recent sensory input June 17, 2010

1. Today on “Fresh Air,” this entomologist who just wrote a book about ants was the interviewee, and he was such an awesome guest–he was perfectly deadpan and matter-of-fact and was able to evoke such intense visual images I got the physical creeps at one point, when he was describing the way marauder ants will come pouring down a trail in the jungle and catch up to and literally engulf a FROG. Ants will also pull all the moving parts off a thing, like a caterpillar or cricket, and carry the torso back to their compound and let it lie around there still alive a few days, trying to flail its amputated parts. The (non-Terry Gross) interviewer made a creeped-out noise that was definitely not feigned and this added somehow perfectly to the creepiness. It was much more nerve-wrenching to hear and be forced to imagine this myself than if this had been a television documentary and there had been footage to watch. I wonder if this is why I subconsciously avoided NPR for so many years–too much stimulation.

2. I somehow let myself watch free-range television last night for two hours: a new VH-1 reality series called You’re Cut Off! in which the premise is that a bunch of improbably wealthy women have their financial support “cut off!” by the people who have been facilitating the women’s fascinatingly dysfunctional means of coping with what must be really unpleasant inner lives. I’m not being sarcastic here–if you had filmed all of these interviews and then presented them without background music, and with some old narrator doing tinny voiceovers sounding like Alex Trebek at the bottom of a well, as part of like an old 16-millimeter psychology teaching film called “Recognizing Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” they wouldn’t be out of place and would be entirely un-lowbrow in intent and effect. There were plenty of elements of the women’s responses to new surprising indignities that were so clearly unstaged–none of these women would be capable of doing such subtle acting as to make some of these responses “look real” like this on cue. To the extent some of the women were clearly trying to play to the camera, they were doing so ways so pathological as to exemplify how disturbed they really were. You listen to the dialogue clinically, i.e. just the women’s dialogue, not anything by the voiceover guy, and having it in your head just to objectively listen rather than to get sucked into the narrative villainization of the women, and the degree to which the women are in vivid compensatory denial of reality is almost as creepy as the ant guy. A couple of their dads appear in the occasionally devastating family videos at the beginning of the show in which the “princesses” (the show’s, and some of the women’s, word, not mine) get “cut off,” and you can get a glimpse of the Faulknerian family dynamics–many of those reading this will remember W&L undergraduate boys who back in the late ’80s were already going to grow up to be these dads–like the plastic surgeon who prescribes Botox injections for his own 21-ish-year-old daughter, which daughter readily admits that she doesn’t think her father would still love her if she didn’t look like she does, which is kind of like a replicant, not in a good Sean Young-y way.

3. I saw a woman’s handwriting today that looked so much like my mom’s that it almost made me cry, but in a good way. The capital “T”s are a particular shape that makes me think of a swan boat. My mom was one of those women who always would get asked by women who were getting married to address their wedding invitations, back in the day when it would have been unthinkable to hire a professional calligrapher, and to address envelopes by any mechanical means would be the ingrained-social-taboo equivalent of nonchalantly spitting one’s chewed food into the middle of one’s dinner plate mid-sentence. It was an honor to be asked to be one of the invitation-addressers, like how in the South it’s an honor for the bride’s second-tier friends to be asked to be punch- and cake-servers at the reception, when you know you’re not in the first tier of relatives and friends who comprise the bridesmaids, which, I know, if you didn’t grow up in the Deep South, just sounds like crazy redneck talk.

4. If your workplace has a high school or college kid working there for the summer, and you’ve observed that the kid is doing a remarkably good job, why don’t you go find that kid and tell him or her that? Let’s just think of this as Encouraging Good Work Habits Day, or, okay, something less Maoist-sounding might be appropriate.

Things I never want in my garden June 15, 2010

1. Flowers that landscapers use for Exciting Seasonal Color, like celosia and petunias and dusty miller and most wretched of all, ornamental kale, which always makes me wish I had a 7-iron with me.

