Grown Up Tantrums, Part Two.

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?13@@.eea3ad9/9934">Private Life
Christian Claiborn – 04:56 pm PDT – May 11, 2000 – #9935 of 9942

To Anne,
I had a crush on you approximately three minutes after I met you. I was in the kitchen here at work, singing the “Mr. Belvedere” theme song at the top of my lungs while I rifled through the freezer looking for burritos. When I finished, you asked did I know “Growing Pains.” Like, duh.
We were at dinner the first time and I asked you what your superpower would be. You said that you’d be able to melt those stickers that come on the top of new CD jewel cases with your fingers. I told you that I’d be able to heat a Hot Pocket to a uniform temperature. We made a pact that we’d only use our powers for good. We were there for three hours and the wait staff had stopped refilling our water glasses and I kept thinking that I had to remember as much of this as possible.
I sent you lots of email. I woke up at two and three in the morning some days, wanting to say something to you, and I’d write you long sleepy letters, most of which I was too chicken to send. I would keep remembering things about me that I wanted to tell you. Every time I sent you something I’d have a private conniption: had I said too much? Was I pushing too hard? Was I going to offend you? Was Igoing to turn you off? Every time the PC beeped I’d taste metal, hoping you’d written. You never wrote that much, but I memorized every word of it.
I wanted to be on your team. I used to look forward to meetings – to meetings, goddamn it – just because I knew you’d be there. I counted opportunities to make you laugh. I meticulously planned the spontaneous exchanges we might have during the day, only to forget all about them when the time came. I read books about things you liked: the 49ers, postmodern gender theory and Emily Dickinson, just so I could have something to say if the topic came up.
I don’t have any right to feel betrayed. You were very clear from the beginning. You never gave an inch, never said a thing that I could misinterpret as interest in romance, and I am a master of the delusional hermeneutics of yearning. You never told me more than I needed to know. I wasn’t led on.
And now I think it’s finally sunk in. You don’t want me to be your boyfriend. You’re a good friend, a reliable coworker, a trusty confidante and that’s all. You’re not going to be won over by my wit or my presents or a letter of reference from my mom. You’re not interested and I can’t fix that.
And it’s weird because I can see where my twin streaks of narcissism and low self-esteem intersected; It’s not just that I like you but that I like being liked by you, that I find self-confidence and strength in your smile and in your laugh that I can’t see the rest of the time. I caught a glimpse of a reflection in you and I fell in love with that as much as with you.
And now I miss you, and you’re just ten feet away.

Born a Bastard

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J. – 02:08 pm PDT – May 11, 2000 – #756 of 760

All I’ve got is my experience and an opinion based on that. My experience, in the larger scheme of things, has been a good one: .adopted as an infant .raised by two tremendous individuals I call mom and dad .shared my home with an adopted brother, three foster sisters, numerous exchange students and a wild assortment of non-human animals .searched for my biological mother at 15 .met her at 17 .searched for my biological father at 20, met him the same year .now in the process of meeting siblings (6)
Throughout, a few bits have served me well.
1. Respect, in the fullest sense. Respect for the privacy of others when requested. Respect for the feelings, emotions, uncertainties of others.
2. Understanding, as far as that is possible. It’s hard for me to understand what my birthmother, adoptive mother, or anyone else for that matter, has dealt with. But I try.
3. Self knowledge and awareness. Perhaps the hardest thing is to examine one’s own motivations, biases, expectations and to put them into perspective, considering 1 and 2.
4. Slowing down. When something seems to be moving too fast, take time, ask for some time. I’m natually good at this. Some say, complementarily, that the air around me is calm, others think I’m so mellow the turtles pass me by–and are frustrated by it. Regardless, it has served me well.
5. The law of the middle. Most relationships are neither extremely bad (stalkers, locos, etc.) nor extremely harmonious (peanut butter and jelly, etc.), rather they are in between with occasionally wide swings and some jiggles (which I live for).
6. Education. An educated adoptive parent who knows that what they are getting into IS different and WILL require some new tools and will LIKELY lead to some sort of reunion scenario down the road will be happier and help their child be happier. This is something that can be influenced a priori. Likewise, an adoptee who learn what the word means early and expands that definition with their intellectual development will be happier (me thinks).
7. The truth: base it all on the truth and things will mostly work out.
Searching for my biological family has been rewarding, rich, complicated, real, surprising, joyous, painful, confusing and ongoing. It was based in a desire to know more, dig deeper, and investigate myself, not in a need for fulfilment, a missing hole to fill, or a primal wound. I don’t think that this drive is at all unique to adoptees, rather a universal theme present since the human mind came to be and reflected in our history, literature and art.
What I have found in my searching are a group of people with an array of similarities and differences, lives apart from mine, and fertile ground for new friendships and challenges.
Knowing the truth about who I am and where I came from far surpasses any expectations, dreams, fantasies, imaginings, or unrealistic ideas I may have had in my youth. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I am deeply and sincerely thankful to those who have worked hard to give me that choice.
Saludos. J.

