people say she’s crazy…

You know how I have some problems with the things people do on public transportation? Well, JC and I experienced a whole new world of annoyance today on our way to a delicious brunch at Sunburst. While I was busily trying to figure out if the woman sitting across from us on the uptown 4/5 was actually a man, the woman sitting on JC’s right was playing with her new cell phone, straight out of the box, which I’m pretty sure is a cardinal sin of new cell phone purchasing. Aren’t you supposed to go home and charge it immediately for 24 hours? Does anyone actually do that? No.Anyway, after clicking through some options and generally getting familiar with her new hunk of metal, this lady did something that the rest of us only do in the privacy of our own homes when we are positive that all roommates, significant others, parents and friends are not in the house–she chose a ringtone. Honestly, the little window was open and I was on the other side of JC, so I couldn’t hear every option all that well, but suffice to say, we both got off the train humming “The Queen of the Night” from the Magic Flute. JC was not pleased.That’s all, really, it was just pretty annoying. Also she had really long fingernails. And I’m pretty sure the woman across from us WAS a dude, in fact. JC wasn’t sure–he was too distracted by the Queen of the Night. 

- The toilet paper in our hotel has puppies embossed on it. Also it is just shy of a grown-up sized roll, width-wise. It is actually quite adorable.

- Tonight on our way to the Western Wall, we witnessed the most intense catfight I have ever seen, and I mean catfight as in fight among cats, not two Orthodox women pulling off each other’s wigs over the price of a falafel sandwich. It was the loudest, mangiest thing I have ever seen, two black-and-white cats against an orange tabby, and it was a sight to behold. Ah, the Old City! Land of the Angry Felines! How do you say that in Hebrew?

- When we got to the Western Wall, just after I took a photo of it, I realized my cell phone was ringing. It costs me $2.49/min to talk AND $2.49/min even if you just leave me a rambly voicemail I don’t listen to (so don’t call me), but I can get texts for free. Except I haven’t gotten any texts since I’ve been here, despite the fact that JC had emailed to say he had texted and the fact that Twitter texts me all the damn time. This has caused some disappointment. Anyway, we’re approaching the wall and my phone goes crazy. I take it out, and lo: 48 hours worth of texts, delivered in one foul swoop. It felt good to connect to the outside world.

- Also it’s not weird to be texting at the wall. There are Orthodox men like, smoking and texting all over the place. Not, obviously, AT the wall, but, you know, in the plaza in front of it. Activities are pretty focused AT the wall. The women are neither smoking nor texting, as they need both hands to manage all of the babies.

-  Offensively bad puns of the day: “Theodore Hertzl’s daughter and grandson took their own lives. Or, committed Jewicide.” “Yad Vashem has a Hall of Remembrance? Our hotel has a Hall of Refrigeration.”

I’m in Israel. I have 24 hours of internets at our Jerusalem hotel, so I’m doing about 900 things at once in the few moments we’re in the room.  Rather than try to be too coherent (I’ve been here since 7 PM yesterday, which is noon Eastern time, and I slept? Some? But I’m tired!), I figured I would download some thoughts on my first <24hrs in Israel:

- This will easily be the longest I have gone without bacon in many, many years.

- Um, everyone here is Jewish.* Dad said, “doesn’t it feel strange to feel so like, you’re like everyone else and you’re at HOME?” At which point I reminded him of how Jewish my childhood was (not).  Being here is wonderful, but it isn’t a society I am at all comfortable in just yet.

- Black hats eating sushi. Not something you see a lot of stateside.

- Jews at the hotel pool = hairy. Very hairy.

- Israeli pistachios are huge.

- Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum/Memorial, is a very different place than the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It’s also an absolutely beautiful building. Come see it.

- All of the young people are gorgeous. All of the old people look like people my parents introduce me to at synagogue/shiva/etc. Uncanny.

Anyway, that’s that for now. I need a pre-dinner nap. Also, for those of you who are interested, I have been washing my hair like a big girl for weeks now! Hooray.

*I know, not everyone. Just most. And almost all the ones I’ve seen.

(And no, I have no good reason why it’s been so long, but I do have some bad reasons.* Deal with it.)

Here’s my Pressing Issue:

ONCE upon a time, I had long hair that I didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t know how to use product in my curly hair, I didn’t know not to to brush it, etc. etc. Mom, naturally, based her treatment of my hair on what she knew about her own hair, so I had a blow-dried roll of bangs that frizzed at the slightest sign of moisture (which, given my area of origin, was daily) and a giant puff of hair behind it, which usually wound up being strapped into a low, unfortunate ponytail. I may have blogged about this in the past.

And then! I had it all chopped off, age 16. I learned the ways of product. I shared the ways of product (you are welcome, Davis). I was a product pro. I still am a product pro! With the exception of a few months during my sophomore year of college and the past year, I have spent the last nine years with my hair floating freely between my ears and my shoulders. I could wash it in a second. Some days it looked crazy, some days it didn’t. It is a decidedly unsexy look for me, but Jesus H. Arrojo is it easy.

