I haven’t been called racial slurs very often in my life; when you’re a middle class white girl from the South, it’s just not something that happens on a regular basis.  The only time I distinctly remember being called a cracker, actually, was when I was in the fifth grade:  a little boy declared that I was a cracker and he was a black-eyed pea, and that made him better than me.  I recall being vaguely hurt by this, in the way that you tend to be vaguely hurt when someone you’ve just met takes an immediate dislike to you.  Mostly, though, I was just puzzled.  “Why did he say that to me?” I asked one of his friends after he’d run off.

“He has a bad home life,” she shrugged, and that was the end of that.  My great experience with racism ended with me playing with the kid’s friends while he went home and sulked.

I understand that not every white person has my experiences; I understand that there are, in fact, white people who grow up being the only white kid at school, and that that’s usually not much fun.  I’m not saying it’s okay when those white people ignore hundreds of years of American history and claim that they’re the ones who are really oppressed, but I get it.  I understand taking an extremely traumatic personal experience and making it into a universal one.  What I do not understand are the white people who grew up in situations like mine who try to claim that having individual black people dislike them or mistreat them is the same thing as being systematically oppressed.  And I have a really ugly reason for not understanding that.  Because my reaction has always been, “Why the fuck do you care if someone calls you a cracker?”

I have had a lot of insults hurled at me over the years:  “fat dyke” was the favorite when I was in middle school, but “mentally ill bitch” has been more popular of late.  When people called/call me those things, it hurts.  But it hurts because those are not “good” things to be.  Being fat is not socially acceptable.  Neither is being gay, or being mentally ill, or being an bad-tempered woman.  Or a woman, period.  Those insults hurt not because they actually apply to the person being insulted, but because they’re all socially unacceptable.  You don’t want people to think that you’re crazy or gay or fat or a bitch.

But being white isn’t a bad thing.  In fact, as our culture is currently constructed, being white is a good thing.  So screaming, “God, you fucking WHITE CHICK!” kind of lacks punch as an insult.

And I mean, animosity hurts.  It does.  It hurts to have someone dislike you, especially when they do it on sight and seemingly without provocation.  It does.  I can understand reacting negatively to that.  I can understand being upset by that.  But it gets on my last fucking nerve when most white people claim to be deeply hurt by “reverse racism,” because I know they aren’t.  They’re shocked, they’re surprised, they’re a little wounded, but they’re not hurt.

Hurt is looking in the mirror and wishing you could rip your skin off because your body is huge and ugly and fat and wrong and somebody called you on it in class today. 

Hurt is not being momentarily offended by something someone said and then holding onto it because righteous indignation makes you feel good.  Because deep down you know things are tipped in your favor and it’s not fair to everyone else but you don’t want to deal with that. 

Hurt is not believing that you should have everything, including the right to always be the victim.  To never be in the wrong.

White people mouthing off about “reverse racism” are nothing more than yet another expression of privilege:  the privilege of never being wrong.  The privilege of pretending the scales balance when they don’t.  The privilege of believing that my momentary discomfort and embarrassment is equal to a black woman’s spending her entire life in a culture that devalues and dehumanizes her. 

I’m sorry, but x /= y.  And only someone with an ENORMOUS level of privilege, someone wrapped in a cultural cocoon of epic proportions, would believe that it does.

Tana French, The Likeness

You know what I hate?  When an author takes an otherwise blameless mystery novel and mucks it up with ill-advised attempts at profundity.  The Likeness is a good mystery, but Tana French wants it to be more–she wants it to be deep.  And you know, it could have been, if she hadn’t overwritten the crap out of it.

The Likeness is about an Irish detective named Cassie who infiltrates a houseful of postgrad English students when her doppelganger turns up dead–and wearing the ID of one of her old undercover identities .  Sounds fun, right?  And it is, when French isn’t musing about how being ”a good undercover” means there’s something wrong with Cassie.  Or whining about the “missing piece” that allowed Cassie’s doppelganger to assume the identity of others, or blah, blah, BLAH.  Yanno, All She Was Worth is a good mystery novel with an elusive identity thief at its center, and you know how Miyuki Miyabe managed that?  BY NOT OVERWRITING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING.  Let the reader think for her goddamn self, yo. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST STOP WITH THE CONSTANT HAND-WRINGING AND PHILOSOPHISING.

