I saw the movie crazy/beautiful yesterday on television and it was, well, beautiful. I tend to be very very critical of teenage coming of age love stories, since it's so hard to do anything interesting with a genre that's been done to death, but this was one done right. Apparently the more explicit sex and drug use scenes were edited so that the film could maintain a PG13 rating. This may have compromised the quality of the film, but it's still damn good. It's really nice to see Kirsten Dunst act her little heart out as Nicole, a role more challenging than Mary Jane in Spiderman, or Torrence in Bring it On (although she was charming in both those roles). And damn--Jay Hernandez, who plays the male lead Carlos, left me weak in the knees. His lips, his eyes, his chest, his tattoos...*swoon.* What a gorgeous guy. The critique of well-meaning but clueless liberals was not as trenchant as it could have been, but the wince factor was high when Nicole's father tries to empathize with Carlos by telling him that "it must have been hard to escape from la vida loca of drugs and violence...it's not just a Ricky Martin song." (Or something close to that).

I love Caffe Driade. Not only do the servers and the patrons provide plenty of eye candy, as well as nummy pastry treats, but they almost always play fantastic music there. It was where I first heard Beck's Sea Change, as well as Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism. I got more done during five hours there tonight than I've gotten done the entire past week. Damn but I wish I were more productive at home.

Anyway, there's a story of mine which has been in progress for over a year, called "Cookie Dough." I had the first couple of lines and the last couple of lines for the longest time, but couldn't write what happened in between those two points until tonight. This is a first draft, so it's unpolished (God, I always say that...at every story reading, I've said those exact words). I think this is the first story I've written in three years that does not contain the word "orifice." Woo!

Cookie Dough

Robbie smashed a second scoop of chocolate ice cream into the paper cup. He sang with Britney on the radio, his overly cigaretted voice offering a plaintive and weary interpretation of “Oops I did it again.”
“Is that all? I can’t believe I’m paying $3.14 for just that much.” The woman’s red lips were pursed in displeasure, like a bloody gash beneath her nose. Her knuckles were white from grasping the Sunday Times so tightly.
Robbie masked his irritation with a creative interpretation of a smile. “You asked for two scoops. Ye ask, and ye shall receive.”
Robbie had renounced God after a particularly nice screw with a plaid-sporting Steve McQueen type in a red pickup truck on October 23rd, 1977, and he never went back. But when he raised his eyes from the cash register to take the next order, he could have sworn that an angel appeared before him. This vision of such beauty and purity and innocence was so sickeningly sweet, he felt like he was being asphyxiated with vanilla. Robbie was suddenly self-conscious about his rough, scarred skin, and the strands of gray mixed with dirty blond of his straggly shoulder-length hair. This boy…his creamy smooth skin, rosy cheeks, chocolate curls of hair…this was a dream of a boy, who knew no evil, no ugliness, no wrong. Robbie almost wanted to take a bite of him and swallow him and digest him to incorporate his young fresh molecules into his own body’s aging matter…but then again, eating veal or lamb doesn’t make one feel any younger or more innocent.
“Your name must be Dick, right?” Robbie found these words escaping his mouth, to his surprise.
“Why do you say that?”
“You look like a drawing in one of those Dick and Jane books, the kind that my Dad read to me when I was a kid.”
The young boy smiled widely, and the brilliant glow of his teeth combined with the sparkle of his eyes nearly blinded Robbie. “I guess I do look pretty old-fashioned. I’m not like some of the other kids here with spiked, bleached blond, or purple hair. My name is Jim. What’s yours?”
“Barbra Streisand.”
“Well, your nametag says ‘Robbie,’” Jim noted, confused.
His mother suddenly appeared, resembling a massive peach elephant beside him. “Jim? Have you gotten your ice cream yet?”
Jim turned to his mother and gave her the same charming smile he had given to Robbie just a few seconds earlier. “No, mom. You sit down and I’ll take care of it. You want butter pecan, right?”
His mother looked critically at Robbie. “You make sure this boy gets nothing but the best, you hear? He got a 1580 on his SAT’s. He’s going to go far someday. Maybe even president!”
“Well, I’ll make sure that this future luminary gets whatever sweet treat his little heart desires.”
Mom glared at Robbie. “Just make sure that your dirty hands don’t come in contact with his ice cream. I don’t want him to get any diseases from the likes of you.”
Was it that obvious that he had HIV? His T-cell count was still decent, and he had always been skinny. Robbie didn’t think he looked sick, at least not yet. Or was she just assuming this because he was gay? Robbie wasn’t sure, but he managed to keep his expression neutral as he regarded Jim’s mother. “I wouldn’t dream of corrupting your son. After all, he’s our future president.”
Jim blushed. “Mom, you just sit down, okay? He’s doing a fine job.”
Mom harrumphed and navigated the way back to her chosen table.
Jim leaned forward and whispered, “I’m sorry she was rude. She didn’t mean it…Sometimes she just gets a little uppity.”
Robbie felt himself melting under the soft brown-eyed gaze of this boy. “She’s proud of you, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just an ice cream scooper. You’re gonna be someone important someday.”
Jim looked startled by this comment. “Everybody’s important, including you.”
Robbie paused, and tried not to show the emotion that he felt, which manifested in a burning sensation inside of the bridge of his nose. He managed a crooked smile and brandished his ice cream scooper. “So Jim, your mom wants butter pecan, what about you?”
Jim gave him another of his devastating smiles. “Chocolate chip cookie dough, please. Both large, in cups."
“You got it, Dick.” Robbie grinned.
“My name’s Jim!” he protested, mock-offended.
“Well, it should be Dick.” Robbie went to task, slipping the edge of the scooper beneath the surface of the butter pecan carton and carving a curl of ice cream which he deposited in a cup, followed by a second scoop. He placed the cup on the counter for Jim. He then rinsed his scooper and moved to the cookie dough carton, repeating the motions. He heaped the contents of this cup particularly high.
“Do you guys make your own ice cream here?” Jim queried.
“Sure do. The best you’ll ever have, Dick.” Robbie placed the second cup on the counter next to its older sibling.
Jim grinned. “You’re awfully confident about that. What will happen if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong. This is the best, kid.” Robbie’s fingers were a little stiff from the near-contact with the freezer as he rang the order up on the cash register. “$7.26.”
Jim fished in his coat pocket for his wallet, and extracted a $10 bill. “Here ya go.”
Robbie slipped the $10 bill into its slot in the register, and counted out the change. “All right, Dick. You and your momma enjoy your ice cream, okay?” He placed the change in Jim’s hands, and his fingers brushed Jim’s open, waiting palm. A jolt of electricity raced up his arm from the point of contact. Robbie trembled slightly and looked away from Jim, not wanting to showcase the vulnerability likely present in his eyes.
Jim looked at Robbie with knowing gentleness and withdrew the hand clutching his change. “Thanks. You take it easy, okay?”
“Take it easy,” Robbie echoed. His eyes followed Jim as he grabbed a couple of spoons and some napkins from the counter, and made his way towards his mother. Robbie realized that they had probably come in after church, given his mother’s dress and flowered hat, and Jim’s navy suit.
“Sir? Sir! Excuse me, I’m ready to order.” Robbie snapped to attention and turned to look into the face of a twenty-something Asian woman with an impatient expression, a physiology textbook tucked under one arm. Must be one of those medical students.
“Sorry, sweetheart. What can I get you?”
"Small pistachio, please."
As Robbie moved his scooper toward the pistachio carton, he quickly glanced over to the seating area to find Jim. He and his mother had risen from their chairs and were putting on their coats. As they headed for the exit, Jim turned and his eyes met Robbie’s, whose heart raced in response. The corners of Jim’s lips rose in a shy smile, and his arm rose in a jaunty wave.
Robbie paused in his scooping and dipped his chin in acknowledgement. He did not blink once until Jim’s figure was obscured by the glass windows and finally left his sight. He wanted all 24 frames a second to replay in his mind as he lay in bed that night, beneath the constellations he had fashioned on the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark sticker stars.

