Look at The Pretty Light

When I was little girl and crying my eyes out, my parents had a technique to make me stop. They’d start pointing out things in the surroundings: “Look at Nana’s pretty lamp. Look at the lemon tree. Look at Spot licking his water bowl. Look at your stretchy socks.”

I’d sniffle, not wanting to give up my crying, but I’d start to look at the things they pointed to. And I’d start to get distracted. I would stop thinking about myself, my sorrows. But the pattern on my grandmother’s lamp was so interesting. The sunlight filtering through the lemon tree was so beautiful. Spot licking his empty water bowl was so funny.

And I would stop crying because my sadness was no longer the most alluring thing around me.

Although I’m an adult now and still spent the afternoon crying, the only thing that could get me to stop was to read a book about innovation. Afterwards, I couldn’t even remember what I was crying about.

Bleak Snow

Last night I went to sleep. This morning, I awoke to everything being bleak. It’s like waking up to snow, but instead of being covered by a layer of pure white ice crystals, everything is covered with a layer of bleak. An invisible dusty grey ash. The only explanation is that last night in my dreams my entire world burned, and this is why, today I wake and it’s all ash. I’m going to have to wear the black rubber boots again, and probably the painting mask too.

Used Up

Deli Dialogue

Him (deli number 70): “I’ll have a pound of the forbidden rice.”

Me (deli number 71): Huskily, leaning against the curve of the glass food display, eying his wedding band, “I don’t know if that’s a very good idea.”

An hour later we had both fucked and dined on forbidden rice.

Actually, an hour later I am home alone, eating a deli sandwich, drinking a bottle of Cain Concept, and wondering if much of my life is lived merely because I have the appropriate diolague for the scene. Put me somewhere naughty, and I’m brilliant. Drop me into a scenario with a taint of normality and I trip over my words—absolutely nothing to say.

A Short, Happy Story

Once, an exhibitionist moved into a new house, and threw away all the curtains. A voyeur moved across the street. They lived happily ever after.

Pick Up Lines

I prefer, “Can I interest you in some sexual positions without emotional investment?”

Jane felt that this was a little too forward for her taste. She is more of an, “Excuse me, but have we met before?” type of girl.

I can live with that. A girl needs to have her own dating style.

“Find your voice,” I encouraged her.

His Women

The religious say that God sees everything. He’s like this big surveillance camera in the sky. Depending on your relationship to old, white men (I frankly find them to be ungodly sexually attractive) this notion is either comforting — because God sees every part of you and accepts it — or horrifying — because God sees everything and judges it. I like to think that God accepts it. Because it must all make sense when you can see all the parts. It’s just as humans our view is necessarily puny. We look out over the Grand Canyon and think it’s grand when really it’s just this tiny glimpse.

Some days, my eyes ache with the fear of going blind. I like to see. It’s my favorite sense. I want to see everything. It’s like an urge, almost sexual. Somedays I don’t care who it hurts, but I must see.

What’s the difference between a man searching and a man escaping? It almost impossible to tell the difference. My only thought is that it somehow pertains to the synthesis of the record. A man on a search records everything he sees, like he’s a scientist in a laboratory looking for clues. A man escaping forgets everything, almost as soon as it happens: he can’t stand the record. So I think my glimpse was like a record. It was the only synthesis that existed. It upset him. But to me it felt tender, as if I’d found a clue. As if I’d just opened the first button of his shirt, and would slowly undress him. We’d been naked together so many times. Each time in each other’s presence, we rushed to undress. But this was another layer entirely.

The Irresistible Urge to Breathe Water

He had a girl in every port. I didn’t mind. I like travel; I like games. I like hearing stories about travel and games. The problem was that he never told me which port I was in. I like to know. Not knowing gave me the feeling of being dislocated, dumb, bobbing up and down on a huge and empty sea. I didn’t know where I was. And more importantly, I didn’t know who he was.

There’s only so long you can skim the surface like a skitter bug, avoiding everything. Eventually you just want to dive; you want to drown. You want to SCUBA without a mask. You get the irresistible urge to breathe deeply in still water.

Startup! The Musical! Scene Two: The Investor Pitch

Scene two starts like The Music Man and ends like Bollywood.

EMPTY THEATER STAGE - ESTABLISHING

A spotlight on “Robs”. He’s dressed in black. A bit hunched over. Looking slightly tortured.

ROBS

Foz. No spotlights. We’re not in the theater trade any longer. Turn off the spotlight. Turn on the PowerPoint.

Foz turns on a PowerPoint. It has much of the same effect as the spotlight, illuminating Jobs on the empty stage. The empty black and white template glows.

ROBS

Write whatever I say into that computer-thing. Okay.

FOZ

Got it.

ROBS

Search!, Inc.
• Like Google, but bigger
• Uber search, made by uber gurus

Robs starts waving his arms a bit more. He’s getting excited. Foz is typing the PowerPoint slide as Jobs speaks.

ROBS

Search!, Inc. is a simple concept.
• Ask it what you want
• It tells you
• If you don’t know, it tells you what you want (this is the business model)

ROBS

Search!, Inc. will change the world.
• International!
• Doesn’t need the Internet
• Usable by cell phone, in any language.

ROBS

With Search, Inc. there’s no longer need to educate the world’s poor. Who needs education when all the knowledge in the world is accessible?

A man in India has a broken down tractor. He calls Search! Search! describes to him, in his native language, how to fix the tractor, and sends him all the parts he needs.

The entrepreneur doesn’t need to hire a handyman, so he saves forty dollars. That forty dollars saved goes back into his farm. He buys forty more cows.

The PowerPoint presentation is changing from the black and white template to a Bollywood extravaganga. Technicolor cows start appearing on the screen, and beautiful Indian woman in saris spin in to begin milking them. They’re rocking back and forth to the growing musicality in Job’s description.

ROBS

Forty more cows means forty more milkmaids. Full employment for the woman in the village. They use their wages to buy cell phones themselves. Empowerment! One of them calls Search! every night and learns how to speak English and to do math. She comes to work for our company. She discovers a new algorithm. Our stock rises. She becomes a multi-millionaire. But more importantly, WE SAVE THE WORLD!

INDIAN WOMEN

THEY SAVE THE WORLD!!

ROBS

WE SAVE THE WORLD!!!