2. Eggplant. How can something that looks so pretty be so revolting? I tried here to think of a celebrity to which I could equate it, but revoltingness is so anathema to prettiness in humans.

3. Cilantro. I don’t like eating it and I’m not growing it. Ditto cumin, which I’ve always felt had kind of a dirty-gym-clothes aroma.

4. Pumpkins. What would I possibly do with more than one pumpkin a year? For that matter–what would I possibly do with ANY pumpkins, given that I’m too scared of klutzily filleting myself to carve a Jack-o’-lantern?

5. Ornamental gourds. Right up there with crocheted Thanksgiving-turkey throw pillows and dish towels depicting Santa Claus in long red underwear in terms of seasonal decorative objects having no intersection whatsoever with any stylistic theme in my house.

Durian May 31, 2010

So I engaged in one of my favorite federal-holiday activities today, which is going to the Asian grocery and buying a bunch of intriguing junk food. (Of course I could go to the Asian grocery any day, but for some reason I generally end up doing this only on Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day.) One of my acquisitions was a package of durian-flavored wafer cookies. Durian is, of course, the famously awful-smelling Southeast Asian fruit that, like, airlines won’t let you bring on board planes because the smell is so nauseous, but which is nonetheless beloved by Southeast Asian people the way people of many cultures love their own repellent foods, like Scots and haggis, or Louisianans and crawfish. I thought artificially-flavored cookies might be a relatively safe way to find out what all the fuss is about.

If these cookies are to be believed, durian tastes like my parents’ garage smelled after my dad used it to whip up a couple of gallons of insecticide. I had to wrap the opened package in a plastic bag and take it out to the garbage can, and then light a bunch of candles, to get the stink out of my house. I don’t even want to think about the potential lethality of a real, true-to-life, non-artificial durian, but I’m sure it’s potentially a felony in many states to force fraternity pledges to eat one.

Now, off to taste my appealingly-packaged “basil seed beverage”….

Five points for Friday May 28, 2010

1. I had a Marcel Proust moment tonight at dinner with the G.s. We were at an Italian restaurant that made its own gelato, and so for dessert I had a sundae that came topped with a perfectly thin, crispy Italian wafer, and it was just like the wafers that came with sundaes at Swensen’s where my dad and I went faithfully every Sunday afternoon for most of my adolescence. If I were writing this two years ago I would be launching here into some rhapsodic about all the people I knew in high school who worked there and how I wish I knew what became of them, but now I’m friends with pretty much all those people on Facebook and there is no mystery left.

2. My cat Lily’s life prior to living with me was notable for slipping out of her old family’s house one day when nobody thought she was even old enough to safely be neutered and giving birth to three kittens two months later. Tonight I learned that the three kittens–who are now almost a year old–are all boys, named Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. I want there to be a Disney movie, like maybe a contemporary retelling of “The Aristocats,” about a mama cat named Lily and her kittens Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. (Note: “The Aristocats” is pretty much the only Disney movie I can stand, except maybe the “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” sequences from “The Little Mermaid.”)

3. I watched “30 Rock” last night for maybe the third time ever and it was funnier than either of the other two episodes I’d watched. But now I’m foreseeing that the second time in my life is approaching for shame-facedly asking my hairdresser to cut my hair like that of a character in an NBC Thursday-night situation comedy. That third-
season-of-“Friends” Jennifer Aniston haircut was actually weirdly perfect for my facial shape!

4. Gary Coleman died. Allegedly he was 42, but I thought he was 42 in, like, 1991.

5. I wish I liked film festivals. They’re just too crowded to be enjoyable–I like seeing movies on Wednesday nights at 9:40 when I can have an entire row in the theater to myself and spread out, and having to hold my purse in my lap the whole time almost ruins the movie altogether. It’s not a prima-donna thing so much as it’s an ADD/OCD thing–having something in my lap for the duration of a movie is like having to go to the bathroom for the duration of a movie in terms of skull-pounding distraction.