Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Where Are They Now?

Remember that girl that sat behind you and was part of the popular clique in grade six? After a stint on Animal Planet and some show called "Cold Pizza," she's now a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight! It says on Celebopedia that she's "a woman with a variety of interests, and a singular beauty."
Remember your former best friend who had an endearing way of sticking her tongue between her teeth when she pronounced "th" and whose mother was a poet? A famous harpist.

Remember that kid whose family were all Shakespearian actors and who had a minor role in "The Wind in the Willows" at the O'Keefe Centre? Lead singer for a popular indie band that is often compared to the Smiths (OMG, the Smiths didn't even exist when I knew him!).


I'm still working on finding a photo of the kid who farted on my head and many years later dated my best friend.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Colour Me McNugget

I enjoy collecting myths about white people. Philip Roth taught me that Jewish people think of goys as big drinkers. A Jewish friend of mine said, when I served him mulled wine, "This is a real shiksa drink."

And now, this, from overheardinnewyork.com:
Manager: My son likes white girls. I'm like, 'Boy, don't you know white people smell funny?! They smell like chicken when it's wet outside!'
Coworker: Oh, yeah, they do be smellin' weird.

The Wait-Chill Factor

My earlier formless grumblings about the TTC have led me to a eureka moment: the wait-chill factor! The longer you wait, the colder it feels. I swear it must have been about -18 with the wait-chill factor today.

I'm a genius!

1. Carr's Assorted Biscuits for Cheese
2. The TTC
3. AWK

1. I was entertaining recently and bought a big box of Carr's biscuits. (There was so much food in the house that three times in a row I forgot to feed people the cheese and crackers, with the result that I have a selection of refined cheeses hanging around in my fridge uneaten. If any of my five readers would like to claim a)a currant-vodka cheddar, b) a mild blue or c) some raw-milk Oka, please let me know. Cheese free to a good home.) As I was sampling the crackers today, I had two thoughts about them. One was that, given a limited number of ingredients (flour, oil, water, salt), a discernable range of crackers is still possible. There are the very pale, flaky ones that probably contain mostly fat; the "standard" cracker, a round, toasty affair; a large, almost malty tasting whole-wheat variety, etc. The other thought was that Assorted Biscuits for Cheese can be abbreviated to ABC and I feel certain that it has, somewhere in the world, currency as an upperclass shorthand, i.e. "We need to pick up some Carr's ABCs, darling."

2. I had an appointment at St. Clair and Avenue Rd. today and it took me almost an hour to get back here (Dupont and Bathurst) on the TTC, in minus ass degrees weather. (Minus 7 C, really.) That's 1.7 miles, people, or 2.7 kms. Is it me, am I becoming more impatient in my bicycle-riding old age, or is the TTC getting worse? Because this is not an isolated incident. Every time I take the TTC, I'm pretty much guaranteed to feel pissed off.

3. I used to help out at a health-care clinic at reception and there was one patient who I got along with quite well; she's a PhD student in philosophy and funny and smart, and one day we recklessly exchanged phone numbers. But then her phone number just sat there on my desk and I'd look at it and think, when am I ever going to call (let's pretend her name is) Estee? It seemed too much of a leap to go from receptionist/client banter to one-on-one cafe talk. If I'd had a party, I could have invited her, but I never have parties. The longer I didn't call, the more I hoped I'd never see her again at the clinic, because then we'd both have to make mealy-mouthed excuses for not calling, and then the pressure would be doubly on. But at the same time I was afraid she'd think I didn't like her, which wasn't true. It was all more stressful than any non-friendship has a right to be. Then, last week, I was walking Awesome Dog in the freezing cold and she was wearing her boots and coat and I was trudging along listening to my iPod and a woman in a long coat with a beagle was walking towards AD and I. AD doesn't care for other dogs and she just kept walking and so did I, no offence intended to the woman, who, as I began to pass her, I realized was speaking and also realized was Estee. But I kept walking because the whole phone number exchange thing was weighing on me so heavily and I thought that if we had to stop and talk it woud only highlight the fact that we got along well and would prompt another exchange of sentiments about how we should get together and I couldn't bear entering into that whole cycle again. I felt bad as I kept walking and I could hear her saying something like "Oh, alright then," in a snubbed way. I felt bad, but I also felt neurotic.

