Salon.com > Maura Kelly

More tips for literary lovers

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Dear Maura and Jack,

I'll keep this as short as I can, because the situation is quite simple really. After many years of keeping in touch across long distances (from occasional emails and phone calls to sleeping together if we happened to be in the same city), I finally live in the same city as a man I have been infatuated with, in love with and everything in between. Now that I'm here, he has become evasive, flaky and sometimes a flat-out jerk. I'm accustomed to being pursued and wooed and made a priority. Now I am bending over backward to try to see someone who changes plans, doesn't make an effort to make time for me and doesn't put any effort into our plans when we do get together. I have never been treated worse in my life. I have never been treated like this by a man -- and yet I keep going back for more. I hate the way it makes me feel, but for some reason I can't stop.

Hit me with the canon. I need it.

Maura writes:

Dear Girl Doesn't Get Boy:

Literature for your love woes

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Dear Jack and Maura,

I'm a 23-year-old straight male, and I've never been in a relationship. In fact, I've never even been on a second date before (and only a couple of first dates, for that matter). I've only ever kissed two girls, and that's the extent of my sexual experience. I feel like I've missed out on so much over the years, and it's made me wonder if there might be something horribly wrong with me. I'm seriously on the brink of giving up on dating (and everything that goes with it) altogether.

Moreover, I don't think I've ever met anyone who is as much of a romantic "blank slate" as I am. Because I've never been in a relationship, I don't have a reference point; I have no idea what kind of partner I'd be for a woman (whether I'd be clingy, whether I'd be open to the possibility of commitment, etc.). So not only do I think I've missed out on a wealth of experiences, but I've also missed out on the self-discovery (or whatever Disney cliché you want to use) that goes along with those experiences.

If you have any literature to recommend me, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Maura writes:

Dear Never Been in Love:

When I almost jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:25:00 +0000

On top of the Brooklyn Bridge late one strange December night, I found myself plotting. I'd text the passwords for my e-mail and Facebook accounts to my closest friend before leaving my phone in my bike basket. (The police would find it and contact her, and she'd understand what I wanted her to do.) Then I'd climb over the railing onto one of the beams stretching above the lanes of traffic. At the edge, I could jump.

Before that night, I'd had passing thoughts that if life wasn't less agonizing by the time I turned, say, 50, I'd end it. It had come to seem normal; that was just where my brain went when I was overwhelmed by stress, unhappiness, exhaustion. I would picture myself falling upon a sword, like some kind of medieval maiden, a (not quite) virgin sacrifice. I'd mentioned these "suicidal ideations" to my shrink, kind of laughing them off, and, indeed, she never seemed too concerned. "I can be so melodramatic," I'd say.

Hair apparent

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 23:54:00 +0000

I must have been a third or fourth grader when I vowed never to turn into someone like Mrs. K., a friend's mom, who was still sporting her very frosted beehive hairdo decades after the style became outdated. She resembled Frenchie from "Grease," after Frenchie's extreme DIY blond dye job cum upsweep came out looking like (according to her boyfriend, Sonny) "a beautiful blond pineapple." And Mrs. K.'s crowning glory was further dramatized by her startling height: Though well over 6 feet tall, she never wore anything but the biggest heels in town. Mrs. K. was so out of touch, so absurdly anachronistic, that I thought of her as slightly mentally deranged -- or maybe lightheaded from the altitude? -- though there was no real evidence she was. Every time I saw her, I tried to figure out what kind of crucial brain material she could be missing to be so strangely unaware of how odd she looked.

People might have been wondering the same thing about me just a few months ago, when I was an otherwise young-looking 29-year-old woman with a head full of prematurely gray hair.

John Hughes

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 19:15:00 +0000

To this day, when I hear the name John Hughes, I get a rush in my stomach that's an awful lot like the feeling I'd get in high school when I spotted my crush standing in the parking lot after classes let out. I became a Hughes fan in 1984, the year his movie "Sixteen Candles" came out, and I revere him to this day for being the first filmmaker who connected with me on a personal level, with an insight into my everyday thoughts, worries and experiences, and for being the only movie person to capture what it was like to be an adolescent in the '80s.

