Batman and Jesus: The Dark Knight Rises Again

I was kneeling on the pavement in a long white robe, cradling a small, frail stranger against my linen-clad breast.

She gazed up at my face, her eyes filled with trust.  I said a little prayer that she wouldn’t die or throw up on me, and then begrudgingly acknowledged that my ambitions for Halloween had gone too far.

I take costumes seriously, and this Halloween, I decided to dress up as Jesus.  I looked like this:

And may have been drinking a little bit of this:

(It's a miracle!)

Around 10PM at night, however, I walked to a local bar and happened upon a lanky female Batman drunkenly sprawled upon the ground.  Except for the shambly revelers stepping over her to get in line, she seemed entirely alone.  I decided to help the little lamb—I’m kind of a Method actor—so while my friends took her phone and started calling her friends, I made it my mission to hold her upright.

“Where do you go to school, Batman?” I asked, supposing that if I could get her to speak, maybe she wouldn’t die as quickly.

“Poit Schloma Nazzzarine Unifershity,” she said. 

“Nazareth?  I’m familiar with it!”  I was pleased with my poorly timed joke, but apparently she wasn’t, because she became entirely unresponsive, and we decided to call 911.

By this time, lo! we had started to attract some attention.

“Get your shit together, Jesus!” bellowed one drunken reveler.  “Take your friend home!”  Someone else started making fun of Batman, and in not very WWJD moment, I actually flipped him off.  He immediately repented: “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize she was so sick… BLESS YOU!”  I forgave him, and he went off to say fifty Hail Marys.

When the paramedics and firemen finally arrived, they found Jesus huddled on the ground, cradling Batman.  They told me I could step away before she puked on me, and I agreed; I didn’t need to be more of a martyr than I already was. 

“ARE YOU A REAL FIREMAN?  THAT’S A GREAT COSTUME,” a zombie exclaimed.  “You are the real Jesus,” a wide-eyed blonde whispered to me earnestly before I anxiously eased away.
The paramedics told me that Batman’s heart rate and blood pressure were stable, but she was still drunk and alone, so they had to take her away.   I assume she made it back to Nazareth just fine.  And it was good.

The rest of the night was less eventful.  A boy asked to take a picture with me to send to his mom because, in his words, “She LOVES Jesus!”  A few men hit on me, so I’m now convinced that Biblical fetishes are a real thing.

Nevertheless, I can’t stop wondering how Batman is doing.  Now, a week later, I wonder if she might still be hungover.  And I wonder if, somewhere in her swampy blackened memory of Halloween, she remembers looking up at Jesus embracing her feeble body.  I wonder if she thinks she had a miraculous spiritual encounter with God.

Either way, she was saved.

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Sex and the Seamen: A Tale of a Famous Dick

I've been reading Moby Dick.  And know that when I say I've been "reading" Moby Dick, what I actually mean is that I've been sleeping with Moby Dick.

Over the past few weeks of this less than exciting Melville English class, my roommates have gotten used to not seeing me in the evenings.

"What are you doing tonight?" they ask.
"GETTING DICK!" I bellow obnoxiously, thumping up the stairs to my bedroom with an 8-pound book under my arm.  I am always very ladylike and mature.

But most of the time I don't "get dick."  My honeymoon phase with Moby is quite over, and most of the time I end up just going to sleep.

To that one guest-lecturer who looked like Bryan Cranston and cried with passion while discussing Chapter 42: I'm sorry.  I'm sorry if my dirty mind and blasé attitude seem to desecrate this Great Work of maritime fiction.  But I'm not the only one with a dirty mind when it comes to Moby Dick.  Nineteenth-century American novelist Hermann Melville, I'm looking at you.

For those of you who have never read it, Moby Dick is about a bunch of SEAMEN hunting for a SPERM whale.  (Children, stop reading this.)  These seamen run around with long harpoons they like to poke in people and things.  They are constantly on the lookout for spouting blowholes and, according to Melville, they "ejaculate" words of surprise whenever they see one.

Here's some more hard evidence:

 

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but from what I gather, somebody's pole went down after they had filled several tubs with (fragrant?) sperm.  Then something queer happened, and some guy lost his grasp on the tackles suspending the head, and it was all very oozy.

