Zen and the Art of Rocking

Not too long ago, I was driving back from Kentucky having just spent six days away from home. I had been in Kentucky watching my dad die, watching my family watch my dad die, and trying not to lose my proverbial shit. Diah’s death got me slightly more accustomed to public crying, but it’s still not on my list of things I’d write as a turn-on on match.com. Incidentally, I also wouldn’t list match.com as a turn-on. That profile was a mistake made in youth that will never be repeated. Where were we?

Ah, yes. In the car, driving back to Nashville. Drained, numbed, tired, and probably unable to breathe through one side of my nose (Kentucky = allergies), I hit Bluegrass Parkway and gave myself permission to loosen up the tight coils that had formed in my spine. As the opening drums of “I Don’t Care” hit me in the face, everything relaxed. I had permission to lose my shit in the privacy of my own car.

Last weekend, I found myself driving to Kentucky again. A panic attack came out of nowhere, seeping up my chest, speeding up my heart, and making my palms start to sweat. As it so often goes when I travel, I wanted to be home. Right then.

A girl doesn’t survive with panic on Paxil alone. I have grown, in part, smarter than my brain. I know its games, and I know how to stop them. Its name is Klaus. It is my iPod.

A PBS special called The Musical Mind helped explain it: when you listen to music that you enjoy, your brain impulses light up, turning your skull into Studio 54. Your brain says “yes” and, in so doing, forgets all about whatever nastiness it was conjuring. It’s like seeing a toddler walk toward an electrical socket and distracting said toddler with a toy. (Unless the toddler is screaming, in which case I suggest letting the kid fry.)

For what it’s worth, clicking the iPod to a song I really, really like helps talk me down from a panic attack. It might help you. May I suggest Fall Out Boy’s “I Don’t Care”?

That Which is Not Understood: RoboKelly.

Everybody with ears knows that Kelly Clarkson can sing, whether or not everybody agrees with the message that lies beneath the glossy surface of American Idol. The message: we can make these nobodies into somebodies, provided those nobodies conform to traditional standards of “good singing.” Clarkson adheres to those standards, even if she has recently not adhered to the Los Angeles standard of anorexic beauty. Clarkson has regained her realistic Texan body, but it has come with a bizarre side-effect.

Kelly Clarkson has become a robot.

I understand that the way people make records has changed. Everything is over-processed, auto-tuned and, once unleashed on radio, compressed into submission. What I don’t understand is why someone somewhere thought that Kelly Clarkson needed her voice to be processed beyond all recognition. On “I Do Not Hook Up,” she’s someone else. She’s Miley Cyrus. It is unsettling and unbecoming, as the world barely even needed the first draft of Miley, much less a clone. Kelly Clarkson is not a pop princess. When The Machine tried to turn her into a pre-fab Pseudo Britney, she fired The Machine. Why, then, is she now doing such a realistic impression of a product of The Machine?

My music business degree is now hopelessly obsolete, as I graduated years before MySpace. One thing that still applies is this: when real talent steps into a studio, it’s a bad idea to put effort toward making it look like fake talent. The Jurassic Park rule:

Just because you CAN do it, doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD.

Do YOU have a vagina dress?

Cat Deeley does.

(e)tv: Burlyesque!

(click here if you can’t see the embed)

You’re Soaking In It

“The only reason you are alive
Is that someone has decided to let you live.”
-KMFDM

Whenever death hits the American public, the American public responds as the American public expects itself to respond. The American public was shocked and horrified by September 11. The American public was stunned by the loss of Princess Diana. Though I didn’t witness them, the American public was probably shocked and stunned by the deaths of Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, and Elvis. Today, the death of Michael Jackson has taken over, making the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon sad footnotes. It’s a bit like Heathers. In life, MJ was Crazy Uncle Jacko who sat in the corner at family reunions and mumbled about Vietnam. In death, he is 20-something and moonwalking at the celebration for the 25th anniversary of Motown. We’ll be stunned for a minute, buy a commemorative copy of the New York Times, and then go back to thinking about what we’re doing this weekend.

I don’t know why the American public is so easy to stun and shock.