To return to my rant about stupid comments said to biracial people, I have to mention this site. Ugh. While I suppose the claim that biracial chicks are always supremely hot is intended to be a compliment, there are two sketchy aspects to this. First of all, there is the suggestion that when Asian features are diluted by Caucasian features, they become more conventionally attractive. Even Asian people are guilty of this. One of my cousins (who is fully Asian) once looked at me wistfully and said, "I wish I could be half white, so I could have eyelids like yours and so my skin wouldn't be as dark." The fuck? This girl is much, much more conventionally beautiful than I could ever hope to be, and she's telling me this shit? Argh. I also recall one Asian chick telling me, "I want to have a kid with a white man, because Eurasian people are always so beautiful." (Well, I then reminded her that I was Eurasian, and she looked at me quizzically and said, "What? Oh yeah! I forgot you were biracial!" *ahem* Gee, thanks for that ego-booster.) Second of all, it singles out Eurasian people as somehow special or different from people of other ethnic backgrounds in terms of their potential attractiveness. I've seen quite a few Eurasian people, and they run the gamut from exceedingly hideous to spellbindingly gorgeous and everything in between. Just like people of any ethnic background. We're not "special" in that way. Perhaps people come to this assumption because of their lack of exposure...they might not see many Eurasians other than celebrities such as Keanu Reeves or Dean Cain or Devon Aoki, and come to the conclusion that all Eurasians must be that beautiful. Or they might see the one Eurasian kid in their school who happens to be really attractive, and then conclude that all Eurasians must be attractive. Erm, no. Wrong.

Song of the moment: Wilco's "How to Fight Loneliness." Solitude is something I embrace, not something from which I try to escape. I'm usually spinning so many thoughts in my head that I don't notice that I'm alone. But I feel a little twinge of recognition when I hear this song all the same. "Doo doo doo, doo doo doo, just smile all the time..."

Fucking insomnia.

Earlier this evening, a car horn somewhere outside of my apartment blared for at least thirty minutes. At first I feared that it might be a scene recreated from Chinatown, but there was enough variation in the noise (such as a few short pauses sandwiched between long stretches of "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep") that I figured it probably was not caused by the weight of a corpse. I'm guessing it was probably just drunken lout behavior. Here's hoping.

I love Dick Button (or as I've called him over the years, "Dick Butt"). He's a figure skating commentator who bitches at inadequate layback spins and voices the desire to pinch the cheeks of chubby faced Russian female skaters. He's the cantankerous one who bluntly says when a skater sucks ass, while Peggy Fleming hurriedly reminds us the viewing audience how nice a person the skater is, to draw attention away from the shitty performance. I watched the U.S. National Championships today, and thankfully Dick Butt was there to give his opinion sans bullshit. He cracked me up when he began to bitch about the first male skater's "flailing of his arms" which distracted from his program. But he was right; it was distracting. The entire men's skate was sort of an odd experience; there were all these tall, slender, lanky men who looked like Japanese anime characters, who twisted themselves into all sorts of insane positions as they leapt and spun and danced across the ice. I liked their sexual ambiguity, their androgyny. Since Rudy Galindo's win several years ago, there has definitely been more freedom in U.S. male skating for men to look pretty and skate prettily (or in a "feminine" way, to use the stereotypical meaning of that word).

