And nobody wants to be alone forever. All I'm saying is that if your personal ad is called Hi ladies im looking for the ONE ! and contains the sentence "Im not fat, about avg weight and 5'7 i am a pharmacy tech and enjoy my work, here are sum pics and a ROSE just for your BEAUTIFUL", well, all I'm saying is that this is not, perhaps, the best ROSE:
Just personally. When I want a man I don't know to give me a flower via a image pasted in a Craigslist personal ad amongst three strangely similar pictures of said man, it might be nice if that flower wasn't black. And you won't meet anybody more attached to her teenage gothdom. Also, I might not be so down with that (obviously fake) flower being adorned with the type of fake blood that I used to play with as a child, a sort of red gel, like cake icing, which came in a white plastic tube. I mean, I guess that's what you get when you lift clipart from Geocities vampire fanfic pages created in 1996.
Just personally saying, not the best ROSE for my BEAUTIFUL.
When I was a kid I liked to wedge a sharp corner in my mouth - you know, the edge of some cardboard or plastic packaging, or else the top of a Bic pen cap - and jab at the point where my palate met my top teeth until it was irritated and bleeding a little. I liked the taste of the blood and the tingling sensation. I never did any real damage. In fact, it never even occurred to me that this was weird, or self-destructive. The pain was besides the point. It was entertaining. I felt something different.
At night now I sometimes look at things on the internet designed to poke me in a similar way, although I take a lot less pleasure in them than I used to in gumming on a repurposed cracker box. One is the blog of St. Paul-based photographer Melissa Oholendt, which I stumbled upon through a friend's blog. Oholendt photographs engaged couples and weddings. On her professional website, she sets forth a mission statement of sorts:
You know the moment where the groom sees his bride for the first time? His look tells a story of love.
My passion is telling your story.
When I say I'm yours, I very literally mean...I'm yours.
So far, so strangely-emotionally-transgressive-and-bizarrely-sad. But hey! Her photos are nice. But (no insult meant to the Oholendt here; I'd hate to be TP'd by marauding fans of the photog), that's not why I look. When I stare blearily at pictures of "courtney & matt" or "beth & jeremy," I'm actively looking to snark (bad news, according to these findings). I want to think something bad. Not because I'm against Oholendt's stated goal of capturing love, but because I'm exhausted by the big question of how people fall in love.
For a good chunk of my life I thought I understood the machinations of emotional attachment, sexual compatibility, and human companionship quite well. Then, when I became single last year for the first time in nine years, I realized I was completely out of my depth. Since then I've experienced the vagaries of the dating world in a fashion that is neither unique nor, all things considered, particularly egregious. The things that have happened to me are the stuff of some particularly mumbly indie romantic comedies. I'll get over it.
But this year I was with a man who took beautiful pictures of me. I framed one, and it's sitting bubblewrapped in a cabinet right now because between the time I packed it into a box in New York and took it out of one here in Los Angeles he made it dramatically clear that my assumptions about our relationship were incorrect. And now on the internet I can look at the pictures he takes of a different woman, one who looks like she would agree with Oholendt's quip:
Um. Is Jennifer Aniston way prettier than Angelina Jolie? That would be a yes.
So I guess this post is a limp, barely interested Team Jolie fistpump.
But anyway. When I was a senior in high school I went through yet another bout of body image issues. I never had an eating disorder or hurt myself, but I sure felt pretty fucking terrible about the way that I looked. At one point I cut a photograph of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis out of one of my mom's copies of Hello!. I coated it in several overlapping strips of Scotch tape, a sort of ghetto lamination job, and stuck it in my wallet.
I'd pull it out when it was time to order at a restaurant. The photo - not the one above - didn't show Depp or Paradis's bodies, just their heads.
"What are you doing?" my sister asked me once. "It just helps me," I said. "You know, to think about being beautiful."
It would have been more effective if I'd just folded the picture in half, pinched the corner sharp, and opened wide.
Today I'd like to walk you down some favorite commercials from my past. I spent many years doing my homework in front of the television in my kitchen, watching everything on Channel 32, the Chicago Fox affiliate, from 4 to 10 PM. The lineup was great: Full House, Family Matters, Seinfeld, Frasier, and most importantly The Simpsons, at 5:30, 6, and 10 PM. I printed out a six-month schedule of every Simpsons episode Channel 32 would play and crossed them off as I saw the episodes, sometimes cross-referencing one of my many Simpsons guidebooks. Although I watched several hours of Fox every day, I did not know that Fox was a conservative network until I got to high school. It was just my entertainment delivery system.
So, let's set the 1997 scene with a little Harvey Danger:
Oh, you thought that was going to be "Flagpole Sitta," right? Psyche psyche psyche!
Empire Carpet commercials were like soothing background noise, always trilling the number to call for carpet tomorrow as I crouched over my science worksheets.
Al Piemonte Alert!
And what could be better than a little Windsong to give me hints about the delicate universe of male-female relationships?
The Moo and Oink commercial I wish I could post here is not available on YouTube, so I'm posting the vastly more famous "Moo and Oink Dance" clip below. But I never saw this flashy clip; the one that I was used to was a fairly rote, poorly made clip with listless employees showing trays of meat to the camera. Please enjoy this much more interesting commercial in its stead.
