you are here

Now that I've settled into my own, into a new apartment in a new city, I finally have the time to do more than simply post photos with a caption as I've done with my last couple of blog postings.

(Btw, this is my desk, overlooking the city lights at night. I've always yearned for an apartment with this kind of view. Hopefully I'll be able to afford this place long enough to someday take it for granted.)


I intended to write this post about a rare thing for the poetman -- poetry. However, I had to comment upon something I heard on the radio before I get around to doing that.

I now reside in San Francisco and work for a dot.com in Mountain View 40 miles south on the Peninsula. Due to my commute, I've found myself listening to NPR in the mornings. If there is any benefit to an hour-long drive to work everyday, it's listening to National Public Radio's broadcasting.

After having worked for major network's news station in Pittsburgh, I appreciate the quality of NPR's news reporting all the more. Not only is it not sensationalized to a nauseating degree (as is all of mainstream news media reporting) but it is legitimately intelligent. They broadcast news the way it should be. You step out of the car and something you've heard during their news broadcast remains with you afterward. Unlike mainstream media that attempts to replicate an action/adventure cinematic experience in its newscast (thus the emphasis of "live" or "action" or "breaking" news) NPR gives something so rare in media today -- a perspective that is conducive to philosophical thought. You're left thinking about where you stand personally, on one issue or another, in relation to society, culture and/or the world at large.

Immediately a few news reports come to mind:

There was an insightful interview with a North Korean national who escaped that fucked-up part of the world. What I found most interesting in the interview is that the individual did not bemoan the squalid and repressive conditions of his homeland, but rather the shattering of the illusion under which he had lived for so long and taken for granted. He believed -- BELIEVED -- that the North Korean standard of living was superlative to the rest of the world's, especially the decadent West's. Only upon leaving did he realize he had lived his life under the guise of propaganda and saw, for the first time in his life, what he had taken to be true had all along been false. It's a perspective you don't get from a mainstream broadcast. It was authentically emotional. Shakespearean. Human.

There was a NPR reporter covering the catastrophe in Haiti who, in mid-newscast, lapsed and showed something so rare in news reporting -- a fissure in his objective reporting demeanor and (gasp) an genuine emotional reaction to the sheer magnitude of the suffering and despair there, epitomized in the sight of a bandaged girl whose broken body waited in a long queue of wounded outside a medical facility. Listening to Jason Beaubien's report, I felt moved in a way no other reporter's reporting has ever been able to.

This particular blog post, though, was inspired by something else -- something that hit closer to home than North Korea or Haiti, personally. It was a report on a survey taken of young people in America; its findings supplemented previous studies that had established reading and writing is on the decline among our young people (17 and under).

This latest survey focused specifically upon blog reading; the results of the survey showed even this type of reading and writing has fallen out of favor with young people. Respondents to the survey complained that blogs not only took too much to write but also took too much time to read. Overwhelmingly, our young people prefer to express themselves -- and read the expressions of others -- through social networking sites and through texts between their cell phones.

If this is the case, really ... how much less dire are our straits than any third-world country's?

you are the wind beneath my ears

2010

...and we still don't have flying cars.

We. Suck.

be good for goodness' sake

Except for the rarest of instances, when I happen upon a good or a service that perfectly corresponds to a family member, friend or lover, and it's within the acceptable price range for giving to that person, and available for purchase then and there, and not on back-order, so when you present the present, you get to see its revealing in that person's company -- you get to experience the immediacy of his or her reaction to the gift, which confirms exactly how correct you were in thinking -- yes, that is the perfect gift for x ... except for those rare instances, I fucking hate shopping.

And I know how very original I am for expressing this sentiment during the holiday season. This is the time of the year when you hear even people who were born to shop say how much they hate it -- even people for whom a "Born To Shop" T-shirt would make the perfect gift outlined in the scenario above.

But most people don't really hate shopping. People rail against the crowds in the stores, the traffic, the hundred-million other things they have to be doing that have yet to be done... but these don't get to the heart of the problem. In fact, with online shopping, there's no excuse to bitch about these things anymore. Anything can be obtained and shipped for free from Internet retailers for the most part during the holiday season. Anyone who doesn't opt to do so, and bitches about how terrible their experience at the mall was, needs the opposite of a sympathetic ear. It's as indefensible to bitch about your shopping experience at the mall as it is to bitch about how cold you are after doing something like shoveling your driveway with nothing but your slippers on.

But people can legitimately bitch about the struggle of trying to buy perfect gifts for those nearest and dearest to them. Because it is hard. It requires effort, and there's an undeniable pressure in making the right selections. Even for those who are easiest to shop for. Because the perfect gift requires insight, creativity... it's when shopping transcends shopping and becomes art. And art's tough to make... or, at least, make well.