ABC Sports tried to help us get to know the skaters better by adding little bullets underneath their names shortly before they skated. I know now that Michael Weiss "works with a hypnotist," and Johnny Weird "idolizes Justin Timberlake and likes to roller skate." Oops, I meant Johnny Weir, but I kind of like that typo, so I'll leave it be. In any case, I did not want to know that Johnny idolized Justin Timberlake and liked to roller skate, and my enjoyment of his gold-medal winning performance might have suffered because of that knowledge. He did have a beautiful skate, though. And it was pretty inspiring that he had such a disastrous long program skate last year, including falling through the boards and having to restart his program and fucking up all his jumps, and ultimately withdrawing due to injury. It's goofy, but I get all warm and tingy over these sorts of inspirational stories. After all my fuckups the past couple of years (which are relative, I know, but I'm a critical person), it's nice to think that with determination and hard work, I could overcome them and become a champion of some sort (a "champion" as I define the word). Provided that 1) I have the talent, and 2) I find that determination and hard work. Iffy at the moment.

My favorite had to be the guy with the rainbow tiered sleeves who skated to some sort of pulsating drum-filled tribal music, who ended up in 4th. He had such a fluid style, with such attention to the music as he illustrated its rhythms by twisting his torso and carving spaces with his arms. He seemed like the type of guy who regularly did yoga and had a collection of crystals, and who only drank herbal tea. He had a sort of unselfconsciousness about him which reminded me of the performance artists and dancers I've known. The commentators spoke about how he and his wife did community service work, and taught Sunday school to underprivileged children; I wasn't surprised.

I saw the ladies' free skate as well, and of course was completely enthralled by Michelle Kwan's skate. It was gorgeous. Perfect. Her excitement during the last minute of her program, after she had completed all of her jumps, as she raced across the ice doing her footwork...chills, baby. Chills.

Outside of opera, figure skating is one of the few somewhat mainstream realms which irony has not yet penetrated. It's truly a sport for romantics, with its overblown emotions, its ridiculous costumes, its gaudy story-telling, its intense now-or-never competition. Your worth is solely judged by those three or four minutes on the ice, not how good you were in practice, not how good you were in the last competition. Just those three or four minutes. And the skaters feel it, the audience feels it. It's so intense. I love it.

Top 5 things NOT to say to someone who is biracial, or of ambiguous race (such as myself):

1) "What are you?"
I always hate hearing this question when the questioner is actually asking about my race, especially when it's the first or second thing that (s)he wants to know after meeting me. To properly answer the question: I'm female, I'm an art lover, I'm a bitch at times, I'm neurotic, I'm excessively verbose, I'm wacky, I'm uncertain about my future, I'm a dedicated listener, I'm a daydream believer, I'm an introvert, I'm a huge fan of R.E.M., I'm someone who suffers from inner turmoil regarding the meaning of my existence. Oh, and my mother is Asian, and my father is Caucasian, and thus I am half of each. If you want to know my ethnicity, then ask specifically about my ethnicity. Don't assume that my ethnicity is the totality of my existence and my identity, because you'd be wrong.

I often respond to this question by asking the person to guess, and I've heard everything from Native American to East Indian to Italian to Mexican to Egyptian to Filipino to Jewish. In my numerous travels around the world, people have come up to me and spoken to me in their native language, often assuming that I work at the store or restaurant where we happen to coexist. Here in the States, Latinos often approach me with a question in Spanish which I regretfully cannot answer. Strangely enough, my racial identity is so ambiguous that I am treated like a universal native...except in my own country, where I am called things like "exotic." See example #3.

2) "Wow, that's so cool of your parents!"
Yes. Back in the 70's, my parents looked at each other, realized that they were of different races, and decided to fuck the whole racist interracial taboo bullshit by literally fucking each other. Their copulation, and thus their creation of me, was all in the name of political correctness, which warms your fuzzy nonracist heart.

3) The word "exotic." e.g. "You look like an exotic Egyptian princess!" or "Oh, so that's why you look so exotic" (upon learning the components of my ethnicity).
OK, so you're saying that I'm the "other," that I'm a foreigner to you, even though I was born in New York City and raised in New Jersey and as American as any other kid. And you use a word that brings to mind Gauguin's Tahitian mistresses and Delacroix's Arabian prostitutes who offer the European man respite from the confines of his own culture via their savage mindless lusty bodies and their feathers and jewels and spices. A guy used this line on me, and it was an immediate dealbreaker. "Exotic" is not a compliment.

4) "Does your brother look more or less Asian [or insert other race here] than you do?"
A female physician actually asked me this during an interview for a NY medical school, after she took off her glasses and peered at me for a few minutes, presumably to determine how "Asian" I looked to her. How the hell am I supposed to make this sort of judgment to answer this question? Am I supposed to measure the size of his eyes compared to mine? Measure the degree that his eyes tilt compared to mine? The relative flatness of our noses? The relative yellowness of our skins? Examine the configuration of his features and determine how it much it deviates from what is stereotypically Asian, compared to mine? This was one question that rendered me absolutely speechless.

5) "If you had to choose one, would you say that you're Caucasian or Asian? [or insert two races here]"
I'm half of each. One parent is one, and another parent is the other. Hence I'm biracial. Don't ask me to choose one, because I won't. Maybe in your little world (or the world of the writers of demographic questions for the census, SAT's, whatever), a person can only identify with one race. That's not my world, where duality and plurality are quite acceptible, thanks.

