll be like WAAAAA and you'll just look at 'em like 'Seriously? Right now? You're really doing this?' And they'll shut up. You should name your daughter 'Papi' so that you can just be like "Really Papi? Really?" all the time."

That's true. I've never ever not wanted to have babies. It's just something I've always known and never doubted.

I'm pretty sure I wanna be preggers too, though obvs not fat. I'm gonna be doing Yoga with all the lunatics from the Upper East Side. For a while I wanted to adopt, after constructing a huge senior project about orphan crisis resulting from China's One-Child Rule, and maybe I'll do that too.

But um, right now I am still a baby, and clearly cannot conceive of caring for another human 'til I figure out how to care for myself. I'd also like her to emerge fully functional like Dakota Fanning in Uptown Girls or Stewie.

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4. Rebel, Rebel

When I remember high school, I remember myself as a well-behaved kid: I got good grades, my teachers usually liked me, I in the smart-kids classes and college-tracked, top o' the class, etc. Howevs , when I really think about it ... maybe I just think I was well behaved 'cause I felt like I knew so many people who were worse. 'Cause the thing is? I was, from time to time, a total bad-ass. I got caught skipping class in public school so I just started going to the nurses's office, having a fake phone convo with the operator/"My Mom," and then walking home. Because public school was boring and kind of the seventh circle of hell, socially, especially coming there straight outta nerd school.

It's way easier to get in trouble at Interlochen/boarding school, 'cause you live there. Thus, all the rules typically enforced by parents are enforced by staff and teachers, who're essentially required to act like the strictest possible parents at all times. So: sneaking boys into my room, sneaking off campus, canoodling with my boyfriend in the woods, snorting Vivran, drinking, smoking, and doing drugs were all breaking serious school rules, not just "laws" and "parental preferences."

By some bizarre unrepeated miracle, the first few weekends of my senior year, my roommate Ashley's Dad came to Traverse City, rented some motel rooms, and invite us all off campus for weekend-long revelries. I've got no clue how we all obtained permission to go--they had insane rules about those things, which's why we had to sneak off campus so often, obvs.

And I needed those weekends, too. It was right before college applications and everything started it's irreversible attack on our sanities, and I missed Ryan (my best friend) like crazy, and so I needed it. I needed dark smoky nights and I needed endless fall mornings with Krista, reading John Kennedy O'Toole out loud to each other, stuffing ourselves with fudge, smoking cigarettes and dissecting our overwhelming angsts over long Bob Evans breakfast feasts. Also, we may or may not've spent a lotta time playing guitar and singing Janis Joplin on the roof.

By the end of the year, every single one of my friends besides Ingrid and I had been suspended, expelled or at least forced to watch the "no smoking" video. How'd we escape punishment? Dumb luck, really. I think I performed an expellation-worthy act at least once a week.

The following video is a taste of our bad-assery (not really, but I only got so much time). In it, you can see Ashley & I on codeine in our dorm room (those're the scenes where I'm in pajama pants and whispering -- RETAINER FULLY ON -- about how if our room were to catch on fire, we'd be "in no capacity to deal with it"), Ingrid (my best friend, we had a very special friendship) and I planning an "alternative" campus tour on the porch of the boy's dorm, me drunk at a motel where Ashley's Dad took us all for the weekend (and my boyfriend making fun of me for being drunk), Krista in the motel, etc. ...

Little Eadie/Ree-Ree: "I'm wearing a lot of clothing because our room is so cold. I'm wearing two pairs of pajama pants. I'm wearing underwear too, of course."

Boarding School Undercover 1998

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3. Rebel, Rebel: First Amendment Activist '99

I did not have any three minute stories. I'm sure that surprises the hell out of you, because this blog is alway so brief 'n snappy. But so, to fill the three minute spot we each got at the Senior Reading, the teachers said: "Read a poem," and I was like "Um, I'd rather play Dolphin Noises on a boom box, naked." So then I wrote a flash-fiction story about this couple waiting in line for a roller coaster, and the girl's pregnant, and he's trying to talk her into riding anyhow:

“They’re not gonna let me on this thing,” she says to him.

He looks at her stomach. “They’ll probably just think you’re really fat. Don’t worry about it.”

She frowns at him. Sweat trickles down along the sides of his red freckled cheeks and then his neck, and she takes a napkin from underneath her left armpit and wipes it along his face, letting the sweat seep through the paper and onto her fingers, and she feels very close to him. She wishes that she weren ’t pregnant so they could still cuddle, wrapped up late at night on his couch, playing Sega. Now, she’s just a fat pregnant girl, ready to give birth to this monster like a Cabbage Patch Kid that'll change their lives completely, forever. She hates it. Her new idea is to pass it off to someone else as soon as it comes out, like a football.

And I read it for the Senior Reading, and it went really well. The last week, "Festival," is readings and performances for all the families/alum/recruiters/etc., including Senior Reading Redux.

I was called into the office by a woman I'll call Twatitude (clearly not one of the two male teachers who loved me. She never loved me enough.), and told my story, which she thought was a really fantastic story, honestly, was inappropriate for the Festival reading. Apparently, it "implied abortion," and they didn't want to deal with "phone calls."

In the following passage, the most offensive passage is highlighted:

“Isn’t it bad for the baby to take it on a rollercoaster? Don’t they have rules like this for a reason?” she asks.

