Lately, I’m living in Vancouver. I used to visit Toronto over the summers, and so I’m familiar with that unique disappointment of an American traveling abroad to Canada. You have to search so hard to find any difference that the ones you do find — the two-dollar coins! the superfluous u’s! the healthcare! — become the focal point of your anecdotes, making Canada seem like a very mild-mannered place indeed. People say “sore-y” and “eh” and something that falls shy of both our Yankee “uh-bowt” and the exaggerated “a-BOOT” that will always and forever honk forth from the mouths of cartoon Canadians. There is French included on all shampoo bottles, cereal boxes, and hand-washing stickers. Clerks and cashiers are slightly friendlier, while people on the street are slightly more aloof. BMIs are, on average, 5-10 points lower. In a word: Canada!

Vancouver, specifically, is a strange place. Whenever I tell people I’m living there, they almost inevitably go, “Oh, it’s beautiful.” This is probably because Vancouver is beautiful. During the first few weeks of January I was unimpressed by the constant gray wash of rain and the 99 bus route that took me to the underwhelming, industrial UBC campus. But now that it’s May I’ve been forced to admit that Vancouver is, in fact, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The ethereal fir trees, the Technicolor flowers as big as my head, skies that (when it stops raining) over-compensate by turning hot pink, Robin’s egg, velvety indigo, and perfect backlit aqua-blue, the snow-capped mountains that look as if they were painted there, the glittering ocean-liners gliding past beneath them, the willowy glass high-rise apartments. Where I live, at least, Vancouver gives off the impression of expensive, floral cleanliness. My neighborhood is populated by wealthy retirees who walk little bouquets of designer puppies, or else slender young mothers in black yoga pants who push strollers as large as Mini Coopers. When I’m at my most homesick, I think of the humble little U.S. cities I come from — Little Rock, St. Louis — and am overwhelmed with nostalgia for humidity, seediness, old buildings, a faint tinge of dirtiness and languidness.

Vancouver, as it turns out, does have its seedy areas, but the city is divided as crisply and unapologetically as a social satire. You get off at one bus stop and you’ll be catcalled, grabbed, begged for change: you get off at the next and flawless 21-year-olds with highlighted hair will move past you, imperious and unseeing, on their private angelic trajectories to success. For the most part, Vancouver, like all of Canada, is comparatively very safe. I habitually walk around alone at night and never feel threatened. Strange and violent things do happen here, but they’re random enough to seem like something from a fairy-tale — the son of a Russian television star commits suicide next to the sea-wall, or disembodied feet in running shoes wash ashore one by one, alone and mismatched. It’s as if some power-that-be is trying to invent a gritty side for Vancouver and failing, only managing to deepen the folkloric detachment of the place.
But of course this is just me — naive, a transitory visitor, seldom venturing much further than the Shopper’s Mart on West 10th. And as with most beautiful things, I can’t control my compulsive desire to pathologize Vancouver, to create back-stories and mysteries and myths. Plain towns and cities just smack of dusty, clunky reality — but a beautiful city begs for something darker beneath the surface, something wormy beneath the rose-bed. Or, at the very least, something scandalous like nicotine secretly laced into Tim Horton’s coffee, the only reason anyone would ever frequent that place ever again.

This time, I arrived at what will probably be listed in history books as a small but significant turning point in national identity. Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics, just a month after I arrived with my lavender luggage set. To the amazement of all the editorial columns, Canada refused to play the modest housewife offering up Ritz-cracker canapés and demurring, “Oh, no, you play, I’ll just watch.” Instead they gritted their teeth, flexed their muscles, and walked away with enough gold medals to pad Scrooge McDuck’s vault for a spectacular swan-dive. This included an ultimate hockey match that turned the whole city into a ghost town — when I visited my local Safeway I found it nearly abandoned, just me and a few shuffling geriatrics. Cyndi Lauper had been replaced with live coverage of the game, and my cashier wore maple-leaf head-boppers and smiled with the deranged eyes of a cult member. I walked home down empty streets, bicycles dropped carelessly on sidewalks, garden hoses writhing unattended, past open windows that buzzed and murmured with suspense. When Canada won, the pot-lid-banging and car-horn-blowing easily (easily!) exceeded the celebration I’d heard on election night in 2008.

For the next two months after the win, it was difficult for me to forget that I was not in Kansas anymore (or Alabama, Arkansas, et al). The city exploded with the color red, a jolly bloodbath of patriotism. Lingerie mannequins, convenience store windows, minivan antennas, Tim Horton donuts, every storefront and apartment window ever — all of them, spangled with triumphant red and gold. Maple leafs, usually reserved for punch-lines or syrup bottles, became a symbol of unparalleled underdog glory. Canadians everywhere woke up feeling at least 25% better about themselves as individuals. I’ve never felt so conscious of my status as an American. Luckily for me, my naturally ginger hair, unfashionable red winter coat, and penchant for Revlon red fingernails kept me safe. I think people smiled at me more during those few months, and taxi drivers got me to the airport with time to spare. But all the while my heart stayed stubbornly true to the good old US of A: to our half-imaginary obesity epidemic, our hypocritical finger-wagging, our self-made Cinderella mythology that has warped and hardened, our superior donuts and inferior beer, our polarizing letters to the editor, our million and one irresistible guilty pleasures.