Also, pick-up lines not to use on Asian chicks (these are real examples):
-Hey, I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
-Your hairstyle really goes well with your ethnicity.
-You speak English really good! No really, you don't have an accent at all!

Song of the day: "White Winos" by Loudon Wainwright III (Rufus's daddy). Somehow I ended up downloading the song awhile back, I don't recall exactly why. I think I had read positive things about his 2001 album, The Last Man on Earth, and in my curiosity downloaded whatever I could find, and ended up with this song. In any case, it struck me like no other song ever had before, or has since. It's one of the two most wryly moving son-to-mother odes I've encountered (my other favorite is David Sedaris's essay, "Ashes"). I just love when he sings about how he'd switch from wine to beer whenever he and his mother would start to talk about the "old man." There's an easy, simple grace to this song, with the aftertaste of mourning, just like the bitter aftertaste of a complex wine (ugh, cheezy simile, I know). I put the song on a mix CD which I made for a college friend, and also on a mix tape that I had left in my car before my father had used it during my winter break. After he returned the car to me, he mentioned this song specifically, along with Eva Cassidy's "Fields of Gold" and Beck's "Already Dead." Since he's such a wine connoisseur, I'm not surprised it caught his attention. The version I downloaded a few years ago is a truncated version, as I discovered today. As I was leaving NJ to head back to NC, the local radio station (God bless Brookdale public radio 90.5 FM) played a longer version of "White Winos" with several verses I hadn't heard before, which explicitly acknowledged Loudon's mother's death and was more obviously sentimental and wistful. I like the longer version, actually, because it gives a little more context, a little more detail to round out his mother's portrait as well as his own. Shit, I'll obviously have to get the album now.

I saw the most beautiful sunsets while driving. Puddles of melted sherbert (orange and raspberry) blending into an array of beautiful pastels (melons and pinks). Lavender clouds with glowing copper lacey edges.

Last night I dreamt about a guy I used to deeply, desperately love, and am still rather shaken. I haven't been in contact with him for several years. It's amazing how strong an effect the memory of him still has on me. I don't think I'd want to see him again.

I visited a college friend for New Year's and we got into a discussion about various people we knew who were absolute gems, witty and brilliant and sweet, but were hideous by conventional standards of physical attractiveness, and thus had issues with poor self image. And I admit that as gorgeous as some of them are on the inside, I couldn't imagine being attracted to them or fucking them. So perhaps my earlier post about character actors, or at least my claim that I could completely look past physical appearance with regards to attraction, was pure horseshit. *shrug* But that doesn't mean that I can't work towards becoming a better person someday, right?

By the way, speaking of character actors again, I love Bob Balaban. He was a treat in Ghost World, but I love him best in Waiting for Guffman, where he played the musical director who so clearly resented Corky for getting all the glory despite his ineptitude.

I went ice skating with my mother and my aunt today, and really loved it. I've skated twice before. The first time was a few years ago, with my friend Joe. We were probably both about 17. It was wintertime and we decided to skate on an open rink in the South Street Seaport in New York City. Neither of us had ever skated before, and there was much unintentional ass/ice contact. At times he grabbed me for support as he wobbled, which in turn made me lose my balance, and down onto the ice we went. After one of our more spectacular falls, the onlooker tourists crowded around our crumpled bodies, and then pointed and laughed and mocked in their native tongues. The second time was in North Carolina with a bunch of medical school friends. Today's third attempt was in New Jersey (best place in the world, second to Paris). I thought I was going to go insane when the public skate began with a Phil Collins medley (those horrible Disney Tarzan songs which make my ears bleed), but once the music switched to the Beach Boys, I was able to blissfully skate without trying to contain my irritation. (Although it seemed a bit incongruous since the Beach Boys' music always makes me think of summer, rather than winter, their name aside. I know once the summer heat returns, I'll be dusting off my Pet Sounds.) I whizzed along, with cold-bitten cheeks and flapping hair, trying not to crash into the lightning-fast four-year-olds who skillyfully weaved in and out of other more clumsy skaters, such as myself. There was an older guy, presumably a Dad, who chased a young boy, presumably his son, around the rink. Whenever Dad caught the kid, he lifted him up and carried him; as they flew together on the ice, the kid's face was alight with pure joy. While viewing this episode, I experienced one of those rare little aches in my chest, one of those pesky pangs of longing...for a kid, and for a husband or lover who fathered that kid with me, and for the opportunity to watch them do these sorts of sickeningly sweet things together. But then I remembered how glad I am to be able to wait a long time before dealing with any of the responsibilities which accompany cutesy family scenes such as that one.

I fell twice. The first fall probably provided much entertainment to the older moms who were seated on benches ouside the rink, watching their kids stumble on the ice, cameras in hand. There was much arm circling (r of circle = full length of arm) and body bending 45 degrees forward, then backward, then forward again, and leg wobbling, and then...splat. Well, if I'm going to fall, then I'm going to do it in style, dammit. I know the older moms got a laugh or two out of me. Although hopefully they kept their fingers off of their shutter buttons while I was doing my thing.

So, I must admit that after seeing the final Lord of the Rings movie on the big screen tonight (the first one of the trilogy that I've seen on the big screen), I finally understand why so many people are so taken with Legolas, the Orlando Bloom character. I grudgingly admit that yes, he is very pretty with his long blond hair and lithe figure and serene expression and occasional silver head jewelry. And his action sequences with all that arrow-shooting are indeed very cool (I loved the scene where he crawled up the elephant and arrowed all the baddies). However, his face bears such a strong resemblance to the face of the friend I mentioned earlier, Joe, that I can't see Legolas without also seeing Joe. It really is unnerving.

