Um, I mean, whatever.

Via passiveaggressivenotes.com

Well, my neighborhood beautification project was a bust. I distributed a survey that only two people responded to, and now the deadline for the grant I was writing has passed. That is fine because some of these people do not deserve a beautiful neighborhood. But I deserve a beautiful neighborhood and now I am feeling inadequate. Will no one cheer me up?

Luckily, I have my exciting life to fall back on. Example: Insomnia + Vivid Dreams = An Extravaganza of Conversation Starters. While I may not have fallen asleep until dawn this morning, I did squeeze out a dream featuring someone who belonged to the "K.K.Klutter Grandmothers," a swap meet for women of a certain age who hold certain cultural beliefs. One would think that you can’t make stuff like that up, except a certain part of me seems to have without my permission.

I have been feeling particularly trans-rational lately, although I could not put my finger on that exact terminology before the cover story at Salon. Then I put my finger all over it, and it felt good. Speaking of feeling good, I have been using a new moisturizer, which leaves my face a gooey mess but soft and smooth and radiant underneath.

At the therapist today, we discussed how my medication has left all of my less productive compulsions and phobias intact but thankfully robbed me of all of those pesky impulses to go to the gym or floss my teeth or watch what I eat. This stuff is like America in a bottle. No solutions were reached, but I did spill scalding tea all over my hands, which I interpreted as a sign from the trans-rational universe not to get too cocky over my radiant new skin. I have so much to learn.

First, an update on yesterday's socks and underpants mystery. Only able to find those I was wearing, I decided to do the rest of my laundry to at least clear the floor some. And guess what came out of the dryer when I was done: all of my socks and underpants! I don't know how they got in there because they certainly were not there when I started. All I can imagine is that they were trapped in some other dimension, the dimension between lost and found, clean and dirty, fact and fiction.

Second, I wrote an entire entry a few days ago that I posted, I swear I posted, and yet it wasn't there when I just looked, published or unpublished. I'm reposting it below. Has anyone seen this before? I think my brain may have run away with the spoon.

THE LOST ENTRY:

Content Challenge is over, and I won. OK, nobody “won,” because it was one of those things you were supposed to do just to feel good about yourself and also avoid eternal scorn. However, like Cleopatra after Actium, I shall sail into Alexandria wearing the colors of victory before hunkering down in the palace against the advancing legions of Octavian.

I mean, um. Well, who knows.

On Bearthday, Rob and I and two other friends went to see a play on Broadway. It was called Top Girls, and I had never heard of it, but it was quite breathtaking. Marisa Tomei, the Meryl Streep of our generation, was one of the stars, along with Martha Plimpton and some other peple. This is a play about how there is nothing new under the sun and how if anyone takes away your baby you should just suck it up. The first act was very static but static in a way that is like your laundry crackling with electricity just before you touch it: little movement but much going on just under the surface. Things sort of go a little haywire after that, as the play moves into the literal from the figurative, but not haywire in a bad way, just in that there’s a lot to keep track of, including how the themes of the first act overlay the action of the next two. Breathtaking.

In other news, while I was waiting for the crosstown bus on 86th Street, a guy dressed all in black with longish red hair began staring at me in an exaggerated fashion. His eyes first hovered at my face then darted down toward my waistline with something like alarm, then back up. He circled me several times making that whatever direction I happened to be looking in, he was in my line of sight. At first I cursed the stars because I was certain I had either been singled out by a vindictive mime or had done something hideously embarrassing such as forget to put on pants, but then I realized that I was dealing with autistic person trying to convey that he did not care for people to keep their hands in their pockets. When I removed them he was so visibly relieved that I almost felt sorry for him when I jammed them back in as far as they would go just as the bus pulled up. I gave him the stink eye as I got on the bus to disabuse him of any idea that he was going to sit next to me, but I think he was so stricken by my volley in our sartorial warfare that he moved as far away from me as he could.

And that, folks, is how you handle people.

This just in: I cannot find any of my socks or underpants, dirty or clean. Well, they’d mostly be dirty because I remember using all of the clean ones. I’m not one of those people who squirrels away his dirty socks and underpants in filing cabinets or under the eaves or what have you. I mean, I take them off and drop them on the floor just like everyone else. Then, eventually, I wash them and drop them on the floor. Except today when I went to wash them, they were all gone. This might be more explicable if I had been in a locker room lately, but I’ve been home alone: husbandless, Goblinless, and now underpantsless.