For those family members that are farther removed, you have justifiable reason to bitch about the compulsory nature of holiday gift-giving. Though you see these people only once a year at the family holiday get-together, you've got to buy something for them. Ask anyone visibly stressed in the final shopping days of shopping, and after sighing, they'll say something along the lines of "I still have to get something for Uncle Joe, my Aunt Audrey, Dave and Lorrin ... and Ryan, I almost forgot Ryan. What do you get for a six-year-old boy nowadays, anyway?"

In response to the holiday absurdity, a group exists -- the members of which all fly into a pre-designated city each Christmas season dressed in Santa's best and carouse, creating "santanarchy" by behaving in very, unSanta-like ways. You can learn more at SantaCon.info.



I would likely be one of SantaCon's regular attendees if not for the fact I'm compelled to return to my parents' house each year. It is something I look forward to doing -- in large part because we don't buy one another Christmas gifts. It's a relatively firm holiday pact. No one buys anyone else presents because, if you do, you make everyone else feel like an asshole. And making your family members feel like assholes is, well, just not in the spirit of the holiday, unless perhaps your family stars in its own reality TV show.

That doesn't mean we don't unwrap gifts, though. The unwrapping of gifts has been a tradition we've held onto, and though it has waned since the years I was looking forward to things like Star Wars figures and new video games, that joy is still there.

My mother goes through a closet full of drug company giveaways she and my father hoarded whenever they would attend some drug conference as a tax-free holiday. Things like Immodium mousepads, plastic Prilosec paper clip holders, Zantac solar-powered calculators, etc... Each year my mother spends hours wrapping this junk up to look like authentic presents and puts it all under the Christmas tree. Then, bombed on nog and wine at the tail end of our annual Christmas Eve celebration, we tear into the gifts under the tree, sardonically crying out how shit like the Viagra oven mitt is exactly what we'd been hoping Santa would bring.

hmb

I first saw the acronym for Half Moon Bay on a white, oval-shaped bumper sticker -- the same kind you've perhaps seen with the "OBX" for North Carolina's Outer Banks. (I hate seeing the OBX stickers, especially on cars nowhere near the East Coast let alone North Carolina.)

My favorite of these stickers indicates an affiliation with Pittsburgh -- it reads "N'@" which refers to the superfluous Pittsburghese colloquialism, "n'at." It is used with amusing frequency among native Pittsburghers. Here it is in context:

"What are yunz guyz doin' this weekend?"
"I dunno... maybe goin' dahntahn for the Three Rivers Arts Festival n'at."

(The "n'at" is an abbreviation of the phrase, "and all of that." So, in this context, "n'at" would translate as "and all of that which is associated with the Three Rivers Arts Festival (e.g. eating street food, listening to live local music bands and strolling through the artists' vendor tents pursuing the same local artwork you see every year at the Arts Festival).")

Strangely enough, shortly after seeing this bumper sticker and thinking of "N'@" in context, I attended the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival. It was among the first of the things I did upon my arrival to Calif., and the least memorable given its striking similarity to the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. I suppose these festivals are the same everywhere -- lots of local residents mulling about, looking at local artwork and listening to local bands who lack the talent necessary to shed their "local" designation.

Unless they get moist for enormous gourds and/or have a sexual attraction to being stuck backed-up in traffic for hours as the population of a tiny beach town swells to 200k+, I don't see what compels those who flock to the festival year after year. (By the way, pumpkin-flavored beer = gag.)

I'm more optimistic for the next big event on the horizon here -- Mavericks. For a span of 24 hours, the Pacific Ocean churns out 30+ foot waves off the coast of Half Moon Bay. Surfing's creme de la creme wait on standby for the maverick waves, ready to travel to HMB at a moment's notice once they start crashing sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving each year.

I've been warned not to get my hopes up, though. It is not as much of a spectator event as one might think. The waves break on a reef about 1/4 mile offshore so, I presume, without some high-end optics there won't be much to watch except the surfers being towed out to the waves. (Since 1/4 mile is a long paddle to catch a wave, jetskiers tow the surfers out to catch them.)

I don't really need to see Mavericks; mere proximity to the ocean is enough for me. My hosts' Rob and Kate live in an oceanside housing development. You can see the Pacific from their living room window, beaming in the sunlight and brooding in the moonlight. Lately, it's been rumbling at night as its cauldron churns in Mavericks' birth pangs.