I have so much love for Rufus Wainwright's Want One album, and have been listening to it over and over again. I've heard that his earlier albums are better, but I haven't heard them so I can't compare. I've also heard that he's kind of an ass, but I loved his salon.com interview, and haven't read much else so I can't say for certain that he is guilty of assholism. In any case, anyone with a Romantic sensibility will get love from me, because of my insane fondness for those guys (Delacroix and Keats and Coleridge and the Shelleys...I still think that Percy Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" is one of the greatest influences in my life, and definitely one of the most beautiful things I've ever read). And, erm, he sure is pretty. I was actually worried that my love for the album would be marred by negative association, since I played it in the car to calm my nerves as I was driving to meet a guy who turned out to be a complete asshole; thankfully that has not been the case. Some of the lyrics of the songs are meh (what was up with that Britney Spears reference?), but the soaring operatic vocals and classical music influences are simultaneously spine-tingling and very calming. It's lush and gorgeous. *sigh* "Men reading fashion magazines...oh what a world it seems we live in...straight men..."

An older friend of the family, M, was suffering from the ravages of ovarian cancer (currently in remission, thankfully) when another lady (who had gone through a health crisis of her own) told her, "Let people love you. Don't fight them." M proclaimed this to be one of the most important pieces of advice she had ever received. While these words resonated with something inside of me when she told them to me so many months ago, I certainly have not followed them. I'm not sure I know how. For future crises, I hope I learn.

I finally got a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories (thanks Santa) and have been reading them the past couple of days. I had never read her stuff before. It's lovely. The stories are sometimes a little too narrow in their concerns, and sometimes lack a little polish, but boy do I envy the sharp and concise and brutal quality of her prose. And she has a morbid and slightly despairing sensibility which I understand quite well (although I still retain some youthful idealism to temper this in myself). I read "Big Blonde" first, and it's definitely the strongest of the stories I've read so far. "Here's mud in your eye."

I saw the film Cold Mountain a couple of days ago, which I absolutely, passionately adored. (Then again I'm a sucker for epic historical romances...I similarly swooned for The English Patient, another film directed by Minghella, which many of my friends despised). I spent the first few minutes of the film scrutinizing Nicole Kidman's face for the evidence of plastic surgery (which was very apparent in the piece-of-shit trailer for the Stepford Wives remake), but soon abandoned that habit as I lost myself in the story, the characters, the images. I've muchly liked Jude Law in everything I've seen him in so far, and he doesn't disappoint in this film...he was achingly beautiful, tragic, wonderful. I'm relieved that he, and not Tom Cruise, ended up playing the part of Inman. Nicole Kidman (although her Southern accent was less than convincing) and Renee Zellweger were also damn good. Jack White's cameo wasn't as distracting or laughable as I thought it might be (although it was strange to think that he and Renee were dating at the time the film was made, and that he subsequently broke up with her while she was filming the sequel to Bridget Jones' Diary, possibly due to her weight gain or her "conventional" lifestyle during the film). But as often happens when he appears in a film, Philip Seymour Hoffman stole my heart as the slutty minister. I once proclaimed his hotness to a college friend a few years ago (probably after seeing him in a Paul Thomas Anderson film or something of that ilk), and he rolled his eyes and scrunched up his face in disbelief as he spat out his horror at my girlish confession, presumably because he could not imagine that I would be into a guy who was so unattractive by conventional standards.

So, attractiveness. Virtually all of my friends (especially the gay male ones) have strict physical standards, with few or no exceptions. The guy in question must be thin and/or muscular. If a guy is fat, he is automatically not worth consideration. He must also be very young, or young-looking. He must be stylish and dress well and have good hair which indicates knowledge of hair products. He must have a pretty face with no feature too off-kilter, no aspect too unappealing to their aesthetic sensibility. My female friends are also particularly concerned with height; above six feet tall is preferable. Some friends, disturbingly enough, are only attracted to men of certain races.

I judge male beauty as carefully as anyone else does (and am probably even more exacting in my standards than many of my friends are...I don't see the physical appeal of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Richard Gere, Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, or many other supposed heartthrobs, although I may like some of their films), and dammit I do enjoy looking at pretty boys (such as the just-mentioned Jude Law, and Gael García Bernal of the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien). But I'd like to think that, for me, a guy's appearance is not the main measure of his worth. My friends make fun of me when I cluck my tongue at their judgments of "pretty" or "ugly," and when I say, partly tongue-in-cheek but also partly with genuine feeling, that the beauty of a person's soul is far more important than the beauty of a person's body. (Well, I could examine this perhaps artificial and antiquated division between body and soul, but I'll save that for another post, after I've read more philosophy about that subject). I just hate that so many people, especially people whom I love and respect, judge other people's worth by such superficial standards. Ever since I was a teenager, I've mistrusted what was force-fed to me by the media about what was and what wasn't beautiful, and it still astonishes me that others don't see how arbitrary their standards of attractiveness are, and how little effort they have put into redefining those standards for themselves. It seems so silly, but whenever one of my friends expresses disgust over the ugliness of a person who is overweight, I think about Jeremy, who is indeed a fictional character but is also the kind of person whom I would date and love without question. Why would anyone deny herself the chance to be with someone who is such a lovely person, just because he's fat? I don't know...perhaps I'm naive, or perhaps I'm a hypocrite and not as immune to the pull of conventional standards as I'd like to think.

