Symbols and Signs

The Democratic primary is long over and it’s never been a better time to say something vaguely offensive about the election.

Even though race and gender were always in the background, I still feel that no one was willing to embrace just how much this election was about a black man running against a white woman. It so happens that it was a highly likeable black man versus a highly unlikeable white woman. It also so happens that a lot of what was likeable about Obama—his articulateness and his story—and what was unlikeable about Hillary—her vaginal connections to power and her “ambition”—reflected a lot of positive and negative stereotypes about their respective backgrounds.

And yes, it was more than black versus female. A lot of other things happened. But their platforms weren’t that different. I’m not going to get all Hendrick Hertzberg and compare demographic struggles, but race was more of a deciding issue for voters than gender. I felt no obligation to vote for Hillary Clinton as a woman. But in a

Love Story

When I was in college, I met with a professor about a short story I had written. During our conversation, she told me a short story of her own.

When she was younger, she was a dating a guy who was about to turn 30. She went all out to throw him a surprise party to celebrate whatever hair or youth he had left. She killed herself over the party, inviting all his friends and preparing lots of food. At the end of the night all he could say to her was, “How could you do this to me?” For him it was a commemoration of what he hadn’t accomplished in his three decades on the planet.

I met that same teacher last week to talk about Raronauer'ed, The Novel (working title). Reality inspired a lot of the anecdotes in the book, and my professor pushed me not just to recall 7th grade slights, but also to remember why I had remembered them.

Adults always seem to have an air of inevitability, as if who they became was predetermined and there was never a misstep. For my professor, that feeling went double. I never had ambitions to join academia, but I understood that being a tenured professor in New York was the scholarly equivalent of playing in the NBA. For her to acknowledge her own vulnerability to me was a gift, which is why I haven’t forgotten it.

The coda to this story is that ten years later, on my professor’s ex-boyfriend’s 40th birthday, he called to thank her for his 30th birthday party. Being a regret is a purgatory of sorts, worse in a way than having never been thought of. That story would be less memorable if he hadn’t thanked her at all.

Raronauer True Life: I Love MTV True Life

I made an exciting discovery on the internet last week. Many MTV True Life episodes are available for streaming on MTV.com.

I’ve always loved MTV’s earnest, if shallow, attempts to report the news—remember Sex in the 90s? But this series has always been my favorite. Say what you will about MTV, but they do give a voice to the youth. In the case of True Life, any young person, no matter how ugly, with any problem, no matter how trivial, can explain themselves on cable TV.

Take “I’m Happy To Be Fat.” Mikey is a 476 pound gay man from Nashville, Tennessee. In case you missed it in the title, but he’s ecstatic to be morbidly obese, especially because that makes him the object of desire for chubby chaser fetishists. During shooting, one his “friends” from the internet comes to Nashville to visit, and by visit, I mean screw. Obviously True Life paid for this trip, but this MTV sponsored deus ex machina is a small price to pay to watch the two at a buffet, where the chase loads up the chubby with desserts.

MTV True Life is sort of like The Hills but with ugly people and real issues, or realer issues. When The Hills wasn’t as blatantly fake, part of the fun was the voyeurism. These were real people, not picked to live in a house, dealing with the universal experience: mean boyfriends, mean friends and mean bosses. So conversations never went anywhere? That’s real too. I can’t remember the last non-listless conversation I had. Now that the stars of the reality show are real stars, I enjoy The Hills for the meta-reality of it. Even though I already know that Spencer and Heidi are going to get back together, it still feels like live tabloid drama, time delayed, when I watch them reunite on The Hills.

Whether the problems are unique like “I Have a Husband in Iraq,” or everyday like “I’m Pregnant” (which should be shown to teens as an antidote to Juno) MTV successfully plays to lowest common dominator voyeurism. Basically, let me look in on anyone’s life, and I’ll be interested.

That’s Very White Of You Mr. Hertzberg

No one ever wins comparing the suffering of two minority groups. Yet Hendrick “still getting over 2000” Hertzberg argues that black Americans have had a tougher time of it than women. As a white male, I’m sure that Hertzberg has a lot of insight into the plight of both groups.

