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Wikipedia Knows My Darkest Secrets

After watching the first season of Dexter, I was curious about what factor plays a bigger part in the development of sociopaths, nature or nurture. Instead of doing a lot of time consuming research and actually learning something, I went to my old friend Wikipedia. However, the section on sociopaths is a particularly ill written mess with little useful information. But I soldiered on and was rewarded with the following extract, which seemed to have no connection to the rest of the entry:

The one area still being discussed regarding cruelty to animals is within the feline realm. Although cruelty towards them is not what is called into question, ironically it is the individuals who own four or more of these animals.^{[citation needed]} There is increasing evidence of deviant behaviour associated with these individuals. There have been reported cases of cat owners losing perspective of society as a whole, believing that their cats are equal, and in some cases superior, to the population around them. They begin to lose perspective and begin to feel it is their obligation to “rescue” every cat they see and believe they are the only ones capable of judging the appropriate household a cat should be tended.^{[citation needed]}

As the owner of six cats I think this was a rather unwarranted and unfair attack. It seems that Mr. Wikipedia author has a personal ax to grid. Maybe he was feeding his cat Cheetos and Diet Coke three meals a day and is still bitter that some do-gooder took Fluffy away. The only “deviant behavior” my cats have driven me to is the desire to dress them up in capes. Now this is bad, I grant you, but do I really deserve to be lumped in with the bed wetters and fire setters? It seems more of a harmless fetish than anything. And why is four the magic number? It should at least be six, the number of the beast. And don’t think I missed the ironic quote marks around rescue.

Best/most painful moments from the two weeks I spent in Missouri with my family

One

Me: My bedroom is freezing! It’s the coldest room in the house.

Father: No it’s not. It’s always warmer upstairs; heat rises.

Me: I sleep in that room and I’m telling you it’s cold.

Father: No it’s not.

(At this point I draft my mother to go upstairs with me to confirm the relative coldness of my room)

Mother: She’s right. Her room is really cold.

Father: I knew you women would conspire against me, you always do. That room is the warmest in the house.

Me: I can tell when a room is cold! Go check for yourself.

Father: I’m not going to waste my time checking to see if a room is cold when I know it’s not.

(Mother hustles me out of the room before an incident can ensue)

Two

My mother, father, and I watch Juno. My mom was reluctant, but as usual my father and I bulldoze over her opinion and pop the movie in. During the sweet, cheery song at the end my father and I discuss how charming the movie was and we both turn to my mother so she can reinforce our opinion, only to see that she is crying. At that moment my father and I remembered that my mother gave a baby up for adoption when she was 15, and the cheeky, irreverent tone of Juno was more painful for her than any dark exploration of teen pregnancy would have been. We also remembered that we are insensitive assholes.

Three

Best statement made by my uncle: “The Mexicans are killing American with their language. It’s a scientific fact that a country can’t survive if the people speak more than one language.”

Four

On Memorial Day my grandfather and I are at the Wal-Mart outdoor garden center searching for flowers to decorate graves. I’m on the opposite side of the center from my grandfather checking out the lilies, when he starts to whack at his pants in a frantic manner. He hops up and down, cussing freely. I start to hustle toward the peonies to see what’s wrong, when my grandfather drops his pants, revealing his tightly whities and a pair of battling bumble bees. I veer off toward a display of fake flowers, which I become deeply interested in. Later that night, on a midnight trip to the bathroom I see a startlingly white and emaciated figure lumbering evilly down the hallway and I give a shriek of fear and surprise before I realize it is not the ghost of an Auschwitz victim, but my second sighting in one day of my grandfather in his underwear.

The Search for Genius

Last week I finished Eden’s Outcasts, Matteson’s wonderful biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. I have read biographies of Louisa May Alcott before, but never one that also focuses on her father. What I have learned is that my father and Bronson Alcott are soul brothers. Perhaps Bronson was reincarnated as penniless mid-west philosopher to make up for his 19^th century god-complex. If so, he has still not learned his lesson.