On Wednesday night R. took me to see (500) Days of Summer. This was payback because on Sunday I forced him to see Inglorious Basterds with me. I want to say things about Inglorious Basterds, too, but I feel tongue-tied because this isn’t a movie about young romance and supernatural creatures, and because I can’t spend three paragraphs examining my cute bitterness towards the starlet’s BMI. Instead, Tarantino’s movie, as snappy and stylized as it is, involves really incredibly serious stuff, like Hitler and prejudice and dehumanization and death and the nature of violence and why we pay to see violence and how maybe when we watch people die and laugh about it delightedly we’re just as bad as the pasty-faced Nazi boys with their sneering mustache-twirling German-textbook accents. And I find that I’m too overwhelmed to say anything. I wish I could write a whole entry about how this one scene made me feel … the one where Melanie Laurent is preparing herself for the final showdown and David Bowie is singing in the background and Laurent is so tough and icy and noble that I never even IMAGINE being that angelically bad-ass, oh my god, and her red lipstick! And her red dress! But if I posted that, everybody would hate me for reducing a very complicated (just ‘cause Brad Pitt makes a hick accent and Eli Roth has a baseball bat doesn’t make it uncomplicated, kids!) movie into a moment of vicarious, vacuous fashion lust. So I won’t. See what I did there?

Anyway, so, this is apparently the summer (slash early autumn) of movies with unexplained and slightly annoying titles. Like, why the ‘e’? Why the parentheses? Do these things reveal something important about the nature of each movie, or are they only in place so when you forget and write 500 Days of Summer, some loveless Poindexter on the IMDB movie forums can be all, “UM, I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, THERE IS NO MOVIE WITH THAT TITLE.” Not that this happened to me (ha). But that’s not an unrealistic scenario, and I can’t help feeling that Tarantino and, uh, Scott Neustadter just wanted to mess around with their titles so that you’re forced to pay particular attention when writing about them, kind of coercing you into their cutesy wordplay or else banishing you to the unwitting masses of parents who accidentally missed the 4:30 showing of Shorts and had to take the next available movie so they could make it to Applebee’s in time.) Bastards.

Predictably, during this hipster rom-com, I was totally tense and resistant, and sat there with my knees drawn up to my chest, chewing all my fingernails, and hating Zooey Deschanel. It’s funny because I was just re-watching that episode of Mad Men where Peggy Olson is so appalled and weirded out by Ann-Margret’s version of “sexy.” I mean, that’s so outdated, right? When I watch that scene in Bye Bye Birdie, I get total chills. She looks so manic … swishing her skirts, tilting her head, that flesh-colored dress, the puppyish false eyelashes, running and throwing herself at the screen again and again like a bird too dumb to figure out that’s GLASS not AIR. Bye bye birdie indeed if you don’t stop that, amirite? I can’t pretend to understand the male brain … is Ann-Margaret sexy because she’s mad with lust? Is it sexy to think you might have to fight a girl off because she’s crawling out of your television set like that girl from the The Ring? I don’t know! She is unfathomable to me! 

Don Draper explains it to Peggy, who is confused in the same way I am (Peggy, we should do lunch). Men want Ann-Margret and therefore women want to be her, even if they find her terrifying and shrill and disconcerting. And I was like, “OK, Don, well, that’s a fine explanation, but that’s not the way it is anymore! These days, women can define sexiness for themselves! We can have a crush on pre-baby Angelina Jolie even if our boyfriends inexplicably don’t! We dress for other girls, not for boys! I don’t agree with your assessment of female sexuality, Don … it’s not just about pleasing men. By the way, Don, I love your jawline. Could you put your hand up my skirt in a threatening manner?”

But I’m wrong. I’m so wrong. Apparently Ann-Margret still is sexy, according to comments on YouTube. Also, I’ve heard a ton of people say that Megan Fox is today’s unrealistic arbiter of sex-appeal, but I don’t agree. Megan Fox is somehow accessible. She’s self-deprecating and weird and vulnerable. She’s aware that for all her tiny cropped shirts and waist-length black hair and pillow-sized lips, she’s not girlfriend material. OK, she was Shia LaBeouf’s girlfriend, but that was in a movie where the supporting characters were robot-cars with guns for hands. She’s trapped in BoyLand! Like Marilyn Monroe, her decadent hyper-sexuality is somehow fragile; other women can see that she’s being dragged down by the weight of her breasts, and they respond to that. We will protect this impossible sex-doll from the harshness of the male gaze. We will be her friend, which is what she herself truly craves: to be taken seriously, to be loved for who she is inside and not for her tramp-stamp.

The real bitch is Zooey Deschanel.

Who can be Zooey Deschanel? Seriously, who? You could work out and wear low-slung jeans and stripper heels and straighten your hair and make suggestive jokes and come out with an ambiance that’s roughly Megan Fox-ish. Guys don’t look too closely. She herself has bad skin and a nose-job, so. But Zooey! Zooey! She is totally unattainable! She has baby-blue eyes the size of teacup saucers! She has a dear little button nose! At twenty-nine, she looks fifteen! She wears bows around her ponytail and looks beautiful and elegant in high-waist wide-leg pants. I do not believe for a second her BMI is 20.1, but she’s not fussy and bulimic, she eats pancakes with adorable gusto, and God himself melts the flesh from her slender upper arms. Zooey is named after a Salinger character. I don’t care if her name is Summer; it’s always Zooey, OK? Boys, here is what she will do for you: Zooey shares your obscure taste in music. She likes the weird movies that you do. She will make you do silly things in public; you will enjoy it, because you’re with this beautiful girl in her Alice in Wonderland dresses, and she wrinkles her nose when she laughs. She loves the ugliest Beatle: she is a saintly protector of the odd and unloved. She’s like a dude in that she doesn’t want to suffocate you, but she’s like a girl in the way she lies next to you on an Ikea display bed and smells like shampoo and toothpaste and everything clean and pure and good that you remember from your lonely childhood escapist movie fantasies.

