I am more afraid of ticks than bears

I recently discovered that I am more afraid of ticks than bears. As FDR said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…and some arachnids.

When you type “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” into Google image search, the first batch of images are t-shirts and cartoon pictures of FDR’s face that read “The only thing we have to fear is FEAR ITSELF…and spiders.” I’d substitute “ticks” for “spiders,” but my best friend S is mad arachnophobic, so let’s just say arachnids are no picnic in general (and yes, ticks are arachnids–at least according to Wikipedia. I checked.)
You can buy this t-shirt at zazzle.com and wear it to your next AA (Arachnophobics Anonymous) meeting.

My mom and aunt came to visit me in Virginia for a week earlier this month, after I finished my first round of grad school finals (Woo hoo! Now my stress is adult!)., and we spent a few days hiking and nature-ing around. One afternoon we were in Shenandoah National Park. We’d already done a fairly strenuous hike (at least to our legs, which were tired from basically climbing a mountain the day before) in the morning/early afternoon, so for our second hike of the day we wanted something short and manageable. Just a few miles. And FLAT.

We ended up on a trail that was less than 2-miles roundtrip–ostensibly very manageable–but that, despite the guidebook’s difficulty rating of “easy,” was all uphill. Through the grass. And weeds. And various other flora. Now, for a while this was quite lovely–tons of bluets and little white flowers and butterflies up the wazoo–until my mom mentioned ticks. She’d read about them in some of our guide literature to the park and another hiker we’d talked to earlier that day had warned her that the area we were in had tons of ticks and that they were particularly prevalent in this type of weather. I don’t know anything about ticks’ weather preferences, but I do know Ew! Ick! Oh my gods get it AWAY from me!!! 

Now, I’m not a particularly scaredy person when it comes to bugs. I find silver-fish terrifying for some reason (loved that recent episode of Up All Night that had Maya Rudolph calling Will Arnett, her best friend’s husband, to come kill a silverfish in her house), and I hate things with lots of legs (like centipedes, shudder), but I deal with even these fine. Spiders don’t especially bother me, or I’ve at least learned to be strong because my best friend S is terrified of them and someone needs to get the things out of the house. Also, since the warm weather started, these ants have shown up in my house here in Virginia and these suckers are like half an inch long. Since I’m used to California ants you practically look at through a microscope, the size of these Giant Ant Beings does make them seem like some kind of demon ants, but I still squish them with my bare fingers no problem. Point: I’m not usually too squeamish.

However, I hate anything that bites. Mosquitos $%*&ing love me for some reason; if there are mosquitos out, I will always get bit. If I’m with my family, usually I’ll have as many bites as the three of them combined, or more. It’s like I’m the Bella Swan to these bitches’ Edward Cullen: I’ve never smelled blood like yours in all my liiiiife.

My body is really sensitive, so as soon as an insect bites me, the area around the bite will turn red and swell up and itch like mad, like normal people’s mosquito bites on steroids (remember the whole steroids-gave-Barry-Bonds-bobble-head-proportions thing? Your mosquito bites are a normal head; mine are Barry Bonds’ head, post ‘roids.) After a few days, the swelling will go down and the general redness will darken to a patchy purple that looks like a cross between a bruise and a really strange, abstract tattoo. Recently, I was sitting at a friend’s place with my legs propped up on something when he pointed to my outstretched calf and said, “Oh, you have a birthmark on your leg!” Nope. No I do not. That is a mosquito bite from two days ago; it only looks like there’s a hickey on my leg.

Oh! And when I was like ten I got bit by a bunch of stone flies while I was in Florida on vacation and the bites swelled up so intensely it looked like I had half a softball shoved under my skin every place I’d been bitten. They itched like mad and it was about 100 degrees with approximately 500% humidity, so I was miserable (which probably means my family was miserable too–sorry, family, usually you’re okay as long as you keep me fed). That may be the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve been in more pain, but in terms of pure discomfort–ugh.

Suffice it to say I don’t like to have any kind of biting insect or arachnid anywhere near my skin, and something that fucking burrows into your flesh? When is the next plane/train/bus/camel out of this hellscape?

Also, I had a friend in college who got lyme disease and that shit is no joke. She had to take our sophomore year off and when she came back, she walked with a gorram cane. Stay the fuck away from ticks.

So we’re hiking. Then my mom mentions ticks. I get a little nervous but am distracted by the fact that the trail is still going uphill and only getting more overgrown and this is not what I signed up for. If this is going to be an Amazon-style adventure, I would like to know in advance so that I am emotionally prepared–and armed with a machete. But anyway, ticks are mentioned and it’s like the foreshadowing in a movie: dun dun dunnn!! If this is an arty drama, you know someone is going to die from lyme disease in the next 45 minutes. I don’t want to be that person.

The ominous music ratchets up when my mom notices a tick on my aunt’s pants. My aunt is totally calm (probs cause my mom is freaking out a tad bit) and able to pick the tick off with a stick, but it takes her a minute because the thing is clamped on for dear life–the way it wanted to be clamped onto her flesh. Oh my gods AAAHH!

Cue the footage of me running. I basically ran for the next mile or so.