Diary of a flight attendant

Home and Away
George Dallah – 07:39 pm PST – Apr 25, 2000 – #38 of 39

Who says the airlines encourage drinking? Certainly the flight attendants don’t. I’d much rather have an unruly sober person on board than an unruly drunkard. Sober people generally don’t try kicking out windows at 35,000 feet, and generally make “jokes” about having bombs and guns in their carry-ons much less frequently than inebriated individuals.
I should state up front that I admit a lot of nervous flyers have a tipple to calm their nerves, and there are those (myself included) that can’t sleep on airplanes no matter how long the flight is…so a drink or two will help us to nod off.
Sure there is alcohol available, but perhaps the airlines are remiss in thinking that all adults are responsible life-forms.
Some airlines state upfront somewhere (inflight magazine) that alcohol as a dehydrating effect (as does caffeinne laced beverages) and that the best thing to drink is water.
I can tell you that a lot of flight attendants would like to see a drink limit for passengers, but then we get into a war with “management” who want to keep the flying masses happy..to a point. Charter flights are the WORST. Scheduled flights are generally smoother with fewer alcohol related problems.

Stupid things that bother you…

Mothers Who Think
Anjali – 11:07 am PST – May 1, 2000 – #4769 of 4875

I apologize for going off topic but have to vent.
Stupid thing that bothers me: fundamentalist bigots and their apologists. You know, where someone repeatedly makes statements about another group of people (or even her own) that are expounded as absolute truths with no possibility for disagreement but doesn’t give any evidence to prove her point other than personal experience. What, you’re omniscient? Gee, and I was so sure the coming of the Messiah would be accompanied by some sort of advertising campaign.
Oh and for all you apologists: “She’s just being provocative”, yes, yes she is. In a Mein Kampf sort of way. Provocative does not necessarily mean intellectual. If it was, then every bar fight would be Socratic discourse. Some of her best friends are black? She’s black? You’re black? Is she best friends with every black on the planet? Is she the only black person on the planet? Are you the only black person on the planet? No? Then it might be a little difficult for her to speak for them all now, dontcha think? Oh, that’s right I forgot, she’s omniscient. She’s just being tongue in cheek? Hey I’ve got no problem with that. Only you might want to tell her, because she doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, she might want to take some lessons in how to give off that “I’m saying this with a glint in my eye” vibe. Little things like tone, body language, mannerisms and emoticons go that extra mile in convincing her audience that, no she’s really not saying that the only good homosexual is a dead homosexual. The “she’s a member of a historically oppressed group X, so she can’t really be a bigot against Y” line? She can be, and she is. The two can be mutually exclusive. Sad but true.
Oh and my favourite “if you’re upset, it’s because you sense that she’s right and you’re not mature enough to/don’t want to deal with the truth”. No, I’m upset because she’s insisting she’s right without proving it. See, if I insist that JFK Jr. didn’t die in a plane crash but is alive and well and living in Winnipeg to everyone I know but don’t back it up with any evidence, I’m annoying at best and unbalanced at worst. Which is she?
I know that anecdotes are observations, and hypotheses are derived from observation and hypotheses can turn out to be true. You feel free to cite all the anecdotes you want. But don’t you call them absolute truths, especially in the face of contradictory anecdotes. I know where’s there’s smoke there’s a good chance there’s fire. I also know it might just be dry ice.
I believe its quite possible that the Jews control the planet and are trying to enslave its other inhabitants, Mexicans are stupider than Taiwanese, and women lack the necessary intelligence to be software engineers. I have no problem with you expounding that theory. But before you get to state it as an absolute truth, I better see some hard evidence that stands up to critical scrutiny (and that critical scrutiny better involve a discussion of correlation vs. causation and had better eliminate other potential explanations for observed phenomena, such as oh, I don’t know how about poverty, systemic discrimination, different environmental factors), not pure anecdotal evidence, not “some of my best friends are ___________ so I know”, and definitely not “I’m older, richer and more experienced/popular/famous than you missy, so I am right”. Fabio is older, richer and more experienced/popular/famous than I am. I’m not going to agree with everything he says either.

Which “Other Side” of the Closet Are You Talking About?