Now, girls. Girls, you may think that a funny, tough-minded, eclectic hipster girl like Zooey is totally attainable. From a certain angle, i.e. if you were a really bored alien looking down on human relationships, you might assume that girls feel better about leading-ladies like Zooey, because it’s easier for us to sing in a garage band than it is for us to walk around in slow motion with water streaming across our breasts. But the thing is, Zooey is the kind of girl your (potential, please-please-look-across-the-classroom-at-me) boyfriend wants. She appeals to the sensitive, the intellectual, the boys in glasses, the boys who remember your birthday and pine over girls from a distance. They’re boys you THINK would like you, because, hey, you’re pretty smart, you have funny taste in movies, you like video games, you’re brunette, you like to cuddle and whisper Smiths lyrics. But no. Boys will not like you because you’re also a little shy; you mirror their own insecurities instead of making them BETTER PEOPLE. You feel unethical stealing animal masks from dime-stores, and you feel embarrassed screaming “penis” in Central Park. Hey, maybe you’re not that pretty (it’s OK, we’re friends here: I myself can relate, I promise). In the end, you just will not be enough to be a dream-girl. And there’s the modern paradox. Boys who like football and grilling on weekends will like girls who do not read Voltaire; boys who read Voltaire will be discontent until they can date a girl who will complete them with her hair-ribbons.

So, in sum, I worry that I don’t know what “sexiness” is (surprise!). I don’t know if it’s Ann-Margret throwing herself at the camera, or if it’s Megan Fox in leather pants, hanging out with robots. I don’t exactly believe Don Draper; I don’t exactly believe Peggy Olson. I do believe sad hipster boys, but they don’t want to listen to my agreement, because I love trashy things like celebrity gossip, and I look silly in sailor pants. I’m just too plain jealous to be a dream-girl. And sure, fine, all my “witty” blog entries are solely about me, which seems a step in the right direction if I want to be more like Zooey. But my eyes are muddy-colored and I’m crap at eyeliner, which dooms me all over again.

Maybe one day I’ll figure out whether I love Audrey or Marilyn more, and at that point, all things will become clear to me.

Right now my main goal in life is to have somebody intervene. I don’t think this is going to happen because they’d have a very flimsy case. “Sara, you used to be so full of life. Sometimes. You used to be marginally full of life and would sometimes go to parties and drink enough tequila to manage a mildly amusing anecdote. Anyway, Sally, what I’m trying to say is, you used to be sort of OK at parties, like to make the room seem more crowded and therefore fun, and sometimes your clothes amused the rest of us. Now, you haven’t been to a party in four entire months. I worry that if you don’t get out of the house soon you’ll continue to have panic attacks in grocery stores. I miss the moderately friendly presence you used to be. Also, you used to have a job, sort of. Now you sort of don’t. Please accept this gift of help. If you don’t, you can’t sleep on your mother’s couch anymore.”

I really love watching Intervention. I know Fred Armisen already covered the hilarity inherent in an Intervention addiction. I thought that clip was adorable, not because it was especially funny, but because I loved seeing Peggy Olson in a mature stable relationship, with good hair. Go, Pegs! Of course, I also hated the clip because I knew exactly which episodes Fred was talking about … and he’s right. Heidi looked cute as a button before she got all that surgery. Now she looks like Bettie Page with wax lips and a skein of dried glue all over her face. (I’m sorry, Heidi. I also like to buy Opi nail polish to feel better. It works.) I also don’t get why that lady bought all those airplane-sized bottles of vodka when it would have been much cheaper and more rational to buy one full-sized bottle. I know alcoholism isn’t a habit based around rationality and good judgment or anything. Maybe she wanted to be discrete, but when you buy twenty at once, a warning bell the size of a jumbo-jet must be going off in the cashier’s head. Especially when you have a camera crew following you around, I guess. Anyway, Fred brought up good points, and I’m ashamed that I understand every single one of his points, extremely well. Cause I’ve seen every episode. At three in the afternoon. With a glass of wine. Because I don’t want to sit there feeling all superior or anything!

I’m kidding. The problem is, I don’t have a problem. I couldn’t be on Intervention even if I called and begged them myself. I drink like a girl, i.e. a 9-year-old girl, in that I actually sip from shot-glasses. I’m usually with somebody else when I drink, even if they’re not drinking. I like having someone in the vicinity to listen to my theories on Tyra Banks’ love-life. Whenever I need to take a painkiller or an antihistamine, I read every bit of the tiny type on the bottle and take the dose recommended for 12-year-olds, so that if I die I can be all, “I ONLY TOOK THE DOSE FOR 12-YEAR-OLDS, IT’S YOUR FAULT.” It’s painfully obvious that I don’t like plastic surgery, and I’m not addicted to shopping, as evidenced by the fact that I recently spent a whole afternoon stitching buttons back onto my linty clothing. My mascara tubes are outdated. I wait until I’m in a monogamous relationship to hold hands. Even my relationship with food, once melodramatic, messy, and awkward as all get out, has now softened into a sort of vague and boring hostility, not any different from pretty much every woman in the country. I am totally fine. I am 100% stable and normal. No addictions here.

Still, an intervention is about all I really want in life at this specific moment. I’ll never understand why those people walk into rooms filled with their favorite relatives and friends and lovers and some guidance counselor with a cute hair-cut and TV makeup and they start freaking out and running away and punching the cameras or whatever. Nothing bad is about to happen, methadone addicts! Geez, settle down. You’re about to hear a lot of letters about what a swell person you are, and then you get to go and be taken care of by kindly strangers, and in a few months you’ll be walking through the sunshine in white seersucker, smelling flowers, feeling happier than you’ve felt in years, while titles announce to the world how far you’ve come. It’s like being plucked from the woozy burning wreckage of your life and plopped down into a fluffy bassinet. Christianity is mostly so popular because it emphasizes rebirth, and who doesn’t sometimes feel like Meryl Streep in that movie about the orchid, weeping drugged into the phone about wanting to just be a baby again? We all want to be a baby again; a baby who, by merit of some vague lingering regret souring in its cerebral cortex, will make only the right decisions this time, and grow up strong and golden and well-respected, and not cry a lot, or at least not wear dark eye makeup while it cries. (I still haven’t even started to learn that lesson. Not even brown eyeshadow: I just go for right for the glittery purple stuff, that will make the snot streaked up into my hairline approximate an oil slick. I look like a photo from National Geographic after I cry.)

