bad metaphor

Readers be warned: if you want to continue associating with me and remain blissfully unaware of any personal medical problems I might have, just go ahead and skip this post. I won’t be offended, in fact I’ll be kind of relieved. Nothing of concern to you, unless you haven’t had the chicken pox yet. (And if you haven’t, boy are you missing out! I’d be happy to take care of that for ya).

So a slight itch on my back last Friday turned into this brilliant scarlet rash by the time Saturday rolled around, and come Sunday, it had spread around to the front of my chest. Web fueled paranoia convinced me that my torso would fall off.

Calm as always, Elijah mentioned that it looked more like a case of the shingles. I consulted Web MD and the symptoms seemed to match. I figured there wasn’t much to do until I could get in to see a doctor on Monday, so I just waited and shoved my zombiesque fears into the back of my mind while I worked on my personal statement for law school. Now those of you who may be reading this who are familiar with the law school applications process are probably thinking that this point is pretty late in the game to start applying, and you’re right. Many of my perfectly punctual peers have already received their acceptance and rejection letters for the 2010-2011 cycle. And I started this entire process last June, when I took the LSAT, so it’s not as though I didn’t have plenty of time. My references got their recommendation letters in by the end of November. The only thing I had left to accomplish was a personal statement.

That’s right, a personal statement. Not a research paper, which would require fact checking. The task literally entails writing about myself, which I have done on this stupid blog for six going on seven years already. I mean, how goddamn hard could that possibly be? It’s not like the poor guy who actually has to read the stack of personal statements will call a James Frey on me if I made up an anecdote (ha, who am I kidding, nobody reads these. They probably just shred most of them after glancing at the LSAT scores).

But here’s the catch – apart from blogging, I have not written a single thing since graduating from college in 2006. Every single time I have tried to keep up with my writing, start a new story, even edit and develop ones I’ve already written – this little rowdy Greek chorus in my head pops up, jeering and heckling my every word. And that chorus trotted out in full force, at maximum volume, whenever I worked on my personal statement. “YOU SUCK! Why would any law school take you?” “Oh, now you’re trying to brag about how you’re a good writer? Yeah, that’s a real good tactic.” “You’re applying way too late anyways to get into anywhere good. Maybe you should look into clown school.” “Ha, try bridge-jumping school. You’ll probably fail at that too!” What a valuable, helpful resource to retain in one’s head. (Hey brain scientists: which part do these jerks inhabit? Maybe I could just accidentally fall and hit my head there).

Chorus or not, I am just no good at boasty writing. Most people aren’t, actually, judging from examples of successful personal statements. I guess if you have a 4.0 and a near perfect LSAT, you could turn in an elephant doodled in shit on a bar napkin, and still get a free ride anywhere you like. My stats are good but not quite shit-elephant good so I struggled onwards, the little chorus shouting epithets and filling my head with self-loathing. To make matters worse, I was increasingly distracted by the rash on my back, which stung constantly by this point. I removed my bra, thinking maybe that the strap was chafing my skin. Eventually I just took some ibuprofen and some allergy medicine and went to bed, failing again. Well, I’d have till midnight the next day.

Monday I tried calling the doctor – no answer, so I decided to show up at the doctor’s office, which was full of sick people bearing masks. To a hypochondriac, nothing is more terrifying than being in proximal distance of masked sickies. Tried to set a proper appointment, and the only one that was available was during my work hours, so I just decided to come back after work and try my luck then. I ended up having to wait over two and a half hours to have a doctor take once quick glance at me and confirm that yes indeedy, I did have shingles. (Texted the boyfriend to inform of my lengthy socialist wait for health care). Apparently shingles is a resurgence of the dormant chicken pox virus, which lurks silently in your nerves for years, until a moment of high stress triggers an ambush to knife you while you’re already down. Gee thanks, chicken pox. Asshole. I didn’t get out of the doctor’s office and the drugstore to pick up my prescription until about 9:45 – just a couple of hours to refine a personal statement, which should be plenty of time, right?