I am white, so unlike Hertzberg, I won’t say what it’s like to be a black person in this country. I will say the statistics he cites in the piece are misleading, like that there are less black governors than lady governors. True! One problem: 50 percent of this country is female, while only 12 percent is black. And even if I did believe that public figures should mirror census figures, which Hertzberg seems to, women, not blacks, are the ones who are less represented by their politicians.

Again, there’s no sense in comparing and contrasting. But I will say this: In every culture and in every period, women have been treated as inferior to men. Gender is the first subjection. In present day New York, I can do things my grandmother couldn’t even dream of, but I still face small discriminations everywhere. And it’s these little things, which are understood and accepted among women, that Hertzberg could never know about.

Yes, women were never lynched, but we’ve been raped since the beginning of time. Even now, women are still valued for their looks and domesticity. Casual sexism is so commonplace that voting for Hillary Clinton on gender alone seemed absurd to many women. And the fact women have not overcome this barrier, and in fact, did not consider it a barrier worth overcoming, shows how far away we are from equality.

I'm So Vain, I Probably Think This Blog Post Is About Me

Since I read it, I’ve been mentally rereading Haruki Murakami’s piece on writing and running from last week’s New Yorker. It so happens that along with being a Murakami fan, I also write and run. The essay was like the New Yorker’s combined birthday and Chanukah present for me.

In the article, Murakami admitted that he writes for the reader, or rather, the one-in-ten reader whom he hopes to make a fan. This surprised me: Murakami is generally pretty gangster about the opinions of others. That is to say, he seems to do things for his own ends, not anyone else’s.

Personally, I don’t care about my readers in the “I owe something to them” sense. I care about my readers in the “I seek approval from others” sense, which makes me a little nauseous. Knowing this about myself, I hate to promote my work, lest I don’t get the approval I seek. And even when people do like my writing, I’m too unsettled by the potential satisfaction to enjoy it.

The problem with writing, or creating anything, is that you’re either doing it for yourself (narcissist!) or you’re doing it for others (appeaser!). No matter what, there’s an undeniable element of vanity in making something. Outside of my own ego, I’m not sure why I write. Something about it just satisfies me, which I think Murakami would understand.

Wanted: A Real Issue

Missing someone is the dumbest problem ever. There’s a clear cause—the person is gone—and a clear solution—the person comes back. Complaining about missing someone is like complaining Wanted isn’t out yet. There’s nothing to do other than wait. Problems need some ambiguity to be interesting.

(Though really, being desperate for Wanted to come out is lamer than missing someone.)

The New Yorker Knows My Body

Haruki Murakami on running and writing this week:

When I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. … People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it’s not always easy to see things this way. I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. … If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble. In other words, let’s face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.

The Purpose Of My Trip Is Travel

So loyal Raronauer'ed readers, bad news: I’m going away for a week. My BF For E and I are going on a road trip to invigorate the U.S. economy through reckless oil consumption.

In high school, my friends and I went to Montreal for spring break. On the train there, a border patrol guy asked the reason for my trip and I answered, “travel.” This is apparently not a valid response. You can’t just go to Canada to travel. You need to have pleasure or business involved.

But the best part of some trips is the travel. One of my favorite things about visiting my parents is taking the train. Each ride reminds me of the ones I’ve taken before. It’s a sentimental 34 minutes, thinking of the first rides I took with my dad, before I understood why he preferred reading to chatting, the ones I later took with my friends where our idle gossiping disturbed everyone else in the car, and the ones I eventually took by myself, where I learned the pleasure of reading a book in the increments of my commute.

So officially, my friend and I are going to Savannah. But really, we’re just going traveling.

Tattoo You

Ok, secret time: I don’t like Ian McEwan. I don’t like him so much, I can’t even imagine how somehow could possibly like him. Not Saturday. Not Atonement. Not anything else he’s written because I won’t try it.

This leads to problems because a lot of my friends really do like him. I once got into a big fight over the internal logic of Saturday. While I still believe that McEwan doesn’t take a stand on the whole art versus science thing and his main character is a man-brat, I’ll concede that McEwan has accomplished something. He’s created a fictional world that facilities real debate.

