Freudian Slip

I have never been one to dress up as a "sexy nurse" or other ridiculous "sexy" costume for halloween... I never understood the point. My best ever costume was one I pulled together last minute from what I had in my closet: A Gun-Slinging Chinese Cowgirl. It consisted of an outrageous, bright-red line-dancing dress, pig tails, gun holster with water guns, cowgirl hat, Mary Jane Chinese shoes, and Geisha style makeup. I wonder now if this was kind of a racist constume, especially since Geisha's are Japanese. But I would like to think rather that I was challenging stereotypes by being 3 stereotypes rolled into one package. Afterall, isn't that what Halloween has mostly evolved to, making fun of stereotypes? Think about most of the costumes and traditions surrounding Halloween- witch decorations in people's front yard, slutty costumes, racist costumes (like the ever popular dressing up as a Native American costume). These are all only representing one stereotype at a time. I say, if you are going to dress up as a stereotype- you might as well go crazy and be several stereotypes at once. Like, be a sexy old lady dressed in male drag. If you do that, it becomes that you are actually challenging the stereotypes since you can't put them into any one category. I say, confuse people- thats the most fun I could ever have on Halloween. Absurdity is so great, which is why Halloween is so fun.

This year, I think I might take the advice of The Budget Fashionista and be a "Freudian Slip." She says to do this: "Head to your lingerie drawer or to the nearest Target or Wal-Mart for a full slip (you know the kind your mother told you to wear underneath thin dresses). Using fabric paint, write the words "ego","id", etc all over the slip." Awesome.

Kitty's Home

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Since I moved to DC almost a year ago, I have been missing my beloved feline friend, Obsidian. I had to leave her in Portland, and thankfully my mother has been dutifully watching over her, though her husband has not been terribly thrilled.

Obsidian- I have had her since I was in high school- she has been with me through more than any boyfriend- and most of my now friends. I used to feel the same way about my car- my truck (Sam, the '89 Isuzu pup). But the truck is gone now, loooooooong gone in a dump pile somewhere- reincarnated as a garbage disposal or something.

So, Sid (as I like to pretend her name is- Obsidian is a bit of an embarrassing name?) along with my dad, are right now as we speak, in my apartment in DC. Yes, my dad took her on a plane and brought her here to stay. My mom's husband decided he didn't want the responsibility of a cat over the holidays. So, the poor thing, skittish as she is, got on a plane with my cat-terrorizing dad.

Here is a bit of history on Sid: I have no idea what the first year of her life was like. She just showed up on our doorstep one day when I was a senior in high school. She was obviously hungry and very scared. But her hunger trumped her fear, so she came to us for food. She seemed like she had been on her own for quite a while and had to fend for herself. So, we took her in, fed her, and eventually one day she became known as "our cat, Obsidian." As a result of her first year of life as a stray cat, she has always been a little more squimish than your average household cat.

My dad has a long, sordid history with cats which includes chasing them with brooms for fun. I don't know why, but he thinks its funny when a cat puts it's ears flat and hisses, growls, and runs for it's life with its hair sticking straight up.

Needless to say, I was a bit apprehensive about my dad making the 10 or so hour plane trip, which included a plane transfer with a layover. I am happy to say that she made the trip without even so much as a peep (according to my pop), and since has been trying to get used to being in DC in a new apartment. I don't think she is having an easy time of it though, since she tries to hide under the bed or in the kitchen cabinets every chance she gets. My dad has been surprisingly sweet and doting to her though, always insisting that she curl up on his lap so he can relentlessly pet and scratch her chin.

The broom chasing is still going on probably right now as I am writing this. My dad is a traditional guy as far as gender roles go. I have long given up that fight with him, so I do most of the domestic stuff when he is around. I can justify it because he is my guest staying with me in my apartment- I would do that for any guest. Anyway, there have been several times while I'm in the kitchen that I hear LOUD cat screams, hissing, and scampering.

That's right, its my dad chasing the cat with a broom. Don't worry, there is no physical violence, it just sounds violent. I don't think there is anything I can do about it at this point since this is the way its always been. Though, I do think that it will take her much longer to acclimate to her new home once he leaves....


Ed- you may be the only one who finds this amusing, but I want to assure all others who read this- there is no animal abuse going on here.

Oh, and thanks Dad, Mom, and especially Suzanne for getting her out here. It was definitely a family affair.

yellow pillow case

She said she wouldn't go there. She had been over this one too many times and now it wasn't worth the ambiguity that she usually favored. "Where will we go now?" He wanted an answer, but she couldn't give him any. It wasn't okay to be normal anymore, it had to be different now. Everything else had become different, so this would have to be too.

