Me and and the Best Friend and another friend of deep roots and long times ago (i.e. college) have spent the night definitively stating how we will communally homeschool our future children. We will build treehouses! We will take all the kids on a tour of a factory--no! We will trace the origins of a product (like chocolate chip cookies) all around the world! We will find out where the wheat comes from, where the chocolate comes from, where the factory is where they put it all together, we will meet all the people who do it, we will try to understand how everything we eat and use comes from somewhere. We will learn fractions by cooking delicious food! We will watch M*A*S*H and discuss what a metaphor is, how one war (the Korean) can be a metaphor for another (the Vietnam). What "subversives" are. We will get the doctors among us to teach the kids to stain slides and what the parts of cells are! We will sleep all morning and read the paper, then do yoga! (Fantasy: parenthood will be just like life is now.) Instead of music class, we will simply ROCK OUT. We will raise little hipster children and we will keep them from school, where we were pelted with dodgeballs and taught lies! LIES! "Hegemony" will be all our kids' first word. They will know textbooks only as artifacts of a culture they observe but do not fully participate in. I am secretly afraid my kids will be biters and bite the other children. (Aggression runs in the family.) I am secretly afraid my kids will hate me and wish they had gone to school and learned lies and played dodgeball. But I am excited to bring people into the world one day knowing that the hell of institutional education will never be inflicted upon them. I will say to them, "What do you want to know about? What do you love?" And instead of hours spent staring at a clock or trying to melt into a hallway of lockers, they will just do THAT.

But what if it was the alienation that made us who we are today? What if it was the years of adolescent hell that formed us, what if we will be denying the Progeny the valuable experience of feeling like they Don't Belong, the useful pent-up energy of restless adolescent angst, what if high school was some kind of crucible, what if it we are fueling off it now, what if running as far and as fast as you can get from it keeps you moving, what if, in a life without jocks, without nerds, without the reductive, confining categories of "smart girls" and "hot girls" our hypothetical future children would flounder, lost among our best intentions of experiential learning, lost without the very perameters against we rebelled?

Nah, we decided. It would be better not to lie to them, whoever they might be, if we could ever stop drinking and smoking and drugging and generally freaking out long enough to actually reproduce the species. It would be better to at least try to tell them the truth, to show them what little we have learned in these confused deacdes of our so-called youth. The experiment in happiness would be worth it, if it worked. And I, personally, was already too excited about all I would learn.

May God Continue to Bless America

A very strange thing happened to me tonight while watching the State of the Union. Something snapped in me when that guy did the thing where he says, "Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States," and that mentally retarded draft-dodging cokehead alcoholic democracy-subverting fake-cowboy overeducated-yet-still-barely-literate nation- and womb-invading Moron Puppet of Evil strode in. Seeing Powell (the even-toned liar) and Ashcroft (the psycho-religious fascist) and Laura Bush (seated amongst her own handpicked gallery of rainbow-colored honored guests) and Rumsfeld (it really, really makes me nauseous that anyone calls him "Rummy," as if there is anything even ironically endearing about a man who strategies about killing people for a living) and Cheney (who goes right past enraging me and chills me to my very bones) made it all so horribly real. This is our government. These are the people who are in charge of everything, all the money and all the bombs. There was the Supreme Court in their robes, there were the Republicans, there were the Democrats.

I looked at our whole entire tri-partite system of government, playing their appointed roles in this nightmare/farce/End of History/Inversion of All Meaning, checking and balancing and shaking each other's hands, standing up to receive the Never-Democratically-Elected non-President of the United States of We'll Invade Your Country and Replace the Dictators We Supported and Armed Two Decades Ago With Exactly the Kind of Political Vacuum that Creates Terrorism, Not to Mention Civil War and Starvation If We Want to Control the Oil and Have the Sheer Demented Brilliance and Audacity to Call it "Liberating You and Spreading Democracy" and I began to weep.

That never happened before. I rant, rave, or even, on occasion, spit. This goes on for about ten minutes, at which point I am either asked to leave the room, if I am in the company of others or I turn off the T.V. and stomp away, if I am alone. But this time I listened to the whole thing, (less an extended zone-out during the Social Security and Medicare parts). And I took notes.

