It's weird how much a name can mean.
When I was five or six years old, I really wanted my name to be Christina. I thought that was the prettiest, and that having such a name would equate to having a rainbow-colored glittery gown and possibly also being a mermaid. That's just what happens to people named Christina.
Kids with names like Bubba and Jeb have a different path carved out for them than kids who introduce themselves to their montessori school classmates as Zachariah and Llewellyn - who are themselves teased in high school by the Jasons and the Ashlees. Names mean something. It's not fair, and it's not right, but when was the last time you hired a lawyer named Tequila?
The importance of a name was cemented for me in high school. I went to private school in Georgia, which means I was surrounded by rich white people who had lived in the same town for generations. I guess those people eventually run out of inspiration for names, living in the same place for 8 thousand years, because a lot of recycling happens there (and believe me, not a lot of recycling happens in the south) - last names become first names, first names start to look like last names, middle names multiply, and everything is book-ended with numbers and honorifics. I actually went to school with a girl named Forrest (handed down by an extra-kind male relative, certainly), not to mention strapping young men with names like Mulford, Bentley and Johnson (heh).
These names were important to people in the south because they let everyone else know critical information, like who their momma's grand-pappy had been, and what buildings he owned (the name recycling extended to important landmarks, like highways and the local mental health center). Of course this public advertising of blood-lines still didn't stop some people from dating their cousins, but, we were on the Alabama border.
This past weekend, when I was back in the glorious south ruining Steeplechase (see other blog), we happened to tailgate next to a pretty rowdy crew. Four middle-aged women and one gray-haired man of indeterminate age and intelligence (he didn't say much and disappeared halfway through the day) had set up shop and were determined to keep the party going all. day. loooong. The ringleader, who started migrating over to our lot in the early afternoon, spent most of her time crowing such sweet nuggets of knowledge as:
"We're sorry, but we ain't sorry for nothing!"
and
"She didn't steal my third husband - I gave him to her!"
I imagined she had read these on a set of refrigerator magnets or embroidered pillows at some sassy southern gift store, but they suited her. She wasn't really talking to us - just yelling to the crowd at large - but I think she got her message across, especially the part about being "NEWLY DIVORCED" - which seemed more directed at my dad than some of the other comments.
Between the four of them, these wild southern women seemed to have had 27 husbands (though some may have been pass-alongs - do they only count once?), 18 houses and more than a few frozen margaritas. They ended the day by tickling my dad with sunflowers and then hugging it out with him - while my mom quickly ushered us all into the car.
Before my mom could close the car doors (and, believe me, she tried), this ringleader - she of the southern-fried aphorisms and the vodka soaked (but friendly!) embrace - poked her head in to say thanks for the fun time. My mom said, "you're welcome."
[silence. did i mention my mom is the only sober person here?]
Woman: "Are y'all putting up those pictures you took today? On the Facebook? They were soooo fun."
Mom, mentally: "The ones of you rubbing my husband with various flora?"
Mom, out loud, "Oh...I don't really DO Facebook."
[another attempt at driving away, with or without the woman hanging from the door]
Woman: "Oh, yeah, I understand that. Would y'all e-mail them to me?"
Mom: "Um, okay. What's your e-mail?"
Woman: "Well, my name is Darlene and so it's...."
Darlene. God bless you, Darlene, and God bless the south, and God bless my mom for giving me the most boring name on the planet so that mean girls don't write blog posts about me.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Scared
I've always hated "scary" things. Haunted houses, slasher films, ghost stories - all seemed like a horrible way to waste time and lose sleep. For weeks.
At sleepovers, a supposed friend would invariably suggest telling scary stories. "Wouldn't you rather talk about puppies and candy?"
The other girls would laugh, and because, like most 9-year-olds, they were twisted little gremlins, they would choose to discuss gore and shrieks over cuteness and joy. The ghost stories would start, and I would have to find increasingly creative ways to not listen.
"The girl heard another scream coming form beneath the house and - "
"Man! I'm hungry - sorry guys, but does anyone want cookies? No? Oh, you can keep going, don't wait - I'll just be in the kitchen."
I would then play dumb with myself about where the cookies were. (In the garage? No? Weird!) and spend a good 15 minutes architecting a still-life-ready platter of assorted snacks. Bathrooms were also good places to hide out, and I'm sure I got a reputation as the sleepover invitee you need to buy extra toilet paper for.
When I ask other people why on earth I would ever intentionally get scared, they almost always answer, "Because it's fun!" This is a lie. Being unable to go anywhere in the dark for fear of a chainsaw wielding maniac is not fun to me. Suffering crushing paranoia every time I look away from a mirror and look back - with the expectation that a ghouly face will be there - is not fun. Crawling into bed with my parents when I was in HIGH SCHOOL because I actually feared a Signs-like alien invasion? Ask my parents - it was not fun.
I've almost swerved off the road coming back from a showing of Night of the Living Dead because I thought I saw a freaky zombie man standing on the shoulder of the highway. It turned out it was a speed limit sign and that I seriously needed glasses for night driving, but still, not fun.