This Eagleman commercial has surely gained internet fame of its own by now, but I can't begin to count the number of times I watched it, waiting for Daphne and Niles's long-suffering love affair to come on again:
But all of these gems are dulled in the face of the most lovely and subtle of ads, the crown diamond I watched all winter and all summer, when Fox reran of I Love Lucy and Three's Company and I watched although I didn't understand or enjoy those shows, because I was hopeful Bewitched might eventually come on. This commercial is my DNA. It is my blood. It was given to me by my father and I will give it my children.
There is nothing better. The door falling off; the handful of fanned-out cash; the dead-eyed shots of the junkyard: this, truly, is my heritage. Tow me away, Victory!
Do you know how many photographs of James McAvoy I have on my computer?
So many.
When, as a senior in high school, I developed a terrible crush on Adrien Brody, I tortured myself with the knowledge that it was completely inappropriate because I was so old. Even as I bought an autographed photo of Brody on eBay and cut pictures of him out of magazines, tried to follow his supremely boring lovelife on the internet and traveled alone to a movie theater about forty-five minutes away from my house on the El to watch the middling pre-Brody-Oscar streetlife movie Love The Hard Way, I felt guilty. I was eighteen! I was way too old to, you know, discover that Brody's mother was acclaimed photog Sylvia Plachy, buy a bunch of her hardcover collections on Amazon, and try and cultivate a correspondence with Plachy about how much I enjoyed her work so that we would be best friends when I moved to New York for college and I would become her protegee and she would introduce me to her charming, single son...
You see the way my mind works. But I was eighteen. I was still allowed a little bit of that. Being a senior in high school with a crush on a translucent-nosed Oscar-winner was way more okay than being a first-year master's candidate BitTorrenting British TV like State of Play and Shameless just so I could take screenshots like this one:
It's fitting that I have yet to see The Last King of Scotland, one of McAvoy's more famous efforts, but I have sat through all of the Children of Dune miniseries (what an intersection, my favorite pale Scot playing my favorite post-human Messiah's son!) and the aforementioned "middling James McAvoy vehicle" Starter For 10. Oh man, I should definitely see Rory O'Shea Was Here, the fun-quadripalegic movie whose more restrained UK title was Inside I'm Dancing. That looks right up my alley.
Also, I saw Wanted in a movie theatre in the Czech Republic. Twice.
Why the outpouring of sudden McAvoy love, aside from my inescapable preoccupation with this scene from Atonement?
I recently received the happy news that I will be moving to Los Angeles, a city I have long admired from afar, this fall to begin a doctoral program. With that in mind, I thought I'd set out on a free-associative sprawl through a culture I'll be somewhat nearer to starting this September: Japan!
What was my first impression of Japanese culture? My parents started feeding me sushi when I was fairly young...
(Note: Not a picture of me)
Around the time I was ten, my mom became aware of Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro. She sent away for a VHS copy, which my sister and I watched with glee.
For years we searched high and low for Totoro merchandise, not easy to find in mid-1990s suburban Chicago. When I visited the Sawtelle neighborhood of LA with my boyfriend many years later, I was blissed out of my mind to find a stuffed Catbus at the Giant Robot store.
On a childhood vacation to Disney World, I discovered Yukito Kushiro's Battle Angel Alita, a manga about a lonely cyborg girl with a mysterious past. I never fell fully into real manga or anime fandom, although I enjoyed plenty of both media.
I also remember being taken to a Japanese restaurant in Chicago called Suntory at some point in my childhood. It served what I would later come to recognize as shabu-shabu cuisine. The waitresses wore full kimono. I very clearly recall that the restaurant displayed photographs of its locations all over the world - including outposts in Sydney and Johannesburg - and yet I strangely cannot find any evidence of its existence on the internet.
At the beginning of adolescence, I became, like most teenage girls who like Hot Topic, enthralled by FRUITS, the bombastic collection of photographs of Tokyo street fashion available in book and postcard form:
During high school I discovered the work of Haruki Murakami, America's favorite Japanese surrealist. Norwegian Wood was my first Murakami book.
I tried, and failed, to custom-order a white kimono to wear to my high school graduation. In college I read Edward Said's Orientalism, which made me feel a little bad about my love of Japanese weirdness. But I also experienced the work of great Japanese filmmakers in depth. I took a course at Facets Cinematheque on the work of genius / idiot savant provacateur Takashi Miike, director perhaps most famously of Audition:
I've also long nurtured a frustrated desire to learn more about the Ainu, Japan's aboriginal people. Two years ago I was lucky to see Tomu Uchida's film about Ainu culture, The Outsiders at BAM. I've still got my fingers crossed for a Criterion release.
I decided to make this post because my roommate and I were discussing ZZ Packer's short story "Geese," a masterful treatment of the outsider experience of Japanese culture. The juxtaposition of the African-American and Japanese cultural experiences reminded me of my new favorite thing about Japan: Jero!
