High Profile Rampage

You asked me why I try so hard.

Why I pause deliberately before I speak, and annunciate every word so well.

You said it seemed like I was playing a part, and I am.

I wanted to be close to you. I wanted to reach out and touch you and for you to unfold.

But I know better.

I know what happens when you cling to something.

So I built this person. This person full of holes through which occasionally I shine.

And she speaks to you and she laughs with you and you fuck her.

And she feels it when you kiss her forehead, because if I did I would break apart.

  I have now begun my descent into the airspace of The Actual Religious. Come next week I will be living with and working for Episcopalians through the Micah Project. Micah is part of the Episcopal Service Corps, and places interns (me) with area churches or non-profits (the Trinity Boston Foundation, in my case). We also live together, about 15 of us, in two houses in Brookline and Allston.

I expect this will be a weird experience for me, as I have just spent 4 years ignoring my own faith. I also expect it will be unusual to live among people who perhaps Practice What They Preach in terms of actually living like Christians. To be clear, I don’t mean abstaining from sex or alcohol or trying to stop people from marrying or aborting their fetuses (feti?), because that’s not who Episcopalians are. But for me, I tend to believe without following rules. I don’t really think Jesus would give a shit that I swear. But maybe these people will? 

This is for everyone who has ever called me fat. This is for the times you asked me if maybe wanted an apple instead. This is for the time you made me work out in 90 degree weather when I had a cold. This is for the time you told me I needed to go to the gym, and for when you told me I looked “fatter after eating”. This is for America, and for my family, and for my ex, and for my future daughter, and for lots of people I’ve never met.
This is for my mother, who hasn’t worn a tank-top or a bathing suit since I was 3. This is for my sister, who tried to ensure that my life as a chubby girl wasn’t as awful as hers was.
I am tired. I am exhausted. I am fed up. I am enraged. I am disappointed. I am let down.
But I am not unhappy, and I am not unhealthy, and I am not unattractive.
I have only ever felt bad about myself when you have made me. I have lived. I have accomplished, I have succeeded. I have danced, I have swam, I have had sex, I have traveled, I have had a job, I have loved and been loved.
So why do I need to lose weight, again?
What’s wrong with my body, again?
Clearly being a little overweight must be a problem. But it’s not with my health, since I’m perfectly healthy. And it’s not with my habits since I eat well and exercise. And it’s not with my confidence, since I love myself.
I’m sorry that you feel ugly because of your weight. I’m sorry if you didn’t get the job you wanted, or the guy you liked, because of your weight. I’m sorry if you were depressed or you are now. I’m sorry if other people made fun of you or hurt you or still do.
But these extra pounds don’t seem to be hurting me, or you.

So I’d really like it if you could leave me alone.

I’m cleaning out my room at home, which I haven’t really done before (to the extent that some of my favorite children’s books are still on my shelves). 

So far, I’ve found

- 14 newspaper and magazine articles dated September 12th, 2001. 
-4 Dan Brown books, 6 Michael Crichton, 4 Steven King, 3 Tom Clancy, a book of poetry by Keats and one by Yeats (next to each other!), a book called “At Home In Mitford”, a biography of Benjamin Franklin, and 67 and counting non-fiction books about the Holocaust
- half of a sci-fi novel written by me in 6th grade about a juvenile detention facility onboard a cruise liner (I smell a major motion picture)
- 1 Charlotte Church CD 
- A paper I wrote freshman year of college about the Badly Drawn Boy song “Camping Next To Water” (I still think it contains the best lyric ever written; there’s no use in feeling/all the things im feeling/ there’s no one here to feel with me)
-the first camcorder I ever bought which is an 8mm analog Sony Handycam. Not so handy after everything went digital, eh sony?
-2 Russian nesting dolls

and fiveee goldennn ringsss 

I’m moving to Boston in three weeks, an hour from where I grew up. Observations.

1. The ratio of both cheap weed and Harvard students is higher in Boston than DC. Sounds good to me.

2. One of the first times I can remember taking the train into Boston was when I was in 6th grade. We went to the Children’s Museum and my friend’s dad bought me a purple keychain. Everyone was jogging with their dogs along the river. Everyone seemed very normal and wealthy. Then the next time I went we went to Southie and everyone seemed very gruff and Irish. The next time we went to Cambridge and I went to Tower Records and my first Urban Outfitters and had vegetarian Indian food for lunch and that’s when I knew I would grow up to be a hipster.

3. You can drink the water!

4. There are so many white people in Boston. So many. 

I get a real hard-on for disaster films. I remember recording the made-for-TV movie “Aftershock: Earthquake In New York City” on VHS and renting Twister about a thousand times as a child. Maybe it’s because I was in a very large earthquake when I was 6, or maybe it’s because I’m a sick, sick person who loves tragedy. 

Either way; I have seen every bad disaster movie (yes, including Dante’s Peak staring Pierce Brosnan, and about 80 other made-for-TV movies about volcanoes, or hurricanes, or nuclear plants melting down; why are there so many?). Yet I come away from all of them still generally satisfied with the American public (hey, there’s even some good acting in Aftershock- and you thought Jennifer Garner wasn’t a star before Alias) and not bitterly enraged. 

All of that changed with 2012. Forget all the other movies I’ve blogged about, 2012 is literally the worst and also maybe the most expensive film ever to be made. I felt so betrayed after watching this film. There isn’t even one good “honey, the world is ending” talk or armagetiton joke. And you’d think with all the obscene special effects we invented after “Aftershock: Earthquake In New York City” that they could make a believable end to the human race. 

No, no they could not. Or, they did not. Let me give away a crucial plot point; the world is ending. In the year 2012. BUT THATS NOT ALL, because that would be a really banal film. So in this movie, giant metal ‘arcs’ are built to save a small segment of the human race, you know, for breeding. But 90 percent of this film is a really gratuitous series of sequences in which John Cusack hears about the ships from Woody Harrelson (what?) and then struggles to get his family to the mountains of China. 

Ridiculous escape-from-nature scenes ensue. What is it with these modern disaster films (Day After Tomorrow, anyone?) where suddenly you can outrun earthquakes? And volcanic explosions? And cold fronts? No, John Cusack, no matter how fast you drive your limo through the streets of Los Angeles, you cannot outrun tectonic plate motion. 

And don’t get me fucking started on this weird overly personal subplot of a Russian mafia man with sideshow-esque twins. Or Cusack’s daughter who has a habbit of peeing her pants and concludes the movie and the survival of the entire human race with the words “I’m not afriad- no more pull-ups!”. If it were me, I would have been peeing my pants for about 4 days as the world literally collapsed around me. 

The only thing I took from this film is that we should all be wearing Depends when 2012 hits, which actually is not a bad idea. And the relief that at least if we all die, no movie this bad will ever be made again.