Bronson Alcott was an ambitious dreamer who dragged his family from city to city looking for a population that would acknowledge his greatness. He could not stand dissention, and willfulness of any type in his family was construed as a personal insult. His wife and daughters would labor at lackluster, soul sucking jobs to keep the family fed and clothed while he read and visited his great friends, refusing to descend to labor that he thought was beneath him. If it sounds like I’m being hard on both Bronson and my own father, I am. They both had a wonderful, loving side and tended to error more from blindness than inclination. But the parallels between my family and the Alcott family were startling, though I realize they should not be. Bronson Alcott was no harder on this family than Percy Shelley or Edger Allan Poe was on theirs; people of genius are not easy to live with. That said, people searching for genius, but never finding it, are just as hard to live with, and there are a lot more failed than ascending genius in the world.

I also started reading Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian. Written by Scott Douglas, who I have adored as a McSweeney’s correspondent for years, I was quite looking forward to this book. Sadly, it has been a bit of a disappointment. Flashes of Douglas’s sardonic yet affectionate humor are still present, but it is mostly hidden behind a clumsy and heavy- handed apparatus that make it impossible to get into the story. Douglas’s personal narrative is constantly interrupted by surprisingly uninteresting sidebars and needless footnotes. I am all for footnotes in the style of David Foster Wallace, but I don’t need to be told what a class visit to a library is. The whole narrative is also very episodic, which works well for a blog or the McSweeney dispatches, but it oddly unsatisfying in a book. I hope Douglas keeps up his contributions to McSweeney’s and perhaps branches out into other magazines/newspaper. His style is perfect for that venue.

Cat with cape and other fond cape memories

I have appreciated the beauties of a sleek, shapely cape for as long as I can remember. I always wanted to wear one for Halloween, no matter what I was dressed as. Halloween pictures show such original costumes as cat with cape, rabbit with cape, hobo with cape. On my tenth Halloween I finally figured out that a cape complements no costume as much as that of a vampire, and my attire for the next six Halloweens was set (yes, I dressed up for Halloween until I was sixteen years old. I was having sex and pretending to be a vampire for free candy in the same year).

My first cape was black vinyl with a red vinyl interior. I wore it continuously in the weeks leading up to and following Halloween, until an ugly accident involving my sister and a pogo stick put an end to my fun. I would hide behind doors, couches, beds, anything in the house, just waiting for a victim to walk by. I would then jump out, hissing, and flap my cape. I wanted people to run in terror, but I must have been a bad hider because they were always expecting me. My family soon became disgusted with my behavior, which may be why my sister was not punished as she should have been for the reckless destruction of my valuable cape. I still remember the look of baffled horror on my mother’s face as she ran to the bus stop in her robe to keep me from boarding the bus in my beloved cape.

In daydreams I would often picture myself with a flowing cape, wreaking havoc on the pitiful population that had defied me in some way. For me, a cape was a symbol of evil, or at least that of a supremely disturbed and misunderstood person. My rabbit with a cape was an evil rabbit with a cape, capable of jumping on the back of smaller children with capeless costumes and biting at their necks. It makes sense for Dracula and Batman to have capes. They are mysterious and brooding; they have a lot of angst to hide behind a swirling pool of velvet blackness. But Superman? Captain Marvel? To them a cape is nothing but a rather silly fashion accessory. I’m sure everyone has considered how easy it would be for the Man of Steel to trip over his own crimson flag of justice or for a criminal to clothesline the Son of Krypton simply by grabbing his trailing mantle. I am reminded of a college friend who used to wear a cape (he called it a “cloak,” which sounds even geekier than cape) when we would play midnight hide-and-seek. You could always see his gray veil hanging down from whatever tree he had scurried up.

Adulthood, jobs, and higher education has not dimmed my love for the cape. In my opinion football would be more interesting if the players wore capes and spandex. I cherish pictures of caped fat cats flying through the photoshopped air. When asked what should replace the academic robes of old, I instantly picture myself in a striking green cape with matching mortar board teaching the young people about the value of a freshly laundered cape.