Luckily we’d finally reached the downhill portion of the trail, and I took that opportunity to run like the wind, Bullseye. Whilst running I also would shake my arms and legs in what looked like the Hokey Pokey crossed with sheer panic. Or maybe some kind of seizure-related spasm. Regardless, I left my mom and aunt to fend for their own damn selves and hightailed it the fuck out of there, not stopping until I reached the ocean of asphalt that made up the rest stop parking lot, where we’d left our car. Praise Jesus. I never knew I could be so grateful to see a football field’s worth of asphalt. Sometimes they pave paradise to get me the fuck away from ticks.

So now I’m in the parking lot. I run to our car, but as my mom had been driving and it was her rental SUV, not my Acura, I didn’t have the keys. Luckily, Mom wasn’t far behind me because I’d started peeling off my clothes for the benefit of some deer and a trucker fueling his semi across the parking lot. She clicked the SUV open and I sat down on the open back, taking off my shoes and socks and rolling my yoga pants up to my thighs, turning everything inside out and feeling all surfaces to check for ticks. I also stripped off my REI fleece hoodie and a long-sleeved Stanford-emblazoned shirt (basically all my clothing that is vaguely workout apparel says Stanford on it somewhere–when I’m going to the gym I feel like an admissions brochure), so that I was standing in my untied hiking boots–newly verified to be tick free–and a sports bra, pants rolled up past my knees. A some point my mom or someone pointed out that there were bathrooms fifty or so yards away–and that there were strangers next to a car not thirty yards away that were staring at me–so I took that opportunity to 1) pee and 2) make sure every last inch of my body was tick-free beyond the prying eyes of truckers and tourists.

Even though I’d checked my every bodily surface, I still felt like things were crawling on me–ick ick ick–but by the time I returned from the bathroom I felt mostly better.

My mom and aunt verified their own tick-free status–in a much more sedate manner–and we got back in the car. We decided to drive the 50 or so miles to the southern end of the Shenandoah National Park, as the sun was going down and we could watch the sunset from various lookouts and just generally scope things out. I was amenable to this idea, especially once separated from the tick-laden grasses and presented with a bag of dried apple slices. Thus, we drove.

We stopped ten minutes or so later to watch the sun sink below the Blue Ridge Mountains, and yeah, it was pretty spectacular. All three of us we in a good mood once we’d recommenced the drive, so long as my aunt stayed away from grasses and foliage when we stopped at overlooks. She’s a birder and is more interested in getting a picture of or getting a good look at some interesting bird than she is in preventing ticks from clinging to her clothes and entering our tick-free-car-sanctuary–or god/dess forbid, my house. If you bring a tick into my house I will end your life. Unless you are a cute dog, in which case I will help get the tick off you with the tweezers and match and whatnot, but I will say “Ew! Ew! Ew!” the whole time and probably wear rubber dishwashing gloves. This is why I need a real rather than imaginary boyfriend (sorry, Darren Criss) or girlfriend (Lindsay…): so someone else can deal with ticks and I don’t have to!

My mom, aunt, and I managed, however, to return to our SUV asylum without bringing any tiny, horrifying passengers with us. After the sun had set, we set off to finish the last stretch of park before we totally lost the light, and after driving for maybe twenty minutes, we saw something a hundred or so yards ahead of us in the road. It was dark and appeared to be an animal, and then holy hellfires it’s a BEAR. 

No, it’s two bears! It’s a mama bear and a cub!! OH MY GODS STOP THE CAR!!!

My mom hit the brakes car and we inched toward them, staring agog through the windshield (or at least I was agog, mouth open–potentially with high pitched screeches of “It’s a baby bear!!” emanating from it). As we got closer my aunt recovered her senses a bit and was like, “Sweet fuck, BACK UP!” so my mom did so, eventually turning around, pulling off to the side of the road, and stopping the car. My aunt, apparently having used up all of her good sense in the “Back up!” moment, threw open her side door and jumped out with her camera, quiet-running (you know, when you pick up your feet really quickly and look like cartoon mouse Jerry trying not to wake a sleeping Tom) toward the bears. My mom, excited/panicked, whisper-yelled to her to be careful.

Not one to jump off bridges, I would, however, apparently have to say “Yes” to the question “If all your friends ran toward a bear, would you run too?” because I also jumped out of the car and walked/quiet-ran towards my aunt and the bears.

(We were at least 50 yards from them at our closest. We’re not complete morons. Only partial morons.)

My aunt had climbed a bit up the hill at the side of the road to get a better angle on the bears in hopes of seeing them and taking their picture. At some point in all this we realized that there was a mother and not one but two bear cubs. Hyperventilating with excitement/cuteness overload.

I wanted to see the bears as well as possible, not ever having even glimpsed a bear outside of a zoo, but I also did not want to get mauled/killed/eaten/etc. I knew I shouldn’t get any closer on the road, where the bears still sat, so my only choice was to climb the hill where my aunt was and hope for a better view.

I glanced over at my aunt and saw her standing in knee-high grass snapping photos. Grass = ticks = over my dead body. Evidently I take this last part seriously: since I couldn’t go up the hill, I took a step forward on the road, closer to the bears.

At this point my mom, still manning the car and staying prepared to warn any potential oncoming traffic, whisper-screamed at me, “Do. Not. Get. Any. Closer. Moron.” (The “moron” was implied.)

My body halted and my brain did a quick reality check: in hopes of getting a better view of some wildlife that could eat me, I was more willing to approach bears than to risk getting a tick on me.