Recommended for:  If you can stomach the pretentiousness, it really is an interesting puzzle.  If you can’t, skip it.

During my junior year of college, I was snotty enough to take a seminar on Virginia Woolf.  I was a Women’s Studies major; it seemed to fit.  In an effort to get us closer to Virginia, my professor asked us to free write about our earliest memories—Woolf did this in her uncompleted autobiography, so why shouldn’t we?  I came up with something that probably scared the bejeesus out of my professor.  I remember getting my paper back a few classes later:  her comments were enthusiastic and engaged for the first few paragraphs, then trickled down to nothing near the end.

She never said anything to me about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was either A.) bored out of skull by what I’d written; or B.) convinced that she was reading about a half-buried memory of molestation.  Spoiler:  she wasn’t.

I remember very clearly what I wrote because it’s my first memory—not my official first memory, which is of sitting on a stump in my parents’ front yard at the age of two, but my real first memory.  The one I still have dreams about over two decades later.

I was probably about three or four; we were visiting my mother’s relatives in California.  I have a cousin, Jessica, who’s two years older than me and was, at the time, an only child (not to mention the only girl-baby my gramma and great-gramma saw on a regular basis).  In other words, she had LOTS of toys and costumes, and many of those dresses sort of kind of fit me.  So My First Memory is of walking down the street in my grandma’s neighborhood in Oakland wearing a Snow White costume that dragged on the ground behind me.

It would just be one of those moments that’s only memorable because you remember it:  my brother has one of those—he remembers talking about eating grapes with my parents when he was three, and that memory only stands out because it’s all he remembers about being three.  But this memory is different.  This memory is memorable because of the feeling attached to it:  the wrongness.  I tried to get at that feeling when I was writing about it for class, but I think I wound up sounding like I was trying not to remember the Bad Touch.

But what was wrong about that memory is that nothing was wrong:  nothing was wrong. I was wearing the coveted Snow White outfit (I had to practically rip it from Jess’ lonely-only hands), I was outside, it was a beautiful day, and I was being allowed to Think My Thoughts.  Even as a very small child, solitude was important to me.  And yet, I wasn’t happy.  I still felt this free-floating, pervasive anxiety that I could neither explain nor process.  And that’s why, twenty-one years later, I still remember being that little blond kid on a dusty street in a too-large Disney costume.

Because that’s my first memory of my illness.

Anxiety has always been with me; I don’t clearly remember a time when it wasn’t.  But all throughout my childhood in a military town in the South, it was chalked up to “having too much personality.”  It was a stage.  I would grow out of it.  I was just too sensitive.  I was a drama queen.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Whenever I hear Americans pissing and moaning about how overmedicated we are, I think about the nineteen years I spent without being medicated at all, and then the four years I spent being misdiagnosed and mistreated.  My anxiety ignored, categorized as a phase or personality flaw, then masked by depression, then enveloped by insomnia.  I was not one of those stereotypical kids, hopped up on Ritalin or numbed out by Prozac; I was one of the very real legions of kids who needed Prozac but was too scared to say so and seem “weak.”

Americans bitch all the time about overmedication, but I wonder if what we’re really complaining about is misdiagnosis.  It took twenty-three years and eight medical professionals to diagnose me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  Before that, I was “just going through some depression,” and prescribed Lexapro to “get me over the hump.”  And then I couldn’t sleep, and instead of talking about therapeutic levels of medication with me, my doctors gave me a few months of Ambien and a pat on the head.