These are my notes on the State of the Union, with slight augmentation and healthy doses of unnatural rage.

He just picked up and hugged a little girl. She was maybe three or four and African-American. And I thought, "how dare you touch a child, anyone's child, on national television, and allow this image to imply that you love a) children b) females or c) people of color when every policy you enact or attempt to enact shows that you HATE them and think that they are inferior to the oil companies, drug companies, defense contractors and very, very rich people your policies, if not your rhetoric, prove that you LOVE. Your party hates people of color so openly that only after the 100-year-old segregationist is DEAD does his family admit that he fathered a child with a Black woman, your party hates people of color so openly that its one-time Senate Majority Leader-Elect publicly said that our country would be better off if this segregationist DEADBEAT DAD had become president. And you never cared about the Taliban or anyone else oppressing or raping or killing women until you needed someplace to invade, and your gag rule is killing women all over the world from lack of medical care and illegal abortions and the AIDS they contract from the condoms they're not allowed to be given or even TOLD ABOUT. So don't touch that little girl with your slimy, bloody hands! Put the little girl DOWN you EVIL MORON PUPPET!

At this very moment, the Moron Puppet of Evil is struggling to pronounce the word “Casablanca” while he tells a story that sounds like the plot of Lord of the Rings. “The Evil Must Be Defeated," he says. Except he has this peculiar diction that makes him sound like a second-grader reciting his lines in the school play. He emphasizes the wrong words in sentences in a way only someone who has no awareness of what they are saying can.

Now he is telling Congress, "You need to renew the PATRIOT Act." It is a startling reminder to me that in the midst of the war we had almost forgotten about your unprecedented attack on the Constitution, and its general ineffectiveness at fighting terrorism and handy effectiveness at containing dissent against your administration. Why, yes, though you passed it on the basis that it was a TEMPORARY, wartime restriction on freedom in the grand tradition of wartime restrictions on freedom that includes such great moments in American history as the Japanese internment, the Red Scare and the FBI's attempt to undermine the ENTIRE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, let's now make it permanent, since the 9/11 attacks have blessed America with its current state of being permanently AT WAR.

Now he is congratulating himself on getting rid of the Taliban. Soon, he waxes, there will be free elections and “the boys and girls of Afghanistan will go to school." Well, except maybe for the ONES THE AMERICAN MILITARY KILLED..

Now he is praising Libya, shining example of an obedient nation. They have dismantled their weapons program. The peaceniks in the American government are really on a worldwide disarmament mission! No one else is allowed to have weapons but us. Because, you know, if other people HAVE them, they might USE them, whereas we HAVE weapons, and, well, we USE them, too, but when WE use them, we are SPREADING DEMOCRACY and when other nations use them, these weapons might KILL PEOPLE. See, weapons in the wrong hands KILL people. But weapons in the hands of the United States, as we are carrying out what moments later Bush refers to as "our special calling, to lead the cause of freedom" LIBERATE people. It's hard to tell the difference when the weapons are ripping into the flesh and bone of human beings, but that might be because you're not wearing your CAUSE OF FREEDOM GOGGLES with the SPECIAL CALLING BUILT RIGHT IN.

We needed to use military force in Iraq, he asserts, because otherwise "Security Council Resolutions would be empty threats." Yes, the United Nations must be respected and heeded. THAT was the lesson we needed to DEFY THE UNITED NATIONS to teach.

And now we cut to Hillary, standingly ovating the fact that we went to war (And I would just like to say thanks, Hillary, for your oft-lauded BIPARTISAN EFFORTS to NOT BE A DEMOCRAT AT ALL), while also having the bad fashion sense to wear, for some reason, a Sex and the City circa third season enormous flower pin on her shoulder. To even out my unsisterly subjection of Hillary to fashion scrutiny, I will add this equally superficial observation: The men who occupy undeserved positions of power in the government that currently occupies our so-called democracy are so repugnant their very physical incarnations are perhaps the only real shot at abstinence education we have. I look at them and I think, "I ABSTAIN."

