oh-stella!

Someone drew a map of the world. The inside of Africa was a blank and the oceans were full of dragons. At the edge of the map was a waterfall where the seas spilled into the stars. You could try to sail a ship into forever but there would be no wind to push her forward. It’s a different kind of floating, when there’s no water to hold you up.

The world has ended. Yet it turns, and we are still here. Some of us. We breathe. And those who have died are not dead. There was no heaven to ascend to and so they roam the surface of a broken planet. Like the living, they have not discovered an effective means to surrender. The days of the white flag are over, swept away by the blast wave. They will not come again.

*****
If you met me now, would you know me? Would I make your heart race? Does your heart even remember how I made it feel, or why? If I met you now, I wouldn’t look twice. I’ve learned the hard way that love is highly impractical. Love doesn’t know anything about the business of being together. Love doesn’t care how hard it is, symbiosis. It only knows what it wants, and it will manipulate you accordingly.

It’s funny, when I tell people the truth, that I don’t like myself and I think that everyone else hates me, too, they always seemed shocked. I don’t know why. Because most people wouldn’t admit to that, or because it’s not apparent by my behavior that I feel this way? I don’t go around advertising that I don’t like myself, and since whether or not other people don’t like me doesn’t really affect how I view myself, I don’t give much thought to that, either. Maybe that reads as self-confidence. I don’t know how it would. I have a “just don’t give a fuck” attitude because I just don’t give a fuck, not because I think people like me well enough to overlook it if they don’t agree with what I say.

Discussing attempting to find a girl for a coworker to date, I said, “I can’t help. I don’t have any friends, so I can’t hook him up with anyone.” At which point the people at work who I’m friendly with protested that they are my friends, at which point I voiced my usual dissent. People from work who you are friendly with aren’t your friends. You’re forced together by work. Who knows if you would like each other if you had met outside of work. Probably not. I have little in common with any of the people I take breaks with and talk to regularly. In fact, they, being mostly older women, generally are somewhat disdainful of the things I do like, and, so I don’t look like I think it’s all them, vice versa. They wrinkle their noses in distaste at the clothing I like to wear and I mock them for liking American Idol. I don’t need people to like everything I like, so it doesn’t bother me, but I do think that friends need to have some kind of common ground in order for a friendship to flourish. I told them, “I like you, you say you like me, but if we didn’t work together, if we met on the street, you’d probably spit on me.” They all seemed shocked that I would say that, and of course I was exaggerating, but the fact is, there would be no reason for a woman in her late forties or early fifties to befriend a girl in her twenties, apropros of nothing. I’m younger than most of their children.

I’m fine with not having friends. There are a few people online that I consider my friends, and that’s good enough for me. I’m not a herd animal. I never have been. I don’t dissemble well enough to fit in. There have been lots of people who have said that they liked me, but a much smaller number who really knew me, and that’s one of the hazards of friendship. You place your trust in someone and expect them to figure you out because you’ve gone to the trouble of figuring them out, only to find out that they were never paying as much attention as you were. And that hurts, when you realize that you never meant as much to someone as they meant to you. I’d rather have no friends at all than have to go through that again. Sometimes I get lonely, sure, and sometimes I wish I had someone to confide in about the things I’m angsting about, but, in the long run, it’s better, I think, to keep things to myself, than to reveal them to someone else and spend every moment after that waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I’ve got my iPhone. I’m good.

Ultimately, what age deprives us of most is our ability to the speak the language of youth. Some of us make peace with the fact that we have to learn a new way to speak. Some of us keep trying to use the same words, only to find that our mouths don’t move around the sounds the same way that they used to. I don’t know what happens, to cause this, exactly. Life is a terminal condition. Maybe the weight of that knowledge steals away the things we would say if we could move forward not knowing.

I actually had a lot of favorite songs this year. When I first started thinking about it, I couldn’t remember that many, but then I started to go through my rhapsody history, etc, and I realized how many songs I have loved and listened to repeatedly. In fact, since I decided not to include multiple songs by one artist, there are actually a few songs that could easily be swapped for other songs from the same album, so in the interest of acknowledging that, this year, I’m including the albums that were my favorites, too. There are always a handful of albums I listen to obsessively, every year, because I tend to become addicted to albums I like and play them ad nauseum, but I generally don’t do a favorite albums list because I’m not a music critic and I never feel like I can adequately explain why I love a certain album. That said:

Favorite Albums

- Two Suns – Bat for Lashes

- Lungs – Florence + the Machine

- Music for Men – Gossip

- It’s Blitz! – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

- The Blueprint 3 – Jay-Z

All of these albums have entries on my favorite song list, and any one of these albums would have had multiple entries if I hadn’t decied to limit them to one.