My mind shuffled through the tasks I had left to do, a paragraph or two that I’d either need to cut or expand, when – OF COURSE! – blue and red lights danced in my rearview mirror. “Miss, are you aware that you ran that stop sign?” asked the officer. Stop sign. Yes, I remembered that stop sign – a notorious spot for police bored and with nothing to do, the one between the gas stations at the top of 9th and Iowa. One I usually am smart enough to circumvent by electing to drive a few feet further to turn at the lighted intersection, but this time I didn’t. “I did?” “Yep. Gonna have to write you a ticket for that.”

Whether I stopped or not – that is something that is kind of subjective, right? I mean, I’m pretty sure I sssstttttoopppppped. So maybe the officer wanted to see more staccato, less legato. Whatever. $132?! Okay, that is ridiculous. Maybe I could get that fine reduced in court, according to rumored anecdotes from friends of friends who had done the same. By the time I was done being stopped!, I now had an hour and a half to get everything done. Still doable.

There are few things more depressing than still finding yourself at work at 10:00 at night, but since my laptop is still out of commission, I had few other options. Thankfully my helpful sister was online to provide 1) sanity and 2) a fresh perspective, and I managed to cobble together something halfway decent, if not ideal. Even with her help, it took another hour to get it to the point where it was presentable. Countdown one hour. Since everything is submitted online, this part should be a breeze.

WRONG again. I guess the LSAC servers were overloaded with lots of procrastinating dummies like me, trying to upload their personal statements and resumes at the same time. I’d apply to a school, Firefox would implode, I’d have to start it up again and crash it right back into the wall. Eventually I managed to eke in four applications to schools, when I noticed that the timestamp on the LSAC submission was going by Eastern time. Foiled again! I was a day too late and I didn’t even realize it.

I limped back to my car, defeated, my flesh burning and my head in a daze. I still kept it together, barely, right until the moment I got home and my roommate James asked me the innocuous question: “So, how was your night?”

For no justifiable reason at all, I just burst into tears. Poor James helped me open my beer and fled to the safety of his room. He’s a good roommate.

Epilogue to this long-ass post: I have provisionally decided that I probably won’t be going to law school in this next cycle, but at the very least I have everything ready and prepared for the next one. I’m probably not psychological ready for it, for one thing. A number of law school veterans have come out of the woodwork to warn me of the travails ahead (thanks Sara ), and if just the application process itself is enough to bring down some arcane old-timey disease on me, I shudder to think of what medical horrors await me during my first year of law school.

Another reason to wait a year: Eli’s bizarre eye troubles are happily resolved, we’re still young and unfettered. Maybe it’s time to pack our bags and head east.

Is there any activity more soul-crushingly dull than writing a personal statement for school applications? Even for, oh painful irony, a blogger? I’ve been blathering about myself effortlessly for almost six years now, but now there is a goal involved, my typing rate has slowed to approximately one sentence per hour.

Perhaps the problem is that I have taken the dubious tack of writing about how I am a good writer and therefore a good candidate for law school, which is 1) astonishingly dull for me to write and anyone to read, and 2) puts a lot of goddamn pressure on myself. I mean, seriously?! What the fuck was I thinking?! Because the danger of claiming you are a good writer, is that you actually have to write good (there, I’ve already failed). But how else do I spin my worthless creative writing degree into gold?

I would much rather write about something that more closely resembles assignments I’d actually be doing in a school of law. Like, I don’t know, write about a law or some shit. Maybe the Magna Carta. Hell, even an old timey cargo ship named “the Magna Carta” would have more relevance and bearing on what I’d be actually doing, than whether or not some boring old bitch could write about writing. Bah.