Being old enough to pay rent and feed a dog does not make me any less terrified of stupid things. Having someone else in my bed every night kind of does, although, considering my boyfriend doesn't wake up when I repeatedly punch him for snoring, I'm not sure how much I trust his reflexes in the case of a zombie attack. So when he suggested last night that we visit "The Field of Terror" - a haunted corn maze and hayride, I was not particularly excited.
"That means we go outside? At night?"
"Yes, and then people scare us!"
"How is this fun again?"
I tried to explain to him that humans are not supposed to be outside at night in the dark. -"That's why early man moved into caves and started building fires," I told him. "To willingly go into the field of terror is just MOCKING EVOLUTION. Why would I do that?"
He laughed, and then he bought me a haunted corn maze token.
I had never been in a haunted corn maze before, but I had serious doubts as to its enjoyability for me. Haunted-ness aside, I don't like mazes. Getting lost, like getting scared, falls squarely in the "not any fun at all" column. If I am going into any kind of labyrinth, David Bowie and some muppets had better be in there, too, otherwise, I see no need for wandering around aimlessly in an enclosed space. That is what they do to lab rats. Do you think lab rats have a fun life?
We entered the corn maze through a giant flaming devil-head. At least, I think that was the effect they were going for. It was definitely giant, and devil-looking. The "flaming" part, though, consisted of two red lights shining through holes in the eyes, and tiki torches placed on either side of the top.
Corn at night is scary, even with no one in it. In fact, it might be even scarier with no one in it. With screaming groups of teenagers everywhere, it kind of loses its edge. I found solace that night in the idea that, if there was a monster attack, the monsters, like lions of the Serengeti, would probably pick off the weak (i.e. the children and the very many TOTALLY HIGH people) first.
Every 20 yards or so, a structure would loom up out of the corn, and we would be forced by creepy clowns or grinning goblins to walk through places like "The Meat Locker" or a bus inhabited by multiple Freddy Kruegers. These people were scary, but probably not in the ways they intended.
Because I hate scary movies, I have never seen any of the Freddy Krueger oeuvre. How can I be scared of someone that I've never seen in action? For all I know, he brings children candy and then frolics off to help the elderly (though I have doubts). The other creepy-crawlies - the clowns and the chainsaw men - I also don't understand. My dad uses a chainsaw. He's weird, but he's not super-terrifying. And clowns are stupid. I worked with a clown once, at a summer camp. He was frequently too sad to come into work - which was eerily ironic, but not scary.
The scary part was that there were enough people in this middle-of-nowhere town in New Jersey who were willing to be Freddy Kruegers and scary clowns in a corn field every night for a month. It's not hard work, but I'm sure it's must be mentally taxing - the constant screaming, the darkness, the smart-alecks who harass you in your own place of business. And the strobe lights, oh, the strobe lights.
I don't know when strobe lights became the official lighting of scariness, but a good 50% of the buildings we were forced through were lit up like a zombie rave. In fact, one of them was a zombie rave - instead of trying to scare us they simply waved us through a flashing hallway where a number of their black robed buddies were jumping up and down to a weird techno beat.
Where do these people come from? And why do they do what they do? I imagine the actors are all a) really into Halloween; b) really into scaring people; or c) super-excited drama geeks. I have seen all three types of person in action, and yes, they are much scarier than clowns or skeletons or corpsey-looking-whatever-they-ares (It looked like the costume department had gotten kind of picked over by the end. Plaid shirts are not the height of fashion, it's true, but they do not particularly give me the willies.). I fear them because they do not understand that fear is bad, that humans should not enjoy seeing blood and hanging out in the dark, unprotected from the elements. Also, I hate fun.
At sleepovers, a supposed friend would invariably suggest telling scary stories. "Wouldn't you rather talk about puppies and candy?"
The other girls would laugh, and because, like most 9-year-olds, they were twisted little gremlins, they would choose to discuss gore and shrieks over cuteness and joy. The ghost stories would start, and I would have to find increasingly creative ways to not listen.
"The girl heard another scream coming form beneath the house and - "
"Man! I'm hungry - sorry guys, but does anyone want cookies? No? Oh, you can keep going, don't wait - I'll just be in the kitchen."
I would then play dumb with myself about where the cookies were. (In the garage? No? Weird!) and spend a good 15 minutes architecting a still-life-ready platter of assorted snacks. Bathrooms were also good places to hide out, and I'm sure I got a reputation as the sleepover invitee you need to buy extra toilet paper for.
When I ask other people why on earth I would ever intentionally get scared, they almost always answer, "Because it's fun!" This is a lie. Being unable to go anywhere in the dark for fear of a chainsaw wielding maniac is not fun to me. Suffering crushing paranoia every time I look away from a mirror and look back - with the expectation that a ghouly face will be there - is not fun. Crawling into bed with my parents when I was in HIGH SCHOOL because I actually feared a Signs-like alien invasion? Ask my parents - it was not fun.