INDIAN WOMEN

THEY SAVE THE WORLD!!!!

Right in the middle of the musical, the stage goes black. Everyone stops singing.

FOZ

Sorry. I think the bulb burned out.

Foz turns on the spotlight again. Robs seems not to notice. He’s standing up straight now. Enthusiastic.

ROBS

Foz, I think we have ourselves an investor pitch.

FOZ

Um, yeah. Okay.

ROBS

Foz. Show me your jazz hands.

FOZ

What?

ROBS

Jazz hands. Jazz hands.

Robs does jazz hands.

Foz does jazz hands.

Startup! The Musical! Scene 5: A Star is Born

Post investment, it’s the first day in the offices. The offices are in a large, empty warehouse in a bad part of town. Jobs and Woz sitting around. The mood is a little glum. Jobs is drinking a beer.

JOBS

Maybe this is a hairbrained idea. How are we going to get a cast?

WOZ

I put an ad in the newspaper for a secretary. There was already a reply. I scheduled an interview for you at 12.

A rat trap goes off.

JOBS (to Woz)

Great. While I’m in the interview, you see if you can teach that rat to sing.

A meek, shy, mousey girl rings the doorbell of the office. She can barely talk, but hands over her resume.

JOBS

Your name is Star?

STAR (meekly)

My parents were hippies, sir.

JOBS

I can see you’re a total rebel. Let’s go into the conference room.

JOBS (looking at resume)

So, you have a C average in community college. Oh, and you type 30 wpm. Well, at least you don’t exaggerate.

STAR

No sir.

JOBS

Let’s start the interview, then. Why are manhole covers round?

STAR

Because the Lord made them so, sir.

Jobs is hating life. Worst. Candidate. Ever. He puts his head is in his hands.

In the other room, Woz is singing quietly, under his breath, while doing open brain surgery on a rat with his Leatherman tool.

WOZ

Maybe I can get this rat to sing, you never know until you try.

He pours some of Job’s beer into the rat’s mouth. The rat becomes sedated. He takes out his shoelaces and ties the rat down onto a table, and cuts it open with his Leatherman. He’s poking around the rat’s open body.

WOZ

Oh no, there’s no vocal cords. A rat can’t sing. Poor rat. Oh, but look. That’s what makes a rat go left (he pokes, and the rat lurches left) and there’s right (he pokes, and the rat lurches right). The rat can dance!

Woz gets some clips, some electronics and attaches them in the rat’s brain. Then, he takes out a sewing kit from his pocket, and sews the rat back up. He pours some water in the rat’s mouth.

WOZ

That will sober him up. I’ll let him recover while I make the remote control.

Woz sits down at a table piled with electronics and starts to build a remote control. When he’s finished, he turns it on and finds out that he can control the rat like it’s a model car.

WOZ

I can’t wait to show Jobs. The rat can dance!

He sends the rat into the interview through a hole in the wall. Using his remote, he makes the rat run across conference table, just as a joke.

The woman squeals. She has a perfect pitch. Woz is stunned by the beauty of her voice. Since he’s not using the remote control, the rat just stops. Jobs looks at the rat strangely. Then, Woz gets and idea, and runs the rat over her feet. Star jumps up on the chair gracefully and squeals again, again with perfect pitch.

Woz throws open the door to the conference room. He looks Jobs in the eye.

WOZ & JOBS (in unison)

You’re hired.

STAR joins in the harmony.

Startup! The Musical!

The Concept:

Startup! The Musical! is about two Stanford graduates (Foz and Robs) who have a dream of producing musicals. One is a brilliant director, the other a brilliant stage hand. However, once they get out in the world, they realize they’re never going to get a musical funded. But all around them, people are getting start-ups funded. So, they come up with a nefarious plot. They’ll pretend they’re funding a start-up, but secretly, they’ll use the money to produce a musical. No one will know. They’ll couch learning choreography as a team-building exercise. Then, in a dramatic ending scene, they’ll invite their venture capitalists to the opening on Broadway where they’ll reveal to them during the musical that they haven’t really funded a start-up, but a broadway musical.

Plastic Surgery

I started getting plastic surgery because that’s what I’m good at: lying in bed in great pain. I thought that everything would be much better if I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the bathroom mirror. I’d like this to be a morality tale and say it didn’t work, but it wasn’t the case. It cured almost everything.

On the Edge; On the Island

He asked me to come to the Cayman Islands with him. I said yes. This explains just how on the edge I am. For months I had been telling him that the Caribbean is merely a giant blue tepid bath. Everywhere one looks it is postcard pretty. The last time I went it haunted me. You can’t get the stereotype out of your mind. You can’t see anything else. If I’m going to vacation, I want to feel alive. I want waves and wind and dirt. I don’t want Disneyland. I want everything to be more real than reality.

But things have been busy and bureaucratic and bad and now I’m just like everyone else. All I want is an island getaway. To look at postcards and think of nothing.

I like spending time with him, because he has a girl in every port. Thus, he doesn’t care about me, and I need not concern myself with what he thinks of me. When we go to the islands I do not have to pretend to love snorkeling, nor feel guilty because I do not want to go snorkeling. Every single other boyfriend I have ever had has made me feel guilty about a lack of sightseeing inclinations. They take it as a sign I’m not very adventurous. I think it’s the opposite. I’m much too adventurous for snorkling. Seeing things is so overrated when there are books. You learn nothing of the fish, and you see so little. Only the most superficial slice. So superficial it’s pointless to even bother. The very definition of tourist.

Looking at fish swimming is boring when you’ve the soul of Emily Dickinson to plummet. She barely left her house either. He one told me (while fucking me) that my skin is ungodly soft. It’s only because I’m always inside reading.

I’ll told him that I loved him, and I did not mean it. I do that when I’m scared, as if it can save me from the tepid blue bathwater that our entire nation wants to consider vacation. Are things that bad? They are. They’re so bad you want to clutch the warmest body near to you and do it in the biggest, bluest, bath you can find. And you want one moment where he loves you too, even though the entire thing is pretend, like adult Disneyland.

Freefloating Love

The hard part is to have so much love for my unnamed husband, my not-yet-born child. Love without an object. I’m overwhelmed with this freefloating love, that just needs a place to land. To rest, if not settle.