My hosts' community is adjacent to the Ritz-Carlton HMB, and my favorite activity is strolling down to the cliffside hotel to watch the sunset over the Pacific. Cloud banks on the horizon refract its light, making its orb appear analog in its last moments. No longer round, it looks like a tiny pyramid on the horizon, then a dot that finally blinks over the edge.

On the weekends bagpipe music accompanies the sunset, and a crowd of hotel guests gathers along a fence at the cliff's edge, drinks hanging in hand. What's most striking about these Pacific sunsets is the immediacy with which the sun finally disappears into the ocean. It speeds up suddenly at the very end, and is gone. There is a solemnness to the hotel guests as the horizon fades to black, and they walk back from the cliff edge. It's not just the somber tones left in the air by the bagpiper, but also an unconscious association made between the sunset and the human condition ... or simply sadness that a day of vacation has come to an end.

Though the sun is gone, the ocean remains, pulsing at the dark shore. It's this sense of a large mass in constant motion that I like about proximity to the ocean -- it curbs the disturbing stillness of night and pushes you with a bit more urgency into wakefulness the next day. Sometimes it presses into your sleep, leaving you contemplating the unfathomable in the morning.

my small breasts and i

I've been meaning to write about a couple of my friends' novels (Man Martin's Days of the Endless Corvette and Jamie Iredell's Prose. Poems. A Novel.). However, I'm on the verge of relocating west, and I'm busy with the many details involving the act of relocating, one of which prompted this blog post.

In California, I'll be staying with some good friends who had inspired previous blog posts (see umbrolli cutco and the wizardry of toto). In preparation for my visit, I decided to watch some BBC America so that I don't go through the television-viewing equivalent of "the bends" as I shift from my predominantly American sports-related TV watching to my hosts' particular viewing preferences. (As a guest in someone's home, it's really the very least you can do.)

While doing this, I came across a BBC documentary that shares the same name as this blog post. The documentary centers around a group of British women and the difficulties they have in living with their small breasts.

One is a petite Asian IT professional in her late 20s who approaches resolving her breast issues in a ridiculously proactive way. She opts not to consider breast augmentation surgery (which she is quick to say she would have no problem affording if she so chose to do so) in favor of using a vacuum pump apparatus in conjunction with herbal supplements in order to enlarge her bust. She takes her herbal (I love how the Brits pronounce the 'h' in 'herbal') supplements daily and affixes the pump apparatus (consisting of two plasticine cups attached by tubes to a vacuum-generating machine that looks like a cable box) to her tits while she sleeps at night. She lives with her boyfriend, who is "supportive" of his girlfriend's quest for bigger breasts, despite the fact they currently sleep in separate beds due to her nocturnal attachment to her breast pump.

She laments the inability to cuddle with her bf at night and the nuisance of the pump apparatus. As an IT professional who travels on business trips frequently, she talks about the inconvenience of carrying the added luggage of the apparatus (which weighs 7 kilos) on her trips and having to explain its function to airport personnel when passing through security. However, she is committed to not having the body of a pre-pubescent teen so she deals with these problems because of the encouraging results she's seen. A great deal of her portion of the documentary is footage of her standing in front of her bathroom mirror, trying to ascertain how much breast mass she has gained from her regiment.

Another cleavage-deficient woman on the show is in her early 20s and is one of the more attractive women I've seen. If she was a few inches taller, she would be indistinguishable from a professional model -- an occupation for which a large bust is not considered an asset at all. Regardless, she is disgusted with her "little girl's" body, so much so that she is considering registering with the Web site, myfreeimplants.com, where women who don't have the money to buy breast implants get donations from men who do, in exchange for photos and letters chronicling their breast enlargement experience. (Btw, I am not making this shit up. Go ahead and look at the Web site yourself.)

Before registering, though, she visits a boob doctor to become more acquainted with the breast augmentation procedure. He recommends an ideal cup size for her skinny frame and gives her instructions on how to simulate the experience of owning a larger set of knockers. According to his instructions, she boils a pre-determined amount of couscous and dries it out. After allowing it to cool, she divides the couscous into two mounds and packs them each into a piece of hosiery, which she then ties off, snipping away the excess hosiery with scissors, leaving her with two faux implants to put in her bra. These allow her, pre-surgery, to become accustomed to the weight of carrying the extra boobage, as well as gauge reaction to her new beamers while walking around in public.

The camera follows her through the streets of London, sporting her homemade implants in a tight top. They not only look real, and huge, but the knots where the hosiery has been tied off make her seem like she has hard, thumb-sized nipples, as well. Her faux bust proceeds to stop traffic. Giggling, she points out the gawkers and is all too amused by how her couscous-enhanced blockbusters are disrupting the pedestrian street scene.