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.eea9dda/0">Mothers Who Think
David Ehrenstein – 08:57 am PST – Apr 26, 2000 – #1 of 457

Women are trained from childhood to get married. That’s fine, save for the fact thatMen are Pigs. Take it from me — I’ve slept with scads of them.
And that brings up another problem. There are men and there are gay men. Men want to have sex with you, but for the most part couldn’t care less about you on any other level. Gay Men don’t want to have sex with you, but think you’re perfectly charming and are willing to spend countless hours listening to your gripes and telling you how fabulous you look in that new ensemble.
So what’s a gal to do?
Deep down, she believes, all men are the same. And while her “Will” may say he doesn’t want her a REAL woman always triumphs.(“In her dreams,” say I.)
As we all know there have been — and continue to be — any number of “New York Marriages.” Consider Cole Porter. Hell — consider Lee Radziwill. And don’t getme started on Maxwell and Juliet. Or Tom and Nicole, for that matter.
The bottom line is Freud’s famous question:”What does a woman want?”
And the answer comes. . . Rupert Everett
Face it ladies. You wanted to marry a gay man. You knew he was gay when you married him — even though he didn’t, or was fighting the truth. So don’t come crying when he dumps you for his weight trainer.
Discuss.

The Worst Meal I Ever Had/My Biggest Cooking Disaster…Lately

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?13@@.ee8d2e4/185">House and Garden

Michelle F. – 03:15 am PST – Apr 26, 2000 – #186 of 198

Time to revive this thread. My brother and our cousin were making nachos in the kitchen one afternoon. The cousin excused himself to use the bathroom. He returned to the kitchen about a minute later, looked at my brother, and suddenly started screaming in agony. He turned and ran back to the bathroom, ripping off his clothes as he went. He jumped into the shower and turned icy cold water on himself to relieve his pain. My startled and confused brother returned to the kitchen to retrace our cousin’s steps, and that’s where he realized that, prior to using the loo, Cousin had been chopping jalapeno peppers using a knife and his bare hands. It was pure pepper juice that had gotten on his, er, lower regions.
Being the kind, sympathetic relatives that we are, we referred to the poor guy as “Jala-penis” for a very long time.

Seder Talk

Mind and Spirit
Daniel Abraham – 07:28 am PST – Apr 18, 2000 – #1 of 14

For the last several years, I have been increasingly fascinated by the Haggadah, for it is less a document telling of the Exodus than a document of the time it was redacted in more or less the form we know it today. That time was after the small-h holocaust of the Bar Kochba rebellion.
The lack of mention of Moses in the traditional text, and the emphasis on redemption by God alone (“God and not an angel…not an intermediary”) is a reaction to the crushing defeat of Bar Kochba, who had been hailed as Moshiach by Akiba and a number of other authorities. The text is trying, in the wake of the defeat and exile which followed the Second Revolt (and the still recent loss of the Temple in the First Revolt), to rally the people and refocus their attention on God, rather than on earthly saviors.
Recall too that after the Bar Kochba revolt Jews were banned from Jerusalem, renamed Aeolia Capitolina, on pain of death. The concluding line of the Seder, “l’shanah ha’baah b’Yerusalayim,” is saying “Next year we will be back in our capital, under its true name.” It is a cry of hope and rebellion from a time of complete despair.
The injunction to speak and discuss Pesach, Matzah and Maror, and the songs like “Echad Mi Yodeah?” are intended to provide a pretext, at least once a year, for the instruction of the young, so that even at a time of social disorganization there would be a means to transmit some basic knowledge.
I would like to see a greater general understanding of the Haggadah in its historical context, for dramatic as the Exodus story is (even without its Cecil B. DeMille overlay), the retelling of it which we turn to every year has a drama of its own, which at the remove of almost 2000 years is too often forgotten or ignored.

AMERICAN PSYCHO: Time For Re-Evaluation?(A risky thread)

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.eea74c1/49">Books
Jazzhermit – 10:27 am PST – Apr 16, 2000 – #50 of 53

