Category Archives: television

i wear the cheese

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i think i’m going to leave the contribution link at the top for a bit longer.  as you can see, it’ll be a little while yet before i reach my goal.  have i told you how awesome the postcards are going to be?  they’re going to be the best!  i’m having them printed from some of my favorite flickr photos, and i’m going to write bizarre things all over the back, about pie and cars and songs on my ipod, and about how oh my god i think that guy at the next table has a glass eye.  i guarantee you’ll be entertained.  at the very least you’ll be baffled, and i don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good baffling now and then.

most weekends i go out with my friends dusty and sharlee and mando.  mando and i watch all the same television shows.  we know our favorite shows well, and can quote them verbatim.  often one of us will finish a joke with a contextually appropriate line from buffy or arrested development, and the two of us will laugh and laugh, while dusty and sharlee look at us like we’re insane.

“should we be watching more television?” dusty said once.

“not necessarily,” i said.

i used to date a guy who could match me pretty well when it came to quoting early simpsons episodes.  many have attempted this, and many have failed, but this guy came pretty close.  one day we were having coffee and he said, “i think i’m going to stop quoting things.”

this surprised me.  weren’t we having fun quoting things?  “oh?” i said.  “how come?”

“it’s crippling my wit.”

i don’t always remember exactly what people say.  when i want to write about something someone said to me, i try to recall as many of their exact words as i can, and then i just sort of reverse-engineer the rest based on what i know about the person and what they would have said at the time.  but i remember the things that affect me, and “it’s crippling my wit” was exactly what he said.

“yeah?” i said.

“yeah,” he said.  “it’s like i’m making other people’s jokes instead of my own.”

“i see what you mean,” i said, not sure how else to respond.  it made me feel kind of lame.  did he think the quoting was crippling my wit, too?  did he want me to stop quoting things?  i may as well have; quoting the simpsons to him after that was like quoting it to a jug of milk and expecting a laugh.

while i understand his point about making your own jokes instead of someone else’s, i don’t agree that it’s always a negative thing.  a lot of humor comes from shared experiences.  person A makes a joke about something that happened to her, person B laughs because the same thing happened to him and he knows exactly what she’s talking about.  if the same television show or movie “happened” to you and another person, it becomes a valid shared experience on which to build a joke, even if that joke belongs to someone else.  quoted jokes require timing and context like any other.  if i walk up to mando and the first thing i say is, “i wear the cheese, it does not wear me,” he would probably laugh a little because it’s from a show we both like.  but if i say it when we’re talking about bizarre dreams or fashion or cheese, then it’s contextually appropriate and therefore a lot more funny.

while i don’t feel like quoting television cripples my wit, i do feel like watching it cripples my writing ability.  i’ve done some of my best writing during times when i wasn’t watching much television at all, mostly during college or on trips out of town.  today i told mando that i’m not going to worry about any of my favorite shows during my roadtrip.  why would i watch tv when i could be sitting in a coffee shop at a table next to a guy with a glass eye?

five things you didn’t know about me

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nobody tagged me on this thing (boo hoo whatever), but i’m doing it anyway, because it seems like a good writing exercise:

1. in high school, i really wanted to be an actress. but back then i was painfully shy, so the auditions never went well. while onstage i was mostly focused on all the people watching me; to say that my line readings suffered as a result would be an understatement. i tried out for rumors and the best christmas pageant ever with no luck. this upset me a great deal, because i just knew that if i ever got the chance to be in a play i’d be awesome. eventually i was given a small part in this is a test. my performance was marginally awesome.

the part i played in this is a test, though small, was pivotal. i was one of three members of a small chorus of sorts, and our job was to recite this one bit in a round. “this is a test. a what? a test. a what? a test. oh, a test.” our lines varied a bit, though, and sometimes instead of tests we’d be talking about pencils or books or what-have-you. i was the middle person, so the first person would say “this is a test,” and i would say “a what?” and she and i would do the whole bit. then i’d turn to the third person and say, “this is a test,” and the third person would say “a what?” and we’d do it over again. but at the same time, the first person would move on to the next item and say to me, “this is a pencil.” so i’d have to face each person in turn and say, “this is a test. a what? a test. a what? a test. oh, a pencil.” it was hard to remember what item i was saying to the third person while paying attention to what item the first person was saying to me. as i recall, it took me a few tries to get it right, but i didn’t mess up at all during the performance.

this fall my friend jessica’s middle school theatre program did this is a test. even though she teaches middle school and i was a junior in high school when i was in the play, i felt really good when she told me she picked the smartest member of the chorus to play the middle part. suck it, seventh graders! i was marginally awesome!