I love makeover shows, such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but I'm not sure that I agree with the concept of making a straight guy more "acceptable" by making him look more like a supposed ideal. In the end, aren't they taking all these different guys who showcase their individual quirks through their very different appearances, and making them all look the same, i.e. exactly like the guys who are engineering the makeovers (actually, makeover shows seem like a curious method of self-reproduction or cloning)? I remember sitting in a subway train in New York a long time ago, and examining the vast diversity of people seated in the train with me. Very few of them were conventionally good-looking in the movie star way, but they all had a sort of beauty to them. They were all like character actors. And I thought how dreadfully boring it would be if we were all movie stars and none of us were character actors...even though we're all supposed to envy and strive to be like the movie stars. Is it fair that some enjoy the privileges that come with conventional attractiveness, and should those privileges be denied to those who are conventionally unattractive? No, I'm not saying that. But I love diversity, and I strive to not be the person who gives a conventionally attractive person privileges over a conventionally unattractive person. Although I'm probably unconsciously guilty of doing this as well.

So. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Incredibly hot, even with a sweatshirt-covered potbelly and greasy hair and thick-rimmed glasses as he appeared on In the Actor's Studio the other day. A character actor par excellence, and someone I'd quite happily fuck, if his wife didn't mind.

On Thursday morning, as I was driving to the hospital at about 7:50 am, the sky was so striking that I could barely keep my eyes on the road and almost crashed several times. The clouds partially obscured the sun, so that half of it was glowy white and the other half was smoky gray. It looked kind of like a pearl that was half white and half black, and each half had unfurled rays of its own color. Some distance away from the sun, there was a smear of a rainbow, as if someone had dabbed a part of the sky with a giant paintbrush which had been dipped in every color of one of those cheap kindergarten watercolor palettes. It's so difficult to describe; I wish I had been able to take a picture, or that I could paint a picture, to properly illustrate how beautiful and bizarre it was. It was one of those early mornings where I was barely awake after pulling an all-nighter and wasn't sure how much I was hallucinating what I was seeing, or how much the bleariness of my eyes contributed to the melty glowy blurry lights and darks of my vision.

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in scatalogical matters. Not sexually, certainly. *shudder* Not that I judge those who are turned on by such behaviors. Truly. It's, um, just not for me. (Okay, I'll stop.) But it is an element which seems to reappear in my stories...part of it is the desire to probe subjects which are considered taboo, to shock myself and others. Which is a bit adolescent (residual teenage rebellion bullshit). But then, a lot about a character can be illustrated by how he or she pisses or shits: what she thinks about as she sits on the toilet, how he shakes himself of stray drops in order to minimize staining his underwear. I'm fascinated by people who are fearful of pissing or shitting in public bathrooms. I knew a guy in college who would wait until the shared bathroom was empty of others before he allowed himself to shit. Poor guy. These strange little games we play with ourselves.

At one point I decided that since I knew of no female writers who used toilet or gross-out humor, I was going to change that by writing a full novel of it, dammit! But that idea lasted about as long as my decision to become Durham's resident mime.

As I was doing my dishes today I listened to this weekend's installment of "This American Life" and was surprised to hear a story read by Truman Capote. Ira Glass commented that he sounded eerily like David Sedaris, and I agree. It was a Christmas story about friendship and loss and the rural South, and like most of Capote's writing, it was evocative, incisive, and taut with emotion. Tears pricked my eyes at his final image of broken kites drifting up towards the heavens. I first became interested in Capote when I saw a film by Almodovar called All About My Mother, which I absolutely adored. The first Esteban in the story (who was insanely beautiful...*sigh*) received Capote's Music for Chameleons as a gift from his mother, and read the forward out loud, where Capote describes how self-flagellation is a necessary part of a writer's existence. And then I knew I had to have that book. I'm not sure, but I think Joe might have given it to me. Capote has a reputation as a "gossipy" writer, because of his famed exposes of Marlon Brando and other celebrities, but his talent went far beyond that. (Although I did enjoy his gossipy anecdote about Errol Flynn playing "You are My Sunshine" on the piano with his penis). His story about Marilyn Monroe, "A Beautiful Child," was one of the most lovingly poignant portraits I've ever read. The final story in that collection is a conversation with himself which unfolds an astonishing spiritual revelation; I still shiver when I remember how I felt as I read it...a "profound expansion of being," as an author (her name escapes me) of a fiction story in The New Yorker once said. He gives me hope that one day I'll be warmly enveloped with the blanket of a spirituality of my own, which will soothe me to sleep. Somehow I need to construct it, discover it, find it.

Capote did what Nan Goldin did through her photographs: reveal the vulnerability and the beauty and the humanity of a multitude of people he knew and loved, but through his exquisitely written stories. When I went to Montreal earlier this year, trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life since medicine no longer seemed like the answer, there was an exhibition of Nan Goldin's work in the Musee de L'Art Contemporain. One of the highlights was a slide show of her work set to a hymn sung by Bjork, and I bawled quite embarrassingly over the insane beauty of it all. But it then struck me that this was what I wanted to do with my life. Those people were all so brave, to expose themselves and their vulnerabilities, to share themselves so completely with others. And Nan Goldin not only showcased her friends and lovers; she also turned the camera on herself. I want to be that brave, I want to be that vulnerable, I want to share the beauty and vulnerability of others. But I just haven't decided which medium would work best for me to do this. My writing and my art are not accomplished enough, and I'm not sure that I have enough raw talent that I could ever create much that is worthwhile. Is it possible in medicine? I don't know. I'm working in an oncology clinic and it's been surprisingly satisfying. Most med students want to shy away from dealing with death or with terminally ill patients, but I appreciate how introspective these patients are, and the newfound perspective that they have. They're forced to truly evaluate their lives, given the lack of time they likely have left, and most are comfortable enough to share their thoughts with me. Given the threat to my own mortality earlier this year, I can relate just a tiny bit (although of course what I went through is nothing compared to the certainty of their approaching deaths). And the oncologist with whom I work is just fabulous. I adore her, and she is certainly the kind of physician I'd like to be, if I do end up becoming one. She truly knows her patients and cares deeply for them. But is medicine really what I should be doing? And so I obsess and obsess and obsess some more...