Favorite Songs

- “Stillness Is the Move” – Solange
- “Yoga Flame” – Lupe Fiasco
- “Party in the USA” – Miley Cyrus
- “3″ – Britney Spears
- “Happy” – Leona Lewis
- “I Want You” – Fefe Dobson
- “Blow Away” – A Fine Frenzy
- “Purexed” – P.O.S.
- “Geraldine” – Glasvegas
- “Bulletproof” – La Roux
- “Forever” – Drake, Kanye West, Lil Wayne & Eminem
- “Treat Me Like Your Mother” – The Dead Weather
- “Nothing to Worry About” – Peter Bjorn and John
- “Gifted” – N.A.S.A. ft Kanye West, Santigold, and Lykke Li
- “Animal” – Miike Snow
- “Crystalised” – The xx
- “Hell” – Tegan and Sara
- “Help I’m Alive” – Metric
- “Two Weeks” – Grizzly Bear
- “1901″ – Phoenix
- “She Wolf” – Shakira
- “All Is Love” – Karen O and the Kids
- “Empire State of Mind’ – Jay-Z and Alicia Keys
- “Between Two Lungs” – Florence + the Machine
- “Heads Will Roll” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
- “The Girl and the Robot” – Royksopp ft Robyn
- “2012″ – Gossip
- “Siren Song” – Bat for Lashes
- “Blood Bank” – Bon Iver

Notes:

- The video for “Two Weeks” is easily the creepiest video since “Come to Daddy” by Aphex Twin. There would be a two-way tie between that and the video for “Heads Will Roll” for which one was my favorite, this year.
- The first time I ever listened to “Siren Song”, I cried. That’s how hard it hit me, the level to which I identified with the song’s protagonist. “I’ll love you the best way I know how.”
- “Party in the USA” is literally the only Miley Cyrus song I’ve ever liked and “3″ is the first Britney Spears song I’ve liked in years. I’m not an apologist about liking pop music, because I like whatever I want to, but I was genuinely suprised by how infectious those songs were. Ditto Leona Lewis. I don’t really like her voice, no matter her technical skills, but “Happy” is just one of those epic songs that you get swept up in, pretty much against your will.
- I have “Treat Me Like Your Mother” and “Geraldine” downloaded as playable songs on Rock Band. I always get 100 percent on “Geraldine”. Singing. I don’t play instruments, but when it comes to the vocals, I don’t need no instructions to know how to rock.
- I’m thrilled with how popular “Empire State of Mind” has become, because it was instantly my favorite song from the album and I’ve listened to it a million times without ever becoming tired of it.
- Obviously “Stillness Is the Move” is a cover of the Dirty Projectors, but while I have failed in my efforts to like Bitte Orca, I have been in love with Solange for almost two years, now, and she can do no wrong. I do think the song is good in its original form, but, as with Leona Lewis, I don’t really like Amber Coffman’s voice, so I prefer the cover.

Chris Brown is pissed off because supposedly some stores are refusing to carry his new album. It’s called consequences, Chris Brown. You could stand to become a little better acquainted. Your fans are obviously willing to go to ridiculous lengths to bestow forgiveness upon you, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has to do the same thing. Let go of the martyr complex and get used to not being viewed as an angel. Public opinion has turned against way better artists for offenses a lot less heinous. If the Dixie Chicks can be completely blacklisted from country music radio for having a negative opinion of the president, then surely it can’t be that big of a surprise that some people aren’t going to be willing to support someone who is an admitted domestic abuser. Be glad you’re still rich. Be glad you still have all of the fans you do. Be glad that you didn’t have to go to jail. Be glad that nobody decided to do to you what you did to your girlfriend. Shut up. Stop acting like because you apologized everyone should forget what you did and be fine with you, now. That’s what children think. You’re an adult. Act like one.

I like to watch time eat its tail. I crawl back into the cocoon of blue light from the computer screen and reverb from the stereo, the way a sight matched a sound matched a feeling matched a wound, how every event conspires to bring you to a place, to a bed beneath an engine falling from a jet, an angel crashing through the ceiling and telling you to prepare the way. I can’t remember summer. I know it existed but I can’t remember it. Under the blankets, it’s always two a.m. on some night in November. It’s always an anorexic autumn, starving itself in an attempt to become winter. Bones clamoring to be noticed beneath a husk of skin.

I laugh because everything is funny. I cry because nothing is. I feel days marching forward, single file, but meaning nothing. There’s only a cliff at the end of the trail. We all fall over, but we don’t know where the bottom is and what is there. Maybe there is no bottom. Maybe we fall forever, with nothing to accompany us but the memories of all the things we ever did and all the things we didn’t do at all.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. That’s what the pills said. They told you to love a lie, and you did. Loving a lie means that love means nothing. We are all made to love and to be loved, but love doesn’t mean anything, so neither do we.