Waking up with her head on the yellow pillow case was the only thing she could count on, but she didn't want to count on that anymore. It was too much for her to commit to. What else could there be? There had to be choices, something to lean back on- like that game you used to play as a kid when someone stands behind you and you have to close your eyes and fall back into their arms.

"Wait, whats that called again? Oh yea, it's called Fountain Head- that book you used to read out loud to me. Did we ever finish it? I think we only got to page 92. We should finish that you know. Finishing things is good." Silence.

"It wasn't me that you thought you were talking to. It was someone else. I don't know who you thought was going to be there on the other side of the door, but it definitely wasn't me." She forgot how trivial and benign speech could be. Where did the time go? Everything was so different now, and everything felt so old. The paper she wrote in perfect cursive, her high school essay, "Forging Though the Wilderness: A Story of Witch Hunts in Connecticut" was fragile now, like old paper crumbling in hands. The paper had been aged, but not by time. The fibers had been forcibly changed, dipped in sepia and laid out to dry in the hot sun on the green wooden table in her childhood's backyard.

"You think this is a metaphor?" he asked her. "Well, its not. This is real life. We have to make decisions and stick by them. You cant just start reading a book out loud to someone and then never finish it." She imagined what it would be like if she just kissed him. Would he shut up? She didn't particularly find his lips alluring. They looked chapped, peeling, sticky, and white- like he really needed to drink some water.

She stood up and pulled her pants up- they always fell down a little when she sat and then stood up. Constant readjustment. Constant readjustment? She constantly had a lingering feeling of malaise. She was always readjusting to the disappointment she saw in his face.

She could paint a portrait of his face in a hundred different ways. She could spend the rest of her life doing that. But what use would that be? Each time she finished one, she wouldn't know what she was supposed to do with it. Give it away as a Christmas present to different people? She was always broke, but Christmas presents of someones face probably wouldn't go over very well (at least behind closed doors). Especially of his face. His face constantly changed. Constant readjustment. His face was constantly readjusting. It was ugly in a pretty way. She felt the opposite about her face- pretty in an ugly way. She wondered if it would ever be pretty in a pretty way, or ugly in an ugly way? She was tired of the not knowing for sure. Except she knew for sure she wanted to get rid of the yellow pillow case.

The yellow pillow case had to go. They always pick up the trash on Fridays, so today would be a good day for that.

Google Images

Here are the pictures that came up when searching on Google images for people I know. This may only by funny to those mentioned here (but who else is reading this anyway?)

Hey, I have an idea- Wouldnt it be funny to have your Halloween costume be your Google Image picture?

Me:


My boyfriend:

Elissa:Oh wait, that's actually her! (on the right) She must be famous.


Cory:


Sharon:


My Dad:


My Mom:
This is actually some art that comes up from a Google search from a class she teaches

My Brother: A music video he produced:
On the Outside



My Older Sister:


My Second Oldest Sister:

From Ed: The Male Species

Let me introduce myself. I'm the "Guest-Blogger," pen-name "Ed." I was asked, by the owner of this blog, to contribute a post this week and run with some thoughts. The prevailing thought? Men of course. The infuriating, fascinating, mysteriously uncomplicated (or so it only seems?) male gender.

Lately, I've been dating older men. It's just sort of happened that way. Not too much older, mostly in the age box of 29-36, OK that's two age boxes. So sue me. I've been told many times that if you don't want to deal with silly relationship and dating issues you should look to older men, those who are obviously more mature and adept at dealing with their and your, issues. I was told they were mature, I believed they would be mature.

But alas. It's really never that simple, is it? Case and point. The older guy who picked a fight with me (over nothing) while he was drunk, walked out on me at 1am, failed to return a phone call, an email saying "OK, whatever, let's at least be friends" and also erased me (ERASED!) from his myspace profile. It takes a bit of effort to do this, I have people I don't talk on there but I don't make it a point to go erase them, effectively saying "I am ending all communication with you and this is the big gesture." And why does should this guy, at 29 years old, be erasing people from a myspace profile? Not the definition of maturity.

But I'm a young, intelligent, reasonably attractive mid-20 something girl, and I do what we would all do, cry into the ice cream for awhile and then hit the bars with some friends to meet someone new. Which I did.