Bear, tick. Bear, tick. Potentially angry mother bear desperate to protect her cubs, tick. Apparently, the answer was  “potentially angry bear” because there was no way I was getting anyway near that grass.

I conceded the backwards-ness of this preference. I backed up. A little. And stared open-jawed a bit more before the bears began to walk down the hill on the opposite side of the road and my mom whisper-screamed at us to get our asses back in the car.

Not a half-hour later we saw another mama bear and baby amongst the trees and brush at the roadside. Though we turned the car around once again to get a better look, this time we watched from the (relative) safety of our SUV.

Come to think of it, the SUV was probably a safer bet all along. Faced with plastic and metal and doors, those ticks didn’t stand a chance. They may have pinchers that grab on like a motherfucker, but they don’t have any opposable thumbs.

I’m Not Being Sarcastic, I Really Am This Excited

In the spirit of my last post advocating enthusiasm, I am going to dedicate this post to things I am crazy enthusiastic about. You could say that I am disproportionately excited about Disneyland and toast, but I say taste this toast and tell me it doesn’t taste like pure joy.

1. Lindsey Pavao tweeting my blog post about her!

Last week, I gushed about my crush on The Voice contestant Lindsey Pavao, and when she found out about my blog post (probably through her boyfriend, who is friend’s with my brother J and commented about the post on J’s Facebook wall), rather than filing a restraining order or hiring ninja body guards (regular body guards are so 1992),

she tweeted it to her gajillion Twitter followers along with a sweet note. Nearly 5000 people read my blog that day. I’d like to say that kind of traffic is normal, but I’d also like to say I’m dating Evan Rachel Wood, it’s just that she doesn’t know it yet — so no, not really. Thanks, Lindsey! Such a classy lady. Also, how hot is this picture?

Must. Buy. Dark. Lipstick.

2. Toast!

I really love toast. “But it’s just burned bread!” Sure, the way diamonds are just compressed carbon.

If made correctly, toast is crunchy on the outside, moist and bready on the inside, and covered in delicious, delicious butter (or your preferred butter substitute — I’m a fan of Smart Balance myself).

My brother, a competitive cyclist, used to have exercise-induced asthma, which was a serious problem when he was biking up mountains. He discovered, however, that he was gluten-intolerant, and when he cut gluten out of his diet: poof! no asthma. Since then, I’ve tried eliminating gluten from my diet, and even though my mom and brother felt that doing so had profoundly advantageous physical effects, I didn’t really notice a difference. I did, however, become aware of how much wheat was in my diet, so I decided to cut down just in favor of nutritional diversity. But there was no way I was giving up my toast, and luckily, brown rice bread came to the rescue. It makes amazing toast.

Rice bread isn’t great for sandwiches or generally eating it plain — it’s really dense and a bit sweet — but it makes damn good toast. The inside is so soft and sweet that the butter provides a wonderful salty contrast. (I’ve gotten fairly simple tastes when it comes to toast: I don’t need jam or marmalade or Nutella — I can’t buy Nutella; I will just eat globs of it from the jar — just a good glazing of butter, but don’t skimp now. Dry toast with just a tiny scrape of butter is so pitiful.)

Once, when I was in high school, I had a toast-related trauma. I was on my period, and in those days I had mad hormonal mood swings as part of my PMS, so my ability to handle disappointment was almost non-existent. One weekend day, I woke up sick with cramps and all I wanted was to make some toast and lie on the couch watching TV. I walked into our family room and saw my dad and brother watching a soccer game on the television, and when I turned to the kitchen, there was no toaster oven. It had burned up the previous week — caught on fire and everything! during dinner! it was rather exciting — and my dad and brother were supposed to buy another one while my mom and I were out of town visiting colleges. They clearly had not replaced the toaster. I looked at them on the couch, then at the empty countertop where the toaster oven used to be, and turned on my heel and walked back down the hall, all the way into the bathroom, at which point I stood with my forehead against the wall and cried quietly. My mom found me like that a few minutes later and was basically like “wtf.” She made me take a bath and managed to make me toast in our oven. My mother is wonderful.

3. Oh yeah: THE HUNGER GAMES!!!

I know you’re tired of hearing about The Hunger Games — they’re all over every form of media — but that’s too bad. Pipe down — I’m even more crazy enthusiastic about this one.

I love these books. I was really surprised how into them I got. I basically sobbed my way through the second and third ones; I was terrified my favorite characters were going to die, which, considering the high body count in these things, was quite likely. I fell in love with Katniss, who has been touted as a refreshingly feminist heroine, which I think she is, but not just because of her survival skills, talent with a bow and arrow, and her defiance. She is also a deeply emotional creature and spends significant portions of the second and third books basically catatonic because the people she loves keep being killed and kidnapped and tortured all around her. Katniss can be strong by masculine standards while retaining the emotional qualities that society traditional labels “feminine.” Peeta’s main strengths, similarly, are his compassion and emotional intelligence — again, “feminine” attributes — though he’s not exactly a wimp with a weapon, either. In addition to giving Katniss two very different choices of lover, Gale and Peeta also present two complicated and contrasting options for what it means to be masculine. (Kelsey Wallace has a great meditation on this over at Bitch Magazine online.)