2. also during my junior year, my church youth group held our second annual dinner theatre. our youth group leaders were in charge of the first annual one, but for the second one, they decided to delegate. this was how my sister came to be in charge of the dinner, and i was put in charge of the entertainment. though now that i think about it, i probably volunteered. i’d been going to that church since my parents brought me home from the hospital, so i knew i’d feel comfortable performing for an audience that had known me for sixteen years. while my sister organized the food and decorations and chose a theme, i picked out skits and sets and costumes.

i loved being in charge of the theatre stuff. i held auditions for the parts, went on thrifting and borrowing sprees for the sets and costumes, and organized and led rehearsals. i even made the programs myself. my day planner from that time (which i still have) was filled with ideas and to-do lists in bright orange ink. in retrospect i was probably a bit over-stressed: i remember calling one guy’s brother an asshole, and hanging up on someone’s mom when she informed me that her daughter wouldn’t be able to attend rehearsals that day. but i was on a mission!

i had only planned to be in one skit myself, but when one girl had to drop out in favor of band practice, i took over her part. to me, that was the most fun of all. that skit had a romeo and juliet plot, but the characters’ lines included their stage directions. for example, i played the princess, and one of my lines was, “the princess stands at her tower window,” or something. there was even a curtain character, who would walk to the middle of the stage at the end of every scene, say “the curtain falls,” and then fall over. everyone died at the end of the play, and my last line was, “the princess dies, and is beautiful even in death.” my pratfall at the end of that line got huge laughs. suck it, high school! i was awesome!

3. i had seizures when i was a baby. massive infantile spasms, they were called. as i was only a few months old, i don’t remember any of it, but my parents definitely do. according to them, i was in the hospital for awhile, and then my dad had to give me steroid shots at home. i can’t even imagine what it’s like to have to give a shot to your own baby. the way these infantile spasms went, the doctors were pretty sure i’d be mentally incapacitated in some way, so my parents had me take an IQ test a few years later. i also can’t imagine how you administer an IQ test to an infant, but the results of that test put my IQ at a genius level.

when i was thirteen, my mother took me to the hospital to get an EEG. they stuck all these suctiony things to my brain with glue and plugged me into some machines, and then they put me on a table in front of a big observation window and told me to fall asleep. there’s no way i’m going to fall asleep! i thought. i’m not tired and things are glued to my head and this table is uncomfortable and zzzz in retrospect, i wonder if they slipped me something.

after the EEG, my mom took me to lunch at the hospital mcdonalds (do they even have those anymore? it seems counterproductive), and showed me a letter she’d written to me when i was a baby. in the letter, she said that there was only one chance in two or three hundred that i’d end up normal. the word normal is a subjective one, but i suppose i am normal in medical terms.

i used to think that my beating the 0.5% odds and emerging from seizures with an infant-genius IQ meant that god had spared my brain so that i could achieve something specific. but i don’t think i believe in god anymore. and really, that’s way too much pressure.

4. in the last eight years i’ve had no trouble asking people out, but my first experience asking for a date was a terrible one. there was a sadie hawkins dance my sophomore year of high school, and i wanted to invite jeff tupper. he was in three or four of my classes that year, and i’d found him pretty easy to talk to. which was saying a lot, since i didn’t find anyone easy to talk to in high school. also, i liked his hair.

i’d told my friend jean about my crush on jeff tupper, and we’d decided i should ask him to the dance the next morning, which was a friday. i’d asked jean if she would go with me to ask him, since i didn’t want to do it by myself. we found him in the hall just before the first-period bell rang.

“hey, jeff,” i said. that part was easy.