I've almost swerved off the road coming back from a showing of Night of the Living Dead because I thought I saw a freaky zombie man standing on the shoulder of the highway. It turned out it was a speed limit sign and that I seriously needed glasses for night driving, but still, not fun.
Being old enough to pay rent and feed a dog does not make me any less terrified of stupid things. Having someone else in my bed every night kind of does, although, considering my boyfriend doesn't wake up when I repeatedly punch him for snoring, I'm not sure how much I trust his reflexes in the case of a zombie attack. So when he suggested last night that we visit "The Field of Terror" - a haunted corn maze and hayride, I was not particularly excited.
"That means we go outside? At night?"
"Yes, and then people scare us!"
"How is this fun again?"
I tried to explain to him that humans are not supposed to be outside at night in the dark. -"That's why early man moved into caves and started building fires," I told him. "To willingly go into the field of terror is just MOCKING EVOLUTION. Why would I do that?"
He laughed, and then he bought me a haunted corn maze token.
I had never been in a haunted corn maze before, but I had serious doubts as to its enjoyability for me. Haunted-ness aside, I don't like mazes. Getting lost, like getting scared, falls squarely in the "not any fun at all" column. If I am going into any kind of labyrinth, David Bowie and some muppets had better be in there, too, otherwise, I see no need for wandering around aimlessly in an enclosed space. That is what they do to lab rats. Do you think lab rats have a fun life?
We entered the corn maze through a giant flaming devil-head. At least, I think that was the effect they were going for. It was definitely giant, and devil-looking. The "flaming" part, though, consisted of two red lights shining through holes in the eyes, and tiki torches placed on either side of the top.
Corn at night is scary, even with no one in it. In fact, it might be even scarier with no one in it. With screaming groups of teenagers everywhere, it kind of loses its edge. I found solace that night in the idea that, if there was a monster attack, the monsters, like lions of the Serengeti, would probably pick off the weak (i.e. the children and the very many TOTALLY HIGH people) first.
Every 20 yards or so, a structure would loom up out of the corn, and we would be forced by creepy clowns or grinning goblins to walk through places like "The Meat Locker" or a bus inhabited by multiple Freddy Kruegers. These people were scary, but probably not in the ways they intended.
Because I hate scary movies, I have never seen any of the Freddy Krueger oeuvre. How can I be scared of someone that I've never seen in action? For all I know, he brings children candy and then frolics off to help the elderly (though I have doubts). The other creepy-crawlies - the clowns and the chainsaw men - I also don't understand. My dad uses a chainsaw. He's weird, but he's not super-terrifying. And clowns are stupid. I worked with a clown once, at a summer camp. He was frequently too sad to come into work - which was eerily ironic, but not scary.
The scary part was that there were enough people in this middle-of-nowhere town in New Jersey who were willing to be Freddy Kruegers and scary clowns in a corn field every night for a month. It's not hard work, but I'm sure it's must be mentally taxing - the constant screaming, the darkness, the smart-alecks who harass you in your own place of business. And the strobe lights, oh, the strobe lights.
I don't know when strobe lights became the official lighting of scariness, but a good 50% of the buildings we were forced through were lit up like a zombie rave. In fact, one of them was a zombie rave - instead of trying to scare us they simply waved us through a flashing hallway where a number of their black robed buddies were jumping up and down to a weird techno beat.
Where do these people come from? And why do they do what they do? I imagine the actors are all a) really into Halloween; b) really into scaring people; or c) super-excited drama geeks. I have seen all three types of person in action, and yes, they are much scarier than clowns or skeletons or corpsey-looking-whatever-they-ares (It looked like the costume department had gotten kind of picked over by the end. Plaid shirts are not the height of fashion, it's true, but they do not particularly give me the willies.). I fear them because they do not understand that fear is bad, that humans should not enjoy seeing blood and hanging out in the dark, unprotected from the elements. Also, I hate fun.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Matches made in Heaven, vol. 1
Keith Olbermann (seriously? two n's?) and Seth Rogen.
Huh? What?
Yes. Listen to their deep, throaty, crazyperson growls. I am convinced they were created in the Jim Henson Creature Shop(pe) and then, to the great dismay of the puppeteers, managed to escape. The Olbermann character, originally intended for Sesame Street, was eventually replaced by Sam Eagle (see graphic a., below). Rogen was never truly replaced, but was fondly remembered during the creation of Snookums the giant monster creature.
These two need to do voice work on a father-son/buddy cop animated feature, stat. Entertainment demands it.
Figure a.:
RIGHT?!?!?
Huh? What?
Yes. Listen to their deep, throaty, crazyperson growls. I am convinced they were created in the Jim Henson Creature Shop(pe) and then, to the great dismay of the puppeteers, managed to escape. The Olbermann character, originally intended for Sesame Street, was eventually replaced by Sam Eagle (see graphic a., below). Rogen was never truly replaced, but was fondly remembered during the creation of Snookums the giant monster creature.
These two need to do voice work on a father-son/buddy cop animated feature, stat. Entertainment demands it.
Figure a.:
RIGHT?!?!?
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