Jero is the stage name of Jerome Charles White, a Pittsburg native who is now a star in Japan. Jero's maternal grandmother is Japanese, and he grew up listening to enka music with her. Enka is a tradition of very heavily sentimental love songs which has recently gone out of style in Japan. For an English equivalent, think of the work of Perry Como, the "Velvet Fog." (With Japanese subtitles for thematic consistency!)
I'll leave you with this CNN interview with Jero. Sayonara!
It's almost spring, so that means it must be time for another installment of Personal Ad Hell. Let's walk hand-in-hand-in-hand down to the underexplored mm4w alley of Casual Encounters, shall we?
Me and a close friend just decided to drive to New York today. We have never been and would like to have some company to possibly show us around. We are currently on our way from Pittsburgh and may need a place to hang or crash. I am 23, white and the taller of the two. He is 22, white and wears glasses. We are both gentelmen and we know how to treat a lady. If interested we can send a pic or two. I can give my cell # to those who reply. Hope to hear from you soon ;)
PS we will arrive roughly around 7am and we will be staying till sunday
Wait. Um. Isn't this section for two dudes who want to screw the same woman? These guys also want a chick to let them stay at her house and perform tour-guide duties for free. No mention is made of sex, and I'd love to meet the woman - probably deeply religious - who would happily play NYC ambassador for these clowns and then be scandalized when they try to fingercuff her in her foyer. I love the useless physical descriptions: one is taller than the other one. You know, the one who wears glasses. And they're already in the car! Get ready, ladies of New York City!
I can't say what, exactly, upsets me so about this ad. Both of the headshots look like they were taken by the dudes' moms, for starters. The lower penis looks, in shape, disturbingly like human excrement.
Like all transcendent CL ads, this post quickly departs the subject of sex and becomes all about how WOMEN need to LEARN A THING OR TWO:
As you know many men are full of hot air and when a female takes them up, they cannot perform as advertised. We can and would love to meet up. We are not pornstars and do not pack attachments like they do, because they are freaks of nature, but females clearly have told us throughout our lives that we know how to use our nice sized and thick equipment.
Note: all women should read "nice-sized" as "uses fingercots as condoms." But at least they're not FREAKS OF NATURE!
While your sex life right now may be wonderful, non existent at the moment or you are just downright bored at the moment, when sex is good, there is nothing like it. However finding it, is easier said than done and going to a bar and just hooking up in an alcohol induced state is not your style. That is why you are trolling the posts here on Craigslist hoping that you can find what you want by responding to a few posts.
Uh, yeah. You guys know that everything written in second person is actually just clumsily styled first person narrative, right?
We play safe, are both easy going and very respectful. Condoms are always worn for penetration and we play with your pleasure in mind. Our favorite position is you in doggie style being very well fucked while also sucking the other guy. Saying that, we are fine with all positions, combinations and inputs. We also love eating pussy and will go down on you for as long as you want us to or you can ride our faces or 69. For the lady whom truly wants it all, we can go backdoor or DP, but you have to let us know if you are comfortable with it, since we want this to be totally enjoyable for you. This may not be for you and we'll totally ignore your backdoor if you tell us that. Blindfolds, spankings, light bondage, toys, a second female or more as long as we are on the same page is fine with us. We are so open, that if you have a strap on and want to fuck one or both of us, that is fine too. Or stick a dildo up our asses too. We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good and we are not uptight sexually. We are not neanderthals and your input is very important, because this way we know up front what you enjoy. We can be very dominant and if you want us to treat you like a total slut, totally controlling that is fine too.
Look. I'm of course happy that these guys practice safe sex and are so willing to negotiate the terms of their internet-arranged threeway. But I am pretty sick of the rhetorical device of suggesting exactly what one wants to happen as if it's another person's desire. This whole thing would be so much shorter if it wasn't reliant on such a whiny, accusative, passive-aggressive prose style. "We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good." Uh, okay, least-fun, most-defensive threeway participants ever. Is the gay panic you are guaranteed to have if your cocks touch at some point in the evening "fine"?
Oh, cute. Of course you assholes live in Williamsburg. This thing reads like a hipster douchebag guidebook (maybe one that the author of the first ad discussed in this post could use on his NYC trip):
Hi there,
How are you doing today? If you're feeling up for it (and you aren't/weren't a dude), there are three wonderful dudes out there who want to have you over for a little wine, a little supper and some sex.
we're looking for a special lady who wants to enjoy three dudes at the same time, in multiple positions and areas of your body. we have lube, ribbed condoms, and a Jack Johnson CD so we're pretty much all set to go.
Must be OK with Eiffel towers, using safe words, crying, the word "booyah", bukkake, chest hair, and have a burning desire to get all sexxxed up by three dudes at the same time. This is an experience that will blow your mind.
Your pic gets one of me naked holding a teddy bear next my junk.
Oh, yeah, an evening with these clowns is exactly what the doctor ordered. Allow me to put on my white belt and triangular-fold printed scarf, hop on the L, and get ready for a room full of men-children who haven't been this scared since they watched It on cable three weeks ago. They didn't expect that anyone would take their stupid NYU joke seriously, you see, but I went to the trouble of looking up what an Eiffel tower is, and I want something for my trouble. To the soundtrack of "Better Together".