Even a few months ago, when I emerged from an appointment in which I was concerned about adult-onset diabetes with a fistful of Lunesta samples, I was struck not by the fact that the doctor was handing me sleep aids like candy, but by the fact that he had not listened to a word I’d said.  I had a diagnosis, I was on medication, I didn’t need or want the sleep aids, and if he’d actually read or listened to my medical history, he would have seen that they weren’t warranted.  But that’s the thing.  I’ve had a lot of doctors, and here’s the hard truth:  some of them are stingy with the meds (my current shrink practically faints at the idea of upping my dosage), and some of them let Ambien rain down like…well, rain, but almost all of them have ZERO interest in what you have to say about your own body or your own mind.  Which is why it can take them so fucking long to figure out something that’s painfully obvious:  THEY AREN’T LISTENING.

The problem isn’t that Americans are overmedicated; the problem is that most of us don’t have a goddamn clue what’s wrong with us in the first place.  If I were to go into my shrink’s office and emerged zonked to the gills, that would be overmedication.  If I were to emerge from my shrink’s office with a medication plan tailored to someone with depression (which has happened to me before), that would be misdiagnosis.

The two are not one and the same.  And conflating them has done some pretty fucking horrible things to the mentally ill in our culture.

You want the honest truth?  When I was nineteen years old and four years away from learning what was really wrong with me, Lexapro still made me feel better.  It did.  It didn’t stop me from trying to kill myself because nothing could have (that was a bad scene), but it did stop me from having wild-animal-trapped-in-a-cage feelings whenever I saw my dreaded ex, or heard his voice, or thought I heard his voice.  It dialed down my responses from “OH FUCK WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” to “Hey, man, this is mildly unpleasant.”  It worked for me. It was prescribed for depression—in my then-shrink’s defense, I was depressed at the time—but it did double-duty and knocked out a good number of my anxiety symptoms.  Not all of them, of course, because it wasn’t prescribed for that reason so it wasn’t tailored toward that, but I was operating with like, 40 percent of the usual amount of crazy.

But I quit taking it the summer between my sophomore and junior years.  Because other people encouraged me to quit taking it.  Because “this was not the rest of my life” and “I needed to adjust to life without medication” and “what would withdrawal be like while I was in classes?”

So I quit taking it.  And for two more years, I accepted as a matter of course that I would want to throw up every time I saw my ex boyfriend, that my head would get all swimmy and there would be a roaring in my ears and I would have a reaction that’s normally reserved for near-death experiences.  I accepted that.  Because being on medication was bad, and not being on medication was good.  Even if not being on medication hurt so badly that by the time I graduated, I was a bitter, distrustful, and deeply damaged human being.

I didn’t want to be one of the overmedicated masses.  I didn’t want to be weak.  I didn’t want to be a candyass.  So I suffered for three more years until finally some nice old Southern gentleman looked at me and said, “Here, you poor, stupid woman, have some Klonopin.  And while we’re at it, how do you feel about Celexa?”

Honestly?  I feel GREAT about it.

But plenty of other people don’t.  A few years ago, I was reading a mildly famous author’s blog (she shall remain nameless, largely because she deletes shit all the time so there’s no way I could link to anything I’m about to paraphrase).  And she wrote this entry in which she revealed that she was bipolar—not that it was a shock, because I’ve known some bipolar kids who “forgot” to take their meds and reading this woman’s blog gave me flashbacks to the time when one of my friends hurled her luggage against the wall and then cried for a day straight because she was seventeen and no one had whispered the sweet nothing “Lithium” to her yet.  Anyway, this woman revealed that she was bipolar, but that she was treating it with diet and exercise because she didn’t believe in drugs!  And even though there were days when she curled up on her couch and couldn’t do anything because her illness put her in a dark, scary place, she was happy to tough it out!  Because drugs are bad, and exercise is good, and relying on “natural” remedies is best!

My reaction to her post was A.) Fuck that shit; and B.) Oh, God, you poor woman.