So, please, if you are reading this, intervene. Intervene in me. Intervene in my simple but somehow terrifying life. It won’t take a lot … five minutes, tops. Wear something that looks good on cable. Make me stop watching Pushing Daisies and worrying about the calories in raw almonds. Make my hands stop shaking when I fill out applications for volunteer work that I’m probably not even qualified to do. Make me not fall asleep at four in the afternoon with a library book opened on my lap. Tell me why you like me, or at least why you used to. Give me a generous gift. Interrupt my life for me, and I promise I’ll do the same for you, one magical day, in a room with beige carpets and folding chairs, where everything will start anew.

 Marie Antoinette is one of my favorite movies; every time I watch it my heart expands like a soap-bubble and I get cartoon sparkles in the corners of my eyes. But the problem is that I can’t make it 20 minutes into the film without developing a specific, intense, and pricey appetite. Usually when I want snacks during a movie I rummage through the cabinets until I find organic raisin bran (my mother’s house), Sun Chips (my boyfriend’s apartment), or stale Pepperidge Farm cookies (my own place). This strategy doesn’t work during Marie Antoinette, though. It’s impossible to ignore the adoring fetishism of the camera panning over whipped cream, ripe berries, and pastel petit fours. Coppola slowly takes over your brain like a seeping perfume, and before long the act of eating something hearty and nutritious (raw almonds, a Greek salad, a tuna sandwich) seems analogous to eating a boiled shoe.

I remember reading that in the Victorian Era, certain stylish precursors to modern anorectics would try to survive on only delicate, beautifully-presented foods, so that their sustenance would both influence and reflect their personalities. And the sweet personalities in turn influenced physical appearance. So, the more sugary the Pain Perdue, the more limpid the eyes, the curlier the hair. It actually seems logical, and a movie like Marie Antoinette (though from a different time period) only emphasizes this attitude: you are what you eat, so eat only grace and charm, only eat cake.

1. Beth dying is one of the few things that makes me cry, every single time; although, ashamedly, only in the movie version, not so much in the book.

2. If Jo had married Laurie my world would be a brighter place today. Of this, I have no doubt.

3. Of the four sisters in the film version, only Meg failed to become a major film star (Claire, Winona, and Kirsten were already starlets of varying intensity). Amy, however, was the only sister who had two actresses portray her, one for her childhood and one for her adulthood. Samantha Mathis (the adult Amy) remains a relatively minor actress compared to her childhood version (Dunst). Both of the actresses are distinctive enough that there’s no possible way to imagine them being evolving states of one another; this is a major flaw in the movie.

4. Another major flaw was having John Brooke, with his dark brown eyes and clean-cut appearance, suitable for the husband of the oldest sister, portrayed by Eric Stoltz, as a ginger-haired precursor to the beatniks. I hated this beyond words as a child.

5. Six years after Little Women, Samantha Mathis and Christian Bale would play out one of literature’s most psychotically vapid and indulgently dysfunctional relationships. Sometimes I pretend that Amy and Laurie would have become Courtney and Patrick. Their wealthy, self-satisfied, expatriate artist life seems vaguely appropriate.

6. I wish more people would write terrible R-rated fanfiction for this film.

I watch Gossip Girl because nobody can stop me, plain and simple. It’s truly a wonderful show because if you just need glittery escapism, you can drain your mind of pesky things like dignity or irony, and suddenly you’re wearing a headband and drinking a saketini on a New York rooftop. Or if you’d rather keep your cynical third-eye wide open, then you’re presented with a show so hysterically, unapologetically bad that you won’t run out of blog fodder for months. I mean, seriously. It just gets worse and worse (i.e., better and better). It knows it’s unstoppable because it appeals to 11-year-old girls, and therefore will always have a captive and uncomplaining audience. I think they toss the bloopers and inconsistencies and adolescent-Diablo-Cody-on-designer-drugs dialogue in there just to annoy the high-horse hipsters who tune in to boil with rage at the state of US entertainment. So, in sum, it’s like my favorite show ever.

A few weeks ago (sometimes panic about study permits and plane tickets intervenes with my ability to blog quickly and effectively) two of my favorite television friendships collided dramatically. And if that metaphor reminds you of a car accident, you are correct. It does remind one of a car accident, where one has plenty of time to pull over onto the shoulder of the road and just gawk to one’s content and pull out one’s camera phone. One is a jerk. Anyhow, what happened is, Tyra Banks, I guess hired because of her work in Life-Size or as Super Smize or whatever, managed to land a guest role on Gossip Girl. Trying to figure out who approached who about this is like trying to figure out which preschooler hit the other one first. But there Tyra was, with a cameo, the same week as Hilary Duff, because God was reading too much fanfiction and decided to intervene. And Tyra’s cameo was about what you’d expect, which is to say, awkward and saddening. If you were like me and sort of hoping that maybe this Gossip Girlcameo would miraculously reveal the clever, self-aware business-mogul that I suspect lurks behind every media bimbo (see Paris Hilton for starters), by the end of Episode 3.4, “Dan de Fleurette,” you’d be like me: crying plump tears of disappointment through your compulsive painful laughter.