“hey, guys,” he said to jean and me.

“uh, jeff,” i said, “i was wondering if you would, um, go to the sadie hawkins dance with me?”

he froze. a look of horror crossed his face, and i knew what he was going to say before he said it. “no,” he said.

i did not know he would be so abrupt. “ok,” i said, and took off running down the hall. jean followed.

of course i had to see him in classes all day. and i knew he’d told his friends, because i kept catching them staring at me. jean said that at least now i knew what would happen if i asked, but it was small consolation.

i spent that weekend moping around the house. when you’re fifteen and your parents live in your house too, it’s hard to mope around without telling them what happened. i was able to avoid talking about it until sunday afternoon when the phone rang. “it’s for you,” my mother said, handing me the phone. she had a strange look on her face, so i knew the call wasn’t from a girl.

“hello?” i said.

“alison, it’s jeff.”

he’s changed his mind! i thought. he does want to go to the dance! oh god, i’m so nervous. what am i going to wear? “hey,” i said.

“i’ve been calling everyone all weekend trying to find your phone number,” he said. “i wanted to tell you that i said no because i have a girlfriend.”

i suddenly recalled seeing him in the halls at school, always with this one girl. how could i have been so stupid? “oh,” i said. “i didn’t know.”

“i didn’t want you to think it was because of you, so that’s why i called.”

“ok,” i said.

“ok. see you tomorrow.” he hung up.

it didn’t make me feel any better at the time. i was still embarrassed, and of course i then had to answer my mother’s inevitable who-was-that-on-the-phone question. but now i think it was pretty brave of jeff tupper to call and tell me about his girlfriend. so thanks, jeff tupper, even though that’s not your real name. you should have just looked me up in the phone book; there weren’t that many headleys in there.

5. i think this is something i always knew, but i didn’t fully realize it until a friend and i discussed it this week. the television is always on in my apartment because the noise and picture and general distraction keep me from thinking about bad things. i’m afraid if i turn the tv off and try to work in silence, i won’t be able to keep the terrible thoughts at bay — the thoughts about my life and career and past and relationships that would derail my entire day if i let them take over. in my better moments i tell myself that there are just a lot of shows i like, and i watch them because i want to know what’s going to happen next. but that doesn’t explain all the reruns and old tapes and dvds. no, those are around for the bad thoughts.

inexplicable feelings i’ve had over the past week:

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1.  unnecessary job-related anger.  job-related anger may not sound all that inexplicable, but i was angry at nothing.  well, really i was mad at the unevenness of the workload lately; for three days out of the week i’m bored to tears (once almost literally), then for the other two i’m buried under more work than i can handle.  this situation isn’t really anybody’s fault, which kind of makes things harder, since it means i’m angry at nobody as well as nothing.

the anger wouldn’t normally affect anyone other than me.  but recently i wrote my sister a long email while i was angry about work, and it made the advice i gave her sound less sensitive than i’d intended.  i’d like to get rid of this anger if i can, since my job isn’t important enough to warrant it.  “we’re not curing cancer here, people,” i’m fond of saying to my coworkers during times of stress.  this always puts things in perspective for me, though i’m not sure it helps anyone else.

2.  a brief pang of sadness when i found out that neil patrick harris is gay.  why should i be sad?  it’s not like we used to date or anything; in fact, i don’t even know the guy.  but he was my first celebrity crush.  in junior high i was obsessed with watching doogie howser, m.d., and i couldn’t figure out why until my friend kim made fun of me for having a crush on doogie howser.  “i do not!” i protested.  “and his name is neil patrick harris!”

once i discovered that it was, in fact, a crush, i went ahead and embraced it.  cutting pictures of him out of magazines proved difficult, since my mother never let me buy bop or tiger beat, so i found whatever i could in the newspaper.  i rented all the movies he’d been in and taped the show so i could watch each episode over again.  my fear of embarrassment prevented me from writing “alison harris” or “mrs. alison patrick harris” on any of my school folders, but i definitely did it in my head.  eventually i got over that crush and moved on to someone else; i can’t remember who.

and now neil patrick harris is gay.  oh well.  i’ll still always think of him as doogie howser.