“Thirty two bucks to see a guy I hear every week for free?” was my reaction, when I heard that Ira Glass was coming to town. I’m a big fan of This American Life, and I even donate $5 whenever he implores me to each year. But that seemed such a stiff price for radio, unless there were juggling tricks or a rabbit pulled out of a hat, or anything else uniquely communicable through a live viewing. The problem with the radio show is its greatest asset: it’s just so good that I don’t feel like I need to see what’s going on, which is why I haven’t quite gotten into the TV version of TAL (well, that and we don’t get Showtime). I would fork over thirty bucks to go see Radiohead, fill my head with loud guitars and a dazzling light show – but some old public radio guy? I just didn’t know.

“Did you hear Ira Glass is coming to town?” asked Eli’s mother, over lunch one day. I said that yes, we’d heard, and what an exciting opportunity but the ticket prices seemed a little steep, and then I think the food arrived so the focus of conversation turned to that. Later that day, Eli got a call: his parents had bought us the tickets. Because of my offhand, cheapskate lament! I felt both grateful and slightly guilty, emotions that I often experience when interacting with Eli’s well-to-do parents – I definitely didn’t intend to troll for free tickets, though it certainly must have sounded like such to them. (Though I am not Jewish and was never raised strictly or even lazily Catholic, somehow I still managed to grow up with a strong, all encompassing sense of guilt. Who knows where that comes from. It’s probably a ‘child of immigrants’ sort of thing).

Anyway, here’s the show. On center stage there is an unassuming desk with a microphone and some radio equipment – no unicycles, tap shoes, or juggling balls. After the introduction, lights go out. A shadowy figure dimly shuffles towards the desk, and the lights remain off as he talks. “Thirty two bucks to not see Ira Glass?” I think, bemused and a little irked on behalf of the people who paid for my ticket, but the familiar, disembodied voice fills the darkness in the auditorium, and we acquiesce.

The lights flicker back on, eventually – Ira Glass says he wanted to do the whole show in the dark, in the most “radical bit of theater” ever staged in the Midwest, but the Lied Center folks protested on behalf of paying customers (who no doubt would have lodged complaints echoing my initial reaction), so the lights come up and we get to see the wizard behind the curtain. It is anticlimactic, and I actually kind of want the lights to go back off. Not to knock Ira Glass the person, or make him feel self-conscious about his appearance or anything – but his voice is so much bigger than the visual apparition we see on stage, that it is just kind of…weird. He wants the lights off, too, as he finds the sea of our faces a little overwhelming. He pleads ineffectually with the lighting technician to turn the house lights down just a little (“can you turn the lights down to 20? Maybe try 15? Hey, is anything even changing at all?”).

Eventually both he and the audience settle into our respective grooves, accept the visuals, and move on. The theme to tonight’s show – just like with the radio show, his live show has to have a theme – is storytelling, the fundamental building blocks of a story and how to successfully put a story together in a manner compelling enough to draw millions of listeners to check in with your show for one hour every week.

Spoiler alert – if you want to hear Ira Glass tell this yourself, and you hate spoilers, I’d skip this next couple of paragraphs. Right down to the ****, now, go on.

He plays an example of a really amazing story that did not make the air, a story told by his friend Peter, whose father was enraged at the fact that he is being charged for interring his wife’s remains at a crypt. Both Peter’s father and mother served in the military, and as veterans, one of the perks is that when you die, you get a free burial at any military cemetary of your choosing in the country. Even if you are not killed while in service. So the story is that Peter’s father goes to take the remains to the crypt, and the people who work there say, okay, that will be sixteen dollars.

The old veteran protests, “but it is supposed to be free,” and the secretary says that while yes, it’s true that the burial is free, there is a charge for bringing the remains to the crypt (as Ira Glass puts it, “it’s shipping and handling”). And actually sixteen dollars is pretty cheap, as the handling fee for a normal burial is thirty two dollars (or the cost of an Ira Glass ticket). The old man is just infuriated and feels betrayed by the government for whom he fought and risked his life so many years ago. For people who are part of “the Greatest Generation,” their relationship to government is different than the cynical attitude adopted by future generations. American government is supposed to work, and when something is free, it is totally free – no strings attached.