Then today as I was waiting for the bus, Estee came up to the stop and she looked at me and she looked right through me. And I was studying her face because I was so certain that if it were Estee she would have said something that I just couldn't quite believe it WAS her because she looked at me like total stranger. When we got on the bus we ended up standing quite close to each other, maybe two feet apart, and I looked her in the eye and started to say her name but she just started me down with an impersonally angry look on her face and I was so confused -- still thinking maybe it wasn't her? -- that I lost my words and she looked away and I crept back to the front of the bus and now I am so hoping I never, EVER see her again.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

URGENT: This just in: Pushing the funny/terrifying envelope

Remember way back when I mentioned KKK hair scrunchies?

My friend Reitzel just forwarded me an even more funny/terrifying link. Watch this now: http://www.eveningservice.com/Video

No, it's not a spoof. I also found this link on his website. Cole Porter? Elton John? Who knew? (Ravi Shankar? No, really -- who knew?)

Warmology

Well, it's sure cold out. As most of my readers know, I am perpetually cold. But, at the age of 30, I began to understand the basics of keeping warm. I had to teach myself since I grew up in a family of warm people who always said "Just throw on a sweater!", which didn't change anything. I mean, you have to picture me clawing off my socks as soon as I got home from school and putting my feet on the hot-air register, examining them for the telltale silvery spots of frostbite.

I feel so proud of my discoveries in the field of body-warmth retention that I think I should be hired out as a consultant. Maybe I could create program for immigrants who are coming from warmer places. I would say that there are a few golden rules, but the most important is

WEAR AN UNDERSHIRT. Yes, the humble undershirt. It has to be the old-school kind, the kind that you can really tuck in. Because the tucking-in is key here. Never let your lower back get drafty.

Also important are:
THE ROOMY, STEEL-TOED BOOTS. Steel-toed is optional. A lot of people grimace at the thought of their feet being encased by steel in the winter but what it does is create a chamber in which the heat from your toes can circulate. It really works! Especially in conjunction with

WOOL-BLEND SOCKS!

Also, ALWAYS HAVE EARS COVERED.

Finally, make sure your coat -- which is down-filled -- COVERS YOUR ASS (I wouldn't be allowed to say "ass" in my pamphlet for the immigrants though). (Well, the pamphlet would be printed in 8 languages anyway.)

So, I put this into practice this morning on my dog walk, and I admit to one problem: by the end of the half-hour walk, the fronts of my thighs were beginning to feel painfully cold. I suspect the solution to this may lie in wearing tights. Future R & D will tell.

And now, to warm your heart: Stupid Yoga Quote #2: "Inhale all that sweet cherry nectar."

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Windmills of My Mind

















Windmills give me the creeps.

Monday, January 22, 2007

The Radiant Radish and Other Flotsam


OK, let it be known: I am trying to write an article and as a result I am probably going to be filling this blog with the random flotsam that pollutes my brain, suddenly clamouring for my attention when I try to fix it on one important task.

But really... could there be anything as joyously weird in the world as the Beach Boys' song "She's Goin' Bald"? It's like some fragment of a dream: you have the perfect Beach Boys harmonies, combined with lyrics that could have been written by Frank Zappa. "Silken hair, more silken hair /Fell on her face and no wind was blowin' (She's goin' bald)/ Silken hair, more silken hair/ Lay near her pillbox down at her feet (She'd been on a trip)"

And then this, a spoken-word break:
"She drew her comb across her scalp
And brushed what she had left
I tried to salvage what I could
And threw it in a sack
She made a bee-line to her room
And grabbed all kinds o' juice
She started pourin' it on her head
And thought it'd grow it back

Ah ha haaaaaa

You're too late mama
Ain't nothin' upside your head
No more no more no more no more"

Deliciously wrong.

Another song on the album, "Vegetables," a paean to, uh, vegetables, features Paul McCartney. McCartney's contribution is to keep time by chewing rythmically on a carrot. Around this time (1967) Brian Wilson was running a health food store in Hollywood called "The Radiant Radish."

Awesome Dog's Iron Gut

These are things that my dog enjoys:
Figs
Canteloupe
Tangerine segments
Grapes
Broccoli
Carrots (raw or cooked)
Spicy foods such as chili
Breakfast cereal
Coffee or tea with sugar and milk
Meats, cheeses.