Apart from the gender dynamics, though, and the extensive social commentary that I’m not going to get into right now, The Hunger Games books are awesome because you cannot put them down. Plot gets a lot of shit in the literary scene for being literature’s baser element, a sort of necessary evil, but the phenomenon that The Hunger Games has become is a helpful reminder of the power of plot. Stories entrance, compel, and change us as human beings, so you can scoff at The Hunger Games and pick up your copy of Gravity’s Rainbow instead, but there’s something about the visceral experience of narrative that should be valued just as much as a heightened aesthetic experience.

Now, as for the film franchise, I thought the movie was generally very successful, though I thought it took out a lot of the political commentary that is in the book and that the filmmakers botched a few important moments (as well as cutting out some of my favorite moments from the book — Katniss shouting “Peeta!” from the tree and then clapping her hands over her mouth? That moment is gold!). Maybe it’s a function of the PG-13 rating and the studio’s need to market to young teenagers, but the movie is basically Hunger Games Light, less violent, less complex, with less drastic consequences for the characters. In the novel, Katniss is really beat up at the end of the Games and Peeta is literally seconds away from death — he ends up having his leg amputated and the doctors that rescue him and Katniss from the arena have to restart his heart, twice — while in the film they’re just dirty with a couple of bruises and small cuts. Still, the movie was quite an accomplishment in terms of its faithfulness to the books’ significance and tone; I’m not sure if even the final Harry Potter movies felt as in step with their source material as The Hunger Games film.

Bottom line: I LOVE IT.

4. Faux fur’s becoming popular!

Since I love animals so desperately, I can’t handle real fur. I discovered yesterday, reading an interview with him in GQ, that Drake has a $5000 arctic fox fur bomber jacket. No. Not okay. Little foxes!! Suffice it to say I now like Drake less. I was never in love with him like some people, but I will not forgive this fox thing. Foxes are my spirit animal.

But while real fur is super not okay, in my opinion, I still love soft things. I especially love when my clothing is really soft. I never thought I’d be into faux fur — it always seemed so gaudy; also, Gotti — but this past season’s batch of higher quality acrylic stuff, as well as my changing fashion sense and decision that my clothing isn’t weird enough (seriously: I sometimes stand in front of my mirror and think, “This outfit isn’t weird enough”) but I’ve come to be a sucker for faux fur. It’s fuzzy! If I can pet my clothing, I’m on board.

5. Water (specifically, drinking it) !

I love water in general: the ocean, rain, rivers, lakes — I go apeshit for that stuff. In my daily life, though, water is most important as something that I consume in large quantities. I drink more water than anyone I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of my mother.

One time, in college, I was in a professor’s office at around 10 am, carrying my usual Nalgene, which holds something like 36 ounces. Since this was my first appointment of the day, it was full. My professor gestured to it and said, “Are you really going to drink all that?” When I replied in the affirmative, she was impressed. “I never drink enough water. I consume so much coffee.” I nodded in understanding and we launched into the discussion I’d come to have. During our half hour conference, I emptied my Nalgene of about 30 of my 36 ounces.

I’m the person that the busboy has to come back to every five minutes because my water-glass is empty again. I get really excited if a waiter/waitress leaves a pitcher of water on my table in a restaurant, and I’ll frequent any establishment that has a water cooler or a soda fountain where I can refill my water bottle.

I love water. It’s delicious and it makes my body run better and it doesn’t have any calories and it gives me something to do during awkward pauses in class.

6. New Gossip Girl episodes!

Gossip Girl is trashy and ridiculous, filled with improbable events and characters that I find abhorrent. And yet, it’s also awesome. Anything that involves Chuck or Blair is entertaining. Case in point: consider Dan Humphrey. He’s so annoying a friend and I once had a “Who is more annoying, Dan Humphrey or Finn Hudson” conversation, and we basically came to an impasse because both of them so desperately need someone to shake them by the shoulders and yell, “What is wrong with you? You’re living in a dream world!” I find Dan Humphrey so distasteful that I didn’t realize I find Penn Badgley (the actor who plays Dan) attractive until I saw him opposite Emma Stone in Easy A (stellar movie, btw — so erudite; also, Stanley Tucci). Watching Badgley as Woodchuck Todd in Easy A (you must see this film if you haven’t already), I realized he’s actually pretty cute. And not irrevocably obnoxious. It’s just his character on GG that I find so repellant. And yet, now that Dan is dating Blair, I find him and plot points involving him amusing. Although even Blair can’t save his hair. It looks like a marmot died on his head.

Blair’s redemptive powers are great. She’s a fierce woman with unapologetic ambition and no patience for other people’s bullshit. Also, a gold Burberry Prorsum trench coat.

She's clutching her coat like that because she's wearing lingerie under it and definitely didn't realize her boyfriend's parents were there.

This is what it looks like when it's not being violently jammed to the body in order to hide garters and a corset. WANT.

The writers have included some things in the last few episodes that I think totally betray Blair as a character, but these infractions aside, you can always count on Blair to have a witty barb, an inventive scheme, and truly excellent designer clothes. Unlike Serena, who, in addition to continually setting new records of cluelessness and entitled indignation, dresses like a trashy sixteen-year-old who shops at Forever 21 and Wet Seal and Bebe:

and then she turns around and thinks a lace-edged romper and a sequined vest are acceptable sleep apparel:

As for Chuck Bass, earlier this season he referred to USA Today as “the newspaper for people who can’t read” and he recently adopted a dog that he named Monkey. Also, actor Ed Westwick has perfected a deep voice full of both disdain and apathy that implicitly says, “Serena, I can’t believe I’m in having another conversation about how you’re still in love with Humphrey — after five years! I have a billion dollars. I could be doing literally anything else. If you weren’t Blair’s best friend, I guarantee you’d have ‘mysteriously disappeared’ long ago.”