So the old man is so consumed with fury that he actually takes his wife’s remains and dumps them in the parking lot outside the crypt. ! For years and years afterwards, Peter and his siblings would actually tease their father about this (being remarkably sanguine about the parking lot dumping of their mother, Ira Glass notes), and when the father was planning his own burial, he would mention wanting to be buried next to their mother, and the kids would go “oh, you mean in the parking lot?”

This story has all the elements of an amazing story: it’s got tension, it’s got a fantastic plot sequence, and even a greater idea to be pulled out of it, that idea about how the Greatest Generation sees the world today vs. how we see it. The only problem with the story is that it turned out to be 100% not true.

During fact-checking, it turned out that the mother was indeed safely interred next to the father (who passed recently). Either Peter made up this entire story – and it doesn’t sound like it, judging from the bewildered tone of voice he has in the recording Ira plays for us – or the father just came up with this incredible yet totally fictional story, that became so ingrained into the family history that the kids would tease the father about it until his dying day.

So Ira Glass goes on to say that they pulled that story, and had to scramble to find something else at the last minute to put up, and though the story they ended up going with was good, it was nowhere near as incredible as the parking lot ashes story. Even though that story turned out to be false, I still feel that just like the whole JT Leroy scandal, the unraveling of the hoax leads to even stranger and weirder truths. Why would the dad lie about something like this, an incident that paints himself as the type of guy who would desecrate his wife’s ashes over a measly $16 – and keep it up for so long?

****

Ira Glass then starts to take us through the process of piecing a story together, and how he has figured out a formula for stories that succeed on the radio: action-action-action, a moment of withdrawal and reflective commentary by the storyteller, back to action-action-action, etc. He tells us how proud of himself he is that he has figured out this formula, invented it even – and how crushed he is at realizing that not only is it not a new idea, this formula is so ancient that it comprises the basic format of the Bible. But hey, it’s worked this long, right?

Ira Glass’ charm is that he is so approachable, so normal – he talks about how the journalism that TAL does uses an intentionally approachable tone, unlike regular journalism with its emphasis on detachment and sonorous gravitas. He plays a clip for us of a report he did, on air, when he was twenty six (my age!). And it’s bad. He makes fun of himself, as viciously as only one can be towards their younger self, tells us exactly what’s wrong with it. Afterwards he shares a comment from a friend, after she’d heard the clip: “at no point during this is there any indication that you have any talent whatsoever.” He points out that at this point in his career, he wouldn’t have been able to land an internship on his own show. He would eventually become talented, but as a result of a lot of work and effort.

That’s the most important thing I took home from the show. I hate to say that I am inspired by badness (because what kind of person does that make me?), but hearing Ira Glass at twenty six year old gave me a perverse sense of hope that someday – maybe when I am fifty – I can be where he is now. Maybe not the head of the most popular radio show in America, perhaps, but maybe I could be a successful writer. After all, I am at least as bad at writing now as he was at radio. “Create something at least once a week,” he exhorts the audience, and I make a commitment right then to actually do that something, anything, even if it is just to update this silly blog.

He wraps up the show with a telling of one of my favorite stories of all time, the 1001 Nights. I know this story well, but I listen with my breath held in suspense anyways because he is just that good. I see in my mind the crazed king, unhinged with jealousy transformed into deadly misogyny due to one philandering queen. I’m sad and nervous for the wazir, who is bidden to fetch his own daughter to satiate the king’s lust for violence. I totally see Scheherezade flash in my mind for a moment as a nonchalant, gum-chewing Buffy the vampire slayer type when she finds out that she is to be wed to the insane king: “bring it.”

