An amalgam of largely unrelated things

Snippets from the Life of Mouse, in the form of, you guessed it, random bullets of crap.

• On Wednesday, reader, your Mouse took the Graduate Record Examination. She will refrain from the rousing chorus of whatthefucks and oh-em-gee-this-is-so-effing-uselesses that has been bursting to get out of her for days. She will, however, share the unease that came to meet her as she stared at the computer screen at the end of the Examination. After the computer tauntingly asked her – twice – whether she was really sure she wanted to accept her scores, she was confronted with two three-digit figures that entirely flummoxed her. These figures were delightfully high. She had to suppress a gleeful giggle. She sighed with relief. Then a queasiness set in. These figures are meaningless, she thought to herself. They are empty. This test is worthless and measures precisely nothing. So why, she wondered, was she so proud of herself for having caused those delightfully high figures to appear on the screen? Why has she allowed herself to be trained to believe that ultimately arbitrary test results actually say something about her? Is she really this shallow? More importantly, is the academy really this shallow? Please, she silently prayed, let neither of these be so. And still…. is she… is she, maybe, a little bit, allowed to be pleased with herself?

• If nothing else, should the humanities fail her, at least her math score comforts her with the knowledge that she might have an alternative career in astroengineering waiting for her.

• Because, after all, something you may not know about your mouse is that she once harbored ambitions in physics. Until, that is, she ran across a series of genuine trolls in the shape of mathematics and physics teachers and professors. When she got to the Petri Dish, this mouse was prepared to give it one good go, and registered for courses in advanced calculus, chaos theory, and astronomy. She found, of course, a much comfier, if frequently awkward and sometimes antagonistic, home in her two literature departments, and was delighted to be fostered by a third, eccentric aunt sort of department. But from time to time she misses shapes and numbers, vectors and dimensional multiplicity.

• Which is why she is so glad to have found an unexpected source of mirth in the physicist partner of her friend Professor Lyrical. At every available opportunity, Mr. Lyrical good-naturedly teaches her something about the life of Johannes Kepler, or the origin of quantum physics, or the conception of the atomic bomb. When he sees a merry-go-round, he wants to talk about how to build one from scratch. He is happy that she knows things about the seventeenth century, because he likes to talk with due reverence about Isaac Newton. He has a theory that “life,” that thing humanists talk about with undue reverence and to which we accord such infinite abstract complexity, comes down to a physical surfeit of energy. This theory makes your mouse intensely happy.

• In this bullet, the relative coherence of the list falls apart and I stop talking about myself as a third-person anthropomorphic rodent, so that in the next bullet I can talk about how

• Last night, my dear friend the Conscientious Orientalist and a queer kid we knew in high school and I went to our suburban New England county’s only gay bar. As it turns out, the region has its redeeming qualities. I now know, for example, that there is at least one space in which a genuinely racially mixed group of people can gather in this intensely segregated county. A critical mass of queer Latinos and Latinas eliminate the threat of house music and replace it with the joys of salsa. White men dance with men of East Asian origin. Black butch dykes exchange surreptitious smiles with white, J. Crew-clad, femme faghags. All riddled with tension, to be sure, and the uneasy sense that the wife of the middle-aged white dude standing over there with his hand on a seventeen-year-old’s ass might employ the sister of the Latina standing at the bar as a housekeeper. Nevertheless, watching this peculiar safety valve of a social scenario at work, I found myself comforted. And comfortable enough, for the first time since my return from France, to cut loose and dance, and dance, and dance. When the DJ announced to the room at large that he would like to talk to the “white girl in the glasses in the middle of the dance floor,” I realized it was time to go. The CO and I left our former classmate, the self-identified Straightest Gay Man On The Planet, in the company of a dweeb in a blue button down shirt and Dockers and revelled all the way home in our discovery that, even in Stepford, two snarky, overeducated expat queers can have one hell of a fun night out.

It’s all right, ’cause it’s midnight and I got two more bottles of wine

This past Saturday at the bookstore, I reached or perhaps passed my New Eden threshold. I was also doing inventory crap in the children’s section, which exists in some kind of eighty-dimensional timespace vortex and whither only the most stalwart of booksellers dare venture. This may have exacerbated the twitching, bare-nerve state I enter every time I pass that threshold.

Two of my coworkers, Birmingham and Lefty Sophisticate, stood chatting (talking aesthetics of invitations, I believe) behind me when the moment came to clutch the register’s monitor with both hands and lay my forehead against the screen while emitting an expansive groan of surrender. “Oh honey,” Birmingham said “why don’t you give all this a rest and go get yourself an ice cream cone?”

I didn’t get an ice cream cone, but I did have a walk and a cigarette, and when I got back I determinedly figured out how to open the drawer of the CD player (right hook to the control panel) and extracted another noxious contributor to my proto-postal disposition: the Putumayo World Music mix, “Weekend in Ibiza.” I replaced it with Joni Mitchell, and my day got worlds better.