Today is the last day of Content Challenge. Sadly, I'm too tired to type up my story, so it will come tomorrow. You are really very lucky people.

Happy Earth Day! And Happy Birthday to Rob!

Goblin and I celebrated by taking a leisurely stroll down E. 88th Street to Carl Schurz park. Squirrels were chased, although even Goblin knew she had no hope of approaching them wearing her full-body leg brace.

On the way home, we were approached by two old women wearing official PETA badges. They eyed the Borg harness suspiciously. “Get me out of this thing!” Goblin pleaded. "It's not ethical!" I explained that my dog had had a leg operation and needed to be in that contraption until it fullly healed. While I was talking to one of them, Goblin bit the other one.

“Why did she bite me!?!” the woman said in the incredulous tones of DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM!

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering if we were going to get reported to AETP. “Maybe she doesn’t like you.”

“Hmph. How old is she? She looks old.”

“She’ll be eight this year.”

“Hmph. That’s not old,” she pronounced, and both of the PETA ladies walked away.

New York makes Content Challenge easy.

Wow, only three more days of Content Challenge. Where did the time go? Where did the Challengers go? These are philosophical questions best left to the ages.

Having just survived a whirlwind of a day, I am now about to leave for New York. Rob’s birthday is tomorrow, and he wants to celebrate by going to see some sort of show or another. He’s mentioned the name three times but it does not stick in my mind. There are so many shows in the world. I’m going to try to pack lightly; my strategy is to arrive on the train looking like a homeless person and then visit the Banana Republic clearance rack in the store by our apartment to find something nice enough to wear to a night on the town. They always have the best things there; it much triumphs over the Banana Republic clearance rack near my Baltimore house, which is geared toward a colorblind Lollipop Guild.

I am looking forward to the train trip, because that is time of pure relaxation and reading. Right now, I’m working my way though an autobiography by Agatha Christie, which is quite fascinating even though most of it boils down to “back in my day, things were different, and the world now sucks!” This was written, like, fifty years ago, so one can imagine how much more the world sucks today. Her bones must be rolling over in their grave. It must be odd to be old and see that the world you were raised in is now completely extinct. That is something that will not ever happen to me thanks to Photoshop and my ongoing misinterpretation of my birth certificate, but now the rest of you know what you have to look forward to.

I think I might not leave the house today… for once not because of being too tired (although I sorta am) or because I have too much work to do (I sorta do), but just because it’s an occasional treat not to have to get cleaned up and face the world. Looking and probably smelling like a baboon, I have already faced Rob and Goblin, so now I can just go back to futzing with my website and that will be that.

The big news of the week is that Goblin went back to the orthopedic vet, who wants to postpone her upcoming surgery to see if her leg heals on its own, as it already seems to be doing. While this sounds appealing, I’m skeptical: instead of a ligament or a steel plate, it will only be scar tissue holding her knee together, and that seems to be leaving it open to all sorts of problems down the road. But right now, she’s happy and (most of the time) using all of her legs, and the last thing I want to do is tell her that she will have to convalesce all summer when there are trees to be patrolled and flowers to be watered.

In other news, Rob wrote an alternative rock song for a potential new show. It’s really good. As this came out of someone who hates listening to my iPod playlists when we’re driving, you could knock me over with a feather. Hearing Mr. Showtunes discuss Green Day and Foo Fighters while he and his collaborator plan their approach has been amusing. I hope everything works out because I can’t wait to hear his tribute to Marilyn Manson.

I wish I had something profound to say, but I just woke up from a mind-scrambling nap. That it is nine-twenty p.m. bodes ill for my somnia this night. I think what would put me right out is listening to myself go on and on about my continuing lack of sleep, but unfortunately no one has secretly recorded me doing so, unlike Senator Asshole Who Wants to Rule the World was recently secretly recorded saying she hates the activist base of her own political party. This would be the same activist base that created an organization—MoveOn—in the 1990s with the goal of getting Congress to move on to more important matters than her husband’s sex scandal, so one would think that she sort of owes it to them to not blatantly lie about their record and current actions.

Oh yay, there we go, I can talk about politics. Not profound or even original, but it fills the column inches. Content Challenge expects nothing less.