“America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.” Translation: America will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and if anyone questions America, we will claim to be "defending our security." Well, I was just out "defending our security" and I picked up a supply of cheap oil! How convenient!

After a good half-hour of the Bedtime Story of Why America Should—And Does—Control the Entire World and Should Never Be Fucked With or Accused of Such Crass Acts as Killing People or Re-Colonizing Entire Nations Because WE ARE JUST DEFENDING OUR SECURITY and the SECURITY OF THE ENTIRE WORLD, he switched over to tax relief.

“The American people are spending their money better than the government.” The government is still spending the American people’s money. It is spending way, way more of the American people's money than it gave back. And since you gave the most money back to the people who need it least, and the people who need it most got enough cash to buy a CAN OF DIET COKE, I think the concept of who is spending what money is somewhat flawed in your thinking.

Now he is defending the "No Child Left Behind" Act's commitment to standardized testing as a form of education. I love when he talks about education, since, you know, he’s illiterate. This so-called Everyman attended Andover, Yale and Harvard. If the "average American" could send his or her kid to Andover, Yale and Harvard and his kid came out UNABLE TO READ, the average American parent would a) beat the shit out of the kid for wasting his hard-earned money or b) apologize for not diagnosing his severe learning disability earlier and send said kid to therapy instead of allowing his DRUG PROBLEM TO RUN RAMPANT and rewarding his failure as a businessman with the FIGUREHEAD GOVERNORSHIP of an entire STATE.

And he has “Doubled funding for abstinence programs.” The only way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sex, he says. AND EVERYONE WHO HAS SEX DESERVES TO EITHER GET PREGNANT OR DIE. Because there is no way to prevent pregnancy or STD transmission 99% of the time. Oh, wait, there is. CONDOMS. But we believe that premarital sex is immoral and evil and contraception is immoral and evil, so we should not tell young people about condoms, because if we do, it will cause them to have sex, which they would not have thought of if we had not mentioned it. Oh, wait, only psycho-right-wing conservatives believe that. But they run our country so we all have to live the way they do. Except somehow I sense that a number of the people in that chamber may have engaged in non pro-creative, possibly pre- or extra-marital sex. If only the God they pretend to pray to really DID exist, and he smote everyone who had done the sick things they so righteously condemn. Then we'd be a nation of the pure and righteous. And lots of Harvard students. I hear an alarming number of them are virgins.

The irony is, the "Abstinence Method" is possibly the LEAST effective, as in PEOPLE DO NOT ABSTAIN. They just don't and they never will and they shouldn't. The youth of America should get laid as soon and as often as possible, before we are all killed in the apocalypse the Bush Administration's violent policies is spoiling for. I have just one question: ARE THE BUSH TWINS ABSTAINING? Because ABSTINENCE BEGINS AT HOME.

He now moves on to his much-anticipated far-right-pleasing clear statement on marriage, having last week just committed $1.5 billion to "teach poor people about marriage" (was there ever a more condescending thought?)

“If activist judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will on the people" he threatens, if states insist on redefining marriage, we'll have no choice but to turn the Defense of Marriage Act into a Constitutional Amendment. Great. It'll be like the good old days of the 3/5 Compromise! (You know, when the North and the South agreed that each slave would count for 60% of a whole entire human!) The dehumanization of certain people will once again be written into the Constitution! Now that may not be justice, but you have to respect the honesty.

"Activist judges" force their "arbitrary will on the people" when they make DRACONIAN (and state-by-state) anti-abortion laws. States seem to have plenty of rights when it comes to GUN OWNERSHIP. But the federal government must step in to save marriage from the SICK GAY PEOPLE who, the Moron Puppet rushes to explain, we respect, just not, you know, enough to give them EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW (isn't THAT already a constitutional amendment? Who cares about the constitution when you are RE-WRITING IT EVERY DAY?).