I don’t want to get to know someone. I just want to love them. To have dinner and talk about our hobbies? It’s such labor, such sheer drudgery. So irrelevant to love.

Dating

I always thought my life would go like this: dating, love, engagement, marriage, children. Instead, it’s gone like this: fucking, love, fucking, fucking, love. So, I decided that I should take a deep breath and start at the beginning. Dating.

A young professor from Stanford asked me out. He taught negotiation at the business school. He was Mormon.

“But just culturally,” he explained.

“But isn’t that the worst part?” I wanted to say. “Isn’t that like saying, I’m into terrorism, but just for the violence?”

Instead, I said, “Sure, I’d love to go on a date with you!” It hardly mattered. It was the year where I couldn’t say a single thing I meant. I could only write.

He wanted to go to a concert at a winery to hear a sincere, dippy, folk singer. I sat there while she sang love song after love song, in the soul-penetrating way only a country singer can twang. He swayed to the rhythm, and I sat there, unmoved. I wished my cell phone had reception so I could check my RSS feeds. She sang about loving her horse. Unmoved. Her husband that beat her. Unmoved. She loved her twin sister. Unmoved. She loved rock and roll. Almost. She loved dogs. Unmoved. She loved children. Unmoved. Then, after running out of people close to her to sing about, she tells us she’s going to sing a song about a trapeze artist she saw at the circus.

The lyrics went something like:

Divorced before she was seventeen,
she took to flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

A shiver of passion ran through me. I was so moved. Then, I thought about all the songs I loved, all five of them. They were all about women being free. It seemed that being free, not love, was the only thing that moved me. Perhaps I had to admit to myself that marriage was not really my thing.

Love, I’d always thought of as being bound. To one person. Of tethering you to the ground. But for me, somehow, it was all about freedom, and everything else was just the safety net.

My Family

My cell phone is like my baby. I’m attuned to its pitch like a mother is to her baby’s cries. I’m at a loud party and my cell phone is on vibrate across the room in my purse, but I can still hear it cry. The second it does I want to run to it, attend to it, care for it.

My laptop is my lover. Every night before bed, I am with my laptop. I prop it up on my knees and type all my secrets into it. Then, I close it, and lay it on the bed next to me. I sleep with it all night long. It keeps me warm.

Surveillance as Self-Improvement

One day as a young girl, I was very disappointed in myself for not taking off my shirt in sexy manner. I bounded out of it like I was a child. I wanted to be a woman. A sexy woman would cross her arms, grab the bottom of her shirt, and draw it up over her head, slowly, while arching her back.

But more importantly, she would do this when no one was watching her undress. She would do it alone, every night in the bedroom. Even thought I was much too young for sex or men to be even ten years into the distance, I knew that I had to start the transformation into sexual now, alone, in my bedroom so that someday, when someone was looking, it would have become a habit, natural, not a performance.

But it’s hard to change habits.

I came up with a mental technique. Everynight I imagined there was a camera in the top corner of my bedroom watching me. It was on all the time, and everyone was watching: my parents, the boy at school I had a crush on, my fourth grade teacher. It looked down on me, like a surveillance camera, and watched me undress.

I wonder if healthy, normal girls, like me, spent their childhood moments alone in their bedroom imagining cameras on them too. I suspect theirs were movie cameras. A camera at her level, pointing at her like she was a celebrity. She’d be singing into her hairbrush, performing, pretending she was Madonna.

Whereas, I, on the other hand, it wasn’t about performance, it was about who I was, all the time. It was about monitoring good behavior and bad behavior. There is a twinge of sick to a surveillance camera.

The kids these days seem to constantly be filming themselves. When I go to a party, their are so many flashing bulbs it’s like paparazzi. It’s like saying hello. And I wonder about this perfect mix of surveillance and celebrity.

The Politest Way To Say Someone Has A Low IQ

I am always looking for polite ways to tell people they are stupid. Polite in this context means that the person doesn’t understand what you’re saying. Today was a triumph in this regard.

Me: “It must calm you to know that you could never be executed in Texas.”

Him: Blank stare.

The Essential Question Of Self-Broadcast

I looked in my server logs. There are two people reading my blog. Here is the evidence: http://bettyray.livejournal.com/193091.html.

I was sort of hoping that no one was reading my blog, and I was sort of hoping that everyone was reading my blog. These conflicting beliefs are what enabled me to blog.

Now that there are three of us, it changes everything. I must write for my readers. I must continue in the voice they’ve grown to follow like a soap opera.

But maybe my readers don’t want this. I don’t know anything about my two readers. I should probably do some type of focus group with them, so I can later sell that data to advertisers. This seems like the perfect time, when there are only two of them–I can get really in-depth with the data collection. Actually, I just realized that they both have blogs themselves, so there is really no reason to collect data on them. They give it out themselves.

I have this to say: both my readers are extraordinarily good-looking people. I am thinking about what type of audience I want. Do I prefer a smaller audience made up of extraordinarily good-looking people, or a broader audience of all types? Would it be better to have an audience of a few close friends, or an international audience that could make me a box-office hit? There are pros and cons to each type of audience. I put it on my list to make a list of the pros and cons.

It is the essential question in the age of self-broadcast. Which audience?

I am not sure. However, I know it is essential that any audience have these three characteristics:

(1) They must not insult easily–I don’t want an audience who gets huffy at the slightest thing.

(2) They should view any celebrity I obtain as a collective endeavor, like a house raising. It’s not me, but us. They are creating me just as much as I’m revealing myself.

(3) In person, they should always pretend they don’t know about my blog. They should never say, “Oh I love your blog.” They should never mention it. They should never say, “Oh we have so much in common.” They should never ask questions like, “Is it really true that you fucked Bill Clinton?”

These are the three primary characteristics of a bad audience, the people who it would be a drag to write for.

I am sure that my two readers do not have any of these three characteristics, and they also are extraordinarily good-looking. They are wonderful; they are not a drag to write for. I love writing for them. I think it’s a nice moment, here, just the three of us.

The Golden Lasso of Truth

Comparative Superhero Strengths is an important and interesting academic discipline that I almost founded. It’s like Comparative Religion, but instead of religions you compare the various strengths and weaknesses of superheros.