I sat in the vortex of death children’s section singing “A Case of You,” happy that my sad, dusty alto voice was at its best at that moment, and articulating for me the process of depressurizing. When your basic giant dickwad walked in soon after, I was calm enough to defuse his situation and merely suggest to Birmingham that we keep a loaded automatic under the register.

Still, by the time I made it into the train to New York this morning, I felt like I was wearing my skin inside out. The only way I can describe this feeling is as a kind of aphasia. I said to Lyrical the other day that I feel isolated in New Eden because virtually no one here speaks my language, both literally and figuratively. I thought of it in terms of foreignness, of an irreducible difference between myself and my surroundings, of the impossibility of translation. But I’m now realizing that mine is an aphasiac anxiety — I attempt to express something, tell some story about myself, and whatever comes out is something entirely unintended that has a sense wholly unrelated to what I had wished to communicate. Or nothing comes out at all.

I don’t mean this, really, in terms of actual spoken language — though there’s that, too. I can’t say what I mean, exactly, but it’s something to do with feeling that the edges of my self are eroding, or that the world has turned upside down and forgotten to take me with it.

What saves me, aside from frequent trips to Dishtown and New York, where kindred spirits resuscitate me, is that the ladies of New Eden Books are not what I expected them to be. To look at Boss Lady or Birmingham, I’d never have thought they were people I could get along with peaceably, let alone befriend. Getting to know these women, recognizing their complexity and allowing them to recognize mine, finding what lies behind what I thought I saw when I first met them, has been an incredible opportunity.

Some kind of leftover adolescent angst born of my high school self’s sense that everyone was evil and everyone was out to get her, some judgmental defense mechanism caused me to write off, for example, the Literary Hoover from the moment I met her. She was, to be fair, wearing something suspiciously pink and well-pressed, but according to my code of judgement I had no reason to believe that I had encountered in her the most voracious reader I’ve ever met. I had no idea I’d be finding myself relieved to have her standing next to me as the only person in a fifty mile radius who could get excited with me over histories of premodern medicine. Another coworker proved to have a delightful, easy laugh and an ability to talk about virtually anything with interest, and in still another I discovered an inexhaustible reservoir of silliness and affectionate sweetness.

Some of them even get me. Boss Lady has learned how and when it’s funny to tease me about my radicalism and sometimes-sardonic aspect, and Lefty Sophisticate laughs with me in my snarky moments and knows to squeeze my shoulder when someone buys a James Dobson book. At the end of a long day recently, Birmingham said, “I’m real glad you’re going to Brit City on the Sea — I think that’s gonna be real good for you.” This came as an incredible relief — she understands, I thought, that I don’t belong here, that it’s not inventorial misadventures making me twitch but a profound sense of isolation and a streak of wanderlust. She sees that I don’t fit in, and she likes that about me.

Just goes to show, mouse, I thought to myself: don’t you burn any bridges, because you never know when the straight blonde Republican ex-flight-attendant pink-pants-wearing tennis-playing fiftysomething Southerner is going to turn out to be your favorite new friend.

In which mouse contemplates divinity

Today I received a sign from God. (The Hebrew variety. Vengeful, but gifted at writing on walls.)

As I returned from my coffee break to the insanity of pre-Father’s Day New Eden Booksery, lost in my own world, sipping my latte, smoking my cigarette, minding my own damn business, I received a Sign. From God.

The WASPiest man on the planet — impeccably coiffed, impeccably tanned, Dior sunglasses, popped Lacoste collar, Nantucket-red pants, boat shoes — stepped out of his custom Range Rover just in front of me. He shook out his impeccably coiffed hair in the WASPiest way possible, his hair all fell impeccably back into place, and he said over his shoulder to the blonde elegantly descending from the passenger seat:

“Hurry, then, Muffy dear – we don’t want to be late!”

This happened. This actually happened. Reader, what the fuck.

It’s a sign. Get out of here, Mouse. Get the hell out, now. God hath numbered thy kingdom et bloody caetera. When life begins to imitate the most hackneyed clichés in the book, when life becomes a caricature of a stereotype of itself, you have officially entered bizzaro-land and will soon reach the point of no return. Out. Scram. Va-t’en.

Check. Thanks, God. Got it. Scramming. Learning the words to “God Save the Queen” as we speak. Yessir.

My life as an autonomous lesbian sleeper cell

I hate coming out. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

It’s not my closet. I’m not hiding anything. A given interlocutor has a closet in her head out of which I am obligated to wrest myself. It is the assumptions of others that dominate those conversations. It makes me fucking insane. This is likely because I was lucky enough to spend five years in a place where, generally, heterosexuality was not assumed, or not as vigorously as it is here in New Eden.