I only wish the Moron Puppet had had the honesty to frame the same sentiment more bluntly, as in, "Dick Cheney's deviant dyke daughter should not be allowed to tarnish the purity of the institution of marriage with her deviant Sapphic love." Though a) how many of those words does he know? and b) How capable of a functional relationship do you think the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL is?

During the marriage stuff, the camera cut to Republican Senator Rick Santorum, clapping with somber approval at the notion of formally defining marriage, while I and thousands of other readers of Dan Savage's syndicated column gleefully thought in unison, "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex!" (Dan Savage, in a brilliant display of activism, challenged his readers to name a sexual act or thing after Rick Santorum, to honor his display of homophobia.)

See, Santorum thinks that if we let gay people get married, one day, the union of a "man and a dog" is going to be sanctified by the United States government, if not by God. (Though I am confused. You mean the United States government and God aren't the SAME?) This is my favorite part. It's the conservatives who claim to be so afraid of perversion who think up the MOST PERVERTED STUFF. A man and a dog?! Ew, Rick Santorum. That is gross. But you know what is grosser? A Senator (and a President) so afraid that they WANT to be done up the butt that they abuse their power to the point of ENACTING UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAWS oppressing people who DO do it up the butt.


Now we are on to blurring the line between Church and State, or as the Moron Puppet calls it, "Unleashing the compassion" of religious organizations that have been unfairly "DISCRIMINATED AGAINST and denied government funding." Huh. I thought the government denies them money because our country was founded on the SEPARATION of CHURCH AND STATE. When the coffers of the church and state were one it was called MEDIEVAL EUROPE. It is not discrimination against people of faith to say that faith has no place in government services. But I think he may finally have found the one phrase that sums up his entire administration. "The Bush Administration: Unleashing the Compassion."

He winds up with this charming anecdote of a little girl, Ashley Pierson, "age 2, I mean, 10" who wrote him a letter asking what she can do to help and asking him to tell the troops that, "'Ashley Pierson believes in you.'" He told her to "study hard in school" (since your family does not control the CIA and the key electoral college states and you might need good grades to get anywhere in life), "listen to your Mom or Dad" (I did! My Dad invaded Iraq and so did I!) and "when you see a person in uniform, say, 'thank you'" (for being poor enough to have to put on a uniform to get what rich people get without having to RISK THEIR LIVES).

Ashley Pierson, I believe in you, too. I believe that if you decide to have sex before you get married, you don’t deserve to catch an STD just because your school wasn’t allowed to tell you about condoms. I believe that if you get pregnant, you should not be forced by your government to carry a child to term. I believe that if you personally would not end an unwanted pregnancy, you would not want to restrict the rights of other women to do so, because I believe that you, Ashley Pearson, are not especially interested in my uterus, though your pen pal up there on what he miraculously correctly pronounced as the "rostrum" certainly is interested in both of ours. I believe that you deserve a real education, not just a standardized test every year. I believe that you and every single other American deserves adequate health care, and that providing you with education and health care is a loftier goal than giving millions of dollars in tax cuts to people who have millions more, or spending billions of dollars on weapons. I believe that you already live in one of the freest, safest nations in the world, and you should not let your freedom be restricted by the threat of terror that grows more real the more violent your government becomes in the name of preventing it. I believe in you, Ashley Pierson, and that in you and in every American is the capacity to recognize—and bear out—the truth.

A Few Questions

How come when schools are failing they take money away from them, but when the war in Iraq or the War on Drugs fails for a year (or thirty), they throw more money at it?

How come conservatives care so much about the lives and rights of embryos and brain-dead people and so little about everyone else?

How come the same people who want to preserve aspects of our socio-political structure that are thousands of years old (sexism, racism, oppression, repression) want to destroy an environment that is even older?

I don't think the Friendster craze is going to follow us into 2004. Personally, I am relieved. I found Friendster disturbing from the very first "An Invitation to Join Friendster," email. Friendster, promised the emails, would provide me with "new people to hang with and date."