In fact, it is quicker to say what she won't eat: salad greens, raw chicken, brussels sprouts, walnuts, anise-flavoured hard candies.

One day when she was feeling stressed out she stole and ate from my friend's pantry a 2 X 4 in. piece of white chocolate brittle; a bag of chocolate-covered caramels (w/ wrappers); and a few lemon hard candies. (She left the anise-flavoured candy.) She had just tucked into a bag of jelly beans when we walked in to the room.

This binge had no discernable lasting effects on her health or behaviour.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

A Word on Ella Fitzgerald

I listen to jazz. That statement, which should be a simple statement of opinion (if there ever is such a thing) feels loaded with subtexts: jazz seems like an impossibly adult genre to enjoy, and at the same time brings to mind a smug, cozy Starbucksian aesthetic, a bourgeois pleasure whose bourgeoisness is made all the more obvious by the divide that exists between those who originally played and listened to jazz, and those who later appropriated it to enjoy with their half-sweet soy Tazo™ chai latte (this is actually the drink I order when I go to Starbucks – and yes, I occasionally go there). But this is not a contrived pleasure of mine, and it predates Starbucks – I started listening to jazz when I was in my early teens. Nothing too crazy: Miles Davis and John Coltrane and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald. Specifically the Cole Porter songbook. I wanted to be a swell like Cole Porter. I subscribed, apparently, to an antiquated notion of sophistication. (“You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane,” goes the song “You’re the Top.”) But actually, it’s true: they don’t make swells like Porter any more. That whole ascerbic urbane Dorothy Parker schtick. (Come on – “the tin-pantithesis of melody”? Now there’s a lyric.)

Anyway, this isn’t about Cole Porter. This is about Miss Fitzgerald. I don’t know anyone who gets passionate about Ella Fitzgerald. She never had a hook. But her singing is the purest singing I’ve ever heard. If Billie Holiday is a glass of rough red wine, and Sarah Vaughan an over-sweet honey-drenched Middle Eastern dessert, Ella is just a nice big glass of milk. If I may continue with metaphors, listening to her voice gives me the simple pleasure had by a child listening to her kindergarden teacher. She looks like a kindergarden teacher too, actually. I think that’s one of the reasons why she’s considered a stand-by, because there was nothing sensational about her: she never had tumultuous marriages or drug habits, never dripped with sex appeal, never seemed eccentric. She was just a big, sweet, simple-seeming woman. There is a danger in her singing that nothing human comes forth, but then listen to the version of “Mack the Knife” she did for a live audience in Berlin – forgetting all but the first verse, she makes up the rest, laughing at herself all the way through. But never once does she let the audience down – like some progenitor of contemporary rappers, she never misses a beat or a rhyme. (My favourite line is where she’s supposed to be saying, “Didja hear about Louis Miller? He disappeared, babe, after drawing out all his hard-earned cash,” and she just says, “Miller, Louis Miller… Ahhh, something about cash.”) I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t.

So, Miss Fitzgerald, I raise my nice big glass of milk in a toast to you.

Last Night's Dream Brought to You by the Landsberg-Lewis Foundation!

I dreamed that I was running a unionized bakery that employed immigrant and refugee women.

I shit you not.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Sick = Bored


Bored = writing in this here blog more than once a day.

But all I have to write about is how sick I am. Look: my sinuses are so fuck-fuck-fuckidy-fucking congested, it's making me mental. As soon as I have to breathe through my mouth, I feel like I lose a bunch of IQ points. Not "I feel like I look like," mind you -- I really feel stupider. As long as I am doing some sort of physical activity, sinus function ameliorates. I can breathe through at least one nostril, even if the air going into my sinus causes a raw, searing sensation (which it does). But as soon as I sit, or, worse, lie down, I feel like my sinuses fill with spray foam insulation. I can feel them becoming chubby, dense with impossibly immovable catarrh. This in turn makes me feel panicky. Sleep becomes difficult. Tongue dries out, assumes revolting texture. My left sinus is more prone to draining, which means that with any luck, when lying on my right side, I get passage of air in the left nostril. However, sleeping in my parents' lumpy bed has caused my right hip to ache when I lie on it. Thus, the neck-straining posish of lying on my back, head rotated to the right, to sleep. I read two novels while trying to get to sleep last night. I think a third, by Turgenev, finally proved too much and I dropped off.

And don't even get me get started on the issue of sub-nasal chafage.