Now, I don’t read as queer, even to other queers, because I’m not butch. (Dispensing, for the nonce, with the rant about the supposed equation between dykeness and butchness.) I’m not femme, either (another rant about binaries hereby dispensed with), but I’m a fey little thing and will always be read as feminine, no matter how I present. Body language can do a lot — folks with good queerdar will pick me up pretty quickly after a few minutes of conversation. But, sadly, New Edeners tend not to come with the right software for such nuanced observation. (In high school and early college, I wore a rainbow belt — and even that wasn’t enough.)

Since presentation won’t do it for me, language has to carry the burden of proof. Unfortunately, I don’t have energy to explain my identifications fully, but I also hate identifying with a simple label for the benefit of the clarity of mind of others. And there’s always the which-label problem: when pressed, I identify as queer or as a dyke. I despise “gay,” and “lesbian” makes my skin crawl. “Sapphist” is a fabulous throwback, but illegible in most circles. Further misfortunes occur surrounding the fact that, in a place like New Eden, “queer” and “dyke” must carry with them an ungainly Queer 101 lecture that is likely to sound threatening to these sweet little straights.

Not that I mind threatening, but some of these sweet little straights are my coworkers and I must continue to get along with them, for my own peace of mind. I’m not fully out at work yet, and it drives me nuts. Worse, of course, than any of the dynamics of coming out is the horror of being read as straight. But I refuse to engage in the kind of PSA-style revelation of my so-called “sexuality” that dominates narratives of disclosure in this culture. So how do I maintain my integrity in a way that also allows me to continue to have healthy working relationships with my coworkers, about half of whom are probably homophobes?

Sex lives, or even romantic lives, are not a topic of conversation at New Eden Books. And I’m not currently partnered, so the “my girlfriend” drop is out. So I envision a scenario like this one:

“Hey mouse, have you read the new Joyce Carol Oates?”
“No, not yet. But I was reading that Sarah Wa–”
“Oh, but the Oates is so great! There’s a galley in the back – grab it before someone else does. Hey, will you shelve these for me?”
“Sure. Also, I have sex with women!”

Clearly not the way to go about things, but what’s a little dyke to do when nobody knows she’s a dyke?

I Work in a Bookstore v. I: Whining and Ranting, or, Mouse Wants Her Mushy Liberalism on the Cheap

I work in a small independent bookstore in a small suburban town. The store has its limitations, but we justify its failings (an over-emphasis on tchatchkes, for example) with mushy-liberal soundbytes about how it’s “important” to have a bookstore in New Eden, and “supporting” independent bookstores is also “important.”

It’s not that I don’t believe those things. I do, firmly and totally. But, of course, there’s more to the bookstore problem than the comfort of wistful, wealthy New Edeners.

Because we’re such a small store, and because most of our clientele is so wealthy that they don’t bother to pay attention when I tell them their totals before swiping their Amex cards, we sell everything at full retail price. This means that even with my substantial discount, I can still generally get what I want — new — more cheaply on Amazon or at a megastore. Used, in like-new condition, I can get virtually anything I want for next to nothing on Amazon or eBay. These services are also substantially more convenient — we don’t have a huge inventory at New Eden Books, and special orders generally take five or six business days to arrive.

Now, while I realize that these differences are likely due in large part to the systemic favor conferred on big corporations by the publishing industry, I have trouble not believing that Amazon and the megastores are a democratizing force in the world of books. The two statements are not mutually contradictory.

The French have solved some of the problem with their “prix unique du livre” — by law, a new copy of a given edition of a given book must cost the same amount absolutely everywhere. (The same applies to cigarettes and gasoline.) This means that the only advantage the big chains have over independents is the size of each store’s inventory. The phenomenon, encouraged by the prix unique law, of flourishing specialized bookstores balances out this advantage. “Yes,” I think to myself, “I can get lots of books at Gibert Joseph, but I can get better books, and talk to knowledgeable salespeople, at Ombres Blanches.” The law has also encouraged a boom in the production of “livres de poche,” cheap (three-to-six-Euro) paperback editions, frequently of books that are also published in nice, expensive editions. And because the great publishing houses stand to gain a lot from the livres de poche market, these cheap editions are frequently very well executed. Gallimard’s Folio imprint, while not as bibliogasmically gorgeous as their fancy editions, produces excellent, frequently excellently annotated, editions of middle- and high-brow books. For this I am deeply endebted to them. In short, for a long while the law enchanted me as an example of a spot where, for once, socialisme à la française was working.

Then it occurred to me that the imposed market-control probably means that the price of books is set somewhat higher than it is in American megastores. So perhaps, while maintaining the illusion of socialistic idealism, the prix unique du livre in fact reinforces the status of books as an élite commodity.