Also, in a recent episode, he wore this:

That, my friends, is a hooded red onesie. I rest my case.

Nate should be embarrassed by how normal his workout clothes are. Embarrassed.

7. Dogs!!!

When I see a dog in public, I have to concentrate on utilizing all my self-control in order not to run up to it and hug it. “That is someone else’s dog. She will be freaked out if you scream and sprint toward her and then start hugging it.”

I can barely help myself. I just fucking love dogs!!

8. Disneyland!!!

I can be a cynical person. I think that the US Government is, in the worst case scenario, evil, and in the best case scenario, spectacularly incompetent. I don’t trust corporations and the all-pervasive consumerism of our country makes me very uncomfortable. HOWEVER, I love Disneyland. I love it. I realize that Disney is a multinational corporation that is doing tons of stuff I don’t agree with and that even their that movies I love from my childhood perpetuate harmful racial and gender stereotypes, but I just don’t care. Outside Disneyland, sure, these things are a problem, but inside those gates, I’m at The Happiest Place on Earth, and I plan on having the best fucking time possible.

I went to Disneyland with my two best friends to celebrate my 19th birthday, and my best guy friend, S, does not revere Disneyland in the way I do. I think he’d only previously been there once, as like a seven-year-old, and he thought we were going to approach our time in Walt’s fantasy kingdom with the same sarcasm cynicism that we apply to so many other things in life, but he was so wrong. Right after we’d entered the park, he made some comment that was not vehemently pro-Disneyland, and I almost ate his face.

“I have basically no areas in my life in which I have maintained my childlike sense of wonder. I enjoy lots of things, but it’s really hard for me to do so unreservedly, to open myself up to the untempered joy of an experience. Disneyland is basically the one place that makes me feel childlike rapturous wonder and if you take that from me I will end your life.”

Suffice it to say, S was amenably positive for the rest of the day.

Now, don’t even get me started on the glories of Disney World…

9. THE OLYMPICS!!!

THE OLYMPICS ARE COMING THE OLYMPICS ARE COMING THE OLYMPICS ARE COMING AHHHH!!!

Generally, I’m not a huge sports person. The friends who’ve seen me at Stanford football games can attest to the fact that when I do focus on a sport, though, I get really fucking into it. Screaming, swearing, gesticulating wildly — and soccer matches are possibly even worse.

The Olympics are pretty much my favorite thing ever. Not Olympics time? Sports — eh. Olympics time? Oh my gods what is on is that curling I must watch it! 

In my mind, Olympics are the ultimate competition and winning an Olympic medal the highest honor an athlete can attain. Of course, in certain sports (mostly uber-popular team sports), other championships might take precedent in terms of prestige, such as the World Cup for soccer, but in my mind, when I’m watching the Olympics, this moment is the most important moment in this person’s career, period. That’s what gets me screaming at a biathlon with people shooting on skis in the snowy wilderness, what gets me crying about some diver and her arduous journey to get here.

The Olympics are a perpetual waterworks for me. Put on almost any medals ceremony and I’ll just burst out in tears.

I love it. I love Bob Costas, I love the video bios for the athletes, I love the special NBC Olympics music. I love seeing athletes whose careers I’ve followed compete. I love rooting with my whole heart for someone I just found out existed twenty minutes ago. I love watching sports I normally don’t give the time of day. Mostly, I love the emotionality of it — the joy, the agony, the disappointment, the triumph. I CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF IT.

When do the Olympics start again? July 27? Bomb. GET READY PEOPLE!! LONDON 2012!!!!

The Case for Enthusiasm

If you read this site, you’ll already be aware of the fact that I’m a pretty sarcastic person. I’ve been known to say that my mother tongue is sarcasm, but that’s not quite true — it’s my father tongue. My mother is generally quite positive.

I am also fairly critical, a skeptic, and I definitely sometimes yield to the temptation to be elitist with regards to art and entertainment — Mumford and Sons? Really? — but I am also a sucker for enthusiasm.

How I feel about the Olympics/Disneyland/a new Toni Morrison novel/insert thing I love here

The two worlds I spend most of my time in are academia and the art world, and I’m constantly surrounded by people hating on everything. It gets tiring. Wow, you don’t like Sylvia Plath, congratulations on your discerning taste, jackass. While academia certainly has a canon that it’s acceptable to worship/you’re expected to worship, academics can also fall prey to the hipster ethos of “the more obscure it is, the better it is” (unless it’s written by a woman: then it’s “chick lit”— or possibly young adult lit — and unworthy of serious discussion). And while artists love geeking out with each other over shared love of a certain writer/painter/musician, they also love hating on anyone whose work becomes successful. Just ask any young poet about the Dickman brothers: it’s a love them or hate them thing, and bitches will throw down.

Did you just say All American Poem was a shitty first book?

John Lithgow knows what's up. (Also, these gif Tumblrs are all over my Facebook feed recently, so you're getting some gifs today.)