This one seemed promising. A no games, straight shooter; if I like you, I like you kind of guy. Called immediately, called when he said he would, did all the normal prerequisites, inviting me out, walking me to the car, an excellent kisser, etc. But on the third date (granted two of these so called dates had technically been "group outings") I made a rookie mistake. I let him stay over. In my defense, the dude's
a bartender, he gets off at 3am, and if you want to hang out with him at night you're either sucking down G&T's and later trying to remember if you drove, rode your bike or walked to this bar in Oakland, or hanging out in your bed...with him...because that is the natural place to be at 3am.

So of course, he stops calling after that. Typical right? But he's 30. And seeing as we had been out a few times before, I wasn't thinking of it as a one night stand kind of thing. Naive? Could he not at least call to say, thanks but no thanks? He's 30!

OK, so maybe I'm whining now. I apologize. Another example however; The 30-something Dude who took me line dancing. Yes. Line dancing. I thought this was a joke, and I was happy to be in on it, except that it turned out to be deadly serious. At the end of the night I asked how old he was. Here's a hint, it's always a bad sign when they answer that question with "how old are you?" What do you say to that? You could just tell them, but why are they avoiding a simple question?

He never told me how old he was. I heard from someone who knew him that he was 36. OK then. Being 25, I don't see that dating someone who is 36 is out of the realm of possibility. I do however have certain qualms about dating a man who won't tell you his age and has some kind of cagey reply to that question.

Maturity. A hard thing to come by in the male gender. Are they actually getting younger as they get older? Are the good one's just being weeded out?

Birthday Dinner

Let me just say that my boyfriend is very sweet. His intentions are always good, he is my sweetheart. He has been very good at putting up with me the past couple of days, and did a good job making me feel good about my b-day.

Yesterday was my birthday. I wasn't very excited about it this year- maybe i was having some sort of pity party about getting older- about where the time has gone- about what little I have accomplished compared to what I want to accomplish...

I have decided that the next twelve months are going to be a time of major transition. I am going to feel happy and satisfied with my efforts. What will it take for me to feel satisfied with them? That I am trying. I am going to try harder than I ever have before at actually DOING what I say I want to do. Which is painting on a regular basis, taking lots of pictures, and trying to get my art career off the ground.

Back to the birthday. Daniel took me out to this really interesting restaurant in Silver Spring. Its called Jackie's- a 70's inspired gourmet TV dinner restaurant that shows old black and white movies. Pretty unique I thought. Good food too. He is also getting me a digital camera- so that means I will get to start posting pictures!

Is it really a sin?

It is very likely that I am missing some Bible passage somewhere that touches more on this subject. I am by no means an expert. If you are reading this and you know of something- please let me know.

Did you know that no where in The Bible does it say anything about abortion being murder? The only thing it says about the subject is that it is a sin for a man to hit a woman who is pregnant and cause her to have a miscarriage, and that this is less of a sin than murder. So if The Bible doesn't consider a forced miscarriage murder, then would that conclude that abortion (which is basically a forced miscarriage) isn't murder either? Let me be clear, I am not stating what my opinion is- I just want to open it for discussion.

Bill Clinton as VP?

I read an article in the Washington Post this morning about the possibility of Bill Clinton running as VP along side Hillary Clinton this next presidential election.

This is just speculation of course, Mrs. Clinton has not stated anywhere that she is planning on running, let alone has Mr. Clinton stated that he would even want to run as vice president. But it is an intriguing idea, don't you think?

My first reaction to this idea was "wow, that would be so great. I love Bill Clinton, even if he wasn't perfect (ie. the not calling what was going on in Rwanda, genocide, and not stepping in sooner, was appalling)."

Can an ex-president who has already been president for two terms, run for vice president? At first, you would think of course not and assume that would violate The Constitution. According to the article though, its highly debatable.

Just as back up information; The Constitution says that a person can be eligible to the Office of President as long as he or she is a natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident of the United States for 14 years. Okay, so what does that have to do with being a VP? Well, the 12th Amendment says in Article II, that no person who is constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President. Amendment 22 says that a person cannot be elected president that has previously been president for 2 terms.

Well, that makes sense, right? Maybe not.

Think of it this way: This suggests that a president cannot be ELECTED president for more than two terms, it doesn't say anything about SERVING as president.

If say, Hillary became incapacitated or assassinated, Bill would then serve his duty as VP and serve as president. He would not have been elected, Hillary was elected. He would be serving as president. He just wouldn't be able to run for president the next term from that post.