My thesis was 543 pages. It was mostly about Wonder Woman. I attached great meaning to the fact that her main superhero strength was that she had The Golden Lasso of Truth. When she spun this golden lasso around a person, they couldn’t help but tell the truth. I was very moved by it–you didn’t need to do the cinematic things like being able to fly, leap high buildings in a single bound, or wear a cape. Just making people tell the truth, that was enough to be a superhero these days.

My thesis advisor said that it was academically irresponsible to write 543 pages about Wonder Woman without mentioning that her breasts were totally fucking fabulous. We got into a big fight about it. He said that it wasn’t just her breasts and the Golden Lasso of Truth–she also had wristbands that she could use to deflect bullets. “Ouch,” I replied. He didn’t get the joke.

He said that I obviously had not read any of the assigned comic books. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and imagined a golden lasso wrapping around me. Then I said, “You’re right.” The truth was, I hadn’t read a single comic book all semester. I couldn’t even tell if Comparative Superhero Strengths mattered. I was not a superhero.

My Upskirt Shot

Yesterday, I was sitting on the grass with a friend in Palo Alto. A van with a 360 degree camera on the top drove by.

“That’s the Google van,” my friends said.

“That’s how they make Google Streets?”

“Yes.”

“They just took our picture.”

“Good thing we’re not having an affair.” He and I are always trying not to have an affair.

“Very good thing.”

“Did you see the post on Boing Boing about Google spying on someone’s cat?”

“I’m going on a diet. Right now.”

“Why? You’re not fat.”

“I need to loose ten pounds. The camera adds it. If there’s going to be an upskirt shot of me online—which seems inevitable—well, I at the very least don’t want my ass to look fat it it.”

Coffee and Melon Juice

Things are a whir of busy. Airplanes and work and people depending on me and all that. Many lesser people would use this as an excuse not to blog. They would say something cliche like, “Oh, I’m sooo busy living! I just haven’t had the time to blog!” They are wrong. They are the type of people who probably will never be interesting, because they make excuses. Interesting people aren’t like that. Interesting people do not make excuses–they stare down the truth. The truth is that you have 24 hours a day. You fill it. You do what’s important.

Time is always fleeting. It does slip away, like something cliche, like sands through the hourglass. Spending a minute a day trying to remember some of it, trying to pin a specimen of yourself down on a blog seems like a good use of time to me.

I spent the weekend with a lover. Our relationship is based on the fact that we have the same loves: we love productive work, we love fucking, we love reading, and we love drinking. That’s all. We spent the weekend at a beachside hotel, and did set foot on the beach. Or the pool. Or outside the hotel. All those things were outside the scope of our loves.

How many lovers could you do that with? Almost none–by in large, lovers would all implicitly demand that at the very least you take a walk, hand in hand, on the beach with them and would be huffy at dinner if you spent the whole time working instead. The entire idea would be to escape the everyday with your lover.

Not us. Not needed. We needed no escape. We are already there. A walk on the beach would not take us any closer to what we love. We already did what we loved, every day.

We had spent so much time together being happy that I thought on my way home I should determine if I loved him (despite it being a moot point since he didn’t love me.)

I thought to myself that I didn’t love him, but that I could spend every second of every day of my life with him and be happy. Then I thought that was very fucked-up. If that isn’t love then what is love? I think that should be love. Love is what you do every day. Not the exotic. Not the distant balmy beaches. Love is the people, the things, with whom you share the same space.

This is exactly why bloggers should report, so in love, in such detail, exactly what they had for breakfast. When I woke up, he was gone. There was only a note. I called room service and ordered coffee, melon juice, a protein smoothie, huevos rancheros, a bowl of berries, a banana muffin, and a Belgian waffle. I ordered for both of us. Then I ate alone: just a sip of coffee, and the melon juice.

My Trust in God

I realized today that I trust money. Money says, “In God we trust.” Therefore, I trust God.

4 Reasons Why I Hate Snapshots

1. They’re without content, and without the redeeming quality of beauty. Rarely does anyone look good in a photograph. Rarely do they capture someone’s spirit. They’re posed in a way that’s artificial and tells you little about the people being photographed aside from the fact that they were all in the same room at the same time engaged in the innane social convention of taking photographs. Almost no one knows how to actually use their cameras. It should be a law that you are not allowed to show others your photos unless you know what white balance is.

2. Looking at them makes me feel like an alien. I want to say, “Wow. What a boring photo. Jackie looks horrible. Why are we looking at this? What response am I supposed to have? I realize I’m supposed to have some social reaction, so I nod and smile. I want to say, “If we’re going to share our attention, if we’re going to look at something together, let’s look at something interesting or beautiful.” Perhaps worst of all is when the 40-year-old man takes a foray into making artistic photographs—it’s the mid-life crisis for really boring men, I think. They’re almost always an extreme close-up of a flower, occasionally it will be a geometric abstract photograph of city buildings. They present the photograph to you, and you are supposed to nod and validate their creativity. I want to say, “Maybe there’s a reason why you’re a banker.”

3. They proliferate into suburban junk. People have thousands of photographs. They never look at them. It hardly matters that the digital makes endless storage possible. You only have time to look at so many images. You spend all your time uploading them, backing them up, printing them, putting them in scrapbooks or letting them pile up in shoeboxes. I don’t like to own things I don’t use. It seems disrespectful to the object. Even pixels.

4. They’re a horrible way to capture memories. A friend just sent me seven pages of notes from his trip to Africa. It was amazing. I really got a sense of his trip. Had he done what most people do, showed me photos, I wouldn’t have seen anything. 99% of people take the same photographs when they travel–smiling people with their arms around each other, and photos of famous landmarks that are much better photographed in a postcard. Often the two genres are combined. In writing, an author tells you the visual details that he thinks are important. A picture has almost too much information in it. It’s not prioritized. Your typical consumer taking a snapshot is lazy—they let the camera and social convention to do all the work of seeing for them. You can click a button, but that doesn’t mean you see. You have to do that for yourself.

Citation Is An Important Social Value

Good-bye books. I love you. I’m going to miss you.

Reading incites in me the urge to write. Writing incites in me the urge to cite. Citation is an important social value. One should always read the text, return to the text, be grounded in the text. If two people are not discussing the same text then we’re not discussing anything.

