Don’t Go Around Breakin’ Young Girls’ Hearts

It would seem that I’m a little late to the party, but it’s just taken me most of the weekend to get my thoughts together. It’s hard to write when you’re spontaneously bursting into tears.

Like most youngsters who were born between, say, 1975 and 1995, there were four years of my life where Michael Jackson was the single most important person to me. I worshipped him; I listened to my tapes (Bad, Dangerous, HIStory) and my dad’s records (Off The Wall, Thriller) all day long, never making time for anyone or anything else, I kept MTV on as much as possible so I wouldn’t miss a video, I practiced his dance moves with my sister.I wanted to marry him, and I wanted to be him. And while, in subsequent years, my passion waned, my tapes got relaced by metal CDs, and the attractive 20-something I’d initially fallen in love with moved further and further away from my present, he was always there in the back of my mind and in the muscles of my hips, which were always ready to weave and shimy whenever any of his songs came on the radio, the party mix, or the dj’s turntable.

I was born in 1984, the year of Thriller; I have never known a world without Michael Jackson. In some ways I never thought I would. I could see him, 90 years old, receiving another lifetime achievement award, and pulling himself out of his wheelchair (hoverchair?) to moonwalk for us again. I have never gotten to see him live, but I always thought there would be time for that. I never thought he would leave us, and now he’s gone.

These random crying jags of the last three days are stupid — I didn’t know the man, he wasn’t a friend or anything like that — but they can’t be helped. It wasn’t just Michael Jackson that died on Thursday afternoon, it was a large and sparkling part of my youth, a time so vivid and alive and innocent, when all that mattered was music and dance and life was no more complicated than that. When he died, that died with him… and I’ll never ever get it back.

But we’re lucky, because he left us a body of work so large it justifies two channels playing it on loops 24 hours a day for a whole weekend. And, in the end, he’ll never quite leave us because we’ll always have those amazing music videos, the living testaments to his incredible, unmatchable talent. We are all so lucky that he decided to share his entire life with us, to dedicate himself to our entertainment and our pleasure. I will miss him so very, very much.

I’m gonna end this post with how I want to remember Michael, the video I consider to be his badass-est of a giant catalogue of badass videos:

We’re Gonna Have To Take The Boy

Committed to seeing a movie with The Boy. That’s all well and good, but all I really want to do is curl up with Lost Seasons 1 – 5.

We have to go back, you know.

On Benadryl and Maker’s Mark (And Some Other Things)

On Benadryl and Maker’s Mark

Mixing them? Don’t do it.

I have a pounding headache and I’m drowsy and before anyone asks, this was not for recreational purposes. My eyes itched last night. I have spring allergies (bad ones). So I had to take it. It just happened that I was drinking Maker’s Mark at the time.

The results are bad.

I will avoid this in the future.

On Maker’s Mark and Jell-O

Jell-O is the best whiskey chaser ever, especially when you don’t have a mixer but desperately wish you did.

I also made another discovery. On Tuesday/Wednesday morning, I attempted to pull the stapler-in-Jell-O prank from Season 1 of The Office. You know, when Jim encases Dwight’s stapler in Jell-O and leaves it on his desk? My version of the prank failed (the Jell-O didn’t set right, the mold fell apart, wah-waaah), but in doing so, I discovered something important and amazing.

To make the mold, I needed twice as much Jell-O as one packet provided. The most important thing, for me, was matching color. So I, out of necessity and perhaps lack of foresight, mixed together one pack of strawberry and one pack of cherry.

The resulting Jell-O was uniform in color and tasted EXACTLY like RED. Neither the strawberry nor the cherry overpowered each other, and the combination had NO flavor found in nature.

AMAZING.

RED.

On Awesomeness and Lost

Dudes, how awesome is Lost this year? If you said anything other that SUPER-AWESOME, you’re wrong.

I’m going to go be nerdy and read about it.

OW, my head…

I Remember You, Doug Ross

Well, then. I told you I had writer’s block, didn’t I? I’m going to try a new method here on this blog, not that anyone really reads it, so be patient with me. And if you like it, please say so. It’s always nice to be told you’re on the right track.

