Bothered

I'm reading Catcher in the Rye. (I'm about midway through.) And I think my gauge for what really has a lot of weight is screwy right now. I mean I think most people would go by Maslow's hierarchy, roughly, in weighing which things are most important. A situation in which someone's in need of food or safety is heavier than one where someone's bored, for example.

But what's getting me this time through reading this book is how nobody will have a drink and talk with Holden. He asks a couple cab drivers, some ladies in a bar, a kid who he's helped tighten her roller skate. Nobody says yes. That's bothering me. That feels like a big deal. He's kicked out of school, he gets beat up a couple of times, he manages to hire a prostitute, but it's irking me more that he really has this one simple request that he can get nothing for.

I was watching Sex and the City last night, season four, on my laptop, and I decided that what happened in that episode was the saddest thing that happened in the entire series. Or at least the saddest line.

Charlotte and Trey are married and live in a gorgeous expensive Park Avenue apartment. They are in the first stages of a divorce. House and Garden Magazine has come to do a feature on their apartment, and Charlotte is thrilled. She says that when she was a little girl she used to put on her mother's pearls and look through H&G magazine.

For a while it looks like Trey won't even show up for the picture, that's how bad things between them have gotten, but at the last minute he does. They take the picture, and Carrie's (as narrator) voice-over says that little girls in their mother's pearls will be watching this magazine thinking Trey and Charlotte are the perfect couple. The camera pans in on their faces, and they smile.

I'm telling you, to me, this is worse than Carrie being left at the alter (spoiler alert?) or Samantha getting breast cancer.

I blame Holden for his catching kids from falling off that crazy cliff all day long.

Story of My Life

If her question [How come nobody ever told us what was important?] is meant to be a neon arrow pointing damningly at our culture, this is a pretty serious book. It’s a pretty serious book.

I read Story of My Life by Jay McInerney recently (thank you Jon Fox). McInerney is an American author who wrote it in 1985. I have part of Vic Bobb’s review of it in italics at the top. (He gave it a B/B+ if you’re interested.) I’ve given STML to Jessica Lung, so if you see her, tell her to get reading it.

The first line is “I’m like, I don’t believe this shit.” Yep, it’s like that the whole way: whiney first-person narrative from a 20-year-old woman spoiled and coked out of her mind living in New York City.

I’ve also read Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell—if you know me at all, this should not shock you. A couple things surprised me about this book. (Vic hasn’t reviewed it... that’s not one of the surprises though.) First, it’s not a novel; it’s not even fiction. It’s a compilation of newspaper columns written by Bushnell. Unlike the HBO series, the women in the columns are not bonded by healthy friendships, there are way more drugs, and it really happened. It was depressing and put me off Sex for at least a week.

But for as much as the materialism, the objectification of people, the days without sleep, the sex, the makeup, and the 100% batshit-bonkery are depressing and morally bankrupt, those things are alluring. I read both books rapidly—I devoured them—for the spectacle.

What’s important to me right now is making life as pleasing as possible. (You can ask Mitch.) If you left me alone with a pile of fashion magazines, a library of books, some Mexican food, good beer, and my bicycle, I’d be completely happy.

I suspect that this is not the correct answer to “What’s important?” But all the right answers I can think of (God, Love, Education, Helping People, Saving the World) quickly spiral into abstractions whenever you get two or more people talking about them. And I’m sick of abstractions.

Materialism. Hey-o.

Fifty-fucking Thousand

How can you not love this show? How can you not? Ahh!

Jon was saying the other day, dapper young man that one, that the movie betrayed the shows. The series is witty and unsentimental, and the movie is not. At least, that’s the essence of what he said... I’m not quoting directly.

And, you know, he’s right. I’ve been watching the commentaries to the episodes. I’m watching the one to the movie right now. And the show is a farce—if not at the core than at least somewhere. Michael Patrick King, his majesty director, talks many times in the show commentary about cream pie-ing. Whenever a character has got it figured out, is sure, is at the top of the world, she gets a cream pie in the face.

God, I love this movie. And I’ve had maybe a little too much beer to write this well. And of course it was supposed to be the blog of all blogs. Forget whatever happens in my life.

Stanford knows that Marcus is the perfect boyfriend, beautiful and young, and it turns out Marcus used to be a male escort. Splat.

Trey is the perfect prospect, rich, WASP, and mannered. Charlotte knows she’s finally found her perfect husband, and then there’s the flaccid penis problem (first time I’ve had to spell flaccid, I think) and the not wanting children thing. Splat. Cardboard baby, splat.

I read something on Focus on the Family’s blog about Sex and the City. It criticized the show in the following way: it’s a blah blah blah show blah blah blah desperate women (or women desperate for sex) and then something else. And I thought—exactly! The success of the show, in my mind, exists because these women are not the poised figures that women are supposed to be. They are a desperate deranged coping reactionary lively fabulous representation of what women are in real life. And anyway they laugh.

I was justifying my love of Sex and the City to Jon Fox, once, in the following way, “It’s way funnier than Gray’s Anatomy.” To which he responded, “Well, Sex and the City is a comedy and Gray’s Anatomy is a drama. So it had better be.”

So anyways, in the shows, for everything serious or sentimental there is a back cutting of a joke, a self-awareness, or a cream pie. MPK says that there were originally more jokes written in the movie. They were discarded in lieu of the pain of the plot—again would never have happened on the shows.

And here’s where I get to the point: the second movie’s coming out and we couldn’t be more excited here at Westover (or what’s left of it). What if the movie was a giant cream pie? How fabulous. The first movie set us up with marriage and children and Samantha being free to have sex like always. And what... what! if they had an existential crisis! What if the dresses, clothes, fashion weren’t good enough any more. Splat. What if they came out front with the theme of the show—not sex, but how to live life not alone. What if everyone gave in not to cosmos but to knitting?

Maybe the cream pie in all of our faces is that we die. Or finally, finally, get old enough that our bodies (trusty companions) betray us. Or we are no longer beautiful... except my friends, y’all will always be beautiful (until you’re not, of course. Splat.). And what we’ve really got isn’t the stuff that we’ve trumped up and gotten so happy and sure about; it’s, well, smaller and harder... it’s... it’s... aw, fuck if I know, I’m only 22.