I want to shave my head, paint my face with ashes. But I’ve never burned anything and I try to pretend that I’m not the same person anymore, the kind that would cut off all her hair.

I actually read the comment, in an article on the current “fat acceptance” trend, “you could weigh 250 pounds and eat healthily and run marathons and a thin person who doesn’t do any of those things would still be considered by outside observers to be healthier than you.”

On what planet does a person who runs marathons and eats healthily weigh 250 pounds? Unless that person is a tall body-builder, that’s not even a realistic scenario. And the fact that someone could use that as an example of how they believe society is unreceptive to the idea that overweight people might not actually be in bad health speaks volumes about how grounded their theories are in reality, to begin with. It’s one thing to posit that prejudice against overweight people is very often given a thin veneer of concern for those people’s health when most people who don’t like overweight people actually don’t care one way or the other, and that the effects of being overweight are very often exaggerated to justify those prejudices. It’s another thing entirely to pretend like the effects are mostly fictional and that overweight people could very easily, without the outside observer’s knowledge, be exercising vigorously and eating sensibly and still not losing any weight. What. Ever. There’s a reason why there are so many stories about people who are overweight and decide to start running, walking, etc, and the end result is that they lose weight. Because if you’re running or walking or exercising regularly and you’re not overeating, you’re not going to not lose weight. It’s almost impossible. So the 250 pound marathon runner wouldn’t stay 250 pounds for long, and that’s why the story is almost purely fantasy.

So, while I think it’s certainly true that you can be overweight and relatively healthy and yet, people who are thin and indulge in other unhealthy behaviors will still be superficially considered to be healthier, it’s not to the benefit of anyone to push an agenda that teaches that it’s okay to accept being overweight as though negative treatment by other people is the only consequence of being overweight. I don’t have any problem with people being happy with themselves, but pretending like being overweight is not bad for you is wrong and it’s wrong to encourage other people to do the same. Yes, you can be perfectly happy being morbidly obese, if you have no desire to try and remedy the situation, but you cannot be perfectly healthy, it’s just not possible.

I know I’m returning to the same well again, but…

I don’t understand how ABC can be comfortable with the message they are sending by being unwilling to allow Adam Lambert to perform on Good Morning America after his performance at the American Music Awards while simultaneously hyping the fact that they have booked Chris Brown for an interview and a performance on 20/20. Adam Lambert is persona non grata for doing risque choreography but Chris Brown, the convicted felon and domestic abuser, is welcomed with open arms.

I can’t think of a single good argument to use in favor of ABC. Not one. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that ABC thinks people in this country are more willing to forgive someone for being illegally violent than they are to forgive someone for displaying their sexual preferences in public. I don’t know which is sadder. That ABC thinks this or that they might be right.

Of course, the American public has its priorities skewed, anyway. People were calling for boycotts when Kanye West made Taylor Swift cry, and yet, here it is, mere months after Chris Brown admitted in court that he did, in fact, fuck up Rihanna’s shit, to use the scientific term, and still, he is well on his way to having another massive hit song with “I Can Transform Ya”. It should be “I can transform your face into a mass of bruises and swelling.” It would probably still be a hit. I won’t even get into the fact that it’s a straight rip-off of “Uprade U” by Beyonce, because this rant is not about music.

The common denominator in those two instances were both black men. Fortunately for Taylor Swift, she’s a cute, blonde white girl, so people care more about her hurt feelings than they do about Rihanna’s face. I wish I could even say which people without seeming like a racist, but the thing is, a lot of Chris Brown’s fans are young black women, and they seem to be, to me, entirely too eager to make excuses for him and demonize Rihanna in the process. If you don’t believe me, go to twitter and search Rihanna or Chris Brown, sometime.

I was watching The Black List on HBO, and Keenan Ivory Wayans said that white people hold creative works by black people as being representative of the entire race as a whole, while creative works by white people are just taken on their own merits, so that you can’t make a movie that has black people as the primary characters without white people saying, “What message does this send about black people?”

So, it seems like, to me, the way people have reacted to these pop culture events reinforces that idea. Chris Brown hitting Rihanna is not a big deal to the white people who drive the entertainment machine because that jibes with the idea that they have about black men, to begin with. That they’re aggressive and misogynist. And since Rihanna knew that Chris Brown was a black man before she started dating him… Oh, those wacky blacks. Let’s ignore them and hope they go away. And if they don’t go away and we can possibly milk them for information that makes us feel better about ourselves, we’ll do that, too. But Kanye West dissing Taylor Swift is bad, because she’s white, and she doesn’t deserve to have an angry black man be mean to her. So it’s, essentially, you can be that way with each other, because that’s how you are, but you can’t be that way with me, because I’m white, and I am better than you, so I don’t deserve it. And since white people use occurrences like these to inform their ideas about what black people are like, in general, the fact that so many young black women are still falling in line behind Chris Brown just says to them, “You’re right. That’s totally how we are.”