Want to know what happens next?  No?  You're throwing up?  I'll tell you anyway.

Next, one of the seamen falls into a GIANT HOLE inside the head of a dead whale.  The men watch it happen: "Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea" (Melville, 1159).

This is Fifty Shades of Grey shit.  How are we allowed to read this in school?

The plot continues to thicken.  Lots of boring-ass paintings are described, Melville claims that whales are fish, and a crazy guy with one leg yells a lot.  Then this happens:

Sorry for giving away all the good parts.

I have to write a paper on this novel, but somehow, I don't think my "Moby Dick is an allegory for gay sex" thesis will go over well.  Because for several weeks now, I have sat inside a dreary little classroom listening to men in scarves talk about Melville's manipulation of language through metaphor.  I entertain myself by doodling whales, giggling at the word "sperm," and imagining Melville looking down from heaven and mocking us.  He wrote this Great Work of American Homoerotic Fiction, and nobody gets it.

Melville, I get you.  Squeeze those oozy tackles and do yo' thang.

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Inspiration: How To Achieve Your Dreams!

Think Fast: What’s your favorite quotation? 

If you just answered, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” then congratulations!  I can tell that you’re really socially aware, you read a lot of Gandhi, and that you’re obviously totally original.  But if you weren’t one of the 19% of people who went straight for the eye thing, maybe you’re one of the 27% of people who answered, “Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Dammit, I need to address something.  If you shoot for the moon and miss, you’re not going to land among the stars.  What with there being no gravity in space and all, you might float around for a while, but chances are you won’t have made it up that high anyway.  You’re probably going to fall and die.

Understand, I don’t have a problem with dreams.  Barack Obama inherited dreams from his father, and now he’s President of the United States.  Justin Bieber never stopped beliebing, and now he gets to record songs with Will Smith’s son.  I just have a problem with inspirational quotations about dreams.  I think that they’re stupid.

“I’m a dreamer.  I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.”

MIKE TYSON said that.  Because no one seems to scream “I like fluffy white clouds and eating ears” more than this guy:

Photo: deliberationroom.com

Mike Tyson has also been quoted saying, “I’m on the Zoloft to keep from killing ya’ll.”  He has a professed love of pigeons and is obviously a total softy.

“Man is a genius when he is dreaming.”

-Akira Kurosawa

Woman is a genius when she is not retweeting bullshit about dreams.

“If you can dream it, you can become it."

-William Arthur Ward

I dream of being the next Missy Franklin.  Good thing that’ll happen.

“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough.  You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."

-J.M. Barrie

I used to love that quote, until I realized that it is MISERABLY SAD.  It reminds me of that time I left my family and friends to go to a boarding school for the arts where I couldn’t eat.  And then my dream still didn’t come true.  Ha!  Haha!  It’s so funny because it’s not funny at all!  It’s just true!  Moving on.

“Good things come to those who wait.”

-Assumedly some bad mom

I think that proverb is supposed to teach patience, but it’s often applied to dreams in a “Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come” sense.  But waiting for good things to happen, or waiting for your dreams to come true, is a TERRIBLE idea.  Working towards them is a good one.

I grew up believing that if I was passionate and driven and strong, I could do anything I wanted with my life.  It was an unfortunate side effect of having really supportive parents and a 1^st grade teacher who believed my love of “Boxcar Children” stories bespoke of unparalleled genius.

But I got tired of dreams not coming true, so I made it my mission to fashion a foolproof method to guarantee that they would:

“I’ve discovered the secret to making all my dreams come true.  The secret is to have really vague dreams."

-Annamal Crackers

Specificity kills dreams.  I just ate a chocolate granola bar, and I enjoyed it.  And you know what?  I have always dreamed of “having enjoyable experiences.”  THAT DREAM CAME TRUE JUST NOW.  It has been my life-long dream to have love in my life.  And guess what?  I have a cat who truly loves me.  BOOM.  Dream achieved.  I dream of good things happening—any good things happening—so that my dreams come true every day. 

“Reach for anything and if anything happens, then you’ll be okay.”

Inspirational.

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YouTube: Unwanted Relationship Advice

SURPRISE!  I'm a YouTube Sensation!  Just kidding.  As of this moment, this video has... no views.  But by the time 25 people have watched it, I will consider myself a star.