Terrorists had been trying to bomb the World Trade Center for years. Princess Diana was hounded constantly. MLK and JFK had no small portion of enemies, and Elvis was taking all of the pills in Memphis. The only times TMZ ever got a shot of Michael Jackson were when he was scuttling out of a doctor’s office. Nothing screams “death’s door” quite like having medical dust masks to match every outfit.

Humans are so easy to kill; all you have to do is cut off the air, get the heart to stop, or damage the brain badly enough to do one of the two. Anurisms, stray bullets, car wrecks, heart attacks and blood clots are everywhere. If you eat three times a day, you have roughly 600-800 opportunities to choke each day.

Today, toddlers all over the world are going to notice their parents’ behavior and want to know why people have to die. People die because we’d have a hell of a population problem if they didn’t. People die so that those who are left alive won’t squander their time. Somewhere, Little Timmy is realizing that he can be snuffed out at every turn. Somewhere Timmy knows death is always two steps behind him. Somewhere, Little Timmy is deciding to stop wasting time.

Tough, Cranky, Bitchy Love

Ladies and gentlemen, I have spent the last two days on Vh1.com, watching season 1 of Tough Love. Why? Morbid curiosity, masochism, and a deep and abiding love for trashy reality tv shows. I have been indicted for loving reality tv ever since season 1 of The Real World. I am an habitual voyeur, at best being a student of the human condition, at worst being someone who just really loves to watch skanks rip out each other’s hair extensions. I also watch PBS and read a lot. I tell myself that they cancel each other out.

I didn’t immediately seek out episodes of Tough Love because it just didn’t seem to hold a candle to, say, an ex-stripper sliding down a pole to hit the floor in a Chinese split (seen on For The Love of Ray J). There was also some little part of me that knew watching Tough Love would piss me off. It’s a similar feeling to when one has to place a service call to Comcast or, God help you, Dell.

The premise of Tough Love is that a group of women who are attractive but seem unable to find fulfilling relationships move into a house for a sort of dating boot camp with a matchmaker who bears a striking resemblance to Fred Savage. He tells things as they are, often with the help of a panel of straight-talking men, his mother and, in one case, electro shock devices. Anyone with half a brain will have these women pegged and categorized ten minutes into the first show: there’s the career woman, the tough gym rat, the gold digger, and the stripper. To make our lives easy, the stripper even admits to having daddy issues which lead her to constantly seek male validation. Please to enjoy some choice male quotes.

Episode 1: “You’re Smiling And Approachable!”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s something to the great dating theory that smiling makes people more attractive and confidence is sexy. I just don’t subscribe to the dating show theory that women should do everything in their power to appear to be giant balls of fluffy, non-challenging cotton candy just because someone in the room happens to have testicles. In fact, my logic tells me that someone who actually HAS testicles would like someone who doesn’t feel the need to behave like a benign pageant contestant. I should alsopoint out that I am single and have a cat, thus I am clearly defective, unlovable, insane, and nothing I say should be taken seriously, according to Public Domain Fred Savage.

Episode 2: “I don’t ask girls what their dreams are unless I’m really interested.”
I’ll give you a clue, Scooby. Our dreams are to be referred to as women, not girls. Not even Public Domain Fred Savage got the memo on this one. He repeatedly refers to the women on the show as “the girls.” I’m not a feminazi; I would have accepted “the ladies,” but “the girls”? Sorry, P.D. Fred Savage, I must question how well you know women.

Episode 3: “Her breasts are too big to be sexy.”
Allow me to translate: “I say things like this so women will think I’m highly-evolved and will have sex with me.”

Episode 3: “A man isn’t capable of being truly compassionate until he has a child.”
No word on who the hell is being stupid enough to have a child with someone who hasn’t yet displayed compassion, but I know it happens. I’ve seen Maury.

Episode 4: “She wasn’t difficult…she was easy.”
Oh, well. Thank GOD Taylor finally realized that she has to be blindly non-challenging. God forbid she disagree with anything her date says or present herself as anything but a warm, maternal dick cozy. “Really? I ALSO don’t think the Holocaust happened! We have SO MUCH in common!”