We have taken a line as a culture that is largely responsible for that woman’s attitude towards her mental health:  that it’s something that can be “toughed out,” and that drugs are to be avoided at all costs, even when the cost is your happiness and your sanity.  Our ideas about overmedication have made it virtually impossible for people to say, “Look, I have this fucking problem, see, and I take a goddamn pill, and it goes away.  Bam!”  It’s like any admission of illness is an admission of weakness or trickery—we’re weak or we’re deluded or we’re both.  We’re lazy.  If we just tried harder…

Wow, this whole overmedication thing is starting to sound very familiar, huh?

And you want to know the truth?  Even if someone came up to me and said, “Mankiller, there is a complex combination of herbs and an intensive course of therapy that has been clinically proven to manage anxiety as well or better than traditional medications,” my first reaction would not be to ask where I could sign up.  My first reaction?

“Fuck my liver!  Where’s my Celexa?”

Because guess what?  I’ve got nothing to prove.  I have no one to impress.  I do not want to spend the rest of my life carefully managing my diet and my supplements and my daily chanting in order to accommodate the accident of nature that made me crazy.  If other people want to do that, then cool, but it’s not my scene, and I don’t see how wanting to spend my time and energy on other things makes me “weak.”  Frankly, I think makes me efficient.  I’m not a candyass; I’m just using my time effectively.  Isn’t that supposed to be an American virtue?  Or is it only a virtue if you’re not nuts?

So some of you may be wondering, “What is with all this goopy relationship shit?  Where is the incisive literary commentary?  When will she finally post another Bayou entry?  Where is my goddamn sandwhich?”

To which I say—why were the stats on my last entry so low?  What, do you people hate charity?  And teenagers?  AND CONDOMS?

I think we’ve BOTH got a lot to answer for, really.

Anyway, the truth is that I’ve been short on book blogging simply because I lost track of my list.  Yes.  Yes, people, I have a notebook in which I write the name of every book I read and the date on which I finished it, but sometime in the middle of October I STOPPED UPDATING THE LIST.  And the fact of the matter is that I A.) read so goddamn much; and B.) do not have a terribly good memory for these things.  So I haven’t been posting about books cause I can’t remember which ones I’ve read.

As for the Bayou thing—eh.  I’ve got more.  I do.  But that shit is so painful that I swear I’ll still be chipping away at it come this time NEXT YEAR.

And make your own goddamn sammich!

In any case, I can’t remember so good, but I’m pretty sure that I keep waking up surrounded by LJ Smith novels.  Somehow I ended up with both the Secret Circle omnibuses and three of the Night World ones, and I have plowed through all of them.  And you know that feeling, that feeling you get deep in your brain when you’ve watched too much of a crappy CW show, that feeling that’s all “Damn, there goes my will to live?”  Yeah.  That’s the feeling I got off those books.

Secret Circle is about a girl named Cassie who moves to a Massachusetts town VERY CREATIVELY named New Salem and finds out—SHOCKER—that all her neighbors are witches.  And so is she.  Only everyone keeps making this big deal about how she’s “half outsider” because all the other witches have been living in New Salem and interbreeding since the 1600s–but only one of Cassie’s parents is from this twelve-fingered enclave.  Cassie feels all bad about being an outsider, but really?  If it were me?  I’d just be like, “Dude, I’M THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO’S NOT INBRED.  SUCK IT.”

In addition to being sad about the fact that her parents weren’t siblings, Cassie is also totes bummed because her true love, a guy she met on a beach one day and was INSTANTLY ATTRACTED AND BOUND TO, turns out to be her new bff’s boyfriend.  Oh, and does she get over it and start humping the dark and mysterious hottie who opens up only to her?  NO!  BECAUSE HE’S NOT HER SOULMATE!

Ugh.