In other news, my laptop seems to have crashed.

At least the dog looks extremely cute in her salt-proof booties. Something's gotta get you through the day. And I have no scuba-diving cat to do it for me.

Image courtesy of juveniley entertaining site, Rude Food.

Pee Cola [Ghana]? Fart bar [Poland]? I'm there.

Celebrity Dream Time

Last night's dream featured Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. I had to wash her turbans. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson was running around the building looking for her.

Had to breathe through my mouth while I slept last night. Woke up and my tongue was dried out. It's an interesting and vaguely repulsive feeling. Own tongue as foreign object, suddenly.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

I've been illin' the past couple of days... a boring old flu. Sick, single 'n' self-pitying, that about sums it up.

Anyway, for some time I've been meaning to catalogue all the stupid statements I hear in the course of doing yoga. Most past comments I've let go in one ear and out the other like so much drivel, so the comments will only be updated as I hear them. However, there was one comment made by yoga teacher Kathryn Beet in a class I took several months ago that was so flaky as to be literally enraging. I almost walked out of her class. The scene: We are lying on our mats at the beginning of class and she's walking around and among us, speaking in her mesmeric, hyp-mo-tizing voice (v. similar to the "poetry-reciting" voice I heard so much of in my tenure as a Creative Writing student), and she says: "I want you... to feel... as grounded... as an elephant. Elephants... are so grounded... they can communicate with each other... through the vibrations... in their hooves."

*photo by Kendall Gelner

Monday, January 15, 2007

I Am the News


I was just offered a sweet dealio (dealio? where did that come from? Too much watching of "The Office" [UK]) by Big Media. Soon -- if I did not fail the copyediting test, which featured a three-page snorefest of an article about Bombardier -- I will be controlling your media. I am the big floating green face behind the screen. Mwah ha ha. They lured me with promises of fun and benefits. Benefits! For the first time in six years I can have my teeth looked after and BUY NEW GLASSES (I have a real complex about my present glasses, which are losing all their anti-glare coating. When seen at a certain angle to the light, the glasses become totally opaque. I'm always afraid people will see it as an ominous sign, like the mad glint in the eye of a born killer). But it is bittersweet. I will miss the airy, colourful offices of the Immoderately Popular Women's Magazine, and the girly repartee. Instead, Big Media's offices seemed designed to keep you from knowing about things like time and weather. I.e., total dearth of windows. Also the decor is grubby and half the staff consists of etiolated older men. But how can I complain? They are even talking about letting me write for them! My name, delivered to your doorstep -- and yours, and yours, and yours...

Friday, January 12, 2007

The Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse

1. Toast
2. The clothes women in my building wear to work
3. Important job prospects
4. My former Peace Child "co-stars"
5. Ideocy
6. Sleepy harmonica and Beatles' covers.

1. I'm getting the easiest one out of the way. How can people eat bread that has not been properly toasted? It's so, so, so, icky. Hot, spongey, moist bread. Not at all the same thing as delicious, browned, assertively crispy toast.

2. Looking at the rear ends of the women who work in my building -- which I do, albeit in a disinterested, habitual way -- I feel vaguely saddened. Not by their rear ends so much as the way they dress them. I feel the same, slumpingly defeated way when I look at mediocre "office-lady" clothes like the stuff at Fairweather or Lady Reitmans or Suzy Shier. I just have this sense that these women don't really care about their bodies at all, that their bodies are just some sad vehicle that transports them from home to the GO train to the office. There is a profound transmission of apathy in the visible panty lines & ill-fitting trousers. I feel far sadder about the whole thing than the women themselves probably do.

3. I am being wooed by an Important Media Outlet that wants to take me away from my job at the Ginormously Circulating Women's Magazine. It's very flattering to be wanted by IMO! Especially since I was certain my interview there was a big, fat failure, an opinion that was only confirmed by their not ever returning my phone calls. In fact, I was convinced that they thought I was a flake. I imagined myself as Annie Hall meets Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Now suddenly they want me -- urgently. But I am so comfortable here at GCWM. I like the people I work with! Some of them speak openly of smoking pot! We make jokes about yams! Would that happen at IMO? Also here my versatility as a writer, editor, proofreader and fact-checker is exploited -- I mean, in a good way. Before I got the job I feared the office would be a hive of dowdiness, but it's fun. But IMO is offering me a part-time position that, if I choose to follow it to its full-time conclusion, will pay me three times what I got in my first job in publishing. A salary to rival my parents'! Well, maybe not quite. But a lot anyway. But still, for me, happiness really is more important than money. Even though I dream of being able to afford to fly to LA to visit long-lost friends -- which brings me to