“Nah,” he nods his head. “Nuh-uh. Rules are for pussies. My Mom has all kinds of heart and back problems, and she always takes these things real good.”

“What if this thing kills it?” she says, staring up at the ride, at the screaming kids with their legs dangling. “What if we get flipped upside down, the little cord thing snaps and it falls out and its head rams up against the inside of my stomach, what if that happens?”

So, because I am a Professional Person, I cried my eyes out. It was like everything came to head that day: all my panic at the grown-up post-high-school life I was about to start, about leaving the woods, about the fact I'd chosen to stave off adulthood by drastically reducing my food intake. About my fear of leaving the only place in my whole life I'd ever been really happy, purely happy, for a moment or two, the place where I'd met my best friend Ryan who'd saved me from the near-suicidal pit I'd been wallowing in since my Dad died, about leaving my boyfriend John, leaving my best friend Ingrid, leaving Krista, Meg, Sheetal, Delp , everything, everything, everything I'd come to associate with the word "love," and though I was sick of the rules and the insanity I was also scared shitless.

I was happy enough with things that I'd even let myself be happy and I can't say if I've done that before or since: let myself enjoy something without anticipating it's inevitable terrible demise. But Interlochen was safe like that because it had to end, because high school ends, unless you're really dumb, and then you have to go back obvs.

And so that all came to a head when I was told I had to change my story. All the fear/sadness I'd been holding in. Twatitude suggested: "Read an excerpt of a longer piece," and I wailed; "Oh God, excerpts are so fucking lame and you know it," and finally I agreed to read a censored version of the story, which I created and she approved. I missed class that day 'cause I was too upset to go. It was the only time I ever fully skipped class, sans doctor's note, at Interlochen.

But before I left her office when I brought the censored story, I was composed, and reconciled, and I said: "Thank you. I was upset to leave this place, but you've just made me fucking happy to get the hell out of here. I don't want to be here, if this is who we are and what we stand for, or, rather, don't."

But the day of the reading I started freaking out again. I hated the censored story. It was bad. I liked the old one and so did everyone else. I went there not knowing what i was gonna do.

And I didn't know until I got up there and opened my mouth what I'd follow through on--I'd brought the uncensored copy with me too, just in case--that it'd be the "bad" version.

When the story ended, I walked by Twatitude and she wouldn't look me in the eye. She looked away, I dashed past, never to see her again. My favorite teacher hugged me and said "Nice work."

Then I got hands-down totes WASTED and ran into the night.

I graduated. John and I stayed in my Mom's hotel room at the Econo Lodge in Traverse City. We ate donuts and drank milk from the carton in the dark. We knew we were going to break up, because our relationship'd never worked incredibly well anyhow, there was no point in dragging it out long-distance (that was a bad formative breakup experience for me, obvs , as I thought it was possible to break up amicably, to leave no broken hearts). But we did care for each other, and love each other, though we also hated each other, and so he cried and got in his car and left the next morning, and I didn't cry and I got in mine. Then I got home, and I cried.

I hope she got like, ten million phone calls.

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NOW, TO COMPLETE THE SUNDAY TOP TEN ... TWO FACTS THAT ARE NOT AT ALL "RANDOM."

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2. Other People's Words

I'm obsessed with quotes. I'm fairly convinced someone's already said whatever I'm thinking better than I have, and so I collect and hoard and compile and list and archive and broadcast and memorize. I've memorized a lot of Stephen Dunn. I've catalogued online three seasons of The L Word, every season of Six Feet Under, Ani DiFranco organised by topic and album, movies including Grey Gardens, Six Degrees of Separation, Pump up the Volume, Pretty Persuasion, Fight Club, About a Boy, When Harry Met Sally .. the list goes on. And on. And on.

I underline the fuck out of everything I've ever read -- underlined-to-the-point-of-destruction books include Prep (Curtis Sittinfeld), Wasted (Marya Hornbacher), The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion), Bright Lights Big City (Jay McInerney), Birds in America (Lorrie Moore), Don Quixote (Cervantes), Appetites (Carolyn Knapp) and Demian (Herman Hesse).

I've got stickies all over my desktop just for quotes, currently featuring Michael Cunningham, The Buddha, High Art, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Tegan & Sara, the Bible, Abraham Heschel, Jack Spicer, Kathy Acker, Adrienne Rich and Chris Pureka. I just can't get enough, no, I just can't get enough.

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1. BTW, there's this sitcom?

So, Carly and I wrote this sitcom. If you know anyone who is:

1. Rich and wants to fund the filming of our pilot (we have a crew),
2. In development or production, preferably at HBO, FX or Showtime
3. Is a producer who wants to produce it w/your production company or whatever,

Please let us know. Our meeting yesterday w/Haviland was totes exciting, though, and we seriously have a lot of stuff in the works related to this project and others that's gonna be good for all of us. So like, stay tuned, or whatever.

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And finally. Now I need to tag some people. I'm trying not to tag people that I think have already been tagged, and kindly resisting tagging a few people that I know Crystal would like me to save for her, because I'm a really, really good friend.

1. Word Verification
2. A Stranger Among Her Own ...
3. SlogreenX
4. Memoirs of the Mundane
5. Tongue-Tied
6. Surplus
7. Why Don't We Get Drunk and Blog?
8. B.S.: Not Just My Initials

Get on it, kids.