The Night World books have a similar problem:  Smith seems to have fallen off the deep end and become OBSESSED WITH THE SOULMATE THING, because all twelve of the Night World books I’ve read thus far revolve around a mismatched pair who must be together because like, fate demands it.  There’s a silver cord, see, and it BINDS THEIR SOULS TOGETHER.  Or something.  I don’t really get it.  Anyway, it was cool the first two or three times she did it, but by book four I was bored out of my fucking skull by it.  And yet I kept reading, because occasionally another book would be TOTES AWESOME and I had to continue (the putrid Dark Angel, for example, was followed by the rocktastic The Chosen).   I know that Smith was trying to make a point about uniting the various factions—the shifters, the vampires, the witches, and the humans—through looooooooooove, but seriously.  If love were as easy as finding your soulmate and feeling “PING!” an instantaneous connection, we wouldn’t have a sky-high divorce rate.  True love takes time and effort and dedication and, oh, GETTING TO KNOW THE OTHER PERSON.  You don’t love someone you just met.  I’m sorry, but you don’t.  How could you?  For all you know, they’re a fucking serial killer!

I think in the end that’s what killed Smith’s ouvre for me:  honestly, her depiction of love cheapens it.  Because real love isn’t easy or instantaneous or total, and writing a total of SIXTEEN BOOKS AND COUNTING where you pretend that it is is a little…sick.  Not to mention misleading to the target audience.

Recommended for:  Unless you read them as impressionable young things and miss them unbearably, I’d skip these.

…to think about teen sexuality.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1894 when I asked everyone to suggest charities to spotlight during the holiday season, Otter wrote in about Scarleteen.  This is what she had to say:

Oh, here, let me plug my favorite charity to you. Even better than Planned Parenthood! It’s Scarleteen, a site that gives factual, unbiased, nonjudgemental sex education for teens. They’ve had millions of users, and also do outreach and work with homeless teens, runaways, glbt teens, everything.

Heather Corinna, the woman who runs the site, is a friend of mine, and I can tell you she spends at least ten hours a day helping young adults. And she doesn’t make a whole lot of money. She does it herself, with volunteer moderators in the forums. Donations are pretty much all that keep it going.

I’ve poked around the site, and like Otter said, it’s pretty amazing.  There’s stuff on anatomy, of course (see here and here for examples), but Corinna also devotes a large amount of space to questions of sexuality and gender.  Speaking as someone whose “sex ed” consisted of a viewing of The Miracle of Life and some gnarly STI pics, this is some heady stuff.  And it’s based on some pretty sound principles:

While we at Scarleteen do not hold to the notion that just telling young adults to just go have sex is a better solution (or any solution at all, since that wouldn’t answer anyone’s questions), we strongly feel that belying judgment and furnishing them with the facts and context they need to know REGARDLESS of whether or not they are sexually active readies them to learn to make their own choices, and that often unheard perspectives help develop their own systems of ethics and values when combined with the perspectives of peers, schools, parents, other mentors and their overall culture and communities.

Can I get an “Amen!”?  Or at least twenty bucks or a few hours of your time?

Donate here, volunteer here.  And remember, guys: ’tis the season to be generous.  And to help some dumbass teenagers make safe, informed decisions.

So my best friend’s sister is getting married, and since the sister is a conservative Christian, things are a little…tamer than Erika would like.  Particularly the bachelorette party.

“YOU’LL let me have penis straws, won’t you?” she asked me in desperation this morning.  “YOU’LL let me make you a cake with two guys humping, right?”

“Of course, kitty, of course,” I said soothingly, but the truth is–no.  I will not.  Because I’m not having a wedding, and therefore I will not be having a bachelorette party.

I’m surprised Erika forgot this, because she is INTEGRAL to my marriage plans.  Yes, I will get married–I’m just cutting out the middle man.  No cake.  No preacher.  No goddamn dancing.  No torturing of the bridesmaids (I actually LIKE my friends).

No.  It’s going to go down like so:

I am going to wake up one morning dressed in a fabulous red gown with an epically plunging neckline and a burlap sack over my head.  My wrists will be bound.  George will be carrying me slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.  Unless I go on a diet and he starts working out, he will probably be wheezing (note to self:  remember to stash inhaler in epic cleavage).  After a few seconds of abject terror and panicked squirming, I will remember what’s going on and where we’re headed.  “NOOOOOOOOO!” I’ll scream.   “You CAN’T take me to the justice of the peace!  I don’t WANT to get married!  I WANT TO KEEP LIVING IN SIN!!!!!”