But really, I’m so bored with all this hating. A few weeks ago, The Awl published a piece in which they’d asked a number of editors of literary magazines, as well as some contemporary writers, to name books or authors that they’d loved in the past and are now ashamed to think about. Quite a few mentioned Ayn Rand (duh), since many writerly and intellectual types go through an infatuation with her — she particularly appeals to the individualistic mindset of the teenage years. Now, while the woman’s philosophy was batshit insane, I think the fact that thousands of teenagers read her massive novels (Atlas Shrugged is a brick: the thing’s like 1200 pages — imagine a high schooler choosing to read a 1200-page novel) and feel galvanized by them is a sign that she has a certain kind of talent.

The Beats were another oft-repeated example of books people used to love but now are embarrassed to have cared so much about. The Beats are an easy target, and I think it’s kind of lazy to say you hate them. It’s like saying you hate Nickelback: you don’t have to provide any reasons, everyone just nods along. Of course, Nickelback makes me want to drive my face through the wall, and I think their lead singer is impressively unattractive, but still, hating them isn’t very original. It’s the same with the Beats: you can say they’re simplistic and self-indulgent and overly grandiose, and everyone will just go with it. Even though what’s really simplistic and self-indulgent is regarding this passionately inventive and massively influential group of writers as somehow insufficiently literary, but whatever — have fun at your Douche Convention! (I will defend Alan Ginsberg to my grave. “America” is one of my favorite poems of all time.)

Apparently the lead singer of Nickelback is named Chad Kroeger. I'm sorry, Chad, but you are one creepy-looking mofo.

The part of The Awl article that really bothered me, though, was Edmund White’s comments on Virginia Woolf. What he said:

My reaction:

Well fuck you very much. You cannot tell me that reading Mrs. Dalloway isn’t a journey for your very soul, or that Orlando isn’t a tour de goddamn force. (Also, thanks for writing off basically the only female modernist anyone takes seriously — sorry, Djuna Barnes, but almost no one remembers you, even though you’re a genius — or rather, one of the only female novelists period that people are willing to accept as truly great, because she can keep up with people like Faulkner and Joyce, which she fucking does, by the way.)

Now, Mr. White teaches at Princeton, so I’m sure he feels entitled to belittle anything he damn well pleases. And that’s his (annoying) prerogative, but I’m really tired of a culture in which degrading others’ work is the key to establishing yourself as a “serious cultured person.” (Are you wearing a monocle? Why are you not wearing a monocle, serious cultured person? If you’re going to talk about how television is the opiate of the masses, you should at least be wearing a monocle. And a bow-tie.)

Are they playing...Coldplay? Guards, take them away!

Imagine you are standing on a ladder, the top of which reaches a platform with a plate of cookies on it. Hitting the person next to you doesn’t get you any higher in the air, it simply knocks them down to a lower rung. There still isn’t anyone getting the cookies. (And yes, the ladder/cookie bit is an analogy for the progress of the human race. Where do I pick up my Philosopher of the Year award?)

And as much shit as I give various things/people on this site, it’s ultimately more fun to gush about something I love than to rant about something I hate — thus all the pictures of puppies and bunnies and Bradley Cooper.

I die.

I’m trying not to tamp down my natural enthusiasm in my life or apologize for liking the things I like. Yes, I write literary criticism that looks at Faulkner through the lens of poststructuralist and other twentieth century philosophical theories of consciousness, and I ALSO LOVE THE HUNGER GAMES. I LOVE THEM. I LOVE THE CHARACTERS. I LOVE KATNISS AND PEETA AND CINNA AND EVERYONE. I SOBBED THROUGH THOSE FUCKING BOOKS. THEY ARE INCREDIBLE AND THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DISS THEM:

I think The Hunger Games books demonstrate keen attention to character development and a masterful management of plot, and you can make fun of them and of me all you want, but at the end of the day, I’m the one that gets to marry Peeta Mellark in my mind…I mean, what?

I adore Peeta in the books, so I was very skeptical about the casting for the film. Against my expectations, however, Josh Hutcherson was phenomenal as Peeta in the first movie. So now I obviously love him.

I’m campaigning for enthusiasm. Let’s love things and not feel ashamed for it.

My friend C is a continual example to me in this. C has perhaps the most unabashedly open heart of anyone I’ve ever encountered; she’s got love spilling out of her very pores: love for people, for nature, and for art and entertainment, both “high” and “low.” She doesn’t distinguish between these last two; she just loves things. Her heart is practically bursting with affection and joy when she watches Pretty Little Liars, and that enjoyment is not at all ironic. She feels no need to regard such a “trashy” TV show cynically, and watching her watch PLL is an absurdly enjoyment experience in and of itself.

We have a friend who doesn’t watch TV and sometimes when we’re talking excitedly about a show, he looks at us like we’re paramecia to his homo sapien. And we’re like, bitch, talk to Frank O’Hara:

My Heart

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

— Frank O’Hara

I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. So let’s roll back the cynicism a bit. I aspire to be this excited at least once a day:

I have a new crush, thanks to The Voice, and it isn’t Adam Levine…well, it isn’t JUST Adam Levine

So I was planning on publishing like five blog posts when I published those last two, and then I realized that they’d all be about The Voice, because apparently I have a lot of things to say about The Voice, like really a lot. So I decided to sketch those posts out and save them for after I’d written some non-Voice-related posts…except that that second part never happened. All week I thought about nifty things I could be writing for the amusement of all my (imaginary) followers and the proceeded not to write a single one of these things.