I re-read this book (finished it Monday). Saw the movie yesterday afternoon. I’ve registered my thoughts on the movie in its thread in Movies. So I will feel free, here, to speak for the book.
I liked the book. A lot. I think it’s very well written, not at all clumsy or tedious. The litanies of brand names (designers, colognes, restaurants etc.) are meticulously deployed. Everything is seen from Bateman’s viewpoint, therefore if that’s all that he notices about his fellow yuppies, that’s all we will be told about them. I had no problem with that at all.
Similarly I had no problem understanding why Ellis wrote in an often deliberately artless manner throughout the book. For example, Bateman describes no less than four and possibly six different sets of circumstances as “filling me with a nameless dread.” This is not clumsiness on Ellis’s part, but rather a deft illustration of the vacuity of Bateman’s mind. Bateman believes that by deploying a cliched phrase like this his feelings will be made clear, when in fact the very repetitiveness of it (like the repetitiveness which is the continuous motif in the book) only serves to make the phrase, and the emotional state it strives to describe, meaningless. It’s really very funny; the book as a whole is very funny. I laughed out loud a few times reading it on the train, and once a woman sitting next to me looked over to see what I was reading that made me laugh. She turned slightly further away after seeing the book’s cover.
The violent scenes, far from being bright points in an otherwise drab narrative, almost for me slowed the book down. I felt that the detail of them, almost like the report of a pathologist, allowed the satire to come to a crawl when in fact the scenes run by implication, as when Bateman dismisses the two prostitutes without us ever finding out exactly what he did to them, are far more powerful.
I believe the very “tediousness” of the book (and again, I wasn’t bored at all, I was riveted by it) is a stylistic choice on Ellis’s part which serves to virtually goad the reader. Go on, he seems to say; pack it in. Yeah, yeah, it’s boring; put it down. Go on, I dare you. It is only the reader who focuses his or her attention on the book and refuses to take the bait of its potential tedium who will be rewarded by it. This is true also of Glamorama, and in that case I must admit I failed the test. I quit Glamorama after about 145 pages, but I had recognized Ellis’s tactics and quit anyhow.
In Glamorama, the brand names have been bolstered by endless litanies of celebrities’ names, some real and some fictional (i.e. cartoon characters), tossed in a seemingly haphazard way into the narrative, and yes it does become quite brain-numbing after awhile. Which is exactly Ellis’s point, and his way of sticking needles into the reader again.
Example: about 100 pages in, the narrator of Glamorama, male model/club promoter Victor Ward, is at a party and he describes a table at which celebrities are talking. The celebrities are Janeane Garofalo, Steven Spielberg, someone else, and David Koresh. At this point in the narrative literally hundreds of celebrity names have been deployed, almost without repetition, which not only makes a point about the sheer volume of ‘celebrity’ the culture can sustain, but also serves to numb the reader into no longer taking note of which celebrities are mentioned. They’re just celebrity names, tossed about like confetti. So only a careful reader will catch this throwaway sentence, which betrays the entire story as potentially hallucinatory (a possibility which was being explored in more depth when I gave up on the book; Victor was discussing the film crew that was making the movie of the plot’s events, as they happened).
Ellis is a very smart writer, and though I don’t recommend all his books, I do unreservedly recommend Less Than Zero and American Psycho and I plan to revisit Glamorama again in the future.

Elian Gonzalez: Enough is enough!

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Nicole E – 06:51 am PST – Apr 13, 2000 – #1 of 67

Okay, first and foremost let me state my position on this issue. It is my fervent belief that this kid belongs with his father, period. This is, at the end of the day (for me) not about politics, or Castro, or Miami Cubans, or even about the laws of our nation, which have been violated left and right to keep this kid in this country. This is about a father and a son.
That said, this morning on NPR I heard that Janet Reno has ordered the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez to take Elian to an airport “outside of Miami” by 2 p.m. today in order to get on a plane to Washington. The relatives have said they are refusing to do this and that if Elian is going to go to Washington, government officials are going to have to come to their house in Miami and remove Elian by force.
This whole issue has bothered me from the get go, but this latest behavior by the relatives really is the last straw for me. Dozens of our nations laws have been violated, by the relatives and by the government, in order to enable what is for me the kidnapping of this child. These relatives insist they are looking out for Elian’s best interests, but I ask you, is it in the best interest of a child to allow him to go through the traumatic, forcible removal from a home by government people?
The Miami relatives quite frankly turn my stomach. For months they have exploited this six year old kid to make a statement about their political views on Castro. I personally don’t agree with Castro’s politics or his government (although the stupid embargo should be lifted yesterday), but as far as I’m concerned YOU DO NOT STEAL A CHILD FROM HIS FATHER. Period.
If this kid were Haitian or Saudi or Mexican he’d have been on the first boat back.

Washed up after 40?

href="http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?14@@.eea983e/2">Writing
Bard Cole – 08:10 am PST – Apr 13, 2000 – #3 of 16

F. Scott Fitzgerald had good reason to believe he was washed up by 39. He was a screwed-up drunk about to keel over dead. The Fitzgeraldian/ Wolfian myth of inborn sensitivity and genius which can’t help but express itself from the earliest age is, in part, a sociopathic self-delusion that left both of those guys dead atvery early ages.
Normal people, unlike tragic geniuses, are quite capable of marshaling enthusiasm, interest and skill for new projects throughout their lives.
Fiction’s just fiction, anyhow… it’s not ballet dancing or reciting odes in Homeric Greek. All you gotta do is tell a story.