“Don’t listen to her!” Erika will scream (sidenote:  Erika will also be fabulously dressed).  “You make an honest woman of her, you hear!  You’ve been exploiting her long enough!  It’s embarassing!  You’re a disgrace!”

George will carry me in silence; Erika will continue to scream abuse.  Eventually, we will reach the courthouse, where George will deposit me in front of a judge and Erika will remove my sack.

“Uh…what’s going on here?” the judge will ask.

“We’re getting married!” I’ll say brightly, my hands still tied.

And that will be that.  See?  See how easy that was?  All that’s necessary is a boyfriend with excellent upperbody strength and an ill-tempered shrew of a best friend!

I think it’s going to be fabulous.  None of you are invited, but only because that would defeat the purpose.  Don’t worry–there will be video.

…so she’s not going to write anything new today.  Instead, here’s an entry from my personal journal dated June 28, 2008:

George and I are observating a townhouse because he wants to buy one.  We’re standing outside, looking at the exterior while his realtor goes hunting for the code to open the door, when the following conversation takes place.

Me:  Ooooh, I like the ivy growing up the front porch.
George:  I hate ivy!
Me:  You know, you can uproot it if you really dislike it that much.
George:  I will replace it with…ELECTRONICS.
Me:  …robot vines?
George:  Yes.  And I will program them to have moods!  So if you feel a vine snaking up the back of your neck, I will just say, “Don’t worry.  The vines are in sensual mode.“
Me:  …I hate you.

The sad part is, I really wouldn’t put it past him to do it.

So last night I tried to bathe the toilet drinker because it makes his coat all glossy and healthy, and he reacted by clawing me so badly that I bled through my clothes.  And then he pissed all over himself and the tub.

…it was not my finest hour as a cat owner.  And no, I will never, EVER do that to him again.  My poor giant boo—it took him an entire two hours to forgive me.  I felt so bad about it that this morning when he tried to eat my blueberry bran muffin, I barely had the heart to stop him.  “He’s EARNED that muffin!” I thought, but I figured that giving in over the baked good would be like trying to bribe your kid with candy after beating him the night before.  So I ate the muffin myself.  THROUGH MY TEARS OF SHAME.

Man, I can’t WAIT until I have an actual human-type infant!  I will not fuck that up horribly AT ALL!

Anyway, speaking of human-type infants and bad parenting, I’ve been reading a lot of LJ Smith lately and it’s made me think about what kinds of books I want my imaginary future children to read.  I mean, on the one hand I am THRILLED by the breadth and the quality of YA fiction these days:  I’m not saying that YA books sucked when I was a kid, but the truth is, they…kinda did.  I believe I mentioned in my review of Shelf Discovery that I was kind of surprised to realize that I’d read almost everything the various contributors mentioned:  these were women in their late 30s or early 40s talking about the books they’d read in their teens, and they were the same books I read almost twenty years later.  And don’t get me wrong, these were good books, but seriously.  I remember thinking forlornly that it would be nice if I could read something targeted towards kids my age that wasn’t wildly out-of-date; much as I loved the Sweet Valley High books and The Babysitter’s Club series, not to mention Izzy, Willy-Nilly, the mentions of “up-to-the-minute fashions” that had been out of fashion since I was a zygote were a little depressing.

And the stuff that was written more recently tended to be a little…morose.  The 90s were the era of the problem novel–it was WALL-TO-WALL PROBLEM NOVELS AND NOTHING ELSE.  If  a teen novel was written between 1990 and 1999, then it was about someone’s bulimic gay uncle who was dying of leukemia.  I was and am a HUGE Susan Beth Pfeffer fan, but seriously.  SERIOUSLY.  Twice Taken is about a teenage girl who has to go back to living with her mom after having been kidnapped by her bio dad as a little kid; Most Precious Blood is about a mobster’s daughter; The Ring of Truth is about a girl from an old political family getting caught up in a sex scandal of sorts; and The Year without Michael is about how a family copes after the disappearance of their only son.  Oh, and my favorite book as a teenager was Kyoko Mori’s Shizuko’s Daughter, which is about a girl whose mother KILLS HERSELF because she wants a divorce and knows she’ll never get custody of her daughter.