Then Scheherezade, as told through Ira Glass’ voice, does something amazing – she saves her life and the lives of the remaining girls in the kingdom, simply by telling a story so compelling that it holds the king’s interest long enough to put him off killing her until the next night, and then the next. And I actually release my breath, discover that I have been holding it, when the 1001th night is finished and the king says it’s okay, he’s better now. Scheherezade’s stories are more effective than magic. She has subverted her death sentence, taught a man who has lost all empathy how to be human again, all through storytelling.

And that, right there, is at least worth thirty two dollars.

“Gosh, I don’t want to pester her,” I said to my friends as I peered down the dark alleyway behind the Blue Note. “Aren’t we kind of creepy anyway? Who skulks about in the shadows waiting for a girl they don’t know, besides rapists?”

“It is so not creepy,” said James, as he tried the door of a trailer parked behind the building. Thankfully, it was locked and no one official with a baton or a glaring face saw us.

Note that I am not the type of person who ordinarily likes to try and interact with celebrities, major or minor. Even if they seem reasonably approachable. Once I stood about five feet away from Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, who was just idly chatting with a sound guy or whoever, with no one else mobbing him for autographs or anything…and I was still too shy to walk over there and introduce myself. At the time I thought about it and just decided I had literally nothing witty enough in my brain to contribute to a conversation with the King of whip smart rock nerds. Maybe my buddy Indie Dan could, but not me. I was too tongue tied to even shout “you rock!”.

Eventually a band member or two emerged from the doorway, and the flicking of lighters combined with wafting cigarette smoke set me at ease. A few Andrew Bird fans joined us in our groupie vigil, waiting to pounce on the headliners as they popped out of the door. Andrew Bird emerged first, and an elated Krissy managed to beat back some blonde floozies (pfft) to get a photo opportunity with the Bird. Then out came Miss St. Vincent, Annie Clark herself, and my helpful friends pushed me forward. Took a photo with her, babbled something about how she should come to Lawrence, and she said something about how her sister had gone to school there, and she’d been to a frat party there once. I’m not sure if in my drunken, giddy state, I did true justice to the many exciting tourism opportunities of my town in the two minutes I spoke with her. Once we walked away, we played it cool…ish…until we rounded the corner, and then skipped back towards my car like three schoolgirls high on pixy sticks.

Later, I saw that she added ‘Lawrence, KS’ to her spring tour dates. And yes, I may have boasted constantly about it for the rest of that week.

Fast forward to the Bottleneck, last Monday. I was glad I got my tickets over a week ago, as the place was packed and I’d even shown up early, by rock o’ clock standards. This band from Sweden called Wildbirds and Peacedrums opened for St Vincent, and they were only the most incredible band I’d seen in ages. These two gentle looking hippies strolled onto the stage: “we are from Sweden,” said the woman timidly, and the pair promptly proceeded to blast our eardrums with their music. She had a full, brassy soul singer’s voice, and he attacked the drums in a decidedly non-peaceable fashion. At some point during their set, I even questioned whether St Vincent was going to be able to adequately follow this act.

I shouldn’t have doubted: St Vincent brought it that night, with the backing of her incredible band. She had a robotic yet strangely winsome manner while casually shredding her guitar. The flautist – wait, that sounds like a fried Mexican snack food – flutist? Flute tooter – yes, that guy, and the violinist were top notch, intertwining their notes seamlessly to give the impression of a fully loaded orchestra. They walked off stage to go take a smoke break for a song or two, leaving just Annie Clark and her guitar to do a scorching rendition of the Beatles’ “Dig a Pony”:

Not from her performance at the Bottleneck, obviously, but it’ll do. Just crank up the volume and pretend the lights are red.

After the show I contemplated waiting for St Vincent again outside the show, autograph my new ticket, and thanking her for coming to Lawrence (because obviously she came at my behest, and not because she has like any family members here or tour dates to fill, or any other good reason. hee). But judging from the murmurs around us, a lot of other people were planning to do so, and this is the coldest February in Kansas I’ve ever shivered through. So I decided to just go buy some merch and replay happy music memories in my mind, in the warmth and comfort of my home.