Here’s what’s funny: although I often found myself in the odd position of defending him and justifying his actions even to myself, I didn’t like Bill Clinton. Indeed, while he always seemed like a nice guy, I rather loathed him on a political level (although compared to the horror that is GWB, he might as well be Gandhi). But I always liked Hillary in sort of a tough sister sort of way. Even when she was transformed by ambition into a born-again center-right warhawk, and I claimed to start hating her, I could appreciate her positioning and triangulation as the only way a woman, and particularly this woman, could hope to be taken seriously as presidential material. So I still sorta liked the Inner Hillary, and even though I supported Dodd and Edwards in the early primaries, I thought she would probably make a good president and the world would not end if she were the nominee. In any case, I liked Obama even less, and when Dodd and Edwards both dropped out, I was genuinely conflicted in my ideological priorities.

And then Clinton ran a campaign that, over a few weeks’ time, managed the astonishing feat of transforming me into an Obama lover—at least, he is now the candidate I reflexively defend and justify, and Clinton is the candidate who makes me want to vomit up the spirulina protein smoothie I make for breakfast every day.

I am not one of those people who think that Clinton should drop out of the race before the primaries are over. While it’s clear she can’t win the number of votes she requires popularly, I am a democrat at heart and will even support the candidacy of Ralph Nader against popular attack. If someone thinks they can and should be president, he or she should be free to compete in the race to the extent that it is possible given its inherent structure. If the primaries are going to go on this long (a ridiculously stupid system, but it’s the system we have—at least until the Revolution), then a candidate has the right to compete in all of them.

I do think that if a member of a political party is going to stay in the race to the bitter end, however, he or she owes it to other members of his or her political party not to divide and/or destroy said party while thrashing through his or her death spiral. Some examples of this might be not to use the other party’s talking points against your loyal opponent, not to generate inaccurate or irrelevant new talking points that can be used by the other party against your loyal opponent, not to have your donors act like a crime bosses and threaten high-ranking members of your own party when they have the gall to voice their opinions, not to imply that your loyal opponent’s supporters (the very ones you will desperately need should a miracle happen and you become the nominee) are unpatriotic monsters, and other loathsome acts ripped from recent headlines. Lying is the expected default for presidential candidates, so while one might understandably be annoyed by exaggerated stories of coming under sniper fire, for example, at least that’s a misrepresentation of your own personal history. Misrepresenting someone else’s, in the wide-eyed, disingenuous tones of a professional concern troll, is more problematic. It’s like padding your own resume vs. sneaking into the H.R. office in the dead of night and smearing shit over those of your opponents until they are illegible.

Generating and prolonging false controversy about non-issues is also not the stuff of which finest hours are made. Then again, High-Road Hillary, who saw the light of day a few times earlier in the campaign, seems to have been a constructed personality anyway, discarded when inconvenient.

The conventional wisdom former about President Clinton is that he was the best Republican president we’ve ever had. If present trends advance only slightly, it seems as if Senator Clinton is going to be the worst Republican presidential candidate ever. Will I support her if she manages to assassinate Senator Obama? Certainly, because McCrypt-Keeper is an infinitely worse prospect, and I DO think that much of Hillary’s current nauseating behavior is based upon political calculation, and the old tough sister Hillary I used to admire is in there somewhere. But when she sweeps the corrupt, corporatist, Mafioso Democrats back into positions of power just because they passed some personal loyalty test, how is that any better than what George Bush did when he resurrected the criminals of Republican administrations past just because they pretended to like him? From my perspective, that only means we’ll be sold out by slightly more competent people.

I’m still not a big fan of BHO, and I don’t understand the mindless devotion he seems to generate in the wider electorate. While “empty suit” is an overused and inaccurate criticism, for the longest time, it really did seem as if there wasn’t a lot of “there” there. Maybe it’s only in contrast to his pterodactyl of an opponent that I am starting to see his appeal. I do know that while Hillary Clinton may not have lost this election yet, she has lost my respect forever.

As a reformed Naderite and a harsh critic of his disastrous campaign in 2000, there were years in which I never thought I’d say it, but where is Al Gore when you need him?

Jwer takes a Mexican holiday. Or possibly an alien.

Regarding my post of a few days ago, where I posted my Photoshopped masterpieces, I have come under some criticism in comments that all I did was add hair to three guys and proclaim them hunks. This is not quite the truth (I added hair to two of them, but that was only the least subtle of my efforts in those cases). Because I was racing the chupacabra in terms of getting my story out, there is much I didn’t say about the origin of my experiment.