…yeah.

I mean, not that these aren’t great books (particularly Shizuko’s Daughter, which was unfortunately autobiographical).  But seriously.  I had to wait until I was FIFTEEN for them to start putting out things like The Princess Diaries.  No wonder I was so fucking depressed as a kid.

Anyway.  Like I was saying, I’m amazed at the breadth and the quality of what’s being written right now, but I’m also a little concerned.  Because while I don’t believe in censoring, I do believe that some things are just not age-appropriate, and Books-a-Million is totally shelving Flowers in the Attic in the YA section.  Oh, and the publisher has given it a hip new cover with sun-kissed models embracing on a warm summer day.

Ummmm…yeah, that’s all sorts of fucked up.  I’m not saying that bookstores should refuse to sell V.C. Andrews to anyone under 18, but for the love of GOD people, don’t actively market it towards kids.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on Twilight.  I know there are plenty of straight-laced parents out there who ADORE it and think it’s FABULOUS for their young daughters because Edward refuses to sex Bella up until they’re married, but seriously.  Bella is the most passive heroine ever, and she only lives for Edward.  That’s not going to give girls a complex AT ALL.

Which is why I’ve been so pleased while rereading LJ Smith’s The Vampire Diaries, because damn.  DAMN.  Yes, it has the “man, the fashions are completely out-of-date” problem that I mentioned earlier.  Yes, LJ Smith’s prose is a little purple and a tad hacky.  Yes, the plots can be predictable.  Yes, Elena and Stephan have that stupid “I’m in love with you even though I know nothing about you!” plot line that I hate and abhor.  But guys?  Elena is awesome.  She’s the queen bee of her school, not very nice, and not terribly apologetic about it.  She initially wants Stephan only because he ignores her, and NO ONE ignores her and lives to tell the tale.  She’s a strong, admirable character without being a perfect or a passive one.  If I had a daughter, I would want her to read these books, because yes—the heroine is chasing the hero, but she’s doing it on her terms because she knows she deserves him.

Yes, they are problematic.  Much is made of how beautiful and thin and blond Elena is, and that’s bullshit.  But guys, let’s be honest with ourselves:  every girl goes through a vampire phase.  And wouldn’t you rather she go through it wanting to be Elena Gilbert, awesomest girl to ever awesome, instead of dreaming of being stalked by Edward Cullen?

No joke, if I ever catch my daughter with a copy of Twilight, I won’t just trash it like my mom did Flowers in the Attic; I will burn it and then hand her The Vampire Diaries.  Because they may not be perfect, but damn, they are so much better than a lot of what’s out there.

And that is my half-hearted endorsement!

Halloween was a fairly relaxed holiday chez Mankiller.  My best friend and I watched Gossip Girl while my menfolk (FANG! and the Boyfriend) repaired electrical outlets, and occasionally someone would open the door and toss out a handful of candy to the slavering wolves disguised as small children.  It was all very low key. 

Well, let me take that back–it was all very low key for most of us.  For a certain kitty dressed as a shark, it wasn’t low key AT ALL.

Doesn’t my baby look so mad?  You wouldn’t think that wearing a repurposed dog costume would be such an affront to his non-existant dignity, but apparently it was.  He sulked the whole night, and we only made him wear that thing for like, ten minutes.  Brat.

But Halloween wasn’t all about Oliver; oh, no.  Most of Halloween was actually about the three pumpkins I’d bought earlier in the month and neglected to carve until a few hours before trick-or-treaters started hitting me up for Snickers.  Since I purchased two of those pumpkins in early October, it’s not exactly surprising that by the 31st, some kind of burrowing insect had devoured the flesh of one of them.  But instead of turning its good side towards the street and hoping for the best, I decided to make the most of the situation and carve me a jack-o-lantern with a horrifying skin condition:

Isn’t he booooooooootiful?