4. I got an e-mail from my old friend Thessaly, who toured the Soviet Union with me in the musical "Peace Child" when we were teenagers. When I first met her she impressed me because she was from San Fran and went to Wavy Gravy's circus camp. Now she is living in LA, shooting for fame as a gay icon. She calls herself "The UkuLady" and plays '80s songs and original hits on her ukulele. We immediately re-bonded over how hideously thuggish the K-Fed/Spears firstborn is. She told me that she recently saw another former Peace Child, who is apparently living really close to Thess in LA, and is gaining fame as a minor indie star. It surprised me that our teenage exhibitionism actually masked genuine talent. I immediately Googled said minor indie star and one-time friend and, through reading interviews with her, have concluded that she is a little bit insane. I mean literally. This is a quote from her: "I encourage singing out loud. It is a great source of pleasure. I think it is absurd for a person to consider themselves or anyone else a bad singer. That is like calling someone a ‘bad breather.’ We don’t commonly think of sound as matter, but it is — and I think that it is our understanding of ourselves as finite that is coming to an end when we talk of apocalypse. The apocalypse is the end of limited consciousness. That is what we are experiencing right now. So do not be afraid of your own infinite nature." Insane. In one interview it says she comes from Providence, RI; in another she's described as hailing from the Midwest. But I went to stay with her and her mother for a while a year after we toured the USSR & she lived alone with her absolutely insane mother in a quite squalorous house in the exurbs of DC. I was impressed because it was like the only house I had ever been in that was as disorganized and dirty as my parents' house. Her mother was a strange combination of hard-core stage mom (my friend had a gig as a host of a kids' news show and after it aired, her mom would shut off the TV and do a post-mortem) and flaked-out oddball who told me how a friend of hers couldn't lactate after she gave birth until she had her first post-birth orgasm and also told me, as we were driving back from the beach, that she was a narcoleptic but she never told the insurance companies, but she always got sleepy when her kids fell asleep. When she told me this, my friend and her sis were sound asleep beside me. I always got the feeling that my friend was on the cusp -- she seemed to have a sense of humour about her life and her crazy mother, but at the same time her mother was everything to her. So now I can see which way she fell. Sometimes I wonder -- she is SO crazy-sounding -- if this isn't her way of masking her true weirdness, by exaggerating it so it becomes a "quirky stage persona." Does she really believe all that stuff about radiating love and filtering courage the way the trees filter carbon dioxide another quote)?

I listened to her songs on her myspace page, on which she addresses her fans as "Children of Peace" (hmmmm... an unconscious homage to our humble musical?) and talks about buying a magic wand which she feels bad about because it was made by child slaves, and it (the music) was interesting and spooky. All the more so because I knew the whole back story.

5. Why I Am an Ideot. I had to copyedit a really tedious book in which all the characters spoke in heavy dialect, so on the style sheet I created a category called "Idiosyncracies" to distinguish certain, well, idiosyncracies of speech -- only I spelled it "Ideosyncracies." That plus making a rather large number of arbitrary calls on preferred spellings of words -- I decided to keep "rock-and-roll" hyphenated throughout, for no defensible reason -- makes me think my unconscious is sabotaging my freelancing work. I told my boss at GCWM about it and she said "You must feel like an ideot." Heh heh!

6. On 91.1 FM, the jazz station, they seem to have a mandate to play at least one song featuring sleepy jazz harmonica and at least one jazz Beatles' cover every day. Who enjoys this "music"? They sound like anthems for suicide.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Last night, in my boredom I watched three hour-long British medical documentaries, back-to-back, on a show called "Bodyshock." This proved to be a mistake. I was first tantalized by an incredible videoclip (not on "Bodyshock") of these bicephalic conjoined twins from Minnesota, Abby and Brittany, who share a body but have two heads. Twin A can only feel sensation on one side of her body and same for Twin B, yet they can clap. I had to think about that for a moment before it's incredibleness hit me. How could they co-ordinate it? I don't know. They can also drive and -- get this -- type. AIIII! You know what's really weird is how normal, in a sense, they look. Part of that has to do with their remarkably well-adjusted attitude. But aesthetically -- I mean it's like if you or I designed a two-headed person -- it's that straightforward. There is something so conceivable about it. Yet at the same time so totally odd, you can't stop looking. I think it's what they call boggling. My mind doesn't boggle easily, but staring at them, my mind boggled.