I will always love my books, but I can no longer live with them. In this day and age my expectations have changed, sort of like a housewife’s expectations changed the day her husband brought home a washing machine. Nowadays, I just need more out of my books than they are giving me. I know they could give it to me, but they don’t. This is the mark of a bad relationship—it’s a vestige of the past, and you’re clinging to a moment of wonder that no longer exists.

It’s not that I don’t want the physicality of books. I do. I just want to be able to search the books I own. I don’t want to spend hours on proper citation. I could find proper citations using CTRL-F. I could note text; I could tag text. My entire law school oeuvre could fit on one compact disk. All the books I’ve paid for could be accessible to me at all times, no matter what city I’m in.

So, I email Brewster. It works out well. I can pay the Internet Archive to scan my books. Copyright law allows him to provide me with a digital copy for my own personal use, and he can keep a digital copy as a part of the Internet Archive, making them available to blind people, and all that are provided with carve-outs in copyright law.

However, you have to destroy the books to scan them. You have to cut off their spines in an act of mutilation. You have to kill them. I wish I could have both. If you’re willing to pay for it, why must you choose between the content you love and the functionality that the digital age offers.

I’m scared to say goodbye to my books. I depend on their physicality somehow. But, it just reached the point where I had to decide between the physical and the practical. I chose digital functionality. My books recede into memories, and I’m heartbroken. It’s so needlessly cruel.

Teaching Class

I was telling my ballet teacher that I didn’t understand how in my lifetime of taking ballet lessons, I’d learned so little. “Yes,” he said, “no one teaches anymore. They just give class.”

It’s so true. My education has consisted almost entirely of people that give glass. He is perhaps the only teacher I’ve ever had. It’s a very tender role and I’m very grateful for him. I’d posted an ad on Craigslist for a ballet teacher to come to my house. He was the only one that answered.

Next I’m going to post ad on Craigslist for a tutor, a modern incarnation of John Stuart Mill, to come educate me.

The User Manual, Part 1

I have a lot of fears about maintaining a long-term relationship. Specifically, they manifest themselves around two compulsive behaviors brought on by depictions of monogamy in popular culture.

1. I wear lingerie all the time. In the movie High Fidelity, there is a scene where the main character says something along the lines that being in a long-term relationship means you have to look at the same underwear all the time. It was one of those phrases that describes your fears perfectly. I started buying copious amounts of lingerie, and wearing it all the time. No matter what I’m wearing, there’s lingerie underneath it. I have an entire closetful of lingerie. All my lingerie must be washed by hand, and yesterday, I was washing it. I realized that I had not washed any lingerie in almost six months, and that meant that I likely had around one hundred fifty different pieces of lingerie.

Once, my boyfriend undressed me. He sighed. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Sometimes you just want to undress a girl and have her wearing just plain underwear. It’s more exciting. It’s like you’re actually seducing her, not like she’s always planning for sex.”

After we broke up, I went to my mother’s house and stole some of her plain-woman underwear out of her drawer. It was stretched out and stained white cotton. The bra was beige. I wore it all day. It made me anxious and itchy. I realized that a large part of my sanity was caught up in wearing matching bra and panties. It struck me as very sick.

2. I make the bed, every day. I started doing this after reading the book Possession. There was a line in it describing an unmade bed looking like a battlefield. I felt the same feeling of panic. Since that day, I make the bed every morning. One must navigate between their fears, and another fear of mine is that all the time in my life is taken up doing mundane chores. So, I don’t sleep with any sheets. It makes it faster to make the bed. There’s a fitted sheet, and a duvet cover that my housekeeper changes every week. I can make the bed in three gestures. I grab the duvet, and yank it up and down. I grab one pillow and put it in place. I grab the other pillow and put it in place.

It didn’t help. If you’re in a long-term relationship, eventually some mundane object becomes a battlefield. That’s the thing you have to make your peace with. I haven’t.

The User Manual

When we broke-up, I thought, “I just cannot get into another relationship.” I am too old. It wasn’t that I loved him, it was just that I could not bear the thought of starting at the beginning of my life story for the next guy. All the minutia. Where I was born. What I wore on the first day of first grade. How exactly I like to be fucked. There are billions of facts you must tell someone to have even a chance at a decent relationship. I could not bear the thought I would have to start saying them all over again. Moreover, I could not bear the thought that in four years, after having said most of them, having spent copious amounts of time, I would again say the thing that is too ugly, the thing he could never forget, never forgive, and then the new man would just leave again too.

I didn’t know what to do. I pride myself on being a good investor. I’ve always been whip-smart with investing. When I was a child, I follwed stocks the way most children followed sports teams. I’ve been investing since I was eight years old. My allowance has made me a very wealthy woman. My family wasn’t religious. We were capitalists. My mother worked, my father worked. I was a latch key kid. I came home from school and had a snack of raw cookie dough while I checked on my stocks and read the financial papers until my father came home around 6pm to cook dinner. The only profound lessons I’ve had burned on my soul were the lessons of investment. I know that it’s not true, but I can’t help but think of Warren Buffet as my grandfather. I invested in Berkshire Hathway when I was nine, and every year, his investment letter is the most intimate piece of correspondance I receive.

The problem is that the laws of sound investment strategy are exactly opposite to what you need to learn in order to getting married. In investing, it’s absolutely critical that you diversify. In marriage, you have to put everything you have in one stock. You’re forced to invest the most valuable assets you have–your heart, your time–knowing the entire time that the likely failure rate is 50%. And, this so-called 50% success rate seemed highly dubious to me, since all that is considered a success is, “not getting a divorce.” I’d been going to the Berkshire Hathway shareholder meetings since my parents finally let me go when I was sixteen. At every single meeting I stayed up late drinking at the hotel with my fellow Berkshire Hathway shareholders. They were by in large 45 year old men, who after three hours and five beers would always confess just how misrable they were with their wives. It’s sort of a tradition for me that every year at the investor meeting I sleep with a married man. I lost my virginity to a married man (he thought I was eighteen), and it’s really just sort of a sad habit to revisit it every year at the Berkshire Hathway shareholder meeting. I’m thirty years old, and I’ve slept with fourteen married men (I missed two years, when I had a boyfriend). Out of these, there was exactly one who was still in love with his wife. He actually brought her to the shareholder meeting last year and we had a threesome. They were so cute.