Tonight is the first time in… oh, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe longer, that I’ve watched a new episode of ER. Lots of re-runs, but in the best years I was too young and by the time I was old enough to be watching it on the nights it aired, everyone I really cared about was gone and as cute and awesome as Noah Wylie is, Carter was kind of a whiny bitch. What? It’s true, and you know it.

But there was a heyday, wasn’t there? There was a time when I wasn’t ashamed to watch ER, and there was a time far more recently that I reveled in the pure golden drama that was the first five seasons of ER. The endless steadi-cam shots, the medical jargon that rolled of seeminlgy super-human tongues, the pounding tension that a medical drama, when written, acted, and shot correctly, doesn’t even have to try for because, really, what is more terrifying for all of us than to watch someone die.. and imagine ourselves in their place?

The casting, in this case, was the key, I think. Anthony Edwards (Dr. Greene) looked just like my pediatrician. It was uncanny, up to my doctor’s nasal endowments (something Edwards, sadly, lacks), how much they looked and sounded the same. Eriq LaSalle, the cold, gruff, over-achieving surgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold-but-don’t-tell-anyone-or-he’ll-cut-you Dr. Peter Benton, and his amazing storyline about having a deaf son. Anyone who’s watched ER at all will tell you, of course, that half the fun of watching Dr. Benton was watching him lose his mind over Dr. Carter, brilliantly played by Noah Wylie as equal parts loving wealthy buffoon and whip-smart underestimated doctor. There was Julianna Margulies who, now that I think about it, seemed to fall off the face of the earth after her stint playing Carol Hathaway, your archetypical nurse to great acclaim. And, of course, there was her former-ex, one time-paramour, current husband/father of her kids, Doug Ross.

Yup. That Doug Ross. If you’re really old school, you’ll remember this Doug Ross:

Oh, Clooney. Or should I say Doug? I remember you. I remember staring at you saving a child’s life in an overflowing river during the hardest downpour Chicago had ever seen, while wearing a tux. (We should note, here, that ER figured out putting Clooney in a tux was a GREAT idea, like, 10 years before anyone thought of remaking Ocean’s 11.) I remember a lot of things, but I’m really distracted right now because you’re on TV again.

It’s so surreal to be watching Dr. Benton watching Dr. Carter get a kidney transplant, especially since said kidney was acquired from a hospital in Seattle, Washington, and specifically from a now-head-of-transplant-services Hathaway and Dr. Ross. Actually, it’s a little bit like watching an episode of a show that was once great and which you once loved while, every ten minutes, someone throws a glass of ice water in your face (which is really a fancy metaphor for watching the current cast follow their current plotlines — it’s distracting and annoying and I wish it would stop).

[Ok, this is a total aside -- directly the fault of one of those glasses of icewater, by the way -- but don't you usually have to keep organ transplant recipients in sterile rooms because they have to take hardcore immunosuppressants in order to keep the recipient from rejecting the organ? Now, see what you did there ER? You spent 6 seasons keeping me hopelessly addicted to you, which then led to a lifelong love of well-write, sometimes snarky medical shows, so now I know things like how seeing a fresh-out-of-surgery transplant recipient recovering in a normal recovery room with other people sharing their space is utterly ridiculous. I'm hereby naming this the ER Paradox, in which a good television show ruins itself by being a good television show for a while before it eventually -- after staying for too long -- gets lazy with its writing and makes mistakes disproved by itself several seasons earlier.]

[OHMYGOD DOUG ROSS IS IN BED AND SHIRTLESS AND I MIGHT AS WELL BE 14 AGAIN FOR ALL I'M WORTH.]

[And, yes, any ER episode ending with Doug Ross being hot.]

[I have totally lost control of this post because of George Clooney and the surrealness that was the first episode of ER I have watched, new, in 10 years. I think I might break out the DVDs.]

Another Year, Another Abortion Protest

Every year, an anniversary of Roe v. Wade happens. And every year, Pro-Lifers descend on DC to march against abortion.

Last year I wrote a long post about the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, its effect on the nation, and what I believe the law is really about — specifically, about the right for women to be the ones making choices about their bodies.

This year, a mere 48 hours after Obama took office, the march started anew. And many have noted the distinct difference in feel. No longer is there a Pro-Life president in the White House. No longer is there an ultra-conservative regime.

