jackassery

1. I loved it.

2. Midnight showing totally worth feeling like defrosted death at work this morning.

3. Watchmen preview very nearly brought on orgasm.

4. Note to douchebag outside theatre: go back to chatting up other girls by quoting (nationally known, televised) comedians' routines and bumming clove cigarettes and stop touching my earlobes without my permission and positing your guesses as to my sexuality based on the size thereof. You so obviously know nothing about me as either a carpet muncher (your charming term--I prefer "lady-fucker" but hey, you didn't let me define me; you took the liberty, so bully for you) or as a modified individual ("are those, like 1 gauge?" pffft.

When faced with your transit line being on fire, proceed directly to your second-best option. Do not think, "oh, I'll try something new this time" or "maybe they'll get the shuttle buses sorted out real soonish-like." You shouldn't, and they won't, and you will be either 2 1/2 hours late getting home or an hour late getting to work, rushing to someplace you don't even want to be anyway.

In other,not unrelated news, our Boston exit strategy is shaping up more quickly, which pleases me.

This summer I am getting back on the blog wagon. I hope it's drawn by a team of clydesdales.

I'm also making stuff around the house. I just topped an old desk with a layer of cork and hung 9 small line drawings of the wildflowers of North America.

Because I recognize that my words live in the public sphere on this blog, I feel like I should elaborate a bit on white privilege and my thoughts on it. This is precipitated by a small dust-up over my quoting of an alumnus from my college, who, you'll recall from my last post, did not believe in white privilege. He contacted me and, in the resulting minor dust-up, I was able to articulate more of my feelings about the unearned, often unquestioned, power of whiteness. I'm sharing them here, with the full disclosure that I did not change the mind of my interlocutor and I doubt I would be able to: we were at loggerheads at the end of the discussion, with me believing that white privilege exists and him believing that all inequity could be accounted for by racism, and believing, in fact, that the idea of white privilege itself was racist (because it ascribes a characteristic--power--to a race) and appealed to "some people, most of whom have a sheltered, self-absorbed, self-centered view of the world."

I want you to read this article from the Christian Science Monitor, a publication with which I have no beef, before we go on. It's the prerequisite before today's session of "Nora's Bile: Let Me Show You It."

It's short, and I can wait.

Done? How interesting, right? In the vein of Nickeled and Dimed--with its renunciation of one's so-called station to explore how another group lives (or struggles to live)--a young man named Adam Shepard decides to take twenty-five bucks, a rucksack of physical things, and nothing else; leave his home with his parents; and step to "the wrong side of the tracks" in Charleston and "[start] his life from scratch" (sort of) as a homeless man to "test the vivacity of the American Dream."

Right.

When you live in an apartment building, you live with a certain expectation about the noise that will be made above or below you--or both. You live with raised voices, with radios, with alarm clocks left on too long, with parties, with big televisions on too loud. Hammering in the walls, furniture from IKEA being assembled, sex, clicky or clompy shoes on around the house, the dryer running later in the night than you'd like. These are just a few examples of allowances made for renting.

My penultimate apartment in Chicago, near Rockwell, was in a building that muffled sound between floors not at all--a distinction we were only able to make in hindsight, with the contrast of our last apartment. Anyway, the apartment off of Rockwell had a set of very, very loud upstairs neighbours. It all began on move-in day, with an argument. Il dit, "Just pick it up, Rene!" Elle: "I can't LIFT it!" "Just PICK IT UP, Rene!!" "I CAN'T LIFT it!!!" "JUST PICK IT UP!!!" I CAN'T LIIIFT IT!!!!!" There was sex at various hours (not a real problem; at least they were happy for a while...), a combination show-tunes/Riverdance night every Tuesday (CLOP CLOP CLOP Heeey BIG SPEN-DER....), and much, much fighting (YOU'RE JUST LIKE YOUR SISTER, RENE!). At about 3 or 4 in the night. As apartment dwellers, we endured as much and as long as we felt was appropriate, and then responded in the appropriate apartment manner: broomstick rap on the ceiling. At 4 in the morning, having a screaming fight, throwing things, in the bedroom above our heads, and those selfish unhappy people actually knocked back, like our broom raps were interrupting their perfectly good row. We yelled "TAKE IT TO THE FRONT ROOM!" and they did. They were one of the major reasons we moved.