Tyra is playing the role of Ursula, a bossy sea witch who preys on the dreams of young girls glamorous star of the silver screen. Our plucky heroine Blake Lively, who is way too special to go to Brown and prefers to run around New York disrobing for paparazzi and finding herself, is getting a job! And the very adult and responsible job she finds is being Tyra’s keeper! (You guys … if you’d read this far without rushing to watch Gossip Girl, I don’t think we could be friends in real life. You’d want to strangle me with my Forever21 plastic pearls before we even made it through our coffee date.) So in sum, Tyra is playing a fragile, paranoid diva who feels the need to surround herself with nubile yes-women: her “talents” are “under-appreciated,” and she is a bully and a shrinking violet all at once, like a mean first-grader, or someone’s hackneyed interpretation of Bette Davis. TYRA BANKS IS PLAYING HERSELF ON GOSSIP GIRL.

Tyra obviously agreed to this role before she stepped in front of the cameras. Or else, OK, maybe someone close to her (and paid by her!) agreed to it for Tyra. Same thing. I refuse to believe that any human being alive is oblivious enough to ignore the parallels between “Tyra” and “Ursula,” and that includes Tyra Banks. She’s a megalomaniac, sure, but she’s also one media-savvy lady! She has her artificial fingernails dug into all the trashiest pies, and Gossip Girl is certainly as trashy as they come. (It’s filled with beluga caviar and Bubble Yum, just FYI.) So this was a perfect opportunity for Tyra to stop being so clownishly and obsessively self-aware that she tearfully slaps her own size-large bikini-bottom on television, and to start being, you know, functionally self-aware, poking gentle self-effacing fun at her own image while still appealing to the same smug demographic who probably send each other YouTube clips of her talk-show on Facebook with ironic quips like, “Look at what your bff is doing now!!!!” (I do that. That’s me I’m talking about.)


Tyra speaks basically the same way in every incarnation of her that I’ve ever viewed (talk show, reality show, acting gigs, interviews) : as if she’s trying to get through to a very small disobedient child. I’ve read that analogy in a ton of novels, always connected to villains, but it never really clicked until I first heard Tyra. There’s a stagy, wide-eyed condescension in her voice nearly all the time, as if she’s playing along with something embarrassing for your sake, but she’s not feeling kind or playful about it, and she’ll have to stop very soon and go back to her actual real-life adult responsibilities, which you can never understand. All the creepy stunts she pulls on her show are performed with a disdainful aplomb, with the impression that Tyraherself would never think to do these things, and is crying inside, but she knows her duty is to give the poor good-hearted populace what they want. Tyra’s whole life, apparently, is making sacrifices nobody wants her to make but feeling generous and put-upon anyway. Her enormous staring eyes and prim mouth afforded her a modeling career, but they also go very well with her life’s calling, which is to interview 13-year-old mothers and Klu Klux Klan members and reprimand them for their foul ways while also getting them to perform like Victorian freak shows.


So, in sum, the Gossip Girl cameo played out the same way: Tyra spent the whole time talking in a disingenuous “actress” voice that stood out as false even in comparison to Penn Badgley and Taylor Momsen. To my disappointment (but not surprise!), Tyra played Ursula as if she felt very sorry for this poor fragile loony who had her one great acting moment torn completely from the Josephine Baker epic also starring Hilary Duff-as-Hilary Duff (keep up, kids, keep up!). I mean, it’s not hard to imagine Tyra Banks throwing a similar waterworks-and-violin scene if her own work was ever belittled, although in Tyra’s case she’d make sure her temper tantrum went out to all the major networks. Fortunately Ursula has Blake Lively to counsel her on public relations. During this final scene, Ursula stares up at golden Blake like a lost child, while somewhere behind that flimsy mask lurks the actual Tyra, just itching to rise up and send both Blake and Ursula packing. “Two lovely ladies stand before me: one who has all the potential in the world, but just can’t seem to find herself, and one who has such a beautiful face and perfect body and flawless speaking voice, but who may be too sensitive for this harsh industry.” I just want to get back to America’s Next Top Model. Of course Tyra’s natural element is one in which she can rule her glittery little microcosm with an iron fist. Displace her into a world where cartoonish plots and pretexts are fair game for everyone, and Tyra can only manage to churn out a few painfully self-conscious school-play sobs from inside a restroom stall, all the while wondering why Ursula can’t just get her act together and be more like Tyra.


(P.S. I titled this ‘The Witch and the Wardrobe’ because I thought I’d have time to also talk about my Halloween costume. But now I’ve run out of room, so, in keeping with the Lewis theme and acknowledging my preachiness, maybe a more accurate title would be ‘A High Horse and Her Girl.’ Or something.)

[originally posted August 9th, 2009]

Whenever I talk (re: whine incessantly) to R. he’s always all, “You’re just bored lately! That’s all!” Which makes me really angry, because I’m all like, “Why would you even think that? Just because I have nothing to do except watch old Nicole Kidman movies on Instant View and avoid important responsibilities that terrify me? You’re just jealous!” And then I switch our relationship status on Facebook to something incriminating. It’s complicated!

One of R.’s arguments is that guys aren’t bored because they have video games, while girls, lacking video games, become extremely bored unless they have sexy fashion-oriented careers, lots of shoes to organize, or babies in their wombs (I actually added the last part, but I think he was implying as much). This is clearly a very scientific argument centered around years of scientific research. Girls do not play video games, ever. Guys do not not play video games, ever. The gender divide between boredom and not boredom has been marked as such since the Dark Ages, at least, and it shows no time of stopping. Video games will only get better! Girls will only look stupider and stupider for avoiding them! No wonder women have been historically oppressed by the patriarchy … anyone who ignores the siren-call of World of Warcraft really deserves to be tried for witchcraft or married off at eleven years old in order to give birth to male heirs. God, women. If you can’t put up shut up.