I clutched to this threesome, and the fact that I had an unrepresentitive sample of glimpsing the true misery. However, it wasn’t a great investement, even if you assumed the best out of the numbers–that you actually did have a 50% chance of true happiness, not just a 50% chance of not-total-failure. You might as well have bet all your money on the flip of a coin. Even if you haven’t spent your whole life learning about investing, like I have, you can stick your money in index funds and be pretty sure you’re going to get a 10% return. But your heart, your marriage–that’s a matter of flipping a coin, closing your eyes and throwing a dart at the dartboard, choosing door #1 or door #2.

So, being rational, I knew there had to be a way to solve it. How would I solve the problem if I was a CEO, I thought? How would I be sure that my company beat the odds? Then it came to me.

A user’s manual. You got one with your camera, why not get one with your girlfriend? I never got the guys who professed, “I never read the manual.” Who would want to marry one of those guys anyway? What’s fun about intuitively learning how to take photographs while you take tons of crappy photos and never really end up learning how to use the camera entirely? No, I liked the guys who would just sit down for an hour, and read the manual cover to cover. Then, they started taking pictures knowing everything they could. That’s where the fun begins–when you know everything about the camera.

The next time my heart starts to go even the slightest bit, I’m going to hand him the user manual. It’s 436 pages. If he reads the entire thing, we can have a second date.

I Love Oral Argument

You approach the podium. Look the judge in the eye. And say, “May it Please the Court.” It’s so direct it sounds almost naughty. Never, outside of sex, have I stated so plainly my desire to please.

You blush, and buck up for a relationship with a complete lack of social niceties. He won’t pretend he cares about pleasing you. The relationship is constructed for maximum efficiency. Truth-telling could take forever if you let it, and we’ve got a lot of business to get done here.

You’re there, with him, in the eye of the storm — the minutia of the record, the thousands of pieces of paper that make up a lawsuit, years of case law, a client that needs you, the weight of precident, millions of dollars, and the heightened emotions of conflict all swirl around you. But, in that moment, it’s just you and the judge. Everything else is peripheral.

The night before my oral argument, I read a book about the encounter so as to pick the proper outfit; so as to use the proper amount of my sexuality. This book said that the judge wears a robe in order deny his body. So I did my best as well. The entire idea of the courtroom is to provide a place for a man’s head. Where reason might reign. You lay out the framework with a clarity, with a structure, until the judge trusts you are heady enough. Then he listens. Like no one has ever listened to you before.

It’s a swift move into intellectual intimacy with the judge. It’s so intensely erotic; the only place outside of sex that I’ve ever felt the capacity to move into someone’s mind so swiftly. You go to the center of the matter. Do not stop at go. Do not stop to clear your throat, or take a sip of water. You address only what the judge cares about; the issue at hand. Go there.

You try and go right to his place of need, his point of doubt. And if you fail to make it there fast he interrupts you, impatient that you’re not there. He tells you where to go, like a man pushing your head back onto his cock. So directly, like men have been trained not to do. The interaction is structured so that your quaint human responses are inappropriate: defensiveness, annoyance, or distain won’t do. You must state the truth. You must not bore him, even for a moment. There is not enough time. There is the possibility for only one type of relationship: eloquent intimacy. There is only one thing to talk about: the thing that matters.

Those Guys, the Law Abiding Citizens

Once I was sitting in on a meeting with a lobbyist for Napster and an aide to the most powerful person on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee was trying to write legislation banning peer-to-peer software.
The aide was going on and on an on about how this legislation needed to be vague.

He said, “If the law isn’t unclear then those guys (meaning, P2P developers) are just going to write code around it.”

The lobbyist replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh yes. I know what you mean. We have to watch out for those guys. We have to write the law to fool those guys. They’re the ones that are always going to work around the law. Those guys. You know, society has a have a name for those guys. We call them law abiding citizens.”

It was perhaps the only truly funny moment of all the time I spent in Washington and the only time I’d ever hear a lobbyist be sarcastic.

Eternity for the Audience

My ballet teacher just left. He said that dancers believe when they dance they are controlling their bodies. What they really are doing is controlling the audience, and controlling the space. Thus, in arabesque, the most expansive pose in ballet, a quick flick of the gaze above the horizon line opens the space of eternity for the audience.

Oh Andrew, I Don’t Know if I Should Kiss You or Slap You.

I only have an American’s sense of libel. When it involves a public official, we don’t seem to get all up in arms over it like the English do. I’m just getting used to the localized standards of the most easily offended countries being imposed on international websites. If I’m getting it right, I think it might be possible that the British journalist Andrew Orlowski just libeled me, and the rest of the public. We’re not too dumb to understand what Wikipedia is, what it’s good for, and how we should use it.

He rails against Wikipedia’s lack of quality and moral responsibility.

In terms of Wikipedia’s moral responsibility, I can’t imagine what responsibility anyone has other than to do what they say they are going to do. Wikipedia does exactly that. It’s a “Wiki” (meaning, anyone can edit it) “Pedia” (meaning, an encyclopedia). It’s not just in the name, it’s in the tagline—it’s the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I don’t know what Andrew Orlowski thinks Wikepedia’s moral responsibility is, other than the responsibility of being exactly what it claims to be, which it does very well.

Even an utter moron understands what it means that “anyone can edit” Wikipedia. That probably means it’s not the most reliable source. Certainly no one should be copying it straight-up for school assignments–that’s what quality sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica are for. It’s reasonable for the public to believe that the Encyclopedia Britannica is holding themselves out to be an “Encyclopedia” in the full sense of the word–written by experts, fact checked. It’s unreasonable for the public to believe that Wikipedia is doing the same, after all, they’re only half a “Pedia.” It’s a similar situation to Andrew Orlowski being rabid that the website “GossipNews” is publishing unverified opinion. BY GOD’S SAKE! THEY’RE REPRESENTING THEMSELVES AS DISTRIBUTING “NEWS”! THE PUBLIC WILL MISUNDERSTAND! THEY HAVE A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY ONLY TO THE MORE SERIOUS PART OF THEIR HYBRID-NAME!!!