Yet our rights remain threatened. I do not understand the people who so actively fight for the illegality of abortion. Certainly, I understand the moral and human arguments. I understand how, as a human, you could be incredibly uncomfortable taking a life that is growing inside of you. I don’t claim to know where the point of conception is, and I’m not a doctor so I don’t care to speculate. But what I do know is that, as an adult and as a woman, I am more than capable of knowing what is right for me, and under the law I should have the same rights as any man in this country — that is, the right to be the only mind in control of my body. The argument against abortion contains, inherently, the implication that women are not worthy of having complete control of their physical person, like a man is. It contains, implicitly, the notion that we are inferior, that the government must think on our behalf. That it must tell us what to do when we become pregnant. And that is wrong. Just as the decision to remove a tumor is up to the patient in which it is growing, the decision to end a pregnancy should always be up to the woman carrying the fetus.

I had a conversation with my close college friend’s father the night before the inauguration about abortion. It came at the end of a rather lovely dinner. My friend and her dad were arguing about who among them was more liberal than the other (she works for a Democratic congressman and was part of Joe Biden’s campaign; it was the most adorable argument I’ve ever seen), when she said she was to the left of him on abortion rights. As they are a, clearly, staunchly liberal pair, I inquired as to his beliefs. The answer he gave me surprised me: he said that he believes that men should have reproductive rights. It’s a loaded statement, because it could mean a number of things (some of which I can’t help but bristle at). He explained that he believes that men should have some kind of say, or some way to legally express their opinion, about whether their girlfriend/wife/partner should have an abortion because, assuming they do not stay together and she has the baby, he will be obligated to pay child support for that child. And he believes that men should be able to use whether or not they wanted the baby to mitigate said child support.

I can’t help but see his point. I don’t think men who, from the start, are aggressively (read: passionate, not violent) against the birth of a child they conceived should have to pay as much child support as men who had children willingly, but whose spousal/partner relationships didn’t work out. But I cautioned her father that giving men a real say in abortion is wrong and threatening; that this is a women’s rights issue. And he argued back that it was a medical technology issue — that one day, when technology is advanced enough, we’ll essentially have reverse abortion; women will be sterile until they choose the time at which they would like to have a child, at which point their normal fertility will be restored (think of it as a super-strengh IUD).

And, again, I cautioned him: that is not the answer, and that is not the issue. As I’ve said on this blog before, I do not know if I will ever be able to have an abortion. I know I do not want to be pregnant, and as a woman I take steps to avoid that situation: I take birth control pills, and I use condoms. But should it happen, I need to know that, as a human and as a woman, I have the right to have a safe and sterile medical procedure that will eliminate a pregnancy I do not want. I will not — I will not — raise a child I am not ready for or capable of taking care of, and it is my right as a woman and as an American to be the one in charge of that decision. The government should not have a say. Strangers and religious zealots should not have a say. It is not their body, it is my body. And it is, and should always be my choice.

I agree that we must work together to educate children about sex, protection, and pregnancy. With the right amount of education we could drastically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies each year. A reduction in conception is a reduction in abortion, always. But while we work to make sex safer and pregnancy more controllable, we must always protect the right of women to control their bodies. It’s my body, it’s my life, and it’s my choice.

The Midnight Disease

It’s taken me 13 days to write this post.

It seems like ages ago that words used to spill from my fingertips with little or no thought. There seemed to be endless stories built up in my head, and they would pop out at the strangest times, the oddest hours, and I would let them. I would sit up in bed with a notebook, or at my computer, and without any hesitation or self-reflection I would let those words do what they wanted to all over the place. Sometimes the stories that came out were complete drivel; sometimes I’d edit and revist in a couple days and beam with pride. But no matter whether they were good or bad, best thrown out or keepers, they were always there.

And then one day, they weren’t.

Before they left me, they put themselves into a 200+ page magnum opus of cultural theory, my undergraduate thesis, an intense study of four years, one country, and one band. Those words served me well, and when I was done and the accolades were mine to collect freely, they declared themselves on vacation and never came back.