So you’re getting another post on The Voice. And because 65% of the entries on this blog end up being about people that I think are sexy — regardless of what my intended topic is in beginning the post — you’re getting also getting another “Look at this person I find attractive! LOOK!” entry. This one departs a little from my norm, though, in that it features a lady person. So straight men, lesbians, and other lady-lovers, congratulations! Sexy chick: ahoy!

But first I’m going to make you sit through some gushing about Adam Levine because, come on, his sweaters?! Adorbs.

In case you’re not sure who Adam Levine is, he’s one of the “coaches” on The Voice, and he’s the lead singer of Maroon 5, that band whose songs sound like sex. If you haven’t listened to one of their records all the way through (because midway you and your partner got…distracted) you might be familiar with some singles like “She Will Be Loved,” “Harder to Breathe,” “Makes Me Wonder,” and that mental parasite “Moves Like Jagger” (that song’s a catchy ringworm that squeezes its way into your brain).

I’ve always liked Maroon 5. Yes, with varying degrees of shame, I’ve always liked them. Maroon 5’s songs are catchy pop-rock with a sensual funk/jazz flavor, and their lyrics mix actually interesting figurative language (“The sex she slipped into my coffee”) with the straightforward: “It really makes me wonder if I ever gave a fuck about you.” Okay, so the latter is more common, but come on — that coffee line is pretty good stuff.

So while I’ve liked the band, my feelings about Adam Levine specifically have been a bit mixed. On the one hand, he writes sexy songs and looks like this:

On the other, he always seemed a bit sleazy to me — the kind of guy my friends and I might describe as an “STD grab-bag,” who not only knows what “manscaping” is but participates in it (photo above says “yes”). So I was always vaguely attracted to him, but I resented being attracted to him and felt like I had somehow gotten oil all over my body any time I thought of him.

But then I started watching The Voice and Adam began his campaign to win me over, which he did by being incredibly invested in the singers in the competition (especially but not only the ones he’s coaching), making jokes with Blake Shelton about how the two of them are in love, and wearing adorable sweaters.

Thanks to the fact that they shot all the Battles on one day but showed them over four weeks meant that we got four weeks of Adam’s awesome sweater. I approve, NBC, I approve. Also, re: my recent post on facial hair, this is a successful employment of stubble. Though his hair is a bit too gelled.

And then hiding behind said adorable sweater when he doesn’t want to be mean and send someone home.

He’s such a shy little bunny!

Actual shy bunny.

Also, that above photo where he’s nude is an awareness ad for testicular cancer, and the hands belong to his (now ex) girlfriend, model Anne LongRussianName, so even that is now less vaguely unsettling.

But anyway, Adam — sextastic as I’ve come to think he is, what with his sweaters and his posing for Out magazine and his pro-queer rhetoric and his feminist-y comments to the media — is not the crush I’ve come here to talk about. I’m here to discuss Lindsey Pavao.

Lindsey is one of the contestants on The Voice this season and, in my opinion, one of the best ones. For her audition, she performed a cover of the Trey Songz tune “Say Aah,” which she had arranged herself and which essentially remade the song entirely, turning the beat-heavy hiphop song into The Weeknd meets Lily Allen meets the Antlers.

This has the audio for the full song and I think it’s worth a listen. I like this a lot better than the original.

At the time, Cee-Lo called Lindsey’s audition the most interesting thing to happen on the season so far. Since then, Lindsey trounced her Battle Round opponent on their duet of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” then two weeks ago gave an invigoratingly creepy performance of Gotye’s definitively excellent “Somebody that I Used to Know.”

Now that the live shows have arrived, the production value has risen exponentially. Instead of throwing the contestants onstage with some basic lighting changes that Kyle, the 10th grader who does the lights for the school musical, could pull off, Lindsey and the others now get fully choreographed routines complete with a half dozen to a dozen dancers (for one female performer, they were half-naked men, to  Blake’s confusion/distraction), complex lighting effects, smoke, and help from wardrobe.

While I appreciate what they’re trying to do, I also think that producing each song likes it’s the VMAs sometimes distracts from the actual contestant singing and other times makes a nervous, inexperienced performer look very out of place amongst so many professionals. Sometimes, however, that VMAness works in tandem with the singer to elevate the song to an experience. That’s how Lindsey’s performance of “Somebody that I Used to Know” went that Monday night. When the music began, viewers couldn’t pick her out onstage amongst a crowd of dancers wearing creepy mime masks. Then Lindsey leaned out from their midst, totally in command, and her voice slid into the song with a spooky airiness and her signature slightly ragged tone. My poet side wants to say her voice “slunk” into the song, like a cat (that may or may not be an animagus and thus magical) slinks into a room. Lindsey has a slinking quality about her. In a good way.

That shit is terrifying.

After emerging from the line of terrifying mime-corpses, she then proceeded to own the gorram stage. That woman has presence. There’s a shyness to her that emanates as an enigmatic quality, and it only makes her more magnetic. Even after the performance, when the coaches were commenting and Adam noted that he liked it overall but wanted her to really blow it out more on the chorus, she just stood with her gaze slightly lowered, head tucked into her shoulder a bit, with this small smile that said she was totally in control and not at all bothered by the criticism of the smoking-hot Grammy winner 15 feet in front of her. (That I could be so composed; I run into furniture, counters, and doorhandles on a daily basis. I know they’re there, that knowledge simply doesn’t alter my course.)

