Archive for the ‘It Could Be Worse…’ Category

Surprises from Broadly’s Rachel Dolezal Interview

December 13, 2015

Which can be found here.

  1. “In the aftermath of her newfound infamy, Rachel resigned from her unpaid role at the NAACP; the Spokane City Council voted to remove her from a volunteer Police Ombudsman Commission, and Eastern Washington University declined to renew her quarterly adjunct professor contract. Broke and seemingly unemployable (with the exception of a six-figure Vivid Entertainment porn offer she turned down), Rachel wrote a memoir proposal. She hoped she would receive an advance big enough to support herself and her two sons for as long as it takes to weather the storm, but she says publishers refused to sign her. Today, she says she remains out of work besides doing black women’s hair part-time and estimates a third of her friends have stopped speaking to her.”
    I am completely shocked that no publisher would buy this memoir.  I can’t tell if that’s because I have such a low opinion of publishers (that’s speaking very generally) or such a hopeful stance on Dolezal’s memoir.  I mean, where is Judith Regan when you need her?!
  2. “Pumpkins line her front steps in autumn, and inside her walls are adorned with her own artwork: a portrait of Pariah, the character in the Spike Lee–produced movie, over the fireplace; a drawing of the KKK chasing a black girl above Rachel’s bed; and a painting of her adopted son Izaiah as a baby next to the dining room table. In the living room, a Langston Hughes poetry book lies on a chest.”

Guys, Rachel Dolezal can fucking draw.  If she hadn’t gotten an MFA,  I’d guess she’d become the next outsider artist a la Jack Kevorkian and prison inmates who sell their paint-by-numbers.  (This guy is an acquaintance of mine.  #kiddingnotkidding)

Resolved

December 1, 2015

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is the new Morgellon’s Disease.  Go!

So Many Conspiracy Theories

November 13, 2015

And you know what’s at the center of them all?  L. Ron.

So my husband suggested I read a Gawker/Jezebel article on a fancy Silver Lake, Los Angeles preschool’s insane drama (full text here.)  Naturally I Google the direct link so as to avoid scrolling through the depressingly vacuous stories on both sites, but that’s neither here nor there.  The Silver Lake preschool thing wasn’t exactly hard hitting––like, these aren’t problems, exactly––but was fascinating in a horrible sort of way.  Apparently the school is run by an egomaniacal do-gooder (they exist) who also has her own IMDB page (it is LA, after all.)  The past few years, she has lorded over Camelot Preschool (too easy) wearing Lululemon pants and a crown made of children’s tears (something like that.)  She also has her own line of maternity clothing, which she advertises as having been worn by “Jenna Elfman, Matt Damon’s wife Luciana Barroso, John Travolta’s wife Kelly Preston, Gillian Anderson…”  Notice anything fishy here?  That’s right––Scientology.  Nobody in Hollywood brings up Jenna Elfman and the Travolta family unless they’re prepared to be associated with everyone’s favorite thetan clearers.  And if I may say so, her inflated self image seems like it would really fit well with the whole OT Supreme Being thing.  As my husband said, “I almost want to comment and bring that up, but… I don’t care.”  All I care about is going on the record, so that when it comes out that this bitch is a Scientologist, I can say, “We told you so.”*

*The “we” because this is really all thanks to my husband, who first pointed out the Scientology connection.

Slow Day

October 7, 2015

ND: I learned a valuable lesson today

And that is don’t put a peanut in your mouth just before you are about to sneeze.

Intern Jobs

September 8, 2015

When I was a wee seventeen, I interned at Sex and the City, which was then the coolest thing––not just show––in the world.  And as I was a minor, technically it was illegal for me to work there, which made the whole thing even cooler.  Ergo, everything I had to do, which included dropping off mail and throwing away the leftover quarter-bagels in the morning, was––you guessed it––awesomely, fantastically cool.  But among these very glamorous tasks of mine, one stood out above all: when the product placement lady left on a week-long vacation, I was assigned to watch recent episodes of the show and count the number of times I spotted a item with a Louis Vuitton logo on it.  Thus I spent a full five days drinking free cans of perfectly chilled Diet Coke, listening to the Mr. Softee song on repeat (seriously, that truck never moved from the corner, despite the fact that no one lived there) and watching the four ladies quip over coffee and occasionally reach into their purses and marking down that yes, indeed, Samantha did have a Vuitton wallet that day!  What they did with this information, I never asked.