But of course, I wasn’t done; I still had two pumpkins to decorate.  One of them turned out relatively normal and is therefore NOT PICTURED, but I decided to jump on the hipster bandwagon and make the other one a drunken, puking pumpkin.  Not very original, I know, but I feel like my vomiting jack-o-lantern has something that other vomiting jack-o-lanterns lack:  that is, three pumpkin’s worth of puke.

Isn’t it EPIC?  Also, special shout-out to FANG! for drinking all those beers.  Thanks for taking one for the team, buddy.

As great as my vomiting pumpkin was, though, when my bff Erika came over later that night, she decided that something was still missing.  So she whipped out her own tiny pumpkin and got to work:

Happy Halloween, everybody!  Hope you didn’t get beer-barfed on!

So this probably would have been more appropriate before Halloween, but I’m afraid that I have some disturbing evidence that my cell phone might be possessed by the Devil.  To whit:

1. When people try to call me, a disembodied voice tells them that the number is no longer in use.  And yet when I call others, everything is perfectly fine.
2. Whenever someone puts me on hold, my phone “randomly” drops the call.
3. Texts show up days late or not at all.
4. Even though my phone can TAKE photos and send them elsewhere, it will not receive them.  Like, ever.
5. No matter where I am or who I’m talking to, the person on the other end of the  line always sounds like they’re under the sea.  Except there’s no talking crab or racist undertones.  Just wooshing.  ALWAYS WITH THE WOOSHING.
6. Have I mentioned that texts show up days late or not at all?  Seriously.  My friend texted me a couple of times on Saturday, and the texts didn’t come through until 3:45 THIS MORNING.  If that’s not the work of the devil, I don’t know what is.

Taken altogether, I’m reasonably certain that my cellphone is a tool of Satan–I mean, even more than cellphones usually are.  Which annoys me, because like many trendy young people (ha!) my cell is my primary form of communication, and it is failing me left, right, and center.  The other morning my carpool tried to call me FIVE TIMES before the call finally went through.  FIVE TIMES.  I’m lucky they didn’t just assume I was dead and leave me.

What?  DC rush hour traffic is brutal.  You don’t have time to wait for the damn paramedics.

Anyway, the whole thing is annoying because not only is it keeping me from communicating with my nearest and dearest, it ALSO requires me to do the thing I hate most in the world:  pick out an electronic device.  Seriously, I hate that shit.  You should have seen me when I went to pick out a laptop–it was shameful.  The Boyfriend was like, “I think you should get this one,” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s cheap, I’ll take it.”

And that was IT. 

I don’t want to talk gigabites or OS or whatever; I don’t even know what that shit MEANS.  Nor do I care.  And my ignorance is not limited to computers:  when I bought SASHA FIERCE, the Boyfriend had to ask the hard questions.  And when I got this cellphone, NO ONE asked the hard questions because I went with my family and where do you think I got my lazy luddite tendencies from?

Seriously:  we all picked the cheapest model phone in under five minutes, and that was that.  You should have seen the look of horror and disgust on the poor salesman’s face.  I’m still ashamed of us all.

And this is the point where I’m supposed to say that I’m going to do better, that I’m going to do my research and learn what all this shit means and get a good deal and fear God and whatnot, but honestly?  I’m not.  Come Saturday I’m going to go to the Sprint store, find the cheapest plan that I can live with, and find a phone that is easy to text on (don’t even get me STARTED on the lack of punctuation options on my current demon-possessed communication device).  Oh, and I’ll make sure it’s pink.  PINK.  Those are my only requirements.  Because I am shallow and life is too short to pretend to give a shit about data plans.

What?  I WAS just going to douse my current phone with a vial of holy water, but I was told that that probably wouldn’t work.  JEEZ.  What do you people WANT from me?