5 Friends

I can't be the only one who found this video surprisingly compelling. If those actors were given scripts half as convincing as an ad lib imploring Americans to vote, our movie landscape would look entirely different. Laura Linney basically made me sob. Even the asshole comedians were effective in their own way. For Christ's sake, Ellen accused me of watching internet porn and I loved every second of it! Watch this video and enjoy feeling patriotic for a little bit.



Really, anything that makes Jennifer Aniston and Leo look this relevant is accomplishing something. Vote and care and vote.

Civic Duty! Heck Yeah! Doggone heckuva job!

Keyser and I just registered to vote! I did not expect to feel this excited. I've voted before, but only absentee from DC (at a steady 92% democrat! electoral college rocks!), and never for president, so I guess this is bigger. I tried to register a month ago, and the clerk lost my application. The whole registration concept seems in itself to be an disenfranchising force... reading the guidelines is confusing, I never have a utility bill on me when I run into folks registering voters on the street, and you still need an ID. So it serves the same purpose as states which make you bring a drivers license to your polling place, no? I'm sure there are well thought out reasons that this registration system makes more sense than, say, dipping our thumbs in ink, but all the red tape makes me long a little for that fledgling democracy authenticity.

Ed Roberson and I are terrified of each other. One day I may look back on this and find it adorable, but right now it's a major stumbling block in the thesis process. I also feel like a jerk who goes to his readings only to corner him about setting meetings. Whatever, that's not true, his poetry is incredible and I love watching him read it. Grow a backbone. Grow one without all the alcohol it takes to face him at Columbia College.

It's funny being a senior and finding these readings that come up a million times over the course of college. Just this week I read Aristotle's Poetics for the third time and Orwell's Politics and the English Language for at least the fifth. You know, they're both pretty good...

adolescence = paralel universe.

Also from the google annals of eternity: the website Rachel Cohen and I built in the beginning of high school. What a weird thing to stumble back upon... a surprisingly large number of the teachers we poked fun at have since passed away. How bizarre to have our little high school jabs at them be around after they are. I don't know if anything we wrote seriously breaches the barrier between in good fun and mean, but I can see how it toes the line. I'm shocked we never got in trouble for it. I'm shocked it's still on the internet. My, but we always have been clever little devils, haven't we... I hope we can keep that site around for long enough to make trouble for someone's Senate campaign. Personal archiving is awesome and strange.

It's been a while, huh. The short update consists of school promising to kick my butt, work promising to calm my anxieties about the job market and my place in it, and my emotional life promising to catch up with me.

Google opened up its archives in honor of its anniversary. What fun. Here is the blurb me and my best buddy Big Gabe put up on the interweb in honor of our b'nai mitzvot. I was really into justice? And basketball? Oh how the times change.

B'nai mitzvah this month

Dinah [Redacted]

Bat Mitzvah September 2

My name is Dinah Fay ***. I am 13 years old and attend the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. I am entering the 8th grade. Some of my interests are piano, softball, basketball, and acting. Much to the disgust of my friends and delight of my parents, I love math. When I grow up, I hope to be an architect to target my talent.

For the past half year, I have been studying religiously (ha ha) for my bat mitzvah. I hope that this event will help me with my transition into the adult Jewish world.

In my parasha, Shoftim, G-d tells us the importance of fairness in our justice system. "You shall not pervert judgement, ...you shall not accept a bribe, ... for the bribe will blind the eyes of the wise and will make just words crooked. Justice, justice thou shalt pursue." G-d is helping us realize that there will always be people who want to corrupt or pervert our justice system. We also need to understand that it would be human nature to forget what is moral for personal benefits. It takes a tzadik to stand up for what is right and put themselves after fair dealing.

Gabe [Redacted]

Bar Mitzvah September 2

Hello, my full name is Gabriel [silly middle name] [Redacted], and my bar mitzvah will take place on September 2. I'm 13 years old and am going into eighth grade at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School.

I enjoy roller blading, computers, and music. Our math team at JDS placed first in the country last year.

Out of the checks I receive as gifts, one-third of the total amount will be donated to Chai Lifeline, an international organization that helps Jewish children with serious illnesses, and their families.

I would like to thank Rabbi Berliant and Rabbi Seidel for tutoring me, and my mom for organizing everything.

Waitress, or, Cloying Cinema Makes Me Want to Vom

I'm sorry, but what was all the hype for? I just saw Waitress, at the urging of about a thousand friends. And listen, that was not a good movie, don't make me list all the reasons. At the end of the day that's not a big deal, there are piles of movies I don't like. What ticks me off is that I just sat through ANOTHER damn movie that touts itself as some sort of feminist triumph, when in reality it's just about a woman who "actualizes" through learning to be nice and nurturing and having a baby. Sure, she doesn't end up with either of the schmucks her small town world offers her. Woo hoo! It's still the same narrative. Babies ---> Make you a real woman. There weren't even believable friendships. Not even Adrienne Shelley's beautiful and ridiculous glasses saved this film. UGH.