Episode 5: “You’re going to get raped.”
I feel for Arian. She’s had a rough time with guys and it sounds like she was named by white supremacists. Thus, when Public Domain Fred Savage tells her that he fears that she will get raped by acting slutty, I understand her outrage. Did she overreact by knocking over some lights? Maybe. Should a man who is a professional matchmaker know better than to use the dreaded “r word?” Yes. No matter how you phrase the sentiment “I fear that you will get raped,” it sounds a lot like “if you got raped, you’d probably have deserved it.” Say “I fear that, by acting this way, men may think you’re a good person to try and take advantage of” if you must. See? I am the least diplomatic person on Earth and I just rephrased that for you. I will be eagerly awaiting a thank you card from your non-kicked scrotum.

Episode 6: “Cute or Crazy.”
Public Domain Fred Savage puts the ladies on a mock game show, where an audience of men votes on whether the ladies’ quirks are cute or crazy. I’m not saying that owning five different tiaras shouldn’t set off the proverbial lights and sirens. I’m just saying “judge not, lest you be judged.” As the audience of men held up their paddles reading “cute” or “crazy,” I watched, picturing various men burying neighbors in the crawl space, keeping condoms in the fridge, or having a giant tub of Crisco under the bathroom sink.

Episode 7: “The world is not your stripper pole.”
Remember when PDFS said that thing about Arian winding up getting raped? Well, it’s come-uppance time, baby. PDFS has invited Arian’s mom to town, hoping that Mom will talk some sense into her daughter. He has, unfortunately, forgotten this he’s just invited the woman who named her daughter a homphone of “Aryan.” Mom shares Arian’s sense of humor, and thinks it’s hilarious when Arian “talks about fellatio.” She thinks it’s even funnier when PDFS says “fellatio.” PDFS responds to this by kicking Arian off the show. The “girls” respond to this by letting PDFS know that they don’t particularly care for him. PDFS, in turn, gets his mom to defend him. It’s like somebody put white bread and ego in a blender and decided to make a Los Angeles smoothie. Is “Los Angeles Smoothie” redundant?

Eventually, we are led to a season finale full of happy-jolly endings where even the ladies who didn’t get matched with a suitable guy say “but I just learned so much!” The post-finale follow-ups reveal that most of the women who left Tough Love with promising relationships wound up back home with relationships not quite working out. Oh well, ladies. You didn’t get married and push a human through your sex organs, but you DID give birth to some damn fine television.

“Would JOHNNY DEPP fight for his woman?”

For those of you who haven’t been classy enough to be watching Daisy of Love, I’ll give you a brief set-up:

There was a guy on there who was under the impression that he…
1. is God’s gift to women
2. looks like Johnny Depp
3. has a coherent thought in his head

The words in the subject line were uttered by the delusional “Fox” during a challenge when Daisy asked the guys to spar for her favor. That’s reason #83,829 why I will never live in L.A. Only in L.A. would someone DARE to compare himself to Johnny Depp. I’m not going to say there’s not a casual resemblance (fostered by the delusional subject’s tendency to emulate Monsieur Depp’s hair and fashion), but…well, well I look at Daisy of Love’s “Fox,” I see “La Bamba-era Esai Morales.” Allow me to demonstrate:

Sidebar:
Have you SEEN Esai Morales recently? There must have been something in the water on the set of La Bamba because both Morales and Lou Diamond Phillips have held up remarkably well. Kudos to you-dos.

The Map, The Plan, The Wrong Turn.

OK, fine. I admit it. I’m having a shitty day, I’m in a bad mood. At some point, you have to stop fighting it and just go with it. Thing is, I don’t have the option of losing my shit today. I don’t have the option of lying in bed eating Little Debbies and drinking vodka. No. For I have work to redo.

This morning, I went to Midas to be told that I need new brakes, which I knew, but (because I stalled for so long on getting the new brakes), I also needed new rotors. The bill came out at $315 dollars. I’m told that this was a good price, but that knowledge doesn’t make it not 315 bucks that I don’t have.