Case in point: to illustrate this entry I was just searching for images of “girl gamers” on Google, and a HUGE percentage of the results involved girls who were a) naked, b) in a spread-eagle position, c)covering key parts of their bodies with game cases and consoles, or c) all of the above. This is what it means to be a girl gamer! It means you have a Call of Duty 2 case between your legs! Never forget that’s the defining element of your being. A “girl cook” works at weird clubs and has sushi rolls served on her naked body. A “girl mechanic” poses with a screwdriver held to her mouth like a lollipop. And on and on. The only real career you can have is to be a mother, which legitimately and necessarily involves your reproductive organs. Everything else is a sham. Why have that Call of Duty 2 case propped there? It’s blocking the baby!


But of course I’m just being militantly whiny as a joke. There are video games for girls. Made very specifically and pointedly for girls, to teach them important life-skills. I’m too poor to own a console, though, so I have to turn to a more reliable resource, i.e., my very own laptop, and the wealth of computer games over at Big Fish Games. Why should girls buy expensive video game systems? Apparently they only use them as lingerie. Anyway, they need to stockpile diaper powder and mashed carrots in jars, and purchase strollers as big as Buicks, and sexy jewel-encrusted oven-mitts, color-matched with their pedicures. If girls want to play video games, they should play them right on their laptops, clicking over from their food porn and Forever21 shopping carts.

Here’s just a candy-box sampling of the girl-friendly offerings you can download at Big Fish:

- Nanny Mania
- Yummy Drink Factory
- Wedding Dash: Ready Aim Love
- Vogue Tales
- The Great Chocolate Chase
- Supermarket Mania
- Satisfashion
- Puppy Stylin’
- Lovely Kitchen
- Kindergarten
- Ice Cream Daze
- Fitness Dash
- Dress Up Rush
- Carrie the Caregiver


There are four basic rubrics of girly-games: fashion, care-giving, weddings, and food. I think that’s pretty fair because really what else do women think about? All these games involve the same basic operation: perform chained events over and over again, with increasing difficulty, until you’re able to multitask like a pro. Most of these games are grouped under “Time Management” games, because everyone knows that girls are obsessed with time. Their biological clocks tick so loudly they can’t even hear their professors or bosses, which is why they’re so suited for the home. Time is like a cannon-ball tied around their ankles, or a pretty albatross necklace. Hurry it up! Find a man before your skin wrinkles, have a baby before your eggs dry up, run for X amounts of hours to work off X amount of ice cream cones. Bring those diet cokes to Table B before they vanish in puffs of angry-smoke and you lose a star!

I’m really charmed by the lack of escapism in these games. You’re doing totally practical things! Stressful, practical things! My senior year of college I was briefly obsessed with what is now the overenthusiastic grandma of all the other time-management games … Diner Dash. Three years later, it’s spawned a ton of add-ons where you can travel back in time (“All Knight Diner”) or even into fictional worlds (“Through the Cooking Glass”). But back in 2006, kids, it was just the basics. Diner Dash basically involved seating people, taking their orders, waiting for the food to cook, getting the orders to the tables, waiting for them to ask for the check, and clearing the tables. As the game progressed you got certain groups of people who didn’t want to sit next to each other, or maybe families with babies who would spill and need a mop, or the lines would get really long and you’d have to go to the podium and turn on the Muzak to calm them down. When I played the game, I would end up nearly crying from the stress, feeling like a total clumsy failure, and pleading with the tiny color-coded customers to JUST BE PATIENT PLEASE I’M TRYING SO HARD YES MA’AM I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOUR DRINK ORDER OK THIS TABLE IS READY GOD I’M REALLY SORRY. I felt bullied and frazzled and totally resentful of my little customers … but oh, the sweet triumph when I managed to send a table off with full hearts and a thumb’s up sign and I got a great tip and went on to the next level.

So basically I was just like a waitress, only not getting paid real money, or interacting with real people.

All right, OK. Again, I’m just being funny for the sake of the internet. I know a lot of these games involve escapism. Just like guys can act out their burning desire to chase down hookers in a generic Ferrari or travel to distant lands to rescue the princess, girls can also bring a little sparkle and fancy to their computer-game lives. For instance, there is one game that takes the Nanny Mania trend and adds a dash of whimsy … instead of human babies, you’re hired-grunt surrogate-wet-nurse nanny to a bunch of MONSTERS.

The backstory is something idiotic like: “In Daycare Nightmare, you care for baby vampires, dragons and other little beasties while their parents are at work!” But we all know what’s really going on. In the gooey pink depths of your female brain, of course, the actual scenario is that Don-Draper-turned-vampire ties you to the headboard, brutally rapes you during your fade-to-black, and a week later a bouncing baby monster claws through your tummy! Aw! Miracle of childbirth! Quick, take photos for Facebook. And then take care of your baby monster. For hours. Tirelessly. Until you can move on to the next level.

Ladies, we should all be so grateful that we live in an age where a simple hour-long trial of a computer game can teach us so much about our future “sad-single-gal” careers and our reproductive duties and even about frosting cupcakes or cleaning up vampire spit-up! Of course I’m kidding, though. I’m always kidding. I know these games are just mild amusement, and why not pretend to serve food or plan weddings? Besides: we all know the real point of video games is to lick them, squat over them, use them as sexy censor bars, or arrange them around our bare-naked bodies on our Target bedspreads and take photos while our parents are out at Red Lobster. And that is not a joke. And that’s why I am so so so bored.