So flash forward to now, and I’m moving crap (a lot of crap) around in my new apartment with the TV on in the background, and marveling at how weird it is that they are obsessed with Friends over here––seriously, it’s on all day, every day––and I see this commercial where they collage together the theme song from various bits of dialogue and I realize that there’s probably some little intern sitting in a dark room at Comedy Central UK watching endless episodes of Friends and picking out “so” “no” “one” “told” “you” “life” “was” “going” “to” “be” “this” “way,” and so on, in order to make said commercial.  I can’t decide if that sounds like the most fun ever or the most horrible.  Certainly not the coolest thing, though.

Another Gchat

September 3, 2015

I know I just posted a Gchat but this one was too good to let go:

HW: oh no
ID: ?
HW: i just got a spam email from my dad
ID: it’s all downhill from here
HW: also included in the list is my seminary
oh dear
ID: you mean he spammed your seminary?!
HW: yes
that is exactly what i mean
ID: HAHAHAHAHAH
what is the spam letter “about?”
HW: oh Baruch Hashem
i thought it was a penis enhancer
it’s only a weight loss tool

European Douche Bags

August 25, 2015

IS: Can you get on a flight and come to Salento?  South of Italy. D rented a house for fifteen but there are only five of us… I can send you more details, we are leaving now and will be there until Monday. The town is Depressa, which means “depressed woman.” There must be a direct flight from London to Brindisi.

If you can’t make it, I’m back in Paris on Sept 2-7, you should come down for the night 🙂 🙂

The Living Museum

August 4, 2015

Last summer, a friend and I went to visit the Living Museum, a decrepit building used as permanent art studios for current and former residents of Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens.  Anyone can go visit, but you have to call for an appointment beforehand, so the doctor knows you’re coming, but when we got there, the doctor––who had a German name––seemed very blase about our presence.  I wondered if I weren’t in my own personal version of Don’t Look in the Basement.  There were a few vacant-eyed smokers sitting in an entryway and a cat slinking about; big fans moved the sweltering air around the room in whorls.  Most of the art was weird and mediocre––outsider art, in my opinion, is so much more often miss than hit––but we found a very unexpected way to amuse ourselves: upstairs were a few empty studios and a number of file cabinets full of medical records and patient journals.  Naturally we flipped through some, and each took a patient log home with us.  Mine is the “work order log” of a James M. (patient confidentiality, people) who used this notebook from late May to early June of 1991.  His handwriting is decent but not frighteningly neat like a serial killer’s, which is a good sign.  On May 23, 1991, his notes from the “community” meeting were as follows:

(1) 9:20 Everybody sleeping.  Wake up guys!
(2) M. wants to be transferred to another ward because he can’t even have beer on the MICA ward.

(3) L. wants to be transferred to a coed ward for sex.

(4) B: explains purpose of MICA.

(5) Discussion of coed vs. male wards.

(6) A. wants to go to a “nice ward” in building 73.

(7) Discussion of sociopathy

(8) A. about d/c plans, about relapse.

From a quick flip-through, it appears that the men had a number of discussions about sociopathy those three weeks.

Below, one of the funnier, if not finer, pieces of art at the Museum.

IMG_1484

                                  Alas!

A Tweet

July 30, 2015

I think the most difficult thing about studying phenomenology would be having to say “phenomenological” at least twenty times a day.

What’s in a Name?

June 22, 2015

The story of a small portion of my life is included in a book that is scheduled to come out in the next year or so (I think.)  When I wrote it, I used my real name, with the understanding that the editor would replace it with a pseudonym later on.  So when I got the chapter back for proof, I saw that my name was… Frances.  Frances!  I was on the one hand a bit disturbed, because to me Frances sounds dowdy, but on the other hand enormously flattered, because I thought immediately of course of the way-ahead-of-her-time Frances Farmer, and who doesn’t want to be compared with a woman who wrote an essay at age seventeen titled “God Dies?”  I mean, honestly.  So maybe rather than dowdy, the editor envisioned me as a moody beauty?  Below are a few other cool ladies named Frances, the first one named after the aforementioned cool lady named Frances.

Frances Bean Cobain

Frances of Rome, Italian Saint and mystic (again, just. like. me.) who wanted to be a nun at eleven but whose parents forced her to marry at twelve.  She had a good marriage, founded a religious order, and turned her home into a hospital during a time of war, among other good deeds.

a whole bunch of duchesses and countesses

Frances “Scotty” Fitzgerald, only child of F. Scott and Zelda, poor thing

Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, which was  porn for smart little girls like me

Frances “Franny” Glass (J. D. Salinger character)

Frances “Baby” Housman (“Nobody puts Baby in the corner!”)

There are a few more who look like they’d be worth mentioning, but I’m on a train while writing this and getting a little naush.