And THEN! I started letting it grow. This was… sometime over a year ago. And now, totally uninterested parties, it is LAWNG. Real, real LAWNG. Lawnger than it has ever been–down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself, as it were. And because it is still curly (duh), I still don’t brush it and just throw some product in after a shower and let it hang out for like three or four days. The problem with this is the shower part–it takes me FOREVER to shower because I spend all the time that you normal-haired people spend brushing/styling your hair in a three-day period… in the shower, brushing (with my fingers) out 3-4 days worth of knots, loose hairs, and city detritus.

What of it? you ask? Well, I am not, how you say, so good at getting out of bed in the mornings. And I am not, so to speak, really that interested in, standing in the shower WORKING on my hair (because it is work, it is like more than a foot of work in some places), especially when I have just gotten out of bed. So I get mornings like this morning, when I woke up and lint-rolled my dining chairs instead of washing my hair. OR I can shower at night and have great-looking hair for like, an hour before I sleep on it and wake up looking like a homeless person. One day of crazy hair… and then three days in a ponytail.

I am at a breaking point. Should I grow up and learn how to shower on a regular basis and take the time to take care of my hair? Or should I just fuck it and chop it all off? I’m not what you would call a petite person, or what you would call a person with notable facial bone structure.  Accordingly, chopping off The Great Balancer would probably make my face look flat and mushy and the rest of me look… eh, larger. But I demand to not be tortured by my hair and suffer the fate of the women who came before me! And no, I will not grow dreadlocks.

I need help, people. What do you think?

* bad reasons include: television; boyfriend; more television; board games. These are not bad things, just bad reasons for not blogging–plenty of people who watch too much TV, play too many board games and have excellent significant others blog extensively and well.

Two New York Times stories about fabricated memoirs caught my eye today, this one about Misha Defonseca and this one about Margaret Seltzer.

Ms. Defonseca’s book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was published in the 1990s and, according to the Times, translated into 18 languages and adapted into a film in France called “Surviving with Wolves” (her “Memoire” included chronicles her living with and being raised by wolves for a time, not to mention killing a Nazi soldier and, it would seem, walking across Europe). Ms. Seltzer’s book, Love and Consequences, which she published under the name Margaret P. Jones, was very well-received, and she was about to start her Penguin book tour when her sister saw her photo in the Times and called her publisher to say that the story she’d sold as a memoir, “about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods,” according to the Times, was completely untrue. She went to a private school and was raised by her white biological parents.

Both women apologized. Both women are ashamed and, interestingly, somewhat confused. Ms. Defonseca’s statement to the AP reads: “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost.” Ms. Seltzer gave a tearful interview to the Times and explained that she felt she was speaking for an unheard population in her book.

Isn’t it a little strange? Isn’t it a little terrible? Two highly-skilled writers chose to do something incredibly stupid that ruined their careers. When James Frey did this a few years back, I felt pretty strongly that it didn’t matter. His fabrications made for a really good read, so who cares if it’s true or not, because you can’t believe everything you read anyway, right? At the time I at least noted that as someone with no experience with drug addiction or rehabilitation, I probably wasn’t the person to approach about how Frey’s fictionalization of his experience made me feel. I blamed Frey’s lies on his ego, and, well, there isn’t much anybody can do about a man’s ego. But I’ve got a theory, as a woman and a writer, on these two women, Ms. Defanseco and Ms. Seltzer, that has more to do with confidence than ego.

When it comes to writing fiction, it’s cozy to write what you know, and it’s tempting to write what you think you know or what to know. If you think you know a tough subject, it’s tempting to tackle it without the research you need or without taking a step back and putting your ducks in a row. Both women had peripheral experiences with the harsh environs they threw their fictional selves into, which gave them that taste of the unthinkable lives they weren’t going to live. They heard voices and saw scenes that stuck in their heads. They thought they had to get close enough to create something empathic, something that meant being there, meant something more than just a story, meant a memior.

The empathy these authors felt for the characters, narrators or groups they created or claimed to have known made them write their fictions. But fiction that rests on dramatic or painful issues (like gang violence or the Holocaust) has to be more that just empathetic–it has to be brilliant. Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust treatments come to mind, as, in a different way, does Jeffrey Eugenides’ approach to teenage suicide. I think Defonseca and Seltzer were crippled by the weight of the stories they wanted to tell. I think they chose to stand inside their stories as a means to prop up and legitimize them. Sadly, the praise their books have received indicate that they are fine writers who likely could have turned out fiction as fiction and succeeded.

If Ms. Seltzer wanted to speak for girls in gangland, she could have gone deeper than the South Central Starbucks where she wrote her book. She could have told one of their real stories or attributed her fictional compilation to the women she based it on. She could have told their stories without exploiting them or driving her career into the ground. Ms. Defonseca did a disservice to writers and nonwriters who did survive seemingly impossible, inhumane conditions during the Holocaust by writing a fantasy and not labelling it accordingly.