I am honored that these people, who I already considered my friends, wanted to be my Friendster. I hold them in the highest esteem, and I would gladly join any club of theirs that would have me as a member. However, they overestimate my desire to meet and/or date their friends. I have this odd quirk that makes me hard to set up on blind dates. I have to actually meet people to decide if I am going to like them. I don't just like people because they are friends of my friends.

I am a big proponent of the one degree rule. This rule states that while you should love your friends fiercely, you really can't account for anyone more than one degree removed from yourself. You might love your best friend’s boyfriend/girlfriend/other best friend. But you are also just as likely to hate them as you might any stranger, if not more so. This is because you know the side of your friend that they elicit in you. Together you create your own special world, full of things the two of you care about. It is easy to forget that your friend has other sides. The two of you eat grilled cheese and watch reality television shows and make fun of them. The two of you always end up drunk and peeing on a public landmark. You can always count on this friend to eat at the health food restaurant no one else likes. You go panel discussions at the New School together. You do drugs no one else does, you care about aspects of interior design no one else cares about, you never plan to, but you always tell them your romantic problems and they speak the truth no one else speaks. Whatever. But the rest of the time, your friends, your beloved friends, are hanging out with other people doing things you hate. Your favorite drinking buddy? She also loves Disney and is seeing Disney movies with her other friend. The brilliant ironic filmmaker? The rest of his friends are evil mean filmmakers. Your lovable fratboy friend who is really deep and smart? His other friends are just regular dumb mean homophobic frat boys. That girl who understands your penchant for expensive jeans? She, unlike you, does not maintain this as a quirk of her personality. The rest of her life is expensive and she has the friends to go with it. Things you don’t like or don't notice in your friends might be amplified in their other friends. So you are quite likely to loathe your friends’ friends, as they will reveal to you a side of your friend that has nothing to do with you, and they will embody that side to an unbearable degree.

Of course, more than an actual meeting place, Friendster is a venue for the socially hypercompetitive. My roommate knows some girl who has 238 Friendsters. It is for compulsive players of the Name Game. "You went to the University of Blah Blah? Do you know so and so?"

I hate that game. It is so stupid. Yeah, I know so and so. She went crazy/got married/became a lesbian/gave up lesbianism. Really? Wow. Yeah, I know so and so, he's so great. Blah blah blah. Oh, he moved to Thailand? Wow. I never would have guessed that when I barely knew him at the University of Blah Blah. Oh, I am so relieved. Now we can have context because we both know So and So from the University of Blah Blah. I can sleep with you now and not worry that you are a violent psycho, because if So and So were here in this mundane conversation and not in Thailand, he could vouch for you.

Whatever happened to going out and meeting TOTAL STRANGERS? What ever happened to meeting weird people in bars, or on street corners, or on the fire escape or roof or stoop of an overcrowded party? Or waiting to meet your friends' friends through the natural course of events? MUST WE MAP AND RECORD EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES IN THE NON-SPACE NON-TIME OF THE INTERNET? DOESN’T ANYONE JUST GET DRUNK AND WALK AROUND AT NIGHT ANYMORE AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS?

One day, these people on Friendster are going to find they've ruined all the surprises.

Friendster is great for one thing, though. It proves how disgustingly incestuous and insular and limited the fancy-college artsy-twentysomething world is. Every time you click on someone, it tells you all the ways it can think of that you are connected to them, and often there are more than one. It's like the Kevin Bacon game. It’s like we've gotten so bored with actually knowing people just want to keep little trading cards of them. As we march toward the fantasy of a purely technological existence, we perfect not ourselves but our internet representations of ourselves.

Also, Friendster, in keeping with its Yearbook of Hipsterism quality, seems to have devolved into a competition of who can be the most flippant, so everyone is posting pictures of defunct famous people instead of themselves. My Friendster-obsessed roommate, trying to show me the benefits of Friendster, encouraged me to see if this friend-of-a-friend my friend is always saying I should hang out with and possibly date was actually on Friendster. He was. "Now you can find out stuff about him," she said. I looked at his picture. “I don't think I find him attractive from his picture," I said. "Emily," she said, "that’s not him, that’s the dad from Family Ties!" And I just felt stupid.