This weekend promises change. This weekend I start a short story class. But I can’t help but feel that I’m blowing my money because my words left me, they left me long ago, and now I’m just a dried up shell of a writer with the desire to write and none of the tools. And how, exactly, is a class going to bring that back? And do I want to subject myself to the embarassment of trying? Do I want to hear how bad it’s become?

And that, my friends, is the root of the whole problem. It’s been 3 years since I had a real outlet for my thoughts, and with the atrophy of my practical writing skills has come the atrophy of my confidence. As soon as words go to paper I am sure they are bad. And reassurance doesn’t help. Of course, reassurance isn’t forthcoming because I’d rather play the fool, the idiot with no talent and no ambition, than show people what I really want to be. Because what if they hate it?

I don’t want anyone I know to think I’m a talentless hack. Worse, I suspect more and more that the less writing I do, the more talentless and hacky I become. This is a vicious cycle. A painful vicious cycle that saps all of your energy and shrinks your brain — I’m not kidding, I can feel it shriveling up in my skull.

All I want is some relief. I want to write something again. I want a two hour burst of extreme creativity and I want to finally, sweating, crying, pull away from the page and look over what I did and feel good about it.

I don’t know if I ever will again.

Happy New Year

Well. We made it.

It’s been a long, long year. But now it’s over. Now it’s a whole new year, with a whole nuew number that I will write incorrectly for at least a week, as I do every year. It will be surreal, and I will feel old, and nothing will change, and everything will change, and it’ll be a wild adventure because everything this year is going to be new, and oh yeah, we’re all poor.

So here are a few resolutions, not that anyone sticks to them anyway:

1. I will eat more lentils. They keep really well, and they’re cheap.
2. I will be more patient.
3. I will stop thinking I should have some sort of major career and totally settled, successful life, because I’m 24 and my panicking just makes everyone else I know hate me.
4. I will stop thinking I’m fat. I’m not fat.
5. I will read more.
6. I will stop watching The Hills. I kill enough braincells the old-fashioned (green) way.
7. I will return my Netflix movies after I watch them instead of letting them languish on my DVD player for three weeks while I berate myself for constantly forgetting things.
8. I will keep laughing at GOOP because it’s good to cut rich, spoiled people down to size, even only in my mind.
9. I will write. Every day, I will write.

That’s a good start, I think. And if I can keep even three of those, I’m well on my way to a brilliant year.

Happy new year, everyone. 2009. Wow. We made it.

A Quick Thought On Valkyrie

Tom Cruise is proud of Valkyrie*. He thinks it’s a noble story, about noble men who plotted and attempted to kill the most evil man in the history of evil men.

But I have a small question, one that didn’t occur to me until just now.

Why doesn’t anyone mention that Operation Valkyrie actually took place on July 20, 1944?

To hammer home why that’s important, Victory in Europe Day, the official end of WWII, was May 7, 1945. So these Nazis tried to kill Hitler… 10 months before the war ended. Or, to put it another way, they tried to kill Hitler something like 6 years after Hitler implemented the concentration camps and started invading other countries to destroy their Jews.

Were these men noble men? I’m sure that could be argued. I’m not exactly going to say they’re not. But I’ll put it this way: I’m decidedly unimpressed.

* – I have not seen Valkyrie, the movie. So I’m not passing judgment on it. Even though all the critics seem to hate it.

“I Will Continue To Write What I Write Until The Day That I Die.”

Harold Pinter died yesterday, Christmas Eve, at the age of 78. As a young woman interested in theater, writing and plays, I discovered new parts of my own writer self through the exploration of Pinter’s exceptional work. As a playwright he was sharp, witty, and insightful. As a man he was brash, confident, and unusual. He is a talent and a force that will be missed by the world. Luckily, we can all keep his plays on our shelves.

Hey There, It’s Been A While…

Hi. As you can (hopefully) see, this blog is going through somewhat of a facelift.

Some of the posts are gone. Others are getting convenient little “read more” tags put in them for convenient reading.

The header image has changed. The layout has changed.

I have changed.

I’m going to be putting a lot more work and focus back into this blog. It’s been months — MONTHS — since I’ve written on it. It’ll still have news and satire, but it’s going to have more me. More of my life. More of my writing. More of what it should have had from the beginning.

Thanks for bearing with me.

–Sara