*Next day update! I’m a few days late on this, but Slate has this great article about Ms. Defonseca’s book.

*THE BEST next day update: Penguin’s site has taken it down, but Gawker has these excerpts from an interview with Ms. Seltzer about her experiences in the ‘hood. Wow.

~~~

And now, dear readers, it’s your turn: if you got to write an earth-shattering memoir that wasn’t actually constructed of your memories (or any actual events, for that matter), what would you write? I, for one, used to have this very vivid fantasy where [even] crazy[er] racist people took over my prep school and called an assembly to tell us how all the non-Christian, non-white kids were getting kicked out, and I stood up and proclaimed my FREEDOOOOOOOM! This was, of course, long before I saw Braveheart, so it didn’t sound quite like that, but you get the idea. I think this mostly stemmed from my parents telling me that if Pat Buchanan ever won an election, we would be in deep shit. But that’s a different story. Anyway, what horrible trials would you overcome in your “memoir?”

So, it was announced yesterday that last summer’s concert version of Hair at Joe’s Pub will be expanded to a fully-staged show as part of Joe’s Pub at the Park this coming summer. Now, I was raised on Hair. If I have ever met you in person, you have probably heard me say, “I knew all the lyrics to Hair before I knew what any of them meant.” I have fond memories of being the car with Dad, singing along to some real zingers for a 10-year-old to know and having Dad say something along the lines of, “Now… you know these aren’t words you can repeat anywhere but when listening to this song, right?” On facebook, under “Religious Views” in my profile, you can find the words “american tribal love rock musical.” You can ask TvG for verification, but I basically died the first time I saw the final scene of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

It’s also been announced that Jonathan “The Sprinkler Hunk” Groff, he of sexually ambigious, Tony-nominated Spring Awakening fame, will star as Claude, just as he did at Joe’s Pub.

Given all of the above, you will easily understand the following messages I received when this link appeared in my Google Talk status message.

Allison: this is going to be a frickin’ awesome summer
i hope groff gets naked
that would make my day

Brian: groff is leaving spring awakening?
me: i guess
by july
WHO CARES, HAIR!!!
Brian: hahaha

Nicole: oh oh oh I wanna go too!me: eeeeee!
Nicole: so adorable

Erica: OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
JAW JUST DROPPED
me: I KNOW!
CAN’T WAIT!!
Erica: we need to like
camp out

Kathleen: hahahaha
wow. you might explode
me: I MIGHT EXPLODE

and then I sent an email to my parents with the subject line, “SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” For real.

I love Chicago, I really do, but this is one of those days where I am so pleased to be a Nouveau Yorker. Even though it is rainy and gray here and too cold to be at all pleasant, at least it doesn’t look like this:

(Tribune photo by Charles Cherney)

I miss you, Chicagoans, but I haven’t worn my snow boots yet in NYC (which, granted, is a total fluke), my red down coat stays mainly in the closet, and I rarely accessorize beyond a light scarf.

A few nights ago, while lying awake in bed, I started coming up with a half-serious Quarter-of-a-Century retrospective blog post. Obviously it can’t be wholly serious, because I’m pretty sure you’d all fall asleep somewhere around age three, and I’d be making most of that up, anyway. I even came up with a great title for the post and some things I wanted to say about myself and how I’m feeling here with the so-called Quarter-Life Crisis and all, but alas and unsurprisingly, it has all escaped me. Must be old age. Anyway, here it is, my QLC ode to growing up, to 2007, to the universe.

You know what? Let’s talk about me growing up first.

Ways In Which I Feel Old, Which Is A Bad Thing

• I can’t keep up with Twitter. I’m sorry, I just can’t.
• When I walk down the hall to the ladies’ room at work after sitting for a while at my desk, my right hip pops every time I pass marketing.
• I got something in the mail about SOCIAL SECURITY.
• I have two cats (this, I realize, is old news, but now it’s starting to sound like OLD news, if you know what I mean. My coworker even gave me a cat toy, how crazy must I seem?).
• Everyone on America’s Next Top Model is younger than me. When participants are my age or older, they are called out for looking old in their photos. What?
• My gray hairs are breeding. I swear.
• I am almost to the point where I ask people in quiet public spaces to chew their gum, or their burrito, or their cud or whatever, quietly. If you are a loved one of mine, I have always asked you to do this. But now, I find myself sitting in waiting rooms and silent subway platforms wondering if asking someone to STOP SMACKING makes me a crazy old lady. I think it does.

Ways In Which I Feel I Am Growing Up, Which Is A Good Thing

• I get Christmas cards, often from adult-type people who have spouses and babies. I love being at a point in my life where I know people with babies and people who are with it enough to send Christmas cards.
• I think I stopped taking shit from people. I know this can’t be 100% true, that somewhere, somehow, I will always believe certain bits of bullshit both knowingly and unknowingly. But the amount of BS I am