When my boss cut my hours, she said she’d hoped it would only be for 3 months. 3 months ends July 1 and I haven’t gotten an update on the work situation. So far, by avoiding spending money on anything I didn’t really need, I have managed to not have to break into my savings account. That ended today, and I now owe myself a thousand dollars. I am slowly sinking into quicksand, and all I can do is keeping trying to hustle and score freelance work. It is endless and tiring and, even when it works, I barely break even. I went to college. Twice. I have spent 30 years trying to be better, faster, and stronger than everybody else, and it’s gotten me HERE. Driving a car that sometimes requires me to have a hammer on hand, and never knowing when the next big blow is coming. One day, something’s going to break and it’ll just have to stay broken.

I considered telling Jen that we couldn’t have dinner each week anymore because it’s something that I’d rather not spend money on right now, but Jen’s leaving soon. In the grand scheme of things, I’d rather have time spent with her than save 60 bucks a month.

I am running out of drugs and beginning to suspect that my shrink did not, in fact, fax in the scrips like he said he would. He probably asked his useless, rude secretary to do it. I don’t know how someone with a medical degree could possibly be the last person on Earth to know that his secretary doesn’t do a single, god-damned thing she is required to do, but there it is. I stopped expecting her to be anything other than rude and useless years ago. So, here I am. Running out of drugs, and preparing to send him an email involving the phrase, “do you seriously think I don’t have enough to be stressed about right now?”

So, I’m here redoing some work that I can’t even charge for because I stupidly assumed that the information my friend gave me was correct. Wrong. Now, I get to redo 4 hours of work and I can’t even bill for it. Even though I’m under-billing this client in an almost major way, he’s probably still going to be pissed when he gets his invoice because he’s on a budget. I have been as fast as I can without cranking out shitty work, but sometimes it’s about fast and not about good.

Katy once asked me how I get up and work on a day when I really just sort of want to lay in bed. “You walk into the kitchen, look at the stack of bills, and then you fucking suck it up.” I had thought that coming to Panera to work would keep me from lying in bed and crying today. I was half right.

Shrink-wrapped

My shrink thinks I’m crazier than I am.

Ever since my last shrink had his nervous breakdown (not my fault, honest) and disappeared, and I had to find a new drug dealer, I have known this. One of the first things he did was give me a day (A DAY) of psychological testing. I went along for the ride, since I had really good insurance at the time and wouldn’t have to pay for any of it. Besides, there’s always that morbid curiosity, odd amusement, and the feeling that I might get a good blog out of it. Like, what WOULD they find? Hell, maybe I was crackers and just didn’t know it. Besides, the test didn’t involve any needles. What the hell. I had a personal day saved up.

The result of that day of scantron sheets, “tell us the story in the picture,” and ink blots (psychiatry doesn’t realize that it’s a caricature of itself) was a 10-page print-out. I have a copy of it in my house somewhere. I wish I knew where it was, as it’s one of the few things on the “I would die if someone found this” list. In fact, it may be the only thing. Oh, wait. I also have some N’Sync in my iPod. Don’t judge me. I only kept that print out because, how often do real, licensed doctors sit down and give you a print out about your psyche? The last time I had that done was at a psychic fair in high school. I gave them two bucks, and I got 5 pages profiling me as a textbook Scorpio. I also got some purple incense and a mood ring.

I don’t think psychiatry is a bunch of hoodoo, but I also don’t think I have mild schizophrenia. Either that, or I’m so crazy that I don’t even KNOW I’m crazy, which I doubt is the case since I have to interact with my craziness at least once a day when I take my meds. I just don’t think that schizophrenia is one of my “issues,” as they say.

What WILL I cop to? I’m high-strung. I’m anal. I have bone jarring, earth-stopping, formerly-crippling panic attacks. I even panicked myself into puking once. In my defense, McDonald’s pancakes were involved. Art school made me depressed. Art school makes EVERYBODY depressed. If you leave art school with an addiction to nothing but Remeron, you’ve actually done a really good job. If you leave art school without ever thinking about offing yourself, you don’t care enough about your work and you’re doomed to be eternally mediocre.

How does my shrink explain my response to his testing? I also have some mental illness that makes me want to dismiss the results of his testing. In other words, by disagreeing with him, it only proves that I’m mental. It’s like someone getting angry when you tell them they have anger issues. I let him talk as he walked me through my test results, gave as little sarcasm as possible, and then totally mocked his tests for years. It’s what I do. It’s my last name, phonetically-speaking.