I made the bold move of using a sugar substitute for my coffee, for the first time ever. Con: the diarrhea I suffered later in the evening, which I suspect was caused by it. Pro: As watery shit gushed out of my ass, I was struck by inspiration and began to sing "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles, changing the word "sun" to "runs" (and "comes" to "come" to be grammatically correct). A potential new song for the student faculty show? It could explore the differential diagnosis of diarrhea. Oh and another song idea...that old jazzy song, "fever," as in a fever of unknown origin.

I also made the unfortunate decision to stop by Kroger to pick up a quartet of bananas. Within the span of two hours, I devoured three of them, each bite dipped into Nutella. I'm such an addict, ugh. I need help.

Please, please, let Saddam's capture not guarantee the re-election of Bush. Somehow. Please?

It is so lovely to fold freshly done laundry in my toasty warm bedroom, with Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker playing from my computer, as the rain taps on the edges of my apartment building, at 4 am on a Saturday night.

Yikes. I read on a messageboard about a site with accurate name analysis, and the skeptic in me of course said, "Oh pshaw." But then I succumbed to my curiosity and entered my name on the site, and this was the result: "Your name of Elizabeth gives you a very idealistic but passive outlook on life. You appreciate music, drama, and the arts and could excel in these fields. You desire culture and all the comforts of life but you are inclined to daydream and not bring your ideas to fulfilment. Although you would like to do many things, procrastination undermines your accomplishment and success in life because of insecurity. You do not like to create issues and will do anything to avoid conflicts. Making decisions is difficult for you without the support and approval of others. This name gives you a very sensitive nature, making you feel much that you do not understand." Which is pretty much a dead-on description of me. All my main faults contained within: passivity, procrastination, lack of fulfillment, insecurity, indecisiveness. Eep. I mean, obviously there are lots of people who share my first name but have completely different personalities. But for whatever reason this description of me is pretty accurate.

I just tried typing "Wings in her Spine" into Google and this was the first hit. Here's the excerpt from Google: "On Silver Wings. ... Shivers of pure ecstasy rippled along her spine as he murmured words of love against her hair and lightly caressed the nape of her neck." Oh, and it gets worse, much worse. It's kind of nice to be randomly associated with crappy Celtic romance novels. And my insecurity about the worth of my writing? Temporarily relieved after reading a few lines of On Silver Wings by Elfie Leddy (the author's name, I'm not shitting you). Yes, I'm bitchy today. It'll pass soon.

Awhile ago, the guy I was seeing at the time (no longer, thankfully) asked me what my porn star name would be. I responded with "Pussy Lo Mein." Yeah. I know.

I hate motherfucker acquaintances who don't have the decency to look at you as they walk by. Granted I've been guilty of the same offense in the past, but usually when I'm not certain if the other person remembers me. A few days ago I saw a surgeon who was my attending during a surgery subrotation (I'll call him "Dr.Peel") walking down a corridor towards me. As we approached each other, Dr.Peel turned his head away from me, stared blankly into space, and walked past me. Given all the shit that I went through while working with him, I can't imagine that he forgot me. Ugh. Fucker motherfucking fuckity fuck fuck. I thought that my bitterness and anger from my time working with him had gotten better...but perhaps not. I hate surgeons. Except for ENT surgeons. The rest of them can go to hell.

I've been thinking recently about muses. Although I discovered a passion for art at a young age, I never cared for the oft-encountered concept of the female muse, whose beauty inspires the the male artist to create his work. It seemed that she was often no more than a body who aroused the emotion or lust which fueled his creative prowess, "an object subjected to the male gaze" as I learned in many an art class and feminist theory class in college. I don't dare to consider myself a true artist, although I have desperately wished I could be...but in any case, from my mid-teens, I wanted to reverse this established relationship between the female muse and the male artist. I looked for male muses to inspire my own art, as unaccomplished as it may be, and I found them. They were not traditional muses; I didn't respond to their physical selves, really. No objectification on my part. (Heh). I just sensed that they would appreciate the part of me which I feared to share with others, my philosophical ramblings and leaps of imagination and word experiments. But alas, it seems that muse relationships are not long for this world...things have apparently just ended between my latest muse and me.

Anyway, I need to stop looking for muses. I need to nurture and push myself to write and make art, not to rely on others to spur me on. I don't need to look for another muse. Looking for friends, for lovers? Of course. But not another muse. I only need myself to unleash the beauty, the imagination, the wild reckless spirit which reside in every person.

Sometimes I wish I could be more like Bruno.

I chopped off my hair today. Well, that sentence is not entirely accurate. I paid somebody else to chop off my hair, and this occurred about 12 hours ago, which was technically yesterday. My hair tickled my elbows when I brushed my teeth this morning; now the ends curve around my earlobes, gracing the angle of my mandible. It kind of looks like ass, but thankfully I don't really care. I had brought a picture of myself with a superimposed shorter 'do (the wonders of the internet) in order to guide her, and of course my hair looks nothing like that picture at all. Strangely enough, the hairdresser looked rather uncomfortable when I told her how short I wanted to cut it. She kept asking me how long I had thought about it and whether I was sure I wanted to do it. I wasn't the least bit conflicted. I associate long overgrown hair with depression. I look back at photos of myself, and inevitably, my hair was longest during those episodes when I was most depressed...my high school graduation, my college graduation, etc. And as I ease myself out of depression, I always chop off my hair in a symbolic gesture of cutting myself free from the bonds of the past. Or starting anew. I haven't been truly depressed for awhile now, but it still feels liberating to get rid of that thick long messy burden of hair, although it was definitely more flattering than my current haircut. Mais n'importe quoi. Hair grows back. Wounds heal. Seasons change. Turn, turn, turn.