Andrew Orlowski seems to disagree with my 4th grade civics teacher and believes that it’s a citizen’s absolute right to not to need to consult more than one source in order to write their book report (it’s the Encyclopedia’s fault, anyway, since they were the ones that got the information wrong). In terms of the accuracy of information, there’s a spectrum, and I don’t think there’s a single member of the public that wouldn’t rate the accuracy of Wikipedia as lower than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I feel similarly unmoved by Orlowski’s accusation that not only is Wikipedia lower quality, but that they don’t care about quality. Of course they don’t. Why should they? That’s the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s job. That’s what the Encyclopedia Britannica is good at. Wikipedia does an entirely different thing. Does Orlowski’s truly expect them to be the hall monitor for–as he phrases it–every single 14 year-old with acne and problems with authority worldwide? It’s a thankless job. Some country is always going to be accusing you of committing libel, and hey, you can’t help the acne–making fun of that’s just mean.

So, Wikipedia does the reasonable thing and lets the 14-year-olds run free. Without the hall monitors, the public gets pretty good information from the pock-faced despite its pock-mockery. Occasionally it’s deeply flawed, but it can do things that Encyclopedia Britannica can’t. Wikipedia isn’t great at assuring quality, but it doesn’t pretend that it is. It only asserts that anyone can edit it. What it’s good at is immediately incorporating new developments, reporting on a wider variety of subject matter, having a global focus, correcting its mistakes as soon as someone notices, and being available to those that can’t afford to access the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Jimmy Wales “hand-wringing excuses” were his attempt to be a good CEO. Like most CEOs, he wasn’t particularly successful at misrepresenting the truth. I assure you, what he wanted to say was, “Duh?!! Of course we’re making it more difficult to find out who wrote what! If we didn’t, we’d have every sensitive idiot from 50 different countries with 50 different sets of libel laws dropping subpoenas on us. It is expensive. The easily-offended Brits alone would require we hire an army of lawyers. Then, on top of those ninnies, we’d have real problems like the countries that require more direct ‘control’ over their information. You know, the countries where there’s a government mandate that you have to copy your 4th grade civics report out of the encyclopedia word for word. Sure, it’s all fun and games when we’re outing a feller who jokingly posted a few facts about a public official so important they weren’t even noticed by anyone for months, but when we’re required to give up the identity of people that posted about democracy in China so that they can be carted off to jail, well, don’t you Brits and all your huffing and puffing about moral responsibility and quality look silly then. So, we do what we fucking can, which is to offer up the ability for anyone to correct mistaken material and not misrepresent to anyone what we’re offering to the public. We’re not perfect, but we offer some valid public services, and if you want quality, there’s always the Encyclopedia Britannica. We’re not going to change our name to the Truth Encyclopedia America anytime soon. We’re just Wikipedia.”

Oh Andrew. Poor silly huffy Brit. I don’t even feel offended enough anymore to slap you for insulting my intelligence. I just feel sort of sad that it’s what you actually believe.

But, onto the kissing part. Well, it’s more like a peck on the cheek. I did think he accurately described the state of content. Not many people do.

Wikipedia’s proliferation owes much to the fact that we’re currently in a temporary, but very familiar blip in history - one we’ve been in many times before. Wikipedia has sprung up to fill a temporary void. Copyright law exists in a permanent state of tension, and there’s latency between a new technology being invented and compensation mechanisms being agreed upon that spread that valuable, copyrighted material far and wide. So I’m very privileged right now, as a member of the San Francisco public library, to be able to tap into expensive databases I couldn’t otherwise afford. In ten years time, these “member’s societies” will be the norm, and most of us won’t even realize we’re members. The good stuff will just come out of a computer network.

Yes. There’s a huge latency that “quality” publishers like the Britannica aren’t even attempting to solve. So until they figure that out (I hardly think it’s Wikipedia’s moral responsibility to) then the public is going to have to suffer with the generally good Wikipedia, and relying on more than one source to obtain accurate information.

Besides, with Wikipedia’s ability to edit information, I think you can be pretty certain that if some odd facts about John Seigenthaler (who?) weren’t noticed, it’s not because a large segment of users were accepting them uncritically. It’s because no one was writing 4th grade civics reports about him. Now, that’s something an American would spend a night of anguish over. Wait. Is that guy even in the Brittanica? Can someone look that up?

Anonymity is the New Privacy

In the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard opined:

The simple ability to conceal one’s identity is the deep flaw in the arguments of all Web 2.0’s libertarian boosters…All western — not just scientific — wisdom is based on identity. Advocates and their critics can be identified and their ideas formally tested…In the end, Web 2.0 will only be good for us if, somehow, it succeeds in evolving towards an identity-based discourse

Bryan Appleyard is entirely correct in saying that advocates and critics must be identified and their ideas formally tested. This is a fundamental step towards finding the truth. But, for me, it doesn’t follow to say that we must not conceal our indentities on the web. Rather, anonymity is required for us to maintain any semblance of privacy.

Consistant identities are a useful thing to have, but actual identities are not necessary. A name is an arbitrary signifier. It would not make a whit of difference if Einstien had released his papers on the Internet using the nom de plume DaffyDuck. Scientists still would have been able to test and confirm the theory of relativity. And, should Einstien have a penchant for the dark recesses of sexuality, and chose to post on the topic of. I’m just going to stop right there. I don’t want to know. It’s none of my business. I went to Google to search for DaffyDuck’s theory of relativity, not his sexual proclivities. Why should both appear when I search under his name?

The Internet has condensed everything into one sphere. It’s the medium I use to work, to shop, to communicate with friends, lovers, family, and strangers. With each of these groups, I communicate differently. Sometimes I’m naughty, and sometimes I’m nice. Sometimes I’m professional, and sometimes I say what I think. I don’t display all parts of myself to anyone, and everyone thanks me for it. Such boundaries are necessary in a society. The only way such boundaries can be asserted in the technological age is with anonymity.

Prior to the Internet, different identites weren’t needed because our interactions weren’t recorded, and they certainly weren’t searchable by all. But, now, Google holds everything, immediately, forever.

An Internet without anonymity is saying that the Internet should be used as nothing more than a PR tool for those with stable professional identities. We all know that potential employers will search for our names, and what we’ve said online. Without anonymity, no one will say anything outside their professional voice, outside of the voice that they want the world to see they have. There’s a considerable gap between how things are, and how we’d like them to seem.