So somehow I got from this to a video about a kid in Egypt who was born with a parastic semi-head attached to her own head (craniopagus parasiticus is the evocative medical term). This is when I should have turned off the computer -- look away! Look away! But noooo, I only wanted to look more. So, get this, there is this head sprouting a head, and the secondary head has a face. It has a face! And the secondary face is soooo almost normal, so slightly distorted in a Photoshoppy kind of way, and it's attached to a kind of neck that is its whole body, you can see in the X-ray that this neck/body has a tiny little spine. It reminds me of when my rubber plant, maybe through lack of water, or being pressed too close to the wall, grows a slightly curly and misshapen leaf. As the baby ages, the secondary head learns to suck and blink, but basically looks spaced out and froths at the mouth a lot. Because the saliva clearly has nowhere to go -- there are no organs in its tiny body/neck/stump thing. OK. This is very deeply disturbing, but I keep watching. It doesn't help that the Egyptian press is all over this operation and even has a camera installed in the operating theatre when they finally decide to seperate the heads, and they show the footage on "Bodyshock," of course, 'cause how else could it earn the "shock" part of its name? Oh and you get to see the dead, detached secondary head lying on some green piece of felt before its burial.

Well, on from this to "The Half Ton Man," which I think might not be so bad -- it's just very fat people, right? And Richard Simmons, as it turns out. He featured prominently in this documentary, giving Brits the wrong idea about how much influence he wields over here. But ohhhhh, "just fat people," eh? Just people who are naked, soiled by their own feces and literally ripping at their own seams, stretching the skin so much that it begins to give and weep liquids. This is not fat. This is something else, something horrible having to do with brain chemistry and compulsion and an insanely enabling wife who, even after his stomach is stapled up to "the size of a thumb" (his doctor's words) feeds him KFC and peanut M&Ms. It's fascinating, I won't deny it, to see so much flesh unbroken by definable features. His head was like some small outgrowth, a knobby mole, on the vast expanse of his body. When they rolled him over, he had been on his stomach so long that his fat retained a semi-rigid shape, like a candle that had melted flat and then hardened. Wow! Time to turn off the TV, right? No, but gosh, there's only one more "Bodyshock" and even though it's 10:30 pm I guess I'll just...

"The 80 Year Old Children"! Well! I'm sure that won't be harrowing! It was about these Indian kids who have "progeria," which inflicts them with geriatric ailments and also distorts their features so they end up with very protruberant eyes and recessed chins and look like claymation characters. If I watched more cartoons/animations I would probably be able to name exactly which characters. Draw a long, thin rectangle. Now add great big, circular eyes that blink from the bottom and top simultaneously, and a mouth jampacked with dozens of teeth, layered three deep. That's it. They are also bald. I am dissatisfied with this description but their features are so distorted that there is no template in my brain to hang their features on, so I can almost not really picture them. And hospital tests reveal that not only are these kids fated to be ostrasized for their looks, but they don't live long, because their glass-brittle bones are being reabsorbed by their bodies, are literally dissolving, so that their collarbones are nearly non-existant and their ribs are no longer attached to their spines.

And then, OK, lights out! Time for bed!

I suspect that I am sounding frat-boyishly callous and normative, but I can't deny that there was something so different, for want of a better word, about these kids' physicality that it was hard at first to see them as human. It feels weird writing that because you're not supposed to say it about anyone. But it's true! And it turns out that there is something just proundly unsettling about looking at deformities: I imagine it's a combination of being constantly inundated with media images of preternaturally beautiful people and some evolutionarily adaptive mechanism. Watching them right before bed, when the unconscious is glimmering just below the surface, is purely hazardous. My mind was literally aflood with images of the cringing, hollow head, the strange, frog-like faces of the progeria family, the strainingly fat limbs of the morbidly obese. I had to read about half of my stunningly boring book by Vikram Seth before I could feel anything like normal.

Never again. Never after dark, anyway. Too much material for my overvisual, overstimulated dream-factory brain.