I told my mother about my haircut and she asked whether I had saved the hair. I replied in the negative and she cried out, "But I told you to save it!" I had no recollection of this. Apparently there is some kid with cancer in my hometown and she wanted to donate my hair to him or her. Ah well. Instead those six or so inches have been swept up from the floor of the salon and are likely in a garbage bag chillin' with rubber bands and sponges and tissues. I'm sure the kid would want prettier, less obnoxious hair than mine anyway. If she had a choice.

Milquetoast. Heh.

I did some volunteer work earlier tonight, and had a blast playing with the kids, especially one adorable little girl who leaped onto me and tenaciously gripped me with her legs as I spun her 'round and 'round until we became so dizzy that we needed to stop. Her mother asked me if I had any brothers or sisters, presumably (I hope) because I seemed to be comfortable with kids, and I responded that I had one brother. She asked whether he was older or younger, and how old he was; when I told her that he was younger and 22, her eyes bugged and she exclaimed "What? How old are you?" I responded, "Twenty-four," and she shook her head in disbelief, saying, "You don't look 24! You look a lot younger!" Well, gee, thanks. She then asked me what college I went to, and I chickened out and said "I went to college up in Connecticut." I felt guilty because in a way it is condescending to not provide a direct answer, but there have just been too many uncomfortable experiences with people who respond with either hushed awe or embarrassed insecurity. And I want to tell them, "Please, Yale is so overrated, and in any case, I'm no better than you are just because I went there," but that also sounds stupid and elitist and condescending.

I'll never forget when I took a painting class in New York City at the Arts Student League, and there was a monstrous bitch of a wommon (she looked like a bored rich wife, with a shiny blonde pageboy haircut and multicolored silk scarf around her neck and expensive black suit, who passed time by painting shitty canvases) there who began to verbally abuse the model. If I recall correctly, she was irritated because the model wasn't perfectly still as she posed, or her resumed pose after her break was slightly different than the original pose. Something like that. The model defended herself in a calm and polite manner, but this evil monster bitch (who clearly had other issues; maybe she recently found hubby in the arms of vapid young model? Or is that too cliche?) then said something like, "I pay you to pose, not talk back at me. Shut your mouth" in an exceedingly condescending and degrading fashion. I was furious and immediately told this wommon that she had absolutely no right to treat the model as if she were just a body and not a person. The wommon responded that she would file a complaint so that the model would lose her job. The model then asked me to speak on her behalf to the powers that be, and I did. Afterward, the model was grateful, and asked me some questions to get to know me a little better. I told her that I had just graduated from Yale and was going to attend medical school in the fall. She then had that look of hushed awe and seemed to withdraw into herself. She suddenly became much more conscious of her speech, and spoke slowly and with extreme attention to grammar (although she still made mistakes) and enunciation. She kept saying, "Wow, you must be really smart...wow." And in the mean time she visibly seemed to think shit about herself, which made me feel ill, and I realized that I had lost chance of making a real connection with this person, a friendship even, because she was intimidated. I suppose that's not my fault, but still, I feel like it was a loss which could have been prevented.

The moon was eerie tonight. It was full, or nearly full: a bright white egg in the black sky which was full of diaphanous speckles of clouds. It actually looked like one of those great blue whales, with all those white spots on its chin and belly, and a big white eye glowing through the inky ocean waters. Around the moon and melting through the nearby cloud smudges there was a beautiful grayish rainbow, like the interior of an oyster shell or an oil puddle in a parking lot. Sometimes I wonder if this year would have been better if I had remembered, as is Korean custom, to make my wishes on the first new moon of the year. I had missed the first new moon; I think I was on my surgery rotation, or some shit like that. But then, it's always easy to think these things in retrospect.

I've eaten nothing today but a few spoonfuls of rice and chicken, and a Cookout Reese's peanut butter cup milkshake. Ah, the joy of letting my seven-year-old-self operate the controls of this 24-year-old body. She's very pleased, because of course Mom would not have let her get away with this back when she only had her 7-year-old body to work with, and had to rely on Mom to drive to the milkshake provider and purchase said milkshake. I'm a much weaker soul, and she knows it.

Am I a total dork for reading Chomsky while doing my forty minutes on the elliptical today? Well, maybe not, since I only got through four pages of Language and the Mind: Present...not because the material was difficult or dense, but because it was difficult to get the book into a position which made it readable while I was using those arm things. I haven't had much luck with my issues of The New Yorker, either. Someone needs to design an elliptical which is more conducive to reading. Please?

I saw a performance of Handel's Messiah in the chapel over the weekend. It was gorgeous; I coveted the mezzo soprano's voice (especially her rendition of "He Shall Feed his Flock"...which pricked my eyes with tears). I was reminded of how much I love singing...it used to be such a release for me. It sounds vaguely disturbing, but during my freshman year of college, whenever I felt depressed, I would climb to the roof of the tower in my residential college and sing my heart out, as the wind whipped my hair against my cheek, with only the moon as my audience. Somehow, someway, I should get my tired ass back into a chorus of some sort. Or maybe find a new tower with a roof to provide a platform for cathartic singing. Hmmm...maybe I need to stalk people with access to the chapel.