So this is where the debate comes in. Doesn't that seem unfair? That an ex-president could possibly weasel his way into a 3rd term? Wouldn't that be a disrespect to the whole Roosevelt thing? A complete disregard of what obviously is morally fair? Well, politics isn't about morals. at least on paper.

Here is where you can get nit picky. You could say that if Hillary runs for president with Bill as her VP, the American people would be voting for them as a package, not one or the other. So, he would therefore be technically elected if he ended up having to take office. "Electing a president means electing a vice president and contingently electing him as president."

I don't know, I sort of agree with the notion that he would technically be ELECTED, not SERVING as president. I think it only seems fair. If say Mrs. Bush ran for president and Mr. Bush ran as VP- that would just seem..... well, COMPLETELY WRONG and almost fascist.

Perhaps since people are living longer now, we should amend the whole Roosevelt inspired amendment. Maybe it should be that a president cannot run for more than 2 terms in a row, but can run again for a third term at a later date?

Fortune Cookie Love at Eastern Market

I think I need to take more risks, be daring- live a little more. Cliche sentiment? maybe. Read on, if you dare.

The trendy little neighborhood in DC known as Eastern Market is a mixed bag. You will find foo foo restaurants, bars and dive restaurants and bars. Its a great place to hang out and live if you are a 20 or 30 something living in DC.

A couple of friends and I are waiting for another friend to get off work (she is a stage manager for theaters; as in theaters with plays, Shakespeare, etc). We were on our way out to Arlington to this great movie theater that was showing Office Space 2, where you can catch a cheap movie and drink lots of cheap beer and eat buffalo wings. I didn't even know a place like this existed in DC- so I was thrilled to be going on this little adventure to say the least.

So Sharon was running late- as is usual, just the nature of the theater beast. So Jesse, Daniel and I are just standing at the metro stop waiting- we were running out of time before the movie started- it looked like we were going to be late.

Daniel suggests that we go grab a quick beer while we are waiting. Me, being the more practical one, says "Are you crazy? She is going to be done any minute, and then either we wont get to drink our beer or we will be even more late!" The boys won 2 to 1.

Their reasoning was this "Come on, what is the likelihood of Sharon calling us at the exact 10 seconds when we are handing the cash over to the bartender? If she calls us before we order the beer, then we just cancel the order and go meet Sharon. If she calls after we have made the order, then we will just down our beers fast and go! There is a 1 % chance of her calling during the monetary exchange!" Whatever. so we go.

We walk into this little Irish dive bar- my favorite kind of place (not kidding). The bartender is a plump blond woman with her hair in a long ponytail (like she hasn't had a trim in ages). She asks for our IDs, and as I am pulling mine out of my wallet I notice that a fortune from a fortune cookie that I have been carrying around for months was static clung to my license. It reads "A very attractive person will desire your company." Immediately I take it off- but then I had a second thought. What if I left it stuck to my license- I wonder what the bartender would do? Its like a sociological experiment. Normally, I would probably have chickened out and not done it, but for some reason I decided to do it.

So I hand over my license and the woman is standing there looking at my license for what seemed to be 2 minutes. Then she looks up at me and says "a very attractive person wants to see me, huh?" and then lets out a cackling loud laugh. I just sort of laugh shyly and say "Oh, is that my fortune? It must have gotten stuck." She looks at me and makes eye contact and grins from ear to ear- like she is suspicious.

Anyway- so we are handing our money to the lady, and guess who calls during the 10 second exchange? SHARON. We all start laughing our asses off and loudly try to decide what to do. We hadn't accounted for this possible scenario! We decided to get the beer and down them as fast as possible.

So the point of the story I suppose is the fortune cookie. I love doing things like that- totally weird things just to see what peoples reactions are. I want to do more of that. Maybe I could start some sort of art project that logs such experiments with photographs...

The End??

Go to my new site! www.almostmaven.blogspot.com


There will be no heaven vs. hell apocalypse as described (if you interpret it in the literal) by The Book of Revelations- it will be nature that ends us all, and humans who provoke her. But it's no big deal really- planet earth will never cease.

Like a picture book for adults:
http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/zoom/zoom.pdf

crazy dreams

My boyfriend and I were on a road trip with a bunch of friends from college and high school. We were headed for the beach, but we had a long way to go since we were starting out in Eastern Oregon. If you know anything about Oregon, you know that there is nothing in the eastern half but random small towns; the kind of places where they hold Renaissance Fairs and where ideas for movies like "Deliverance" come from. You must realize we are ALL from Oregon, so we are used to that sort of place.