3.  a bizarre desire to go out, get incredibly drunk, and do something stupid.  last night i was wasting my youth sitting on the couch making jewelry while watching veronica mars dvds.  it was the one where veronica goes to the eighties dance with meg manning, and meg’s secret admirer turns out to be veronica’s ex-boyfriend duncan, but then deputy leo shows up to be veronica’s date.  a good episode except for that storyline about the russian mafia and the guy in the witness protection program.

and then i saw the scene where logan arrives at the dance, drunk and dressed as tighty-whitey-wearing tom cruise from risky business.  he’s running around yelling about how everyone had better wang chung tonight, “wang chung or i’ll kick your ass!”  that line makes me laugh every time.

it gave me the sudden urge to go out on a one-night bender and yell at everyone to wang chung until i puke in my hair and someone has to shove me in a cab.  which makes no sense because one always tends to regret those things later.  so instead i made another pair of earrings and watched the episode where the vice principal hires veronica to find the kidnapped school mascot.  why is their mascot a parrot and not a pirate?  probably because keeping a costumed person in a cage wouldn’t go over too well with the school board.  anyway.

4.  regret that it’s already the fifth and so too late to participate in NaBloPoMo.  this makes no sense either.  the time constraint is, like most time constraints, an arbitrary convention.  i could have my own personal BloPoMo from november 23 to december 23 and nobody would arrest me.  PoMo makes me think of postmodern, anyway, so i could turn my 23-23 BloPoMo into a PoMoBloPoMo and write about things in increasingly strange ways until my december 23 post is nothing but dingbat symbols, and nobody would arrest me then, either.

i worry too that NaBloPoMo would be good for my routine, but bad for my writing.  there would be days when i would have things to write about, but there would also be days when i wouldn’t.  on those days my participation would force me to phone it in.

5.  strange feelings of missing people.  i miss a person i shouldn’t really miss, and i miss another person i don’t really know.

the first one is my own fault, and i’m confident i’ll deal with it, as i have before.  the second one is a bit stickier.  because when i say “person i don’t really know,” i mean that this person doesn’t exist, not really.  you see, i’ve always had this picture in my head of a person who is perfect for me.  his desirable qualities are usually picked up from friends i’ve had, books i’ve read, and people i’ve dated before.  he’s changed quite a bit over the years, but he always shows up whenever i’m single and feeling a bit lonely.

it’s lame, isn’t it?  it makes me sound like one of those teenage girls who has a handwritten list of qualities she wants in a husband, or worse, like i have an imaginary boyfriend.  neither of those are the case, though i did have such a list as a teenage girl.

really, though, how ridiculous is it to be twenty-eight years old and miss a person who doesn’t exist, who will never exist?  it’s been a long time since i abandoned the notion that there is such thing as a soulmate, that there is one perfect person out there for everyone.  relationships work because people make them work, not because they were meant to be in any way.  sadly enough, there are relationships that are doomed to fail from the beginning, but there are no relationships that are guaranteed success, at least not without a lot of effort.

but i still can’t help missing this fictional person.  lately i’ve decided that my perfect fictional person has a lot of hobbies, like i do.  we’d spend our days immersed in our own separate activities, then reconvene later and talk about what we had done.  that separateness, that aloneness, would be really important to both of us.  i’ve also decided that he understands my occasional lack of conversational transition.  i’d be able to bring up an earlier discussion with no warning, with no preface at all, and he’d know exactly what i was talking about.

i’ve shed quite a few of my romantic notions over the years, but apparently i can’t seem to let go of this one.  i can’t decide if it’s an okay thing to hang onto, or if it’s just another thing about which i should grow the fuck up.

6.  vague embarrassment about having revealed number 5.  because it is a bit embarrassing.  but it’s the embarrassing things that make us us, isn’t it?  as a writer, i don’t want to hold those things back.

one of my favorite lines ever from a cameron crowe movie (though i’m not a huge fan of his), is from almost famous.  near the end, william’s on the phone with lester bangs (philip seymour hoffman), and lester says, “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re being uncool.”