[originally posted August 5, 2009]

Why wasn’t the movie called Girl in the Green Scarf? “Confessions of” is a title-trend that seems to have run its course. Sorry, St. Augustine. I guess the word “shopaholic” was a keyword to attract the right demographic (30-something co-workers on their ladies’ night out; dewy-faced college sophomores with a flimsy understanding of credit cards; or, in my case, smug 25-year-olds with a one-movie plan on Netflix). And the “confessions,” in this case, served the purpose of an indulgent little apology, like a giggle behind a hand with shell-pink nails and a Hello Kitty ring: Oh, I’m so bad! So the title is actually totally apt, even though the Girl in the Green Scarf pops up automatically in Google once you get past the first few letters of “green,” so it apparently stuckaround in the akashic record or whatever.

As an undergraduate I minored in Film, a decision almost as impractical, coyly naive, and self-satisfied as a major in English. But at least I’ve gone through several rounds of Film History 101, which is why I know that back in the Great Depression, women flocked to the theaters in record numbers to watch frou-frou fluff pieces that featured very little plot and long, luxe montages of expensive fashions.

“The girl who leaves school and gets a dead-end job can still look like a fashion-plate for a pittance. You may have pennies in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes, you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Marlene Dietrich…” - George Orwell

Confessions of a Shopaholic, 2009, directed by P.J. Hogan and starring Isla Fisher, is about as close as I assume we’ll get to a revival of this type of unabashed escapism. I mean we’ve had this sort of movie for long before the RECESSION (ooh, look, I dated myself!) snuck up on us and gave us an international wet willy, and we’ll have them long after, assuming the world doesn’t end in 2012, which is about the only thing that could scare Sandra Bullock off the big screen. (Ha ha! Kidding, Sandra! I love it when Nicole Kidman tickles your nose!) Anyway, I’m not familiar with the books that inspired this unapologetic chick-flick, and I didn’t know what to expect when I added it to my queue.

I think this ended up one of the more confusedly moralistic escapism fantasies I’ve ever watched: the entire time you know everything will end up perfect and dreamy, the friends will reunite with tears and kisses, the protagonist will learn her adorable lesson; people will be totally charmed by her antics, and everything she does will wind up being just what the world needed, but she will ultimately turn down her lifelong dream because she knows it isn’t morally fair (?! … I didn’t even get that part, maybe John Goodman was distracting me) but it’s OK cause she ends up with Hugh Dancy (yeah, that’s not a spoiler, shut up). Watching the movie, you get to feast your eyeballs on buckets and boatloads of trendy sexy clothing, so of-the-minute that it looks pretty questionable by the time you see it, but still decadent and coquettish in this dress-up-doll kind of way. And yet ultimately the whole movie is sort of depressing and odd … the girl is in overwhelming amounts of debt, which doesn’t seem so enchanting to someone filling out a FAFSA, I’m sorry. It’s really more of an endearing, twinkling little finger-wag against credit cards than anything else … which, yeah, is a good lesson for us all. Ignore those creepy living mannequins when they try to strangle you with Dior! It’s all a trap! Comical-looking businessmen with comical names will come and getcha! We should all be so lucky to learn a lesson like this. Sooner the better.

Ultimately I think this movie failed (SURPRISE!) because it couldn’t make up its mind whether to come from a Paris Hilton land of total escapism and vicarious guilt-free indulgence, or from A Child’s Book of Virtues. I never expect to learn valuable lessons from movies based on Sophie Kinsella books, and when they try to teach me something, I feel as if I’m being fed a dog-pill in a spoonful of sugar-free Smucker’s jam. Please, let my brain rot in peace. That’s all I ask.

But I did enjoy Isla Fisher. She has such a cute winsome little face, like a slightly spoiled child, and I like the revitalized trend of the “zany redhead” … Fisher and Amy Adams are two examples, following the chocolaty footsteps of Lucille Ball. Somehow their red hair takes off a condescending edge that comes along with airhead blondes, imbuing them with a wholesomeness and silly earnestness that makes them about as impossible to hate as Cocker Spaniel puppies or buttercups. I personally found the “green scarf” pretty ugly, but then again, I shop at Forever21. This is not the movie for me.

[originally posted Aug. 2nd, 2009]

I was supposed to answer a question (why girls like vampires and boys don’t) at least a week ago, but the question still sits there, all complex and taunting, like a Rubic’s cube with the stickers put on the wrong way, and then forgotten behind a stove, and melted into a weird indistinguishable lump. Butguess what! I am going to rescue that lump and put the stickers on the right way and then solve it really amazingly quickly, like Spock or that kid in Good Will Hunting or that guy in Beautiful Mind! Look on my works ye mighty and despair: I am about to change your lives forever. Turn off that YouTube video of the cute little bride dancing along to the autotuned voice of a domestic abuser, because I have something related, but better.

Recently, in an internet community I discreetly frequent, this same question was raised. The answer was supplied. And agreed upon. Like, “LOL preach it gurl!” and “IAWTSFM. LJ friends?” Are you ready for this amazing revelation?

Ladies like vampires because human men are bad and selfish in bed.

… All right. Women of the world internet, we have to talk about this. I understand that I may have be biased, since, being pathologically shy, I have (so far) neatly avoided one-night stands and second-date sex. If I had these experiences, maybe I’d “AWTSFM,” too. There are apparently many, many, many men out there who are really, really, really thoughtless. I know that women are subtle and mysterious and must be treated with great care, and that men are like great clay-footed beasts clomping around, accidentally kicking the Hello Kitty vibrator beneath the bed and stuff. But can we really use this as an explanation for EVERYTHING?

Women love vampires because vampires, having the ability to suck blood and live forever, have spent the past two centuries learning how to please the ladies; men, meanwhile, are just fine and dandy with human women, as long as they don’t demand too much chocolate syrup or cry too hard afterwards or put their box of tampons under the sink like they live there or something. So, good! That was easy! Vampires are explained because of a Cathy comic strip and an email forward from your aunt who wears “I’m a Carrie” t-shirts in public.