So we stop in one of these towns for a quick bite to eat and to take a rest. We meet this nice seeming fellow who is boasting about the town's scenic and little-known treasures. Of course he knows we are not from the area, since we have "city fashion." As he is grinning from ear to ear, he insists on us following him in our car to a "hot spot" known as "Elk Ridge" where apparently there is a fabulous lookout point looking over a huge wildlife preserve of wild elk. We are all for it, so we pile into our car and follow the guy for what seemed to be 15 or so minutes up a winding and narrow road with huge Douglas Fur trees jutting into the road.

Finally, we reach a long dirt driveway and pull up to a HUGE house. We are thinking, "hmm, this is strange, maybe this wasn't such a good idea...we are already behind schedule and at this point we will barely be getting to the beach before dark." But we get out anyway after the nice young man gets out of his car, smiling, waving for us to get out and follow him.

I don't remember all of the details from this point forward, but we go up closer to the house, and a band of about 20 people come running out of the house, grabbing us and forcing us inside and put us all in separate rooms and lock us in there. Somehow we find out that these people are all family and that they are performing a yearly family ritual where they poison the sacrificial people, and them perhaps eat them.

I remember feeling quite calm through this whole experience, sure that we were going to get out of this in one piece. Somehow, I find my boyfriend and tell him that we need to sneak out by ourselves and then call for help for the rest of our friends. He thinks it would be a better idea for us to corral all of our friends and overtake them. I am entirely convinced that this is the worst idea I have ever heard of. Then, we overhear some of the family talking about a shuttle bus that goes too and from town, so we sneak up to where the shuttle bus is waiting and get in the back, crouched down low. There is a blanket in the back seat that we hide under so that no one will see us as we drive by. As we are driving we notice that more and more people are starting to show up to the house, and that is what the shuttle was for. So my boyfriend and I pose as people attending "the party" who forgot something back home. We get off at the first payphone we see in town. We call 911, tell them what happened and they rush over to where we are. We get into the cop car only for them to return us to the house. THEY WERE IN ON THE WHOLE THING. We soon find out that apparently THE WHOLE TOWN is in on this party.

Thats all I remember really, because I think my alarms started going off therefore interrupting the dream even though I continued to sleep.

What does it all mean? I am not sure. If you have ever seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hostel, then you probably realize that this dream sounds a lot like a mixture of these two movies. But the turning point of the dream is the most important, which is this: When my boyfriend suggests that we should all band together, and I immediately disregard his idea as ridiculous.

In retrospect, his idea may have been the better idea since we were just returned to the house after we had tried to escape on our own. Perhaps if we had banded together, we could have forced our way out by shear strength in numbers and gotten into our car.

I think this somehow represents how I take control over a lot in our relationship, and then never want to admit that we should have done what he had suggested in the first place.... But the other thing is this: the only reason we are living in Washington DC is because of him. I didn't really want to move here, but here we are. I think at times I have resentment about this even though in retrospect I am now glad we live here. Neither of us want to live here for long, and its a great place to get our careers off the ground. At the same time though, I am jealous of my boyfriend for actually knowing what he wants. In turn, i try to control a lot of other things in our relationship. And just like the dream- what he suggested actually turned out to be the bset thing, getting out of Portland and lifting ouselves up out of boredom, hopelessness, and poverty. This may be what that dream was about...

the week at a glance

Check out this week's Harper's Weekly Review. I recommend subscribing to this... always puts things into perspective for me about how much is really going on at the same time and how absurd it all is... enjoy.

WEEKLY REVIEW

Research by U.S. epidemiologists and Iraqi physicians found
that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq war,
though half of households surveyed were unsure of who to
blame for the deaths of their family members. President
George W. Bush said that he did not consider the study
"a credible report." The United States Army was planning
to maintain current troop levels in Iraq through 2010, and
to replace its advertising slogan, "An Army of One," with
a new slogan, "Army Strong." Insurgents in Baghdad fired
a mortar round at an ammunition dump on a U.S. military
base, setting off large explosions that were felt miles
away, and the judge in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial
once again expelled Hussein from the courtroom; one of
Hussein's co-defendants then called the prosecutors
"pimps and traitors" and punched a bailiff. Another
defendant declared, "I wish to be executed and finish
with this court." North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il
was said to be at risk of losing his access to McDonald's
hamburgers and Hennessy cognac if sanctions on luxury goods
are imposed in response to his country's recent nuclear
testing. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld showed
reporters a satellite image of North Korea. "Except for
my wife and family," said Rumsfeld, "that is my favorite
photo." Canadian troops in Afghanistan were finding it
difficult to destroy forests of ten-foot-tall marijuana
plants where the Taliban hide. "That damn marijuana," said
one soldier. Right-wing columnist Christopher Hitchens
confessed that he had eaten a dog.