There were plenty of other movies that came out around the same time that I liked. "The Outsiders" (1983) made me incredibly melancholy before I even knew what the word meant. "Return of the Jedi" (1983) and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) thrilled me with their epic tales, and "Ghostbusters" (1984) amazed me with its ingenuity and special effects. "Footloose" (1984) made me sick with the desire to be beautiful and sexy and daring like its stars, Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer. And then there was "Risky Business" (1983). All I remember about that one is the nudity, which made me, a strictly raised Catholic girl, feel guilty and confused. But four John Hughes movies -- "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club" (1985), "Pretty in Pink" (1986) and "Some Kind of Wonderful" (1987) -- were more than entertainment for me. They were comforting and smart but also funny and cool, intimate and personal without being uncomfortably sappy.

Stop the madness

Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:30:00 +0000

In a front-page New York Times article last week, admissions officers from the nation's top-rated colleges bemoaned the fact that new students were arriving on their campuses drained and frazzled after competing for places in their hallowed halls. In the article, titled "Ease Up, Top Colleges Tell Stressed Applicants," the mostly Ivy League gatekeepers fretted that the admissions process "has become such a high-stress exercise in résumé-padding that students are arriving at their campuses on the brink of burnout."

A paper released earlier in the week by the Harvard University admissions office apparently prompted the Times' coverage. "Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation," written by Harvard dean of admissions and financial aid William Fitzsimmons and other Harvard admissions officers, reported that today's students are significantly more stressed about getting the "right" college degree than previous generations were. Fitzsimmons and his colleagues added in the paper that, these days, the pressure to put together the right blend of talents and abilities often starts when children are infants and builds continuously, leading to self-destructive behavior or a sense of discontentment later in life.

Robert Downey Jr. and “VIP syndrome”

Mon, 04 Dec 2000 20:22:00 +0000

Why can't talented, handsome Robert Downey Jr. get over his drug addictions?

It's not as if he doesn't have anything to live for: He could become one of Hollywood's biggest and most enduring names. It's not as if he is in denial about his addiction; instead, he seems to recognize the severity of the problem. It's "like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal," he explained to a judge last year. He seems to know that his problem is screwing up his life, and has repeatedly announced his desire to quit drugs. He has attended plenty of treatment programs. And he has the financial and professional resources to get medical help.

In recent months, after his well-publicized struggles and jail time, his career righted itself. He scored a recurring role on the popular show "Ally McBeal." He was signed to star in a new movie, "America's Sweethearts," with Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Billy Crystal. Mel Gibson was slated to direct him as the lead in "Hamlet" next year in a Los Angeles stage production.

The ghosts of reunification

Fri, 01 Sep 2000 18:00:00 +0000

A German court Wednesday convicted three neo-Nazis of the beating death of Alberto Adriano, a Mozambican meat-packing plant worker living with his German wife and their three young children. During the trial, which captivated Germans and drew unwelcome attention to the country's struggles with racism and reunification, the perpetrators -- two of them only 16 years old -- said they were motivated by nothing more than the alcohol they had consumed and the fact that Adriano was a black man who dared to walk alone through a Dessau public park in the middle of the night.

Found guilty of murder, Enrico Hilprecht, 24, was given the stiffest sentence possible: life imprisonment. His two cohorts, Christian Richter and Frank Miethbauer, were tried as juveniles and sentenced to nine years in prison, one year less than the limit for minors. Their stunning lack of remorse marked the trial: One of the teens grinned during the reading of the indictment and the other claimed he didn't "give a damn" what happened to the victim. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder described it as "a suitable verdict for a heinous crime."

Making the Web safe for children

Thu, 24 Aug 2000 19:30:00 +0000

Attorney Parry Aftab became interested in the Internet as a resource tool in 1990 after opening a private law practice in northern New Jersey. She had been working at a large Wall Street firm, where she specialized in international corporate takeovers, and found that corporate law had not prepared her for the demands of her new clients. So Aftab went online to seek out colleagues who could answer her questions about real estate closings and other small-town legal needs.