What’s my point? That man has spent the last 5 years telling me almost exactly the same thing every time I see him, but last week he broke out a new record (which I’m sure will be repeated at me for the next 5 years). He thinks I’m selling myself short doing graphic design. He thinks I should be an I.T. person. More and more, I agree. Graphic design is a profession where you can hustle your whole life and work your ass off constantly and still be eternally broke. It’s fine if that’s all you ever want to do, but you can’t learn every part of every piece of software and still have a boyfriend or even a well-maintained lawn. The more I deal with the lawn, the more I wish I could pacify it with a blow job. Besides, I’m arrogant and I hate people. If that doesn’t scream “you should be an I.T. person,” I don’t know what does.

My drug dealer has finally given up on trying to get me to meet more upwardly-mobile men…
“Dude, have you SEEN me? Have you MET my potty mouth? Braxton does NOT want to take me to meet his polo ponies.”

So he’s focusing on my career (by the way, “focusing on one’s career” is also one of my “issues,” according to his tests) rather than my social life. He, like so many adults who did so much hand-wringing when I pissed away my SAT scores by majoring in Sound Engineering and then Graphic Design, has gone into the “you’re selling yourself short” speech. It’s fun to watch him go, I guess. Suggesting that I go back to school, which I would do if I weren’t already 30 grand in the hole. Suggesting that I go to book signings to meet men, like I’m hot to go on a series of awkward, boring first dates which inevitably end in some poor, literate fellow being completely emasculated. Or, worse, having some smart fellow make me feel stupid. Or, supremely worst, having a crappy date and then having to kick a guy’s ass at Scrabble just to make a point.

He means well, but there are a long list of things I don’t mention to my shrink because he’d make something of them. Stand up comedy aspirations, book deal aspirations, false-start relationships, new-found love for vodka, how I’d design promo materials for porn movies if they wrote big enough checks…

OK, I mentioned that last one. I am a pragmatic lass with the subtlety of a frying pan to the cranium.
That’s an “issue” too.

Act Like A Lady, etc etc.

Ladies, Steve Harvey has come to bum you out. Yes, THAT Steve Harvey. The comedian. He’s written a book, and he’s telling it like it is when it comes to guys. I hear that it’s even better than “He’s Just Not That Into You,” but I didn’t read that. I also didn’t read The Rules. Until the day I write my book (containing a chapter called “My House, My Expensive Cockblock”), Harvey’s book will have to suffice. Besides, he has penis street cred.

Guys, take notice. Harvey’s book made it to the New York Times bestseller list, the book was plugged at length on Oprah, and the word of mouth (and blog) behind this thing is epic. You might want to read it. Women will start holding you up to the standard Harvey sets, and it would serve you well to at least know what that standard is. It’s a quick read and will serve you better than Max Brooks’s guide on how to survive a zombie attack (though that’s a good book, too).

It isn’t that hard, and nothing in Harvey’s book should be Earth-shattering. He’s just telling the ladies how it is, no sugar-coating, no psycho-babble. He’s breaking it down in a way that is helpful, but also kind of depressing. We ladies already know the male game. We just don’t want to HEAR about it. We like to pretend it’s not there, like we’re dating the one guy who doesn’t fit into the rules. We enjoy our delusions.

Harvey isn’t out to betray every guy on Earth. Mostly, he’s trying to say to the women, “hey…quit putting up with this, quit bitching about it when it happens to you, and quit writing my radio show with the same questions over and over.”

I believe a favorite for me was the 5 things every woman should ask a man “before she gets in too deep:”

1. What are your short-term goals?
2. What are your long-term goals?
3. What are your views on relationships?
4. What do you think of me?
5. How do you feel about me?

He’s rephrasing Amy’s Rule #2: Don’t Date a Guy Who Doesn’t Know What He Wants. The idea being that, if a guy can’t decide what he wants, he can never be particularly sure whether he wants YOU and, equally importantly, whether he sees you fitting into his future. Harvey even predicts the waffling, ducking and dodging a man will do when asked #5. People of both genders, go forth and read.