Don’t worry, all this isn’t leading to some grand statement. I don’t know what the solution to these problems is, but I think about them more or less constantly at work. As I watch how hard the store’s managers have to fight to keep our little place alive, as I watch customers become frustrated with having to wait for a special order and huff off with a “Whatever, I’ll just go to Borders,” I realize what a miraculous thing a small-town bookstore is. I already know many of the customers by name. I have whole conversations with two-thirds of the people who come in, even if they don’t buy anything. In a town that’s, um, hardly known for its intellectualism, we at New Eden Books maintain a healthy bibliophilic haven.

But the reality is that on my salary, even with my discount, I can’t afford to buy as many books as I read at New Eden Books. I realize that I should discipline my book-buying habits, borrow most of what I read from the rather good town library, and only buy what really matters to me. Then I would be better equipped to support local bookstores. But I like books. I like their materiality. I need to own them. I am a book fetishist. I am therefore a full-scale devotee of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble (in that order). There will be more on this, I’m sure. For now, the point is: goddammit, I want it both ways!

Friday education blogging

Still further reasons to be delighted that I am applying to grad program(me)s and never have to do the undergrad gig ever again. Small comforts.

And also still another reason to wish that Columbia University would stop being its ridiculous self.

And furthermore, I’m so glad I resisted the Ivy Impulse. (Kudos to Brown for roundly – or is it flatly? – rejecting me.) I know many delightful people who are products thereof, but I think that’s in spite of, not thanks to, their alma maters.

Oh, and remember my post about high school? Yeah well at least I didn’t grow up here. Way to go, Greenwich — you’ve not only outstripped all your companions in the world of Big Fat Gaffs Made By Wealthy New England Suburban Schools, you’ve managed to completely miss the point on what “race” means. But don’t worry, we’re not disappointed — we didn’t have any expectations of you to begin with.

This reminds me of the time when my town, “New Eden,” re-zoned the elementary schools, simply on a numbers basis. There are three elementary schools, one of which is “in town” near the high and middle schools, a much smaller zone than the others, and also home to most of New Eden’s elderly and young singles, who don’t have school-going kids. So, simple fix: re-zone the school districts so that kids who would have gone to Uber-Wealthy School (UWS) in the leafy western end of town with its McMansions, its Aston Martins, and its coke-fuelled wife-swap parties (I’m not kidding) will now attend School of Moderate Affluence (SMA), in the southern/central part of town, with its sweet little cape houses and its Volvos and its charades-and-wine-fuelled gatherings of the Arts Guild. Even out the numbers. A no-brainer.

But ha! You have not counted on the Ladies of Western New Eden. A flurry of meetings, letters to the superintendent, histrionics at the School Board, and, best of all, letters to the editor of the town paper, testified to the bone-deep snobbery, classism, WASPism, and disregard for the meaningful points of primary education native to the parents of UWS. My personal favorite among the soundbytes that came out of this, from a UWS mother: “I do not want my children to be forced to go to school with children from single-parent and double-income households.” Double-income households, ladies and gentlemen of the jury!

I didn’t go to primary school in this town (we lived in the wide open spaces of the Northern Midwest way back when), but most of my high school friends did. And most of my high school friends were at the very top of our class. Guess what? Not a single one of them went to UWS. All but one went to SMA (that one went to Also Uber-Wealthy School, which was not mentioned in the scandal). In fact, not a single person in the top ten percent of our class went to UWS. The SMA kids got together and wrote an erudite, scathing satirical response to the Editorializing Ladies, which probably helped to keep the new zoning on the table and get it voted through by the School Board and by Town Hall. Oh, and nearly all of them went to top-tier colleges.

Does SMA’s success at pumping out little brainiacs mean that it’s a better school? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it mean that the kids of “single-parent” and “double-income” households are more grounded, less materialistic, and better-attuned to reality, and therefore more likely to develop rigorous work ethics, to value their own work, and to appreciate their educations not as a gift to entitled children but as an opportunity to engage in something larger than themselves? You bet your ass.

This town, however, is in no danger of being in disaccord with segregation laws. Why? Because there are about, oh, five families of color here, not counting a slightly larger handful of families of East Asian descent. But tales of bussing, racial segregation that somehow happens anyway (surprise!), Asian jokes, anti-Semitism, and classism so rampant that kids who live in neighborhoods where houses go for only 500,000 bucks are taunted as “ghetto kids,” will have to wait for another day.

My parents sometimes express guilt at having caused me to attend high school in this alternate universe. And sure, it hurt adolescent me a bit, but nothing a few years of world travel and wonky adventures in the Petri Dish couldn’t cure. More importantly, it was also an opportunity to gaze into a world that few get to witness, and for that I am bizarrely grateful. An important lesson for any American gal: never underestimate the power of crazy, fabulously wealthy, church-going white people in large numbers. There is no better place to learn this lesson than in New Eden.