Bleh. Moving makes me grumpy. So do other people's babies. Speaking of, Baby Gap called me yesterday and pretty much offered me a job. That would have been a great job. But school starts soon and I do not want to drag my butt to Old Orchard five times a week between classes, so that is that... even if it means giving up the American Dream of hanging around pregnant ladies and tiny shoes all day. Poop.

I wish this blog did not account for the most serious writing I've done all summer.

Why, you must be in college!
The other day I met a winsome stranger on the train. I was reading some borrowed Sontag and she wanted to know if I was reading it for class. I said no, no I am just a loser who enjoys feeling guilty about all the things Susan Sontag says I should be feeling guilty about. So we talked for five or ten minutes about war photography and authors who make wildly unsubstantiated claims but are still charming, and then went our separate ways at the Davis stop and I consigned this story to the well of "stuff that happened to me during my university days." Other things in that category include almost getting elbowed in the face by Michelle Obama and sobbing in a sandwich shop full of suits over a Joan Didion memoir. GROSS.

Why, you must have an internship!
The majority of my week thus far has been spent wading through the tax code, or more accurately, other people's interpretations of the tax code. GOOD THINGS TO KNOW: I am not smart or patient enough to be a lawyer. I've been set the task of achieving some sort of understanding of the regulations on how much "lobbying" a 501c(3) nonprofit can do without endangering its tax exempt status. I sort of volunteered for this gig, mostly because I get the feeling everyone in the office was secretly concerned about this but too busy and avoidant to check it out.* I've got a grasp on the law and its loopholes now, but I am getting lost in the murky ethical ground of Why anyone has the right to tell you how to communicate with your elected officials, especially if you are working in the public interest. Maybe if civic involvement were less terrifying, more people would engage.** Especially because there is a separate, lower cap on how much grassroots campaigning a group can do -- one is permitted to spend three times as much talking to congress than talking to the public. This whole thing leads me to what must be the tough part of practicing law: leaving your own Big Fat Opinions at the door. Or perhaps being good enough at manipulating the system to make your Big Fat Opinions arguable policy.

On the topic of the office, I'm really starting to settle in there. With the exception of one truly horrendous project which largely consisted of replacing ampersands with the word "and" in a 10,000 member database, I am reading and helping with things that are interesting, and more importantly, I am observing the bizarre and fascinating world of office politics. Any sort of small community on the scale of an office intrigues me, because quarters are close and everyone MUST work together to achieve goals, and in the case of nonprofits, save the world. Even when there are monumental personality clashes. Memoirs and memoirs to come, I'm sure.

Why, you must have emotionally stunted friends!
I want to put out a public service announcement about dating. Namely: experts name the mourning period for a relationship as equal to between half and the entirety of the duration of that relationship. Experts tend to be right. I wish there was a way to wrench people outside their bodies for short periods and force them to watch the silly and destructive decisions they make from across the street. The Ghost Busters probably have some sort of patented technology on the way, but until then, I will continue screaming into the wind at my friends at regular intervals.

* In no way am I passing judgment on this sort of avoidance; it is why I never go to the doctor and have a hard time cleaning out the fridge. But when breech of tax code is in question, it's probably better to roll one's sleeves up, and it's not like I don't have the time.
**Tangential thing that worries me about the Obama campaign: the rhetoric that without big donors, lobbyist or special interest support, BO will be accountable to the regular folks making small contributions when he ends up in the White House. Seems to me, then nobody's got enough sway with the man to hold him to anything. I mean, a conscience could do the trick, but I'm still reserving judgment on THAT whole kettle of fish.

Baggy Clothing and the Criminalization of the Body

This image has been sitting in an open tab on my computer for literally weeks. What with this blog being a repository for my teeming brain and all, I thought I could unload it on you, and maybe it'll stop haunting my browser.


[To really get the full effect, you'd have to see the flash-animation version of this sucker, which I am now too useless to lay my hands on. The slow and shameless alternation of the images, with asses disappearing and reappearing, with pants floating in and out of acceptability, is truly mesmerizing. But this will do.]


In a nutshell, the police department of Flint, Michigan decided there wasn't enough real crime to fight, so they came up with a series of violations in pants-positioning. Varying degrees of bagginess will earn the offender some combination of fines, jail time, and a heaping helping of public shame. To get the obvious points out of the way first:

• These laws are blatantly aimed at a certain section of the population of Flint. Their enforcement will necessarily target people of color because the laws are designed to do so. Not because those people are any more or less moral, or stylish, or anything else -- because they are being singled out by the legislators. Period.
  