At any rate, this is a video I made with my friend Madeline Blair.  Madeline and I met while working at CONAN, ate some frozen yogurt together, and spontaneously decided to make this thing.

Next time we make a video, perhaps we will choose a camera angle not quite so focused on my chin.

Enjoy!!

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Embarrassing Shit on the Internet

Once upon a time, this thing we call "the Internet" didn't exist.  We didn't have to read about our friends' politics on Facebook, and unless we were physically next to our friends at lunch, we had no idea what they ate.

For a few formative years, we played with real, tangible people and things so that we learned to speak in more than 140 characters and knew that poking was rude.  But technology advanced.  And before we were legal adults, we were having our every awkward, embarrassing, adolescent moment documented online for all of our "friends" to see.

When the Internet came into our lives, the first things we made were email addresses.  People used to care about forwarded emails; there used to be actual email threads.  It was our first encounter with dancing flower graphics and digital American flags.  We believed our forwards could cure people we'd never met of diseases we'd never heard of.  It was a magical time.

Eventually, our parents let us come up with our own AIM screen names, and by the time we were in middle school, we were using them every day.  We once invited dates to Preteen-Center dances under aliases like:

partygurl727

orlandobloomrox42

Wetkiss773

Alittlbtdramatic

Lilsportygrlmgs

lilsurfchick31

lazyboi8881

CAguysdoitbetter

ditzyblonde3242

MissKewl86

digitom91

Hottstuffaroo

It's obvious what was "kewl" at the time: spelling errors.  Also, apparently these "hott" 9-12-year-olds knew how to party.  I get the impression that while I was playing Oregon Trail with my cat, they were dressed up in their Limited Too finest and "wet kissing."

Personally, I want to remember myself as a kid who loved tea parties, Katharine Hepburn movies, and Irish rock.  I want to believe that I was cool.  But because the Internet butted its way into my life before I was a fully developed, semi-stable human being, it documents the embarrassing truth: that I WASN'T cool.  That's right.  I've been trying to bury this for years, but my first AIM screen name was KittyPwincess24.

This is what I imagine someone named KittyPwincess24 would look like:

 
Every day, we post things online.  We instagram photos of our breakfast as if anyone actually gives a shit, and tweet inane nonsense like, "Garbanzo beans!  Yum!"

Someday these things may embarrass us, just as we are embarrassed by our first screen names.  Someday (later tonight) I will regret having posted that photo which yes, is an impressively posed selfie of me.

Do as I say, friends, not as I do.  Remember when you were a QTpatooty32, and then DON'T post your embarrassing shit on the Internet.

Special thanks to everyone who sent me old screen names!  If I didn't use yours, don't be sad, be proud:  It wasn't quite as bad as the others.

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Dancing in Ballrooms with Boys

I am a 5-foot, 8-inch tall individual of medium build.  If I came packaged, my tag would read “Human, Standard Size.”  I get away with it now, but I have been this size since I was approximately 8 years old.  I had fluffy Hermione hair, glasses, and may or may not have experimented with olive khaki capris.  The word “swarthy” somehow applied to me.  If you were to see me on the street, you would imagine my name was “Gert.”

People see photos of  “Gert” now and say things like, “Oh, I remember my awkward stage!”  But this “stage” you speak of lasted for several oafish years of my life!  And it was during those years that I took cotillion.

In case you grew up with parents who didn’t know you needed proper training in ballroom dancing and cookie-nibbling in order to get ahead in life, now you know that cotillion was just that: dancing and etiquette classes.  Boys who hated girls and girls who hated boys gathered in one large community center once a week to nervously eye one another and sheepishly pose for their enthusiastic paparazzi moms. 

“Gert” did not do well in this environment.

I remember standing in line outside by petite, delicate little blonde girls, who actually argued about who would be forced to stand next to me.  “You stand next to her!”  “No YOU stand next to her!”  I shifted from one heavily clogged foot to another, sweating beneath my pink hand-me-down skirt that dropped straight from waist to mid-calf.  The goal was just to get through it—to endure—until it was time for lemonade and cookies.  We would trudge inside and I would sit wedged between two boys, who would eagerly lean over me to discuss “Dragon Ball Z” and which pretty doll-girls they hoped to dance with.

