(non)-acceptance
Wednesday 11 June 2008 | 5 cookies in the jar
Cranky. Cranky is what it is. It has a name and its name is, cranky.
Relatively simple. Nothing fancy. And mostly just because
1. WHYYY can’t I get my shiny new avatar plugin to function even though I have spent an embarrassing amount of today trying to do so? This of course after suavely lecturing the Brujo in the afternoon, regurgitating some pseudo-Robert Pirsig philosophy of interacting amicably with the blameless inanimate while he cursed and sweated over the push-mower and its finical, particular cutting-bar-height-setting screws. Which I then somehow managed to sort out in two minutes. But can I make this berloody plugin work? Noooooo, I cannot.
2. After ten perversely med-free days of joy, energy and productivity (um, vaulting out of bed at 6 am to edge the lawn, anyone? voluntarily spending half-a-day at the State School to take care of loose ends like letters of reference and interlibrary loans? pulling out all my 2007 tax paperwork and actually LOOKING AT IT?) I now seem to be entering luteal madness, complete with predictable fatigue (desire to nap beginning at 10 am), digestive freakishness (nice details omitted) and a tendency to look down morosely at feet rather than up at the indescribably lovely world around me.
[Jo(e) noticed it, though—behold her heartbreaking seeing of a bin liner.]
Et ensuite, nightmares: Maman in her twenties, blonde and in a chic little Chanel bouclé navy suit, distant and cold, not letting me into her bedroom to talk, saying I should call her from the princess phone in the living room; Z., perhaps ill or perhaps angry, watching TV in the dark and refusing to speak to me; someone’s neglected infant falling down a long flight of metal-rimmed stairs, spinal injuries, dwindling to doll-size in my hands, quivering, broken, all my fault; my mother, livid because I’m late to meet her, forgot my cellphone, lost her ceramic pie dish—the hilarious beige one with a “microwave recipe” for cherry cobbler on it, whose ingredients include “15 drops of yellow food coloring,” presumably so you don’t realize your pie crust has been baked in a microwave with Crisco instead of genuine artery-choking butter.
These little tweets potentially warning signs, of course, to be discussed [per betegrise’s recent wry counsel] with the Temporary Pdoc on Friday.
3. For a long time I didn’t care what the Modernist thought about me (he whom I have previously denominated the Librarian, which was never the right name for him, not least because betegrise was the Original Librarian). Now I’m back to checking the stats to see how he only ever looks at my publications page; and I’m back to caring. (Although I never WILL post any new poetry on here, probably, because it eventually will be submitted under my real name in the real world, and you’d THINK someone of his cerebral horsepower would be able to figure that OUT and quit harrumphing pointedly at me, and either read the damn blog or stay AWAY, and furthermore wait, why am I yelling; oh yeah, he doesn’t read this part so I’m just talking to myself again.) Resurrection of mild paranoia? Also probably symptomatic.
Troublingly, there are a great many awfully smart people, bien sûr, who think it’s all a big fat Eli Lilly conspiracy. And who am I to say they’re wrong? Especially with so much Madison Avenue staring me in the crazy face?
Every year, without fail, my mom has supplied Mandarin and me with gift subscriptions to Prevention, which, for those of you who live in blesséd ignorance, is a scary Reader’s-Digestesque little-old-lady health magazine (and I’m too predictably guilt-stricken to cancel mine). Which of late has been running these absolutely horrifying ads for Cymbalta:
Love bites! Love bleeds! I mean hey, fair enough—this tristful frau clearly needs a light massage of the ol’ synapses, without question—but I guess my real worry when I see this picture is WHO WILL TAKE HER TO GET HER HAIR DONE, because if she just got some decent lowlights put in and maybe stopped wearing her overweight uncle’s discarded waffle-weave sweatshirts, I don’t think she’d need as much assistance from psychopharmacology, frankly.
Plus maybe the photographer should have that glaucoma seen to, because everything in this picture is tinted a queasy murky blue-gray.
Ads like this leave me similarly green around the gills. Fair faithless reader, I know you can readily imagine how intensely I dislike the thought of being a pill-popper for the man, a crash test dummy for Pfizer, a rat in a cage for Wyeth. Ah, the academic’s little helper. Quick, let’s stop women from having inconvenient feelings! —And yet invariably, just as I am waxing my most post-Marxist about it all, I’m forced to remember everything I’ve broken in waking life as in dreams. Objects and people and possibilities, various outcomes pre-emptively destroyed during the worst lunar lycanthropic phases; and so, then, What Is To Be Done? Cos, you know, depression hurts.
4. Further aggrievance: I’ve never had more than 50 hits a day, my page rank is fathoms below everyone else’s, and I will neeeeever everrrrr be a professional blooooogggerrrrr [wails forlornly; clearly needs Cymbalta].
The Brujo: But you wanted your blog to be anonymous.
Unnarrator: …
The Brujo: Ohhh…so now it’s a little TOO anonymous, eh?
For from the glass-half-empty perspective, theunreliablenarrator.net, diverting and therapeutic as it has long been, is also the electronic equivalent of not having cake nor getting to eat it too. Since y’all faithless readers know perfectly well who I am, I can’t say anything too itchy about those we know and love; nor can I complain too strenuously about what the Brujo pulled last week (oh, nothing—he just yelled at the dog, which scared the bejeezus out of all three of us)—whilst quand même I also dare not just go ahead and bare my nekkid identity for fear of being discovered by assorted tech-savvy and easily wounded exes, to whom “unreliable” would not mean the aesthetic carte blanche one would hope it would. (And there’d I’d be, smiling feebly, tendering that flimsy adjective as the cool lima bean it is.)