• The illustration addresses only the male body, and a shirtless one at that. [Aside: I'd bet my whiskers female bodies would and will be treated radically differently, not the least because shirtless women are outlaws in practice if not in legislation.] Whether a woman sporting low-slung pants would be treated as a criminal under these guidelines, or as a common sex object "asking for" the unsolicited attention she receives and not meriting societal protection, in any particular instance, is anyone's guess. But either way, I can't imagine the laws would be enforced similarly on a female body.
• Don't even get me started on "disorderly conduct." Sir, your body is so OUTRAGEOUS that showcasing it in any way is likely to cause society to topple into chaos. I mean, come on, wearing clothes is hardly conduct at all, and it certainly isn't rabble-rousing.
  
• It is pretty damn ridiculous that the time and care was given to this issue not only to hash out what level of buttock/underpants exposure constitutes what level of criminality, but to turn it into a helpful flash animation and image set. I wonder if they made posters or radio adverts in any attempt to warn folks they're about to be picked on, or if they made no effort whatsoever and just started handing out citations and smug self-righteous superiority.

Those all being on the table if not sufficiently delved-into, I'm going to press on.

I think that animation has lodged itself so securely under my skin because I can't wrap my head around why the government has any right to tell you how to dress, ever. My ever-indulgent roommate tried to play devil's advocate with me, and invoked the counter-example of flashers -- that is, people deliberately exposing themselves with the intention of scandalizing the viewer in some way. Which is fair. I don't want to see a penis when I'm out for a stroll unless I specifically ask to [which is incredibly unlikely, for a litany of reasons]. But then again, that illicit penis would only scandalize me because I'm so unused to seeing them. So it's a circular system, wherein the current indecent exposure statutes have to remain in place because we are upset by indecent exposure because we haven't been exposed to it, so to speak.

So, what is that about? Does it have to do with our insistant sexualization of the body? Between the ubiquitous conflation of flesh and desire in marketing, the media representations of nudity as inherently sexual, and our lingering Puritan sensibilities (whereby, in our effort to repress the sex drive, we connect absolutely everything with sex, often erroneously), it's hard to think of instances of nudity we encounter regularly that aren't sexual. Children may or may not be the exception, but again, we immediately become suspicious of bathtub pictures and the like.

Are we afraid of men in baggy pants because, in our culture, that level of exposure is tacitly sexual? That's one connotation of "indecent," but certainly not the only thing the term could imply. But: any non-majority group expressing sexuality is necessarily problematic to the dominant paradigm, i.e. cis-gendered able-bodied straight white dude-bros [etc etc etc]. To assert sexuality is to assert personhood, which is very scary indeed if you're black or female or in any other way "non-normative." The logical extreme of this thought process is the burqa, in societies where women's very presence is sequestered because it is seen as provocative, and keeping them covered is an inherent part of keeping them disenfranchised. This whole thing in Flint may just boil down to an excuse to throw more black guys into the sordid interior of the justice system, an attempt to shame huge swaths of the population into assimilation for the comfort of the oppressors. But on another level I think it deeply relates to the problematic way we define what bodies are acceptable for consumption, in what capacity, when.

This is where my thinking runs into about a thousand walls. To revert to the example of the bare-chested woman in public, is the right solution to promote toplessness in women, in the hopes that breasts can eventually become normalized in all their functions, including but not limited to the sexual and baby-feeding ones? Or is that counter-productive, because in the interim those women who are trying to reclaim public space and their bodies become objects to onlookers, undermining the personhood they are fighting for? Do we have an inalienable right to comfort in public spaces, if the action which makes us uncomfortable is committed without malicious intent, or in fact, with the intention of empowerment or celebration?

My gut reaction is that every person has the right to do precisely what they please with their bodies, so long as he/she is not using that body to intimidate or harm others. But already that got murky, because we can't control what other people find intimidating, no matter how enlightened we think ourselves personally. And living in a pervasive rape culture, personal safety is constantly at stake, especially when juries are willing to blame the victim for attacks rather than condemning actual criminals. I may be feeling all knee-jerky because it's so reminiscnet of the abortion debate, in that a woman's right to her body comes into question at the point where the fetus attains some sort of personhood, and the two have to be negotiated. But using that to guide my logic here seems unfair, because I am so far on the "women should do whatever they damn please, whenever they deign to" side of the fence it's borderline insensitive. If one tries to make the free-speech analogy instead, folks should be able to put whatever they want into the world, free of consequence, unless they are posing a specific, demonstrable threat. But again, doing so might not be productive if the society receiving them is so well programmed to objectify and make otherwise pornographic all attempts at reclamation of the body that the deviant action falls into their oppressive paradigm, or puts the doer in physical danger. It feels like a Catch-22, but I may be missing a big hole in my argument, or thinking on the wrong scale -- these things are common at two in the morning.

So here I am, stuck. I know these laws are wrong, and that is more or less all I know. If you want to help extricate me from the tangled mass of my brains, by all means drop a line.