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1:48 pm | 26 October 2004 | in which i flirt with 35 topics

It's finally becoming somewhat fall-esque here on the Left Coast (you can tell by the way it goes from summer temperatures--high 90�, low 70�--to winter ones, which are 70�/45�, and also by all the girls who put on their Uggs with miniskirts instead of flip-flops with miniskirts). California is the impetus for such confusing fashion concepts as the Down Puffer Vest, whose discombobulated architecture keeps your chest burning-toasty while leaving your unfettered arms icy cool. I know school's been back in sesh for some time, but I still crave the smell of new pencils or the slightly gritty springiness of a new pink Pearl eraser. I want argyle kneesocks and hot soup. Mostly, though, I want to zip myself into my antique Boy Scout sleeping bag--you know the one, it's got duck-hunting scenes on the inner flannel--and never leave my house again.

Saturday, still barely-explicably crippled with jet lag, I rented The Rules of Attraction as per Jeremy's suggestion, and it was a dark, weird, disturbing, freaky thing that splayed over the trusting face of the PowerBook, not the light-hearted teen romp I was expecting, and really put me off the carton of Chunky* Chips Ahoy I was slaying at the time. It stars the tall-headed James Van Der B[Dawson's Cr]eek and the roadkill-fascinating Shannyn Sossamon who, not until the duo-directional Tom Cruise, has about two facial expressions: biting her square lower lip to indicate either amusement or chagrin, and cracking a horizonal grimace with the same motivation. I am being hard on her. I don't entirely mean it. But: you know.

And now there is the urge to, as our hip-hop friends say in the vernacular, "flip the script." Every day a small revolution, and while we don't have to get into any kind of symbology reg. the earth's actual physical so-we-are-told motion, or anything along THOSE lines, I do have to say that it's good to do your own tiny 180�s as much as you can. Like: You step outdoors and start tromping semi-angrily down your block, you know how, like you are wearing plaster-filled moon boots, or perhaps in the manner of a predatory dinosaur, like I am thinking this, and you're halfway between the newsstand and your transportation, car, train, whatever, halfway through that first HE-llo cigarette of the day, and you realize you've forgotten your purse/phone/iron rod/necessary thing, and you have to do an about-face, and if you are like me, maybe, you are in full view of other pedestrians and must therefore add a little extry flourish on there to demonstrate possession of your mental faculties. As though to say: I'm not a crazy deranged homeless duct-tape man: this communicated via (choose one): look of surprise/Eureka!; muttered "Oh yeah, I forgot [item]," pre-swivel; or (my favourite) upcast eyes and a slimly-audible "Aw fuck." Okay, so like that--hold that mental image in your head for a goddamned minute, try to get in that space, see what there is to see, and then retain that feeling, the pulled-up-shortness of it--and then apply to your life. Do one deliberately, and do one every day. Zig when you traditionally zag. Dude: Revolt.

This could sound blithe, or reductive, or just plain pop-psychog. ass. This is coming from a girl who had panic attacks while:
a. Folding laundry, specifically towels.
b. Putting silverware away.
...until the grand, glorious, and obvious day I realized that, having grown into this adult critter with two different (and I mean dialectically, David Lynchianly different) moms, trying to emulate both (housekeeping is a learned behaviour) meant that no matter whose way I chose, it was still wrong to the other one. My towels now assume a complicated series of foldings-into-thirds-and-then-quarters. The forks are in an ordered disarray. And I am calm, because as cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face-random as they are, they're still my way. All of which is to say: I'm about to do something potentially retarded to my hair, in the name of science and self-advancement. Are you listening to Cursive? Because they're really good. clm.

*Doubtlessly so-named for the effect they will have on my ass.


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