Reading is for Suckers

I hate it when people brag about the things that make them different. My particular pet peeve is people who love to mention that they don’t watch TV. I don’t mind that people don’t watch TV, more power to them, but I doubt that people who actually don’t watch TV (for an extended period of time. I’m sure all of us have given up TV for a couple of days or weeks or even months) feel the need to brag about it or lord it over everyone else.

Me: Did you watch the new version of As You Like It on BBC last night?

Annoying person: I don’t watch TV. It takes away from the literary experience.

Me: But it’s a play. You’re supposed to watch it.

Same annoying person: Whatever. Did you catch that readers theater production of The Shinning last night at the coffee house?

OR

Me: It sure is nice out today.

Another annoying person: Since I don’t watch TV I don’t really notice things like that.

In my PhD program most people don’t watch TV, mostly due to lack of time, so what is the person who likes to be different than everyone do? Say they never read! In fact, they hate reading! Never mind that this rebel has spent the last ten years of his life studying to be an expert in literature, writing, and teaching of the same. Forget the fact that he must spend hours everyday reading just to stay afloat in his classes and not lose his assistantship. Since he never reads he must learn through osmosis. I bet if I crept into his house late at night I would not find the TV blaring or a video game system binging, but a man huddled under the covers, flashlight trained on the complete works of Trollope.

Being One of the Daytime People

A number of years ago, smack in the middle of my days as a 9 to 5 drone, I woke up supremely happy for no reason I could explain. This feeling of euphoria lasted for hours until it forcibly hit me why I was so blissful: I had dreamed the night before that it was the last day of work before summer vacation. While my body labored over emails and paperclips a hidden part of my brain was waiting in anticipation for when I would be free to sleep in for days at a time, read for hours on end, and loiter about the world in general. My despair on realizing this was nothing but a dream was complete and, I think, the catalyst for my present path. For I now find myself, for the first time in 14 years, with a free summer.

Free time is a funny thing. You dream of it, you yearn for it, and when you finally rearrange your whole life for it, you are overwhelmed with guilt. Every morning I watch Eric leave for work knowing he will grind away for eight hours at a job that is slowly stealing his genius, while I lark about like a house wife with no children and a sloppy work ethic. The guilt drives me out of bed early, so at least I present the illusion of an industrious person. I might feel less guilt if I were not nursing the suspicion that Eric is better cut out for this life than I am. With three months of free time he would probably record an album, write the all-American novel, and learn to knit. I’ll be lucky to escape with the Spanish vocabulary of a five year old.

I truly believe that people are not meant to sweat their lives away at unrewarding, creativity-killing jobs, and yet as I go to coffee shops, book stores, and parks in the middle of the day I wonder, why aren’t all these people in my way at work? Are they rich or just lazy? Even though I am now one of the daytime people, I find myself passing judgment on them. I want to throw muffins at the women dining next to me giving air kisses and discussing how to tax their nanny’s salaries. Such people should not exist outside of fiction I would never read. And why are there so many people in line at the post office at two in the afternoon? I know my tenure will be over soon so I feel free to criticize at will, just as other people who are out of work, on vacation, serving me coffee, or maybe just work nights are wondering why the red-headed girl with green glasses has enough time to eat cookies and drink coffee for the fourth day in a row while they eat cookies and drink coffee for the fourth day in a row. We should all wear tags with our occupations or at least our intentions so we know who to scorn and who to respect. “Aspiring artist” would get a friendly nod, as would “bartender” or “down on my luck,” while “married to money” or “lacking in ambition” would get my unjustified scorn.

 

Things I love about not working in the summer:

 

Eating at restaurants that are usually too crowded to bother with

Finishing a book on the same day I start it

Eating lunch with a different friend everyday

Listening to the Writer’s Almanac

Spending every afternoon at Lulu’s eating cookies and drinking sugary coffee

Being the first person at the library service sales

 

Things I don’t like:

 

Worrying that people think I’m a rich Carmel housewife

Being poor and still spending a lot of money

Putting on weight because I spend every afternoon at Lulu’s eating cookies and drinking sugary Coffee

Guilt