Up to this point, the documentary has been nothing but supportive and understanding of these women and their particular struggles with their body image issues. Here, though, it finally suggests the ridiculousness of these girls' obsession with their lack of tit. As she walks down the street -- shaking her fake howitzers and turning heads left and right -- nonchalantly, she says that this, of course, is not why she wants bigger boobs. This kind of attention is an unwanted side-effect, she says, at which point the driver of a van pulls over to the curb and asks her if she has a boyfriend.

All the while, the makers of the documentary have chosen the Stone Roses song, "I Wanna To Be Adored" as the soundtrack playing through this segment. For those of you unfamiliar with the song, its lyrics consist of the following:

I don't have to sell my soul / He's already in me. / I don't need to sell my soul. / He's already in me. / I wanna be adored. / I wanna be adored. / I wanna, I wanna / I wanna be adored. / I wanna, I wanna / I gotta be adored.

I had planned to wrap up this post by asking how these attractive and otherwise intelligent women could become so deluded that they see themselves as ugly because they lack a robust bust? Is it a personal obsession? Are they damned, as the Stone Roses song suggests, with their vanity attributed to the Devil (He) inside of them? Or is the superficiality and materiality of our postmodern society to blame for these women not being able to see themselves for the beauties that they are?

Then I realized that I was making an assumption in this questioning -- that these women are, in fact, beautiful. One could argue they are not, and that presupposition would entail a different line of questioning.

However, I personally could never make such an argument, and I realize it is because of a superficial bias all my own -- I am entirely too attracted to hearing British women talk about their breasts, big or small, to speak about them objectively. (Btw, there is another BBC documentary "My Big Breasts And Me" dealing with the flip side of the coin.)

I always found the British accent to be alluring, but when discussing this topic of conversation in particular, it's simply irresistible. Perhaps I need help with this infatuation as much as they do. Maybe there's a Web site out there for me to turn to.

g-20

What made leaving the news station easy was the thought of returning to California. What made it even easier was the Group of 20 summit.

When the White House announced that Pittsburgh was selected as the host city for the G-20 summit, not only did the White House press corps laugh but the news station also got its panties in a bunch at the prospect of what was to come. Unlike the swine flu and Jacko's death, the G-20 summit is not a blockbuster national story that the station will have to spin to localize. It's an international blockbuster, and all Pittsburgh's. Its biggest story ever... until, of course, the next biggest story ever comes along.

It was a slow, moving freight train I saw coming in the distance, and I waited, and waited, until the end of August, and then proceeded to step out of the way. It's just now rumbling by.

After I left the news station, I tuned out completely. I didn't pick up a newspaper except to read the sports section. I didn't watch the news, nor visit the station's Web site to see what's been happening. (I didn't write any blog postings since that time, either. Work elsewhere -- on finding a new job, on writing a memoir -- is more responsible for my blog negligence, though.)

Now that I've stepped aside, I've begun slowly to read the newspapers again, and I'm thinking the G-20 summit may just live up to the hype it's receiving. I've read and heard some wild reports of things to expect from the protesters who have converged upon Pittsburgh. Previous meetings of the Group of 20 have provided a venue for protest groups such as The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army to voice their deliciously insane opinions.

David Cheskin/AP

Bands of protesters are apparently congregating in camps in the city's parks like bands of Merry Men, awaiting the conference and their chance to do their warped Robin Hood impersonations for an international audience. I've read numerous businesses -- Starbucks, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's -- are being targeted for various corporate policies or opinions expressed by corporate officers. Based on prior G-20 summits, they'll be throwing balloons filled with piss and shit at the minimum wage workers in these businesses, in an effort to affect change in their corporate practices -- thereby proving to all you anti-Darwinists out there just how similar we, in fact, are to our monkey cousins.

My old boss mentioned that he'd heard city police officers have been instructed, while on patrol, to look out activity in the basements of abandoned homes where anarchists are reportedly hosting bomb-making and shiv-fashioning classes for their acolytes.

I have to remind myself how quickly uninteresting even the most exciting story becomes once it becomes your job and ceases to be a spectator event you can, at any moment, get up and walk away from. The allure of the G-20 consequences -- both positive and negative -- makes me forget this. What a potential boon for the city! How potentially catastrophic if, among the piss-and-shit throwers, there's a bonafide Lex Luthor who intends to unleash some grand-scale wickedness for all the world to see!

In all likelihood, though, the world's leaders will come and go from the city, and the pluses and minuses of their visit will add up to close to zero. There will be no boon to herald on high, nor catastrophe to lament. But the news will try to make it seem like it was one way or the other, regardless.

Fortunately I no longer have to bother -- I can sit back, watch (or not watch) and hope for the best while I busy myself with my relocation West.