At first I refused to accept this explanation. I fought against it so hard, I really did. The problem is that I just don’t have a better one. I tried and tried, but all roads led to Transylvania. (Ha!)

For a while I rationalized it like this: it’s because vampires are supernatural, and supernatural beings have a lot of advantages. They have the glamourous loneliness of the outsider, but also magical powers, so even when they’re feeling lonesome and wondering “why me?” and everyone is giggling at them in the school cafeteria, they still know they could start showing off and make everybody shut up but fast.

Werewolves are fine, but there’s the awkward and unavoidable fact that they turn into animals once a month. What do they do while they’re animals? It’s best not think about it too closely. While some lupine traits are hot enough when transferred to humans, it’s hard to think of your lover running around licking under his tail and itching fleas and panting with his tongue out and having a furry tail, for chrissakes. I mean, geez. Werewolves have succeeded in popular fiction, even as sweet functional characters (Professor Lupin!) but the discomfiting brush with bestiality means that most werewolves are either spookshow figures or emasculated sidekicks (Professor Lupin!). They’re rarely the leading men.

Zombies … well … imagine having sex with a zombie. Just imagine it. Now stop. I told you so. Never going to happen.

And ditto for fairies, and pixies, and genies, and ghosts, and ogres. Maybe elves, but come on, what can elves do? They’re about as threatening as a maple leaf. Sure, they’re hyperbolically gorgeous, but it’d be like dating a really handsome yoga instructor who is way too far gone on his brown rice diet and Parabola subscription to give the slightest fuck about you. But vampires! Vampires are as socially-sanctioned as it is possible for an imaginary monster to get. They don’t just look like humans, they look like humans all the time, and they’re almost always sexy as hell, and this is why:

If you get made into a vampire, one hundred bucks says it’s because you were sleeping with a vampire.

That’s right! Having sex is the way to go! It’s not like a werewolf, where they have to become a wild animal and take a Discovery Channel chunk out of your leg, or like a zombie, where they have to open your scalp like a tin of beans and get your brainstem all over their face. Vampires attack you by sucking on your neck, which, as we all learn in eighth grade, is a totally great experience. And if they happen to penetrate you (sorry, I know I sound like your gross uncle trying to talk to you about birds-and-bees over Thanksgiving leftover, but that’s just what it is) … and if they happen to sip up your life-force like a delicious juicebox, well, OK. Vampires are beautiful because other vampires have this whole sorority-system in place where they only choose the most beautiful to become immortal, and then, because they live so long and can only come out at night, they naturally become very cosmopolitan and suave, having lived through three hundred years of nightclubs and coffee shops and bowling alleys, so, OK, I cave, maybe they do know how to please a woman. Fine. I guess I just made the very argument I hated seven paragraphs ago, only I took a much longer time to tell it.

And this is why we love vampires. Because they only come out at night (alternately: have lovely well-mosturized glittery skin), because they’re either very conflicted and sensitive about their monstrous abilities or else totally callous, because they’re basically JUST LIKE HUMAN BEINGS except more attractive and more dangerous. Nothing untoward. Even their metod of destruction is sleek and sensual, like Audrey Hepburn carrying around a little pink pistol in her handbag and kissing you on the jugular before she goes in for the kill. To use some atrocious grad-school seminar language, vampires can “pass”! They are not “othered”! Except when television shows want them to be symbolic others. But who are we kidding, even the most prurient racist/homophobic finger-wag is buried beneath campy, decadent, bloody sex scenes.

And there. I’ve told you everything you already know. Your gratitude is overwhelming.

[originally published July 30, 2009]

When I feel sad and anxious I do not turn to time-honored coping mechanisms. People the in the olden days did not cope by painting their fingernails and listening to “Billie Jean” on repeat while walking around in a strapless dress, staring out the windows at the rain. When I worry about myself, the best thing to do is not pity myself, but of course to start working hard and prove myself and go for what I want and be responsible and not dwell on the past and not wallow in self-pity. But instead all I want to do is put on a lot of make-up, because that makes me feel like a different girl, and not eat, because ditto, and look at expensive dresses online, and daydream pretty furiously.

If you’re going to escape, why imagine realistic scenarios? Why imagine being promoted, or showing up at a party being all thin and hot, or how beautiful your kids will be and how you won’t name them dumb things like Ryleigh and Khayleb but you won’t name them pretentious things like Mingus or Flannery either, because, COME ON. Why imagine things that you really sort of want and could potentially have if you didn’t suck? Why not just go totally wild with escapism? That helps you not even have to THINK about what you don’t have, because it’s impossible to have any of this stuff. Honest to God.

For instance, I am now imagining Joan Holloway cuddling me on a chaise lounge and feeding me miniature pink marshmallows, while unicorn babies gambol and frolic around the heart-shaped olympic-sized indoor swimming pool, and Sam Rockwell comes parachuting down onto the lawn with a bottle of top-shelf whiskey and a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and hey, maybe I have wings, or maybe I have the Fire Flower from those Mario games I used to play on my brother’s Gameboys. You may be getting confused because Joan Holloway is fictional and Sam Rockwell isn’t, but if this is what trips you up, you obviously are not on the same wavelength as I am. Lucky you! Please go somewhere else, like back to cropping your wedding photos so they’ll look sexy on Facebook.

But of course I’m not going to be able to lie around daydreaming forever. At some point I’ll need to walk in the rain to return my slightly overdue YA library books, and then walk to the liquor store and buy hard cider (pear-flavored), and then watch the scandalous scenes from Mad Men, watch the scandalous scenes from Watchmen, send an unexcitingly inappropriate Facebook message to my boyfriend, and pass out.

Go, me! Show ‘em how it’s done!