So it is with Emily Gould’s

The Status Is

I regretted saying that I only update this site as a means of passive aggressive communications almost immediately. After a week long absence, I’ve updated three days in a row and I’m not passive aggressively communicating with anyone, at least not consciously.

Obviously, the other reason I update this blog is self-promotion. Inspired by the absurd status updates from our Facebook friends, my friend Brian and I started The Status Is, a web site of curious status updates. It’s sort of like Post Secret meets a cease and desist order from Facebook, though my lawyer/dad says we should be okay should it come to that. Anyway, check it out and submit at thestatusis@gmail.com.

Dream On

Last night, I dreamed that I inherited $500,000. It’s funny when your dreams are so literally dreams.

“Butterflies Are Passive Aggressive”

So this couple I sort of know from real life but more so for their internet presence broke up. This is sad, especially because they had so many adorable pictures and videos of themselves online.

Since the break up, each has been updating their respective blogs like crazy. I’ve gone through periods where I write in this space a lot. Most people assume these phases are correlated to my free time. This is not true. My stages of prolific blogging are usually about passively communicating with someone. This is lame.

Perhaps even lamer, when I reread old posts I wrote with someone in mind, even I can’t decipher the message. The intended reader probably had no idea I was even being passive aggressive. Can I take class for this?

Chick Off

If women read more than men—and that’s not a hypothetical, it’s a fact—why is every female writer so afraid of creating “chick lit”? Why do books need a male audience for cultural approval?

Emoticon, Or The Whale

Everyone thinks Moby-Dick begins “Call me Ishmael,” but everyone is an idiot. It actually begins like this:

ETYMOLOGY (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School) The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. ETYMOLOGY “While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.” —HACKLUYT “WHALE. … Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted.” —WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY “WHALE. … It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN; A.S. WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow.” —RICHARDSON’S DICTIONARY תנים (TaNiYM), Hebrew. XnTos (kpTos), Greek. CETUS, Latin. WHÆL, Anglo-Saxon. HVALT, Danish. WAL, Dutch. HWAL, Swedish. WHALE, Icelandic. WHALE, English. BALEINE, French. BALLENA, Spanish. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Erromangoan.
So what does whale in Danish have to do with Ahab’s hunt for Moby-Dick? Throughout the book, Ahab’s obsession with Moby-Dick is rivaled by Melville’s own monomania to describe the essence of the whale. In the end, both are impossible pursuits. Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and Melville learns that there are a million ways to hint at “whale” but no word or hundred thousand words to capture its meaning. This is the existential struggle of communication. So lately, I’ve decided to embrace the futility of language by using emoticons. I usually hate when people use colons, semi-colons and parentheses to describe their feelings. But sometimes, the meaningless of “:)” is its value. Recently, a friend of mine lost a family friend. Her death was unexpected and, as is usually the case, unfair. Speaking to another friend about this over IM I wrote, “Death is :(” Of course “:(” is a terrible description of death, but no worse than sad. Death is so much more than either expression, but “:(” at least hints at the much larger and indefinable emotional experience. And in that ambiguity lays some meaning. Or something like that, ;)

An Open Tape

When I was in college, we read a story about 12 brides who were wed on the same night. The next day, their marriage sheets were taken out and displayed. Eleven were stained with blood and one was white.

All the students in my class immediately assumed the twelfth bride had previously given it up, while all the other women were virgins. But our teacher pointed out there was a host of possibilities about why that the bride’s sheet was white. The husband could have been impotent. She could have refused him. She could have been raped before her marriage. Anything could have happened on that white sheet, while only one thing happened on the bloody ones.

And this brings me back to The Hills. Though Spencer Pratt is a famously bad English student, he understands the importance of the open-ended narrative. Sure, creating a sex tape is a specific sexual act. But the idea of a sex tape raises a more interesting question: What’s on that tape? Anything from hand holding to furry role playing could be on it. A rumor of a sex tape is much more intriguing than a rumor that Lauren is into erotic asphyxiation.

It’s times like this I’m glad I majored in English.