When I began studying how artists created “cover girls” with features largely unheard of in our species, I was struck by a number of thoughts. The first was that the “female ideal,” according to the examples I studied, required a certain age, a certain texture to the skin, a certain ratio of eyes and neck to head size and shape. Jaws are often softened, lips widened, noses whittled down, etc. There are ways of accomplishing all of these things in Photoshop, some of which is documented in online tutorials and some of which I figured out on my own.

This also led me to wonder whether there was a “male ideal” that is equally propagated by media artists, or whether men were largely left alone except for the concealing of a few of less pleasant blemishes. In the photos I posted below, I actually applied the “female ideal” tutorials to George Bush. You will notice a smoothness of the skin, a reduction of the jaw, a reduction of the ears, an increase in the volume of hair, darkening of the hair, whiter teeth, brighter eyes, etc. The only things I didn’t do (which I should have except I was getting too creeped out by looking at this photo for as long as I did) were make the eyes larger and the neck longer.

Interestingly, I didn’t find a single tutorial for how to modify a male head and face to make it more visually acceptable in a stereotypical male way. Actually, the only thing I had to go by was something I read twenty years ago about drawing the male form for comic book artists. But I was more interested in the subtle differences of reality rather than the heroic form, so I began experimenting.

Guy #1 saw a decrease in wrinkles overall (see under eyes and cheeks and around neck), a lowering of the hairline, brighter blue eyes, and slightly whiter teeth. Guy #2 got the same treatment with the hair darkened in his beard (this last was not quite as realistic as I would have liked, but it definitely doesn’t call attention to the white). Also look at his shoulders, where the folds of skin have been removed. I went a slightly different direction with Guy #3, who was already “young enough.” Instead, look for a complete reworking of his skin, a hardening and widening of his jaw, and a widening of his mouth. And I also decided he needed green eyes. Nothing was done to his hair.

I can’t say what the point of this was; it certainly was not “the more hair the better.” I suppose I’m becoming more interested in the signs of aging since (I know you will gasp with horror) I have noticed one or two on myself. I suppose I wish they were as easy to address in real life as they are in Photoshop, but that goes back to that nasty question of who gets to decide what the “ideal” is. In the gay community, even at my ripe old age of 23, I am definitely considered well over the hill, and my endomorphic body type is not considered as desirable as certain other forms. I suppose I find what separates regular from idealized faces interesting because it’s been something I had been conditioned to worry about by the culture I chose to inhabit. Usually, it’s stuff that is so minor that the individual traits go unnoticed and only the overall effect is perceived. Guys #1 and #2 each look ten years younger just through the concealing of some minor features and the minor enhancement of others. Guy #3 goes from geek to chic merely by the very minor adjustment of his facial contours. The interesting thing is, despite what I did to them and the reasons I did it, I find the first two guys more naturally attractive in their “before” photos. I think I’m a good enough artist that one doesn’t necessarily look at the “afters” and think that there’s something not quite right; I didn’t make them into space aliens with long necks and big eyes. I just think I robbed them of what makes them interesting by reducing their deviation from what someone, somewhere has decided was the ideal.

All of this is to say that it’s not just about the hair. It’s about subtle changes that affect larger perceptions and the insidious mindset that forces one to interpret those perceptions in particular ways. This is something we have barely begun to internalize about how we're manipulated to think visually about women, so I won't hold my breath for an in-depth analysis of the male form anytime soon, but it's a problem I expect to get worse before it gets better.

Someone who shall remain nameless just drunk-dialed me and told me about this lovely new Discovery Channel commercial. I must say, it is rather awesome.

I barely knew it was April 15 today since I actually did my taxes in advance this year. I barely knew it was Tuesday since I was so busy that my surroundings sort of faded into the woodwork. Or was the woodwork already my surroundings, who can say? I designed an ad that came out very nicely and then I locked myself out of the house and then I went to an event sponsored by a radio station I used to advertise on. It was a comedic event regarding American politics, and I took my friend Sen, who is from Mumbai. I was half worried that he wouldn’t get the jokes, but he had a better time than I did. Half of my fun was seeing his reactions and, while everyone else was laughing, hearing “Oh, that was so intelligent!” in an Indian accent.

Tomorrow is another action-packed extravaganza.

Me tired. Trained new employee today. Slept not well last night. Want nap, want nap bad, but holding out. Goblin good. Life good. Sleeeeeeeeep.