In 1994, she read about the Epson e-mail privacy lawsuit -- one of the first newsworthy cyberlaw cases -- concerning an employee who was fired for refusing to agree to the monitoring of her e-mail by supervisors. Aftab wrote a few commentaries about the case, publishing them herself online. National law journals, hungry for content about Web issues, published Aftab's work and journalists began to call for quotes about other cyberlaw cases.

Aftab, a graduate of New York University School of Law, quickly forged a new career as an Internet expert. By June 1998, she was considered such an expert about online legal issues that she was asked to be a keynote speaker at a White House summit on online content in Los Angeles. Following her appearance at that conference, she was approached by Curtis Sliwa, head of the Guardian Angels, a citizens street patrol organization that originated in New York. He asked Aftab to get involved with Cyberangels, a group the Guardians started to "patrol" the Web.

Homework chain saw massacre

Wed, 31 May 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Most kids get in trouble for not doing their homework. So why did Charles Carithers get suspended for doing his? Because, in an essay he handed in, he described the murder of the teacher who gave him the assignment.

The whole thing started when an English teacher at Boston's Latin Academy, Shital Shah, asked her junior-year high school students to write a horror story. Carithers complied -- with a story that was a little too frightening. It's about a high school student named Darius who murders his English teacher with a chain saw. "Mrs. Creed ... did everything by the book, she gave no lenience to special students or athletes ... Mrs. Creed needed to be destroyed," Carithers wrote. (In an awkward twist at the end of the story, it turns out the murder victim was not Mrs. Creed but Darius' Aunt Becky.)

Understandably, Shah felt spooked after reading the essay, particularly since Columbine couldn't have been far from her thoughts. She complained to school officials, who decided that the essay amounted to a threat to do bodily harm and therefore violated the school's disciplinary code. They sentenced Carithers to a three-day suspension, a decision that the Boston Teachers' Union supported.

Why don't judges want their financial interests revealed online?

Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Early last fall APBnews.com, a "crime, justice and safety" news site, applied for copies of the financial disclosure forms that federal judges must file each year. As its lawyer indicated to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, APBnews planned to publish the documents online to give the public easy access to them. But a 15-member committee representing the nation's 1,600 federal judges quickly responded -- by blocking the release of the forms, on the grounds that making them available on the Net represented a security threat.

Federal judges have been threatened by angry members of the public in the past. Three were even murdered in years past (but not since 1989). So, at first glance, it might sound reasonable that judges should be concerned about making their personal information widely available.

No way, say First Amendment proponents like APBnews senior editor Bob Port. "A committee of judges ... has said, in effect, you can have our financial disclosures unless you intend to publish them on the Internet -- then, you can't have them," he says. "That's unconstitutional, plain and simple. It violates the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press, and it violates the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law."

Your boss may be monitoring your e-mail

Wed, 08 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Worried that your boss knows you've been checking out those nudie sites and sending dirty jokes? You should be.

Just last week the New York Times fired 20 employees at a Virginia payroll processing center for violating corporate policy by sending "inappropriate and offensive" e-mail, and the Navy reported that it disciplined more than 500 employees at a Pennsylvania supply depot for sending sexually explicit e-mail. Xerox fired 40 people in October for violating company computer policies and Boeing has fired a few on similar grounds too. Such cases hardly come as a surprise: 45 percent of major U.S. companies engage in "electronic monitoring of communications and performances," according to a 1999 survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA).

Is the Net in your locker room?

Tue, 02 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Whether they know it or not, thousands of male college athletes have been caught on videotape, often while showering or urinating and almost always naked, in their locker rooms at universities across the country. What's worse, the secretly made tapes have been mass-produced and are still being sold and distributed on Web sites.

On April 4, a Chicago Tribune article broke the story about the so-called "hidden camera" tapes -- and soon after, two lawyers quoted in the story, Louis Goldstein and Dennis Berkson, were flooded with calls by shocked students. In July, Goldstein and Berkson filed a civil case against the makers and distributors of the tapes on behalf of 28 of the young men.

"You can't get a more heinous violation without physically doing something to somebody," says Berkson. "Our clients have been surreptitiously videotaped while nude, in places and situations where you would think you would have absolute privacy."