Two trains collided while traveling in opposite directions
between the French city of Nancy and the grand duchy of
Luxembourg, killing six people. Floods killed 37 people
in Thailand, and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza killed nine
people. Libya announced that it would provide laptop
computers for 1.2 million schoolchildren, and Chinese
Wal-Mart workers unionized. Americans were claiming
political asylum in Britain. In China's Shanxi and Shaanxi
Provinces, families with dead sons complained that corpse
brides were in short supply. A study suggested that an
increasing number of British students are working as
prostitutes in order to pay their university tuition,
and California researchers found that women dress more
fashionably when they are ovulating. A Vietnamese death-row
inmate convicted of possessing heroin worth more than one
billion dong had her sentence commuted to life in prison
when she was discovered to be pregnant. A Virginia couple
were trying to give back their fifteen-year-old adopted
son, who turned out to be a sexual predator. "They just
told me he was hyperactive," said the boy's mother. A
Pennsylvania woman was arrested for beating her baby's
father with the baby. In Bombay, where the city courts
faced a backlog of 16,234,223 cases, police arrested a
drunk three-foot-tall man for extorting money from people
with a meat cleaver. "Everyone pampered him because he
was so small and cute," said the man's brother. "But he
has brought great misfortune for the family." A Minnesota
school principal resigned after shooting two orphaned
kittens on school property.

In Israel, four doctors were arrested for carrying
out illegal, non-consensual medical experiments on
their patients; the U.S. Department of Justice accused
blacks of suppressing the white vote in Mississippi;
and Adam Pearlman, the "American Al Qaeda," was charged
with treason, making him the first U.S. citizen so
indicted since World War II. Dubai's ruling family was
sued for enslaving children as camel jockeys. A family
representative argued that the suit was spurious, since
Dubai has replaced child camel-jockeys with robots. India's
Supreme Court ordered the seizure of 300 macaques who had
terrorized bureaucrats and destroyed top-secret defense
documents, and the Philippines rejected a plan to help
a monkey-infested island by importing monkey-eating
eagles. In Uganda, a mob armed with spears, machetes,
and clubs killed a lioness, mutilated the carcass, and
imprisoned the remains. Thousands of villagers in the
Indian state of Jharkhand fled their homes in order to
avoid a herd of rampaging elephants. "The elephants," said
a forestry official, "are out to avenge." "They destroy our
crops in the field," complained a farmer. "Sometimes they
damage our houses also." Donkeys were increasingly popular
with Mexican farmers. Swiss researchers in Syria discovered
the remains of an extinct species of giant camel, and a
Virginia biology teacher was suspended after compelling
her students to pose with the bones of a century-old corpse
in Pocahontas Cemetery. Walnut-related crimes were on the
rise in the United States, and a pile of jelly left over
from a wedding party's jelly-fight sparked a terrorism
alert near Leipzig, Germany. An Italian sociologist moved
into a cave, where he plans to spend the next three years;
two Indianapolis morticians ran into a burning building
to save three corpses; and fish leapt from the ocean near
Hawaii in anticipation of an earthquake.

-- Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

* * * * * * * * *
WEEKLY REVIEW SOURCES are available at Harpers.org --
just click the "sources" button in the top right corner.

Anna O: an introduction

"When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself." -Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The only thing you need to know is that I have been diagnosed as a Female Hysteric. My doctor’s names are Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Brauer.

My symptoms include; temporary paralysis, the ability to make words appear on my skin with just a feather, questionable creativity, too much enthusiasm about certain things, an overactive imagination, desires of a peculiar nature, a tendency to cause trouble, an uncontrollable urge to lie, making animal noises, and I faint a lot. There are a lot more, but I forgot what they are.

Along with daily hypnotism, my doctors think they can cure me with what I call, “The Talking Cure.” They like to call it something more clinical, but I like this title better. Sometimes it works. So, they prescribed that I create a blog as a type of Talking Cure treatment. They also said that the more people read this blog on a regular basis, the more cured I will be. So I must write on the subjects of art, photography, feminism, Female Hysteria, stream of consciousness writting, and any other weird things I am interested in while trying to keep people interested. The idea is that if I get all of my symptoms out on "paper," they will eventually go away and I will be cured.