And that’s not how they are. Because they are not a monolith. They’re millions of different people with different lives and different experiences. That should be common sense, but hundreds of years of racism have all but obliterated common sense when it comes to how people in this country view each other.

So, the question is, is the message really that it’s okay to be a criminal but not okay to be gay? Partially. I think the message is also “We hold white people to a higher standard because they should know how to behave, but we don’t think black people can help themselves.” Either way, it’s a stupid message.

I have no intention of seeing Precious. I don’t like to watch movies that only exist to illustrate that life sucks. Because I figured that out all on my own. That said, my internet reading indicates that a lot of white people are watching it, encouraged by the marketing of the movie to believe that the protagonists pain is not specific, but universal. The tagline to the movie is “We are all Precious.” Which is stupid on so many levels, not least the intended treacly double entendre. Other people, however, are complaining, because they don’t think that we are all Precious, and that white people trying to relate to a situation that’s specifically about a poor black person is a product of the need of white people to not feel a sense of responsibility for the way poor black people live. At which point the first group gets irritated and points out that there are, in fact, poor abused white people. Then the internet explodes.

Personally, my take on this is influenced by actually having some experience with both sides of the coin. However, it doesn’t really fall in the middle.

Yes, there are poor, abused white people. There are poor abused people of every color and nationality. That’s an indisputable fact. It’s not really a valid argument for people who are not poor, abused white people trying to find a piece of themselves in someone else’s suffering when that suffering is specific to their circumstances. Because, technically, if you’ve never been abused, or poor, then you can’t really relate to poor and abused people any better than you can relate to black people if you’re white. Basically, what you’re saying is, if this can happen to white people, then, because I am white, it could happen to me. But it hasn’t. So you’re not only co-opting a racial experience, you’re co-opting a class experience and life experience, as well.

The other reason why it’s a totally invalid argument is because it makes the assumption that white suffering under similar circumstances is the same suffering. It’s not. Human suffering is, like a lot of things, on a sliding scale. There are varying degrees. Being black adds another dimension to the suffering of the protagonist because being black contributes to it. Anyone who will tell you that being black doesn’t have negative psychological effects is a liar. You can’t live in a country where it used to be okay for someone to own you and there are still people who hate you because of your skin color and not feel bad about yourself in some part. It’s not possible. That’s just the mental suffering. That’s not taking into account that the social and economic situation that Precious lives in is entirely dependent on the fact that she’s black. Again, anyone who will tell you that most black people aren’t at a social and economic disadvantage is also a liar.

One of the comments I read said something along the lines of “It’s dumb that an upper class black person thinks they have more in common with a poor, abused white girl than a poor, abused white person would.” Which, if that was the point, would kind of be dumb. But I don’t think anyone is arguing that being poor and white is better than being rich and black. Just that white people can certainly know about and relate to being abused, if they’ve been abused, and know about and relate to being poor, if they’ve been poor, but they can’t ever know about and relate to being black. And trying to take the blackness out of the equation is just a way to get around that.

Another really dumb comment was “The whole point of the movie was about being unhappy with yourself and hating yourself, so, since I’m a fat white lady, I have just as much right to relate to Precious as a skinny black person.” Um, no. You can stop being fat. Any time. How can anybody ever stop being black? Sure, people are mean to fat people and a lot of fat people have low self-esteem. But being fat is a solvable problem. Being black shouldn’t even be regarded as a problem, but since it is, what can you do about it? Nothing. You’re stuck in the skin you’re in, and there’s no way to keep people from hating you for it.

When I was little, and I went to school in the ghetto, the black kids were mean to me. They called me a honkie, they broke my lunchbox, etc, etc. But I never felt inferior or bad about myself, because in the rest of the world, once I got back to my neighborhood, my home, being white was good. Sure, they didn’t like me, but it didn’t matter if they liked me or not, because they were just black people, anyway. Nobody cared what they thought. So, while I’ve been picked on because of my skin color, I still have no idea what it’s like to be black, because society never taught me that my skin color was bad. I don’t get pulled over by police for going two miles over the speed limit. I don’t get followed around in stores. I’ve been there with Rasool when those things have happened to him, though.

The theory that human suffering is universal assumes that all humans are equal. That’s not true, so the theory doesn’t work. I’ve been beaten, I’ve been poor, but I haven’t been black, so I’m not Precious. My mother was raped and beaten by her father, but she wasn’t black, so she’s not Precious, either. In fact, she once told me that she and her sisters were not allowed to talk to black people. Because even that evil bastard thought he was better than someone who was black.