Cotillion’s saving grace was that most of the time you didn’t have to deal with the terror of choosing a dance partner; you were assigned one.  And all of the boys were over a foot shorter than me, so while they stared squarely into my brawny, guppy swim team-developed chest, I got to look over their heads and out the window, or send desperate “Save me!” faces to my laughing mom. 

When I did have to choose my partner, I would just wait until everyone else was paired off, and then wrinkle my eyebrows at the last boy standing in an, “I guess we’re both left?” kind of way.  Of course, I would have preferred to dance with the tallish-British kid who was named something like “Rupert” or “Algernon” and wore crested blazers, but I was happy to be with wee Jonathan with the high crackling voice, too.  The main goal was always to dance well enough to win a 3 Musketeers, which somehow, inevitably, made the unparalleled agony of cotillion all worth it.

This story doesn’t have a moral, but I’ll try to pin one on it anyway.  Chocolate rewards are a good thing.  Little girls can be bitches, but who cares, because they’ll probably get pregnant during high school.  It’s okay if you’re tall and oafish.  Wee Jonathan will one day come back from summer vacation and be taller than you, and you’ll get contact lenses, and people will forget that they didn’t want to dance with you, until you remind them via blog. 

And by that time, you’ll be an adult.  And you can drive to the store and buy lemonade and cookies and 3 Musketeers for yourself, and you don’t have to endure doing the foxtrot for an hour to songs by The Mamas & the Papas before you eat them.

Just eat them.

xx-Gert.

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Fortune's Fool, or How I Learned My Future

Once a year while I was growing up, a carnival would pass through my town.  And let me tell you: it was the coolest place to be.  Tweens went to flirt.  High school students went to drunkenly vomit on rides.  And I, regardless, of age, went for the cotton candy.

Every year it was awesome, but the year I was in 8^th grade stands out in particular.  That was the year my friends and I visited the carnival psychic.

At first, we were skeptical.  Was a palm reading really worth $5?  And… was it dangerous?  After my first two friends had their palms read, though, I knew this psychic was legit.  She had somehow known that my adolescent friend Katy was having issues with her mom.  And she knew that Kelly had a crush on a boy at school!!!  THIS LADY WAS MAGICAL!

Trembling, I handed over my $5 and prepared to meet my fate.  Here is what I remember most:

1.  She said I intimidated boys my own age.  (So that’s why I didn’t have a boyfriend!  It had nothing to do with my braces and curly bangs!)

2.  She said I would “go east.”  (And you know what… I DID.  Because it turns out EVERYWHERE is east of California!)

3.  And she told me—drum roll please—that I would be a professional SPEAKER ON SUBSTANCE ABUSE. 

In retrospect, it’s obvious to me that most “palm readers” are merely good at measuring personalities.  We were a pack of giggling, gawky, 13-year-old girls, so of course we were dealing with crushes, “mean girls,” and helicopter parents.  The psychic was hardly taking a gamble when she told us our palms dictated such things.  But where the heck did she gather that I’d become a speaker on substance abuse?  I don’t remember sitting there with bloodshot eyes and bruises on my arms.  But for whatever reason, she looked at me and thought, “This girl… rough… substances.”

This incident came to mind last month when I was out with friends.  We walked past a psychic shop and, on a whim, decided to peek inside.

We warily swept past a burgundy velveteen curtain and found ourselves face to face with the shaman.  She was a chubby woman in a white tank top, smoking a cigarette and playing Angry Birds on her phone.

“Do you guys want tarot readings?” she demanded, sizing us up.  When I hesitated, she narrowed her eyes at me.  “You’re the one that needs this the most.  You’re the one with all the man problems!”

………...…WHAT?  So that’s how this works, then?  The magical spirits, who are apparently personally invested in my love life, gossip about me with the shaman?  Or was the shaman simply reading my aura, which said, “Help, I’m single?”

I called “bullshit,” and coldly declined the tarot reading.  I don’t need some shaman in a Beverly Hills gypsy hut to tell me where my life is going.  I already know:

I’m going to be a speaker on substance abuse.

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