That gap is called the truth. If we’re to place our bets, mine would be that more truth would emerge from a one night barroom brawl of strangers than an eternal corporate meeting where everyone carefully crafted their sentences with future career aspirations in mind.

The Failed Slut, or, the Successful Vanity Publisher

Duration in vain without end or aim is the most paralyzing idea.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power

I once started a blog. Before this one. It was on blogger or one of those services that anyone can use. It was an impulse. I’m not sure what prompted this impulse—maybe blogging is like electricity and it just ran through me like a current on its way to something novel and important like a dog in China blogging about democracy.

At any rate, the impulse was strong enough that I was able to endure filling out a lot of textfields. All with fake information, of course. I heard that 20% of all bloggers don’t make it through the textfields. It’s really difficult to make up fake information. Writing a fake name, address, telephone, and then thinking up a totally unique but memorable password is one of the most difficult parts of writing fiction. My ballet teacher always said that walking in ballet was the most difficult step, maybe it’s the same principle. To this day, I dream of choreographing a ballet that is all walking.

I never did. I’m a failed choreographer. I’ve failed at so many things I just couldn’t bring myself to fail at blogging. It would just be too pathetic. Nothing sounds more pathetic to me than being a failed blogger. I don’t mind saying that I’m a failed choreographer, a failed girlfriend, a failed novelist, a failed daughter, a failed artist, a failed activist, and a failed employee in general. I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve pretty much failed at everything I’ve ever tried. I’d just feel too pathetic if I failed at blogging. That was a level of failure I was unwilling to descend to.

All the other things I’ve failed at, well, I could imagine Phillip Roth writing a novel about failing at those things. But I bet the entire Internet a thousand dollars that Phillip Roth will never write a novel about a failed blogger. In fact, if anyone on the Internet writes a novel about a failed blogger then I will give them a thousand dollars for the screen rights so that I can make a failed YouTube video out of it.

Since this is an anonymous forum, I’ll admit that I wanted to give up. I’m not sure if you have ever seen the back-end of a blog—maybe you’re just a reader, not a reader-writer-global-web2.0-conversationalist like the rest of us. So, I’ll have to tell you what it looks like. It will bore all the bloggers but I don’t care about them. In fact, they’re such deficient journalists that I must say I’ve never heard them report on what the back-end of a blog looks like. I might actually be breaking this story. Oh sure, bloggers know, but the soldiers in Iraq know all about the war too. Journalism is all about bringing the story to the people that don’t know.

A blog is just a form. It’s a bunch of textfields. It’s basically indistinguishable from online shopping. That’s why I sighed. It was disappointment. I’d expected something a little more glamorous. I thought writing would be different. I never actually believed that markets were conversations. But, it didn’t seem so distinguishable from buying a book, really. A blog was just another form to fill out.

So I filled out the form. I didn’t know what to write, and I was too exhausted to make anything up after filling in all that fake information in the textfields, so I wrote in excruciating detail about the time I fucked Bill Clinton. It was diarrhea of the blog. I think the post was about ten screenfuls.

It was something that I’d never told anyone. I know you think that it would be pretty difficult for me not to confess something like that. It wasn’t. I’d always told myself that if you fuck Bill Clinton then it’s part of the deal that you don’t tell another living soul. I always thought it was sort of like a click-through license—when I let him put his cock in me I was agreeing to the terms that I wouldn’t tell anyone it had happened.

If I let it slip, I would have failed in my duty as a slut. I just could not bring myself to be a failed fucktoy. I learned from history. I could never admit to myself that I was in the same category as Monica Lewinsky, failed fucktoy and failed purse designer. So, I was disgusted with myself when I hit the “Publish” button. But I still did it.

I went to go wash a sinkful of dishes. The water was running, the suds were rising in the sink, and I thought to myself, “That was really easy.” Completely betraying yourself was so easy online.

The Internet made everything the same. My entire life was the same. I filled out forms for work—email is just a form. I filled out forms to buy groceries. I filled out forms to play music. Now, I’d filled out a form to completely betray myself and a man that I respect very much despite the fact he’d used me like a tissue to masturbate into.

I had another impulse. I ran back to my computer. My hands still sudsy, I went to go delete the post. Fuck! I thought. How long till the bloggers find this? Fuck! How long until it’s archived on Google? Oh god! Could I take it back? Or was it like Humpty Dumpty and all the kings horses and all the kings men and the entire Wikipedia community could not put it back together again? It had only been seconds, I’d thought! Everyone makes mistakes! My fingers slipped all over the keyboard since they were all soapy and I was so frantic. I typed bloogee.com bliogger.cin bloger.cin blpsser.com before I dried my hands on my pants and typed blogger.com.

There was a form again. Like Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. I was back where I started, ready to log in again. Only this time, I’d forgotten password. I clicked on the button to get my password resent, and went to log onto my anonymous email address that I’d used to create the account. I tried to log on, but then I remembered—I’d used the same password.

All I could remember is that it was a really good password. It was one that no one could guess and couldn’t be cracked by a brute force attack. I’d chosen it out of paranoia and I suppose a little bit of grandeur that I, a puny little human, could remember something that a computer couldn’t. I skipped the textfields where they asked for a backup email address, since I’d wanted to remain anonymous.

So this was it. I was at the end. I tried all the combinations I could and each time I failed. I got sick of failing. I went to bed and took a nap. When I woke up, it was twilight. I had a moment of perfect awake unconsciousness before anything flooded into my brain. But who you are, what you did, what you have to do next, it comes back much too soon.

In Will To Power, Nietzsche described his concept of the eternal return: “Duration in vain without end or aim is the most paralyzing idea.” It is a blogger’s destiny, and it’s mine. I will will myself to do it. I cannot fail. I am a failure as a slut. In fact, I don’t have anything more that I can fail at. This is my last chance—I cannot fail as a blogger.

I will continue to post in the face of crushing boredom. I will continue to post if the whole world is looking or if no one is looking. I will never let it cross my mind that success as a blogger has no meaning and AdWords cannot change that. I will fall in love with my own voice. I’ve failed at everything else. I will not fail at vanity publishing. If I did, I could never look at myself in the mirror again.

Dear Reader, I Almost Knew You

Foucault said that every writer needs a reader. My problem at the moment is that I do not know who my reader is. It makes it impossible to blog.