Those ads drive me screaming up my tree. (OK, fearless readers, I admit, it doesn’t take much, but still.) It’s their insistence on the word weird. Which is kind of weird, if you ask me.

“Weird” means a couple of things. We’ll give them a pass on the “supernatural” one. Duck in barrel. Moving on. But in general usage, it means out of the ordinary: Huh. That’s one I’d never thought of.

Unfortunately, these weird ads end up pointing you to weirdly uninteresting ideas. You cut flab by eating more, in several small meals, so that your body doesn’t think it’s starving. The average three-minute browse of a reputable nutrition site will break this earthshattering weirdness without your suffering through an audio website of this guy offering you his foolproof plan to lead you through this process. (He doesn’t tell you what it is until you give him your money.)

The two intrepid moms discovered that weirdly enough, your teeth will be even whiter if you combine two obscure dentifrices (available for sale from the weirdly heroic and disinterested hosts of this breaking news).

Blah blah. Whatever.  What sells this crap? What draws the crowd around the barker? It’s the fact that these disclosures are weird, i.e., off the beaten track and presumably therefore interesting. Better still, weird old speaks to the now-forgotten wisdom of the ages.  There’s nothing weird about being insatiably curious, which is the main reason people click; that people buy.

This whole thing would make me scratch my head. Sure, I’ve been curious enough to do a little clicking and asking around, but instead of seeking the Rosetta Stone to my life, it’s been to discover the depths of people’s gullibility. Damn, I wish I’d thought of this stuff! But I have the respect of my peers, and possibly an immortal soul. (Better safe than sorry there.)

I am burdened with one of those IQs which make the trailing decimal after 99% significant. I have been baffled by this fact while I blunder through life: My God, if I’m supposed to be so smart with my rate of fuckup, how in the cosmos did we crawl out of the water on our stumpy little proto-legs? It’s a tempting duhhh to relate the people who entrust Mr. Annoying-Voice Webman with their dollars with the middle of the curve, or perhaps below it. But that’s not quite what it is, in my extremely brainy opinion.

People are looking for answers. I’ve alluded to a couple of questions just by the way as I’ve been typing along here. What’s up with the immortal soul concept? And the idea of evolution? Can you go along with both? Most people at some point or another have sought answers to those questions, and to a lot of others: Are adverbs really a sign of poor writing? (Not when I do it. Usually.) Why do you find something in the last place you look? (Ann Landers once had to field that one.) Does chocolate really make dogs sick? (YES, given sufficient amounts per body mass. Have a vet ‘splain it to you, and keep Lucky out of the trick-or-treat bags.)

Why does old window glass ripple? How do you get Play-Doh out of a kid’s hair? Why do experienced hand sewers bother looking closely at both the thread and the needle? How do you make your candles last longer? Why is your hair unmanageable no matter how often you wash it? Why is it easier to peel Easter eggs than the ones for egg salad? Why does black pepper make you sneeze?

I know all those! (If you don’t, and go the trouble of commenting or messaging me, I’ll share.) And if you ask me, they’re all pretty weird, or not immediately intuitively obvious. Although the candle one took me a while. And I didn’t get the answers from clicking a link. Instead, I listened to stuff–professors, observation, deducing things from other similar facts–and experimentation. (I left out the don’t-do-this-at-home-just-because-I-did ones. For example, the answer to “What happens if you put your old Christmas wreath on the fire?” is “A period of hopefully very brief excitement, depending on what flammable objects are within a foot or so of the fireplace.”)

What’s weird to me is that people put so little effort into getting answers, much less figuring their own out. What’s even weirder is the fact that I’m not charging a quarter each for the answers to the above questions. Pony up!

El escritorio del Dr. Evil

Halloween. Costumes. Hmm. Who will you be? (Having no plans, I'm planning on The Curmudgeon Pretending She's Not Home to Trick-or-Treaters, myself.)

A perhaps shameful cowardice, compared to the guy on the T last year who was Dr. Evil. It was flawless-and somewhere he had gotten a doll (or maybe a dummy?) for Mini Me. Other costumed people on the train were equally impressed. He was pretty much giving interviews about how he'd put it together.

A meta-costume thought: If you think about it, Dr. Evil can pretty much be just a skin cap and a gray suit. (Unless you're my ex-husband. Kidding! Just kidding! [Mostly.]) But presentation is everything. This man had worked very hard, and in a small way achieved greatness. I couldn't stop grinning.

And when you think about that wildfire happy spreading to everybody who saw him that night, who's to say that it was in a small way at all?

Uf da.

I used a cloth diaper service for both my breast-fed children. I prefer Macs and stick shifts. I recycle; I vote for the most socially progressive candidates, which almost always means Democrats, even though it’s the choice of the stupid over the mean. Hell, not only do I vote, but I understand the political process. I have a doctorate in the liberal arts. I can’t keep track of who of my friends fits into what sub-category because there are just too many of them. I shop at the local farmers’ market. But . . .

NPR makes me twitch. They make me feel non-white. There’s just no other way to put it. I have a friend (white, by the way) who works at home, and she once found herself under the mild delusion that NPR was trying to make her commit suicide. I knew exactly what she meant.

Even though I myself happen to have that very same FM dj’s voice (the smooth mezzo, the ability to talk in complete and punctuated paragraphs) they make me want to scream. As another friend phrases it, they have never met a point they couldn’t belabor. Their self-precious bleatings sound like the voice of doom itself–except, of course, during A Prairie Home Companion, which isn’t fair to Garrison Keillor, because he doesn’t work for them. (I love Sven and Ole jokes. I was born and went to college in the Midwest. But listening to A Prairie Home Companion gives me the creeps. I’ve been waist-deep in live Scandahoovia, and I have never ever felt quite that non-white.)

The people of NPR live in a miserable world, but they don’t care about it. Theirs is a lugubrious intellectual detachment. Listening to them gives insight into FOX News’ distressing popularity: Highly colored and biased reporting it may be, but by God at least they are real breathing human people with nerve endings. Who probably have non-soy-derived milk in their refrigerators given by cows fenced in by electrical wire, pumped full of crack, and forced to wear Donna Karan 12-inch pumps.

So. Non-white:

I’m genetically multiracial, and so I’ve always chafed at society’s attempts to shove me into one box or another. It seems particularly odd in medical areas. So I asked some savvy public health people about it, and they said, quite reasonably, that it was really a cultural thing: foods you eat, patterns of dealing with stress, a whole bunch of different little things. And when adding all these factors up of all the things that make up my personal culture, by golly I’m just your basic Amurrican girl-i.e., white. I’d always suspected it. At 50%, it’s my largest genetic group, and as I grew up, I was called an Oreo every time I passed a glass of that alien-probed and radioactive milk.

However. Understand that I have medium dark skin, curly hair, and sort of generically-pretty-exotic features. I’ve “passed” as everything from Italian to Navajo–to others of those groups. By and large, I’m a generic minority, and quite comfortable about it. When people ask me The Question, this is my answer:

Some of my ancestors ran out of mammoths.

Some of them ran out of land.

Some of them ran out of potatoes.

Some didn’t run fast enough.

And some ran away from us.

What this boils down to is that I’m an American; and like it or not, the color I am is the ones that don’t run.

But NPR makes me feel non-white.

In many ways (see above) I’m in a close demographic with their target audience: professional class, socially progressive politics (although a tad too conservative in some ways), well-educated. But . . . I’m not. I feel alienated and highly uncomfortable. I am at a party, and I am The Other.

I decided to blog about this precisely because this is so hard to put into words, but here’s an example of what I mean:

One day, I was on the train here in Boston, and a (big white) prep/yuppie leaned over and said, grinning in approval, “I’m glad to see you wearing your beads! So many people hide them!”

(wtf?????) I was absolutely baffled. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to his wife and kid, but he was pleased as punch with me. Then I realized that he thought I practiced Santeria.

I like beads. I started stringing them just for the hell of it years ago and it’s sort of a hobby. I almost always wear 15-20 strands of multi-colored/patterned seed beads. I’m just into it. They’re both visual and tactile. They get admired a lot, but . . . although some of them indeed have orisha colors, they’re . . . just beads.

So I spent the next two or three minutes wondering how to tactfully tell this guy that I’m Episcopalian. That I’m not Latina or Yoruba in any way, shape, or form. And that there are tons of Santeria folks running around with their beads in plain view; he probably just doesn’t hang in their neighborhoods.

And that he had just sort of made me into an ethnocultural exhibit for his family.

I would bet TONS that this man listens to NPR every day. It was the vibe. He was just so liberal and hip! And culturally aware of diversity! So I figured that if I said something, maybe he would be less hip and aware of diversity (in the least sarcastic of senses), so I just left it be. But I was really enraged.

It was one of the most racist things that has ever happened to me.

And that last sentence is a piece of the world a lot of NPR’s audience just won’t get.

You see, there’s a big difference between being included and excluded. I’m still friends with the nice Italian boy I got fixed up with who was told I was Sicilian. I treasure the memory of that convenience store on the res where Grandpa tottered up to me with his cane, cute as a biscuit, and told me something funny as hell in Navajo, and poked me, and I laughed back, because it was funny as hell, by golly! Being taken as a fellow sabra by the Israeli woman in the clearance section of Bloomie’s got a little embarrassing when it turned out that I didn’t know that it was Purim, but hey. (It took me a while to realize that she hadn’t even thought I was goyische. New York can be like that.) I am happy to give anybody the wrong directions in bad Spanish. And I can pass for being black most of the time, although that one’s problematic because of the woeful class assumptions made by people who frequently want to dunk me in that glass of  milk mixed with Antarctic ice cap pureed with high-fructose corn syrup derived from the blood of small dairy farmers.

But although tons of my friends are white, and I don’t feel excluded at all (they’re my friends, duh) . . . NPR . . . they stick up for all of these oppressed people, and valorize them, and moan about them–but none of them, of it, is real. They go home, like most of us, to the people who are just like them, and listen to A Prairie Home Companion. Although they feel guilty for laughing at Sven and Ole, because it’s a class thing dere for dem, doncha know.

But hey, the boys dere are fair targets, because ya know vhat dey make up dere in Visconsin.

Anybody got a cookie?

Lopsided?

I drew the above back in ’04 (I think?) from a specimen at the Smithsonian Naturalist Center. After a year or so, I found it in the sketchbook, and thought, “Yow! He’s lopsided!” I felt pretty stupid. I even called them and asked if he were, and they said no.

But now that I think about it after a few years of working on my self-esteem, I don’t think it’s lopsided after all. (And no, I don’t mean that it’s-a-cool-drawing-in-and-of-itself.) Rather, faces are lopsided; some more than others. And more to the point, after looking at the pic for some clues, I realize that the left side of the face (your right) is normal–and the right is noticeably different. The very fact that you don’t see the zygomaxillary suture there is something of a giveaway. My guess is that something got a little squished on that side in utero. I’m betting the people at the Naturalist Center didn’t see this skull as abnormal, just as I hadn’t when I was right there paying very close attention, so that my hand put down what my eyes were seeing. So it was him; that’s just the skull he had–and I didn’t “fall out of drawing,” as they say.

I’m enormously relieved. I worked pretty hard on that piece, and it’s one of my best. I draw really well when I put my mind to it (and get a good roll on the chicken bones), and I was bummed that I could have done something that spectacularly . . . well, wrong.

The interesting thing for me is that although I have a degree from a kick-ass Art program (UW/Madison), I went with I-was-wrong. I trusted my insecurity instead of my training and talent.

I’m glad my brain and soul have caught up to my eyes and hand.

Twenty-two years ago, I had to take a core requirement in Art History that I just couldn’t bear. It was taught by an extremely non-linear professor. What he was talking about had really nothing to do with the slides, and it was a hu-u-uuge survey course in this echoing concrete lecture hall with a dark high ceiling filled with several hundred communications and animal science majors talking to each other. And I was trapped there for 90 minutes twice a week.

I have a minor auditory language processing glitch. (I can’t take notes.) It gave me too many tracks to simultaneously process, and I hated all of them.

It was ADHD hell.

But the thing that made me nuts–and really, still does, and I’m not sure why–was that at the end we had to look at a slide for maybe a minute, and then sketch on an index card what we recalled, and write something about it.

And it was all really abstract modern art of the sort that makes me completely baffled why the artist gets credit for something that would have been a lot more meaningful if it had been done by a chimpanzee. Mind you, I love tons of abstract modern art. I’m not talking color fields (e.g., the spatter paintings–which can be really difficult to do to get the effect, by the way), I’m talking a tree branch splattered with random paint, with a tire hanging from it (not a swing).

I didn’t see the point. I have this overwhelming need for life to make some kind of sense, and this activity was . . . stupid. At least for me. Cherry on the sundae. I was already in raging hippopotamus mode from having had to sit through the lecture itself.

Anyway, my best friend said the prof was a sweetie, and maybe I could comp the class, and do some other project to make up for it. So I went in to talk to him–and it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.

The sketch cards were his particular baby. (Ooh, tactical error much?) All I really recall was sitting there crying, and his telling me that if I didn’t like sketching, then I shouldn’t be an artist. He asked me if I had any particular art project I wanted to do, and I said that I really liked Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and that I wanted to do some work illustrating the symbolism.

Illustrating. Symbolism. Sounds artsy, right? Apparently not. He told me that I should go do literature instead.

So that’s what I did. I walked out of his office in a daze. I went into the watercolor studio and tore up my entire semester’s portfolio. (I have no idea what I did for the grade.) My friend said I was dead pale.

I think she felt really guilty for innocently putting me in that chair with reasonable expectations, and she was fretting about it to our watercolor prof. She said he just grinned and said, “She’ll be back.”

Fifteen or so years later, I was sitting in a big pink dress in Harvard Yard. I have a PhD in English.

And then I broke. I’m on disability. I’m dead poor. It sucks beyond belief. There’s a good chance I won’t be on the bench forever; at least that’s my plan, because . . . well, heck, peeps, you don’t slog through 250 pages of scholarship by being a wussy quitter. I got myself this big gold ring so I could have this metal teddy bear reminding me that I did that; it’s an objective proof of “Yay me!” And I was what one could say was pre-broken when I did it–I just wouldn’t admit it.

I had plans for my life; I adore teaching. I proposed; He disposed. Me being me, ADHD and PhD and m-o-u-s-e, I couldn’t handle it. So I poked along at the infamous novel, which actually started as a sort of writing warmup while I was working on the diss. Poke, poke, poke. Many adventures. Poke, poke, poke. Had to DO something, so that’s what I did. And presto! I finished it! And am now going through the clean-up–and have started the sequel, heh.

And somewhere along the line, I had to realize that the reason the watercolor professor said that I’d be back, is that there really isn’t anywhere else for me to go. I didn’t waste my undergraduate career on the BS in Art; just as I didn’t waste grad school on the PhD. I’m an artist; always have been; always will be.

So I write (obvously), and I draw and paint. I’m pretty good at it, actually. (One would hope.)

I broke; I had to admit that I was broken–but now I have a prism. Pretty cool, huh?