5. Finalement, in a burst of green-eyed nonsensicality about which I SWORE on Hamlet’s father’s grave I would never blog, nunca nunca nunca, I’ve been petulant because my successor film critic at the Alt Weekly, who handily surpassed my troubled tenure there in his repeated demonstrations of reliability and colleagiality, has now deservedly acquired a nice Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for his manful labors; and I am mostly pouty that I wasn’t ever invited by any of my sub-editors or editors to submit my reviews in the same category, especially since I probably could have snagged a nomination; that is, had I, of course, been organized or pro-active or non-fucked-up enough to apply. Right. Having answered most of my own querulous demands of the universe in this very paragraph, I can now safely affirm that having a nice AAN plaque and another line on my résumé would nonetheless never have made me a happy watcher of X-Men: III and its ilk; and thus I will SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THIS FOREVER.
I swear it. On Hamlet’s father’s preoccupied-sub-editor’s grave.
The Brujo, who just bought his allegedly last carton of cigarettes (?!), puffs philosophically into the suburban night as we sit on the front porch together sweating. Pyewacket rolls in the grass clippings at our feet and mrrrts.
“You’re blogging about that?! I thought it didn’t bother you anymore.”
“Only today, because I had an upset stomach.”
Basically, basically-basically-basically, all I want to know, darlings, is is just one teensy-weensy little dinky no-count thing: What is acceptance? Real acceptance? Versus tolerance/endurance/grin and bear it/suck it up/mustn’t grumble? Or versus resistance?
While There Is Nothing Wrong With Me is clearly NOT an affirmation, I am apparently not yet ready to say, I Am Totally Something Right.
Much less sign my Christian name to such a goofy sentiment.
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Erratum: I’ve recently learned that in fact my attentive editor DID submit my work one year, which of course leaves me feeling, oh, about as tall as Polly Pockets. Besides, contests are, as that wise individual noted, random crapshoots; so as much as I enjoy semi-public pouting, I officially retract this particular moue.
Further, I unintentionally did dear faithless readers an injustice by grumping about the hits-per-day shtuff, which came across uncomfortably like fishing; which it wasn’t, but that’s like Nietzsche’s defenders claiming that he wasn’t a proto-Nazi just because fascists liked to quote him on the Aryan race—because, you know, if he didn’t want that, then maybe he shouldn’t have been so all-fired quotable.
Okay, that didn’t make any sense even to me. Encore, on attaque:
I love you and your little dog too. And I love your comments. LOVE them. I read and re-read and re-re-read them. (And I want you all to have cute little matching avatars, damnit.) I love chortling at your wit, and I love peeping at sitemeter and thrilling to the fact that people in Santa Fe and San Antonio and Dallas and Houston and New York and Glasgow and Palo Alto and San Francisco and Portland have been gawping at my pixels—perhaps, it’s true, much as one cannot take one’s eyes from a graphic motor vehicle accident; but still.
So, mwa. We don’t need no stinkin’ page rank, chicas.
5 cookies in the jar
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Acceptance = Serenity Prayer - Courage - Wisdom?
Acceptance = Making an acc of ept and ance?
Acceptance = your reaction when things are acceptable?
Re-reading the wikipedia bit. “Experience of a situation without an intention of changing it.” Nice negative definition. Acceptance is also not a banana. I suspect one must do the Douglas Adams flight-by-throwing-yourself-at-the-ground-and-missing and perhaps experience the situation with the intention of keeping it exactly the same?
There was that Lauren Slater book a few years back—Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Which was okay. But there’s this page she talks about William James and willfulness vs. willingness and that is the page out of the whole book I go back to now and again on the Amazon on-line reader when I feel like I am trying to force myself into a place my mind won’t fit, trying to accept what is merely tolerable, trying to have the feelings I am quite sure I should have but somehow don’t. I don’t know my William James well enough to know where she got this from—reading James would probably be more beneficial than reading Ms. Slater. The irony as I see it is I think I am saying “accept your non-acceptance.”
Want to play with avatars, only, heh, cannot get my own blog properly formatted, and I giggled at philippics but wondered where to take my jeremiad. Which is slightly better than giggling at the Cymbalta ad. What do you do when your agent calls you up and says that you’re just the type the drug company is looking for to promote their new psychopharmaceuticals?
If only they came up with a page rank tool that qualitatively evaluated the sort of connection your readers got to experience rather than a mere number of hits.
Responding as an Original Librarian (in the good-intentioned belief that reading the right book can ameliorate or at least illuminate any condition), perhaps it’s time to re-visit Vonnegut, esp. “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.” Okay: you’re crazy, I’m crazy—but EVERYBODY ELSE is abso-freaking-batshit nuts to a power of ten.
Quoteth he: “[Eliot] Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy [Pilgrim], but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless … So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.” (Slaughterhouse-Five, Dell 1981 ppbk ed.)
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Editor’s note: Bwahahahahaha!
re: “further aggrievance…”
f.y.i. yours remains the only blog that i actually look forward to reading, and i’m never disappointed.
[Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir]
Lauren Slater’s mother = Blanche DuBois?
And straight from Marsha: