2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

The Writer is a Liar.

Hello. I'm Beth. I'm new here.

I guess I should tell you about myself.

Hm. I've re-written this part a few times, now. I can't get it right. It's just that, there's not too much to say. I'm not that interesting. I'm one of those girls with dark hair and glasses. I look like I majored in English (I did). I look like I may want to be a librarian (I do). I like books, cats and muffins. I'm 21. I have a tattoo; it's from my favorite book. I like snakes, and they've been known to like me in return. I'm a pretty bad speller. I only speak English. I've never been outside the country. You see? I'm just not too interesting.

But my house is.

The first thing you should know is that my house is a Fort, located on the south edge of the city. My house was a place of ill-repute, drunken brawls and drug trade before we claimed it, sailing through the sky in a teacup like Baba Yaga. We: myself and another you're acquainted with, the dispossessed rent boy, the Earl. Our local shaman, peacock and fish-monger. We claimed it with a kiss, and wine, and music. We throw parties for the seasons and ourselves and nothing at all with Bacchanalia's that have become epic legends in our own minds. We've even gone so far as to imagine (in our silliest moments) ourselves a live-in Butler, wildly disapproving of our antics and always ready with a tray of tea if required after a particularly ribald moment.

We decorate our house in feather and bone and velvet. There is no place like us, a Fort defending beauty and spontaneity, good taste and a true enthusiasm for the art of living. We are a Fort on the south edge of everything, defending ourselves against the mundane, the boring, the hopeless.

I promise, I'll tell you all about it.

Lies We Tell to Children: Inspiration

You only know you had something when it's gone. I'm not talking about girls here, though I could be, given a couple more days of rain for 12 hours and sun for 3. I'm talking about inspiration. Just write, and it will come to you, my parents said.

I have learned, many times, at or around 1 a.m., that this is patently untrue. Especially this week, when I've been trying to type up something for this site in praticular, and finding my bag of tricks more or less empty. There hasn't been much to annoy me or rattle my cage that engenders a conversation in a public setting, so there wasn't much to write about.

But. If you have ever had inspiration, between cans of Red Bull and Jones soda, then you know, as I do, that you have to strike while the iron is hot, and not while it is lukewarm. This is hard to explain to Zach and company, who seem to be able to sit and come up with something without getting worked up and talking about it to whomever will listen. I see something. I get worked up. I write. Only after writing out the ideas in some terrible form, just getting them on the screen, as it were, can I refine them into the grade B garbage you see in front of you.

(As you might imagine, the grade A garbage derived from the garbage mentioned in the last paragraph goes to the campus newspaper.)

A slight biographical note. I have been sick for the last couple weeks, or ever since I returned to the snow belt, and like Jerry from Penny-Arcade: We've long canonized our respective lunacies, believing it is like some artistic sacrament that makes our bizarre endeavor possible. We have relied upon them. I use his words to say that for the most part I am comfortable in my semi-lucid, sickened, occasionally picking up books and vomiting in the trash can before class state, and it is that state, I believe, that gets me in the right mindset to write furiously and engage my "gift", as my professors and family members have put it.

I don't know what I would do if I lost it. I can't write normally, and I jumped off the ship of normal habits years ago. I need you to understand that the last time I got a bunch of guys together we ended up playing Starcraft for hours on end. I am very protective of my anxiety and neuroses, because so far as I can tell, it allows me to write well.

Though this might condemn you to insanity (As if anyone reads this anyway!), guard your neuroses carefully. Know, too, what they take out of you and weigh those two things against each other. I tell the people around me that I can hold it together, when more often than not, I know I can't, because I know that's where my inspiration comes from. If it kills me, I can take solace in the fact that I'm burning out and not fading away.

I was told by my parents sickness and neuroses aren't useful. Just by looking at the works of the painters they have me look at, they knew better.

Lies We Tell to Children: The Fairytale Chronicles

There are many things you can tell children that will completely alter the course of their lives and warp their perceptions of the world: there is a fat, jolly man who brings you gifts once a year, that on the day some guy died for your sins a large bunny will bring you candy, and that all dogs go to heaven. All of these things are a societally approved, mutual goal of most adults to preserve a child's innocence and to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. I mean, most parents don't feel that Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ is a suitable alternative to the myth of the easter bunny. "Now little Timmy, I know that your teacher says that Easter is about candy eggs and oversize rodents, but this movie will show you the true meaning of the holiday"(for those of you that haven't seen the movie, the true message of Easter seems to be Mel Gibson making money off of other people's religious fervor).

But a conversation with some friends sparked the interesting debate of how much illusion is too much, when do we start doing children a disservice with our lies? I have never felt particularly betrayed by the things my parents told me that didn't end up being true, but i know people who do. It seems that if your parents lied about "little things" like Santa Clause, then they could have been hiding the truth about other things too, like perhaps they don't love you. It might just be possible they have been caring for you, feeding you, and clothing you out of some sick desire to make you believe lies and watch with some perverted fascination when you discover that they were in fact the ones that bought you all those cool new toys. The ever feared revelation that one is adopted did not carry weight in my house, for some reason kids that know they are adopted don't find it so horrifying.

For me, I feel the worst lies to tell to kids are the ones that society ingrains in us, that give us false expectations for life. Things like the idea that the first person you fall in love with is going to be the person you marry, or that all of your problems can be solved in half hour to hour long time slots, and there will even be time for commercial breaks! However, I feel the worst lie we tell to children, both male and female, is the lie of Happily Ever After.

It is something that pervades everything in our entertainment industry. Books, movies, TV, they all perpetuate this idea that one day we will reach a magical point in our lives where we will have no more problems, and everything else we ever do will be easy.

Most adults, whether down to earth or of the more whimsical variety, all look at the idea of Happily Ever After and scoff. No sane grown up would really believe in something like that. But then we all think, "if I just had a better job, everything would be great. If I just had a bigger house, then I would be happy. Once I get through this hard time, there will be no more problems." The fact is, there will always be problems, there will always be one more thing to own, always one more hurtle before everything is perfect. Its capitalism, plain and simple, we are raised to always want more.

Now you are probably thinking "Cathleen, this is depressing!" and on some level you would be right. It is depressing to think that there will always be something keeping you from reaching that perfect moment from whence forth you will never be troubled. But it is also reassuring in some ways. I mean, have you ever thought about how boring Happily Ever After would be? Think about it, there would be nothing left to work towards, no more challenges, nothing to look forward to. And if you are always looking to the future to find Happily Ever After, you might forget to enjoy the present.

Do you hear me? Go out and live people! Don't sit around waiting for the time to be right, or for everything to be perfect, those things will never happen, so don't let great opportunities pass you by. So do something crazy, go skydiving, ask out that person you have a crush on, dance in the fucking rain!

Life is too short to wait for a Happily Ever After that will probably never happen, so disregard what the fairytales say and live.

Lies We Tell To Children: Blasphemy.

My father was raised by Jesuits and fed on philosophy. His Catholicism was rich, historical, and dead. It was a tradition to be passed on, poetry and ideas, but, before he took ill at least, not a comfort, not something by which to be restricted. My mother was the youngest of five, the daughter of a Catholic and a Jew. She took her mother's Catholicism, but I'm not sure she ever felt as if she truly understood it until a few years ago, at which point she realised that the Church had few nice things to say about either of her children, and she left it. The knowledge that she chose us over a god is a gift so great I don't have the words to thank her for it.

When I was very young, I watched the Disney film Fantasia for the first time with my father. The final scene is an animated Christian afterlife which seemed, at the time, frightening and dull in succession. Before that, I was introduced to Olympus. There were creatures: horses with the torsos of bathing young women, dancing boys with the legs of goats. And there were gods! Funny drunken things, a bearded old man throwing lightning in his rages. And these chimeras were wonders, but stranger still was that my father knew every one of their names. The power of this knowledge seemed infinite. I learned the word pantheon at three.

My sister and I were both sent to a Jewish pre-school and kindergarten and spent a subsequent twelve years in Catholic schools. I was smart and obedient and shy, and so at first school was, like the afterlife I'd been promised, terrifying and boring in stages. The rituals and prayers, however, were mysterious, exacting. There were screaming prophets, strange pacts and sacrifices. I spent grade-school rushing through my work in order to have more time to read, and my favourite books were the lives of the saints, adventure tales of emperors and virgins and martyrs, and classical mythology, ancient songs of heroes and shape-shifting and rape.

Due to my parent's choice to condemn my sister and I to a youth of near constant religious training, we learned that these cosmologies, strict, contradictory, jealous, and all-encompassing though they were, were not exclusive. No culture, then, was stupid or dangerous or wrong. Everything was real. Everything was permitted. In religions and mythologies, then, there were no lies, only choices.

In which I talk endlessly of my own novelty

I have a new hero. The website is simple and clean, the essays are informative (if a bit dry), and it is, first and foremost, about delicious meat. Meat is of particular interest to me, because today is (still) Mardi Gras or Carnival, two terms whose names almost literally mean "prepare to suffer" when translated. Which means that tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and beyond that, forty days of self denial and contemplation and looking down my nose at people who ignore their Lenten vows on Sundays (even though they're technically fine for doing so).

Oh, right, hey, did I mention I'm Catholic? I totally am! EW GROSS I KNOW RIGHT? And Lent? It is a crazy semi-pagan holiday (because there aren't a lot of those in Catholocism) where we Cat-a-holics give up something we enjoy to, uh, kind of mimic Jesus and also to kind of just live lives of quiet and dutiful self-denial, since we are all basically just piles of sparking, gooey ash anyway. But what really ends up happening (at least to me) is a weird mental hierarchy of suffering - I like to give up things for Lent that are more fantastic than just plain ol' desserts or coffee or swearing. This is because I view Lent as a competition, and it is also why I am a very bad Catholic.

I RLY RLY don't mean to bludgeon you over the head with this (because honestly, who really likes hearing about religion? YAWN), but bear with me (hee hee! Bear! With me! Send help!). Some years ago, I gave up all traces of sarcasm from what I did and what I said, vowing to remain completely genuine and true in my actions for the whole of lent, like some kind of monk or paladin or other suitable character class. It seemed like such a great idea, but in the end, I turned into an evil-minded troll of a man, because I had to just tell people that I thought their ideas were stupid and that they should be ashamed for having them. I didn't joke around, I didn't get invited to go along anywhere. I began to grow hunched and crooked and hateful and pale. Forty days of hardcore honesty almost ruined me, body and soul.

But it was still kind of enlightening. For starters, it reveals the necessity of polite lies or begrudging courtesies in dealing with other people. What are thank-you notes, after all, other than a way to just stay in someone's mind? The whole idea is that gifts themselves, humble or extravagant, (extravagancy being its own kettle of fish) are seldom delivered just for fun; more often they are tokens of courtier-like devotion to placate a host (I BROUGHT POTATO SALAD FUCK YEAH) or just to fulfill a grim duty. Christmas mornings everywhere seem to be hopelessly cluttered with hated duty gifts - we can't always get exactly what we want, after all. As children, we learn early on how to lie to our elders, how to put on fake smiles and tell some out-of-touch aunt or uncle how much we appreciate their once-yearly efforts to remind us of how much they really know nothing about us.

You thought I wasn't going anywhere near lies we tell to children with this, didn't you? HA HA JUST AS PLANNED.

The truth seems to be that Western society (okay, American society. On the East Coast. I acknowledge our foreign visitors! There, are you happy? NOW SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS) deception is necessary. Our social interactions and political systems all depend on lies to function at almost every level. I'm simply supposing that we learn the skill early on to placate our superiors - after all, why lie to an inferior - and that deception is not so much enacted out of self interest as it is out of respect. We shoulder the burdens of our friends and families, and try to lighten their load with a little fiction.

It's Only Okay to Hit Children in the Brain with Ideas

Did you see the theme week? It's lies that we tell to children! Come along, and allow me to elucidate.

We lie to children. I, personally, do it out of a mixture containing equal parts of a desire to preserve some sense of childlike wonder in our increasingly dull world (Hey kids, did you know that the moon is made out of cheese?) and because it is personally amusing to do so (You're also adopted!). The lines between generational abuse and affection become so blurred that we are often unable to stop ourselves from perpetuating these vicious not-truths. I'd love to not be responsible for fucking up notions of the world, but I realize that I'm going to end up doing it anyway. It's a psychotic compulsion I have, to spin fabulous tales and make up lies that children below a certain age aren't cagey enough to realize for what they are.

There is little doubt in my mind that if some kind of codex were to be assembled of everything I've told to children under the age of five, it would read very much like how I wish the world worked. Real Life Example Tiem: When I was a wee sprout, my mother (who is 100% Slovak) would tell me that if I misbehaved, Baba Yaga was going to come out of the woods, kidnap me, and then either eat me or turn me into a sheep. The specific form of punishment was never specified, but to me, the witch became a kind of elemental figure, whose inscrutable ways were bulletproofed against my critical thinking skills. Why would an old witch care if I hid in the clothes dryer, and didn't eat my yams? Did she really like yams? Maybe she really hated them! All I knew was that I didn't want to be eaten or transmuted, and so I best do as my mother says.

My mother was at once abusing the trust I have in her (WHY WOULD MY OWN MOTHER LIE TO ME LOL) and perpetuating some aspect of her own youth (specifically, that of child-eating witches. Not recipes or children's rhymes, but child eating witches), inculcating old world names into a new generation. Which is kind of neat. Here is normally where I'd post some tripe about being able to believe small lies (Witches, Santa, the awesomeness of running around naked all the time) before we're able to swallow the larger ones (that our parents will never be disappointed in us, that everyone is willing to give us a fair shake, the awesomeness of running around fully dressed all the time). But I don't really believe that.

The differentiation between large and small lies is basically the taxonomy of different breeds of griffin, that is, you are making arbitrary decisions about something that doesn't exist. All of the lies that we tell to children are our little subversions from what others would have them believe - we know that what we tell them is untrue, but to them it is real, and so the lies live on. Baba Yaga has basically been replaced by the police, in my mind, as the abstract entity that will fuck my shit up if I step out of line. There's no big or small about it - maybe some notion of maturity (witches are cop training wheels), but as a certain past theme week will remind us, we are still plenty superstitious about the world around us.

It can be disorienting too. As technology (and hated science, hsss!) progress blindly onward, our understanding of the world declines. Actual history slides into the realm of myth, borders fade, and soon, we realize that we've always just been the same cavemen as we were before, still just as petty and biased and driven onward by the chemical prods of all kinds of conquest, just put into a suit. It could be said that the lies we tell to children are the only things that really represent us as human beings, as we wrap our hopes and dreams (and fears) up in stories and give them to our younglings as we sit, huddled and picking the nits out of each other's hair as we watch the campfire embers. Or Celebrity (now there's a generous definition if I've ever heard one) Rehab. Or mind reading enviro-helms. Or maybe some kind of controlled hallucinogenic nano-spores. In the end, though, we want some whisper of the things we only half-remember as children to continue onward, to propel the dreamy parasites of our world on into the future, so that we can someday look back at them on the edge of our twilights, and see what is best in our nature being forever youthful and energetic, never quite realizing that the phantom hag that lurks in closets and beneath old trees is really the fondest token of affection they'll ever receive.

Also, that they are adopted.