Yes, her voice is beautiful — both strange and lovely — but Lindsey also has something else, call it what you will: “command,” “charisma,” “the ‘it’ factor.” And aiding her in cultivating this magnetism is the fact that she is damn sexy.

Really, really sexy.

There’s actually another part to the Lindsey story for me, in which I wanted her to do well even before I saw her audition or heard her voice: my brother knows her. My younger brother J currently attends the University of California, Davis, from which Lindsey just recently graduated. She happens to be dating one of J’s friends.

The first time J mentioned her was about 9 months ago and our conversation had nothing to do with The Voice, or singing. We were talking about how my brother is attracted to girls with short hair, like pixie cut short, and he said that the girls he thinks are really hot his friends often don’t quite get. As an example, he then mentioned a girl from Davis who had one half of her head shaved with the other half of her hair long; J and his roommate K both thought this girl was super hot, which their other friends found weird. There’s no accounting for (bad) taste, other friends.

I remembered that conversation because it isn’t every day you hear about a girl with half her head shaved — especially if this is somehow a good look. When it came up that a girl J knew was going to be on The Voice, he mentioned to me that this singer happened to have half her head shaved, I think so that I would be able to recognize her easily, but I immediately said, “Oh! The hot one?” to which he (vaguely surprised) replied in the affirmative.

I was excited. I was going to get to see the hot girl with the half-shaved head! Then Lindsey appeared on my computer monitor.

Hot damn. I did not realize what I was in for.

So yes, Lindsey shows up and she is FOXY. Oh yeah, and she went to UC Davis, so she’s obviously not a moron. And then it turns out she has a great voice and is actually an interesting artist? Aaaand then it turns out I have a crush on her.

I’m sorry, did you say something? I was busy being stupid adorable.

Lindsey is hot. Really hot. It’s absurd how hot she is. Even more absurd than my being attracted to the same girl as my younger brother. (It’s going to be super awkward when he reads this blog post, isn’t it? Hi, J! Sorry about the awkward…)

(Side bar: I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog recently talking about men I find attractive, so it’s possible regular readers have assumed I’m straight. Meh, not quite. 

I identify as pansexual (any time I say that I get blank stares), which basically means bi, except that I hate the term bisexual because it 1) perpetuates the notion that there are only two sexes and thus ignores the existence of trans and genderqueer people, and 2) in its reference to duality implies that the bisexual person is attracted to men and women equally, when I don’t think most people are. I’m certainly not.

I mostly subscribe to the Kinsey Scale notion of sexuality, which suggests that sexuality is a spectrum, not two poles of “gay” and “straight.” Some people may be “totally straight” or “totally gay” in that they are attracted to only one sex 100% of the time, but some people might be 80% attracted to women and 20% attracted to men. Trying to quantify it like that only works as an example; actual attraction is clearly not as simple as percentages. Kinsey tries to approximate this division of attraction with a scale beginning at 0 (stone cold hetero) and ending at 6 (flaming queer), but I think you catch my drift. I slide toward the heterosexual end of the scale; I’m primarily attracted to men. Primarily, but not always. Like in Lindsey’s case. End of explanation/lecture.)

This is why not in Lindsey’s case:

Meanwhile, backstage, Lindsey takes a timeout to be stupid gorgeous.

So to recap: Lindsey has a really cool, strange, vaguely creepy singing voice, which I adore, that is also super sexy, which I am totally on board with.

After her audition, Lindsey disappeared from my TV until her Battle duet/sing-off with some guy I’ve already forgotten. They covered Nirvana’s “Heart-shaped Box” (Lindsey covered it in sexy; random dude covered it in blah — yay puns!)

During the video coverage for her Battle, Lindsey sang well, liked Nirvana, made pretty interesting comments (considering the bank of cliches contestants seem to pull from when they’re talking on shows like this), and was generally adorable. Oh yeah, and her hair looked awesome during rehearsal.

I just love her braid-bun hairdo here — I think it’s gorgeous; I wish I ever did anything that interesting with my hair. Until I was 15, I didn’t even wear it in a ponytail, I just wore it down. All the time. All the time. (It was long, it hid my face, I had self-esteem issues, moving on.) The one confusing thing about being attracted to people of your own sex is that sometimes you can’t figure out if you are more attracted to them or jealous of them. It’s a mind-bamboozling rush of “Ah! I want to look like you!” and “Ah! I want to kiss you!” Not for the faint of heart…

So, as for the Battle: Lindsey did a fine job with Nirvana, securing her place in the live shows and returning my heart rate to normal, and then for the first live show week she sang “Somebody that I Used to Know” by Gotye, which I think is a great song on its own. Add Lindsey and it’s like putting chocolate on my pretzels: sweet and salty and ohmygosh delicious! (Now I’m hungry…) Gotye’s original version is great, and his music video is pretty interesting too.

So anyway, Lindsey sings Gotye, and she wears this:

It’s like Mummenschanz, Renaissance Venice, and a Thierry Mugler fashion show are all happening in the middle of that god-awful Lestat Elton John musical from like 2005 that was based on Anne Rice’s vampire novels and the only real accomplishments of which were in fog effects and boring me to tears.

She stomps around the stage being badass and having a sick voice and generally looking hot as all hell. My parents told me later they thought she had the best performance of the night; I thought that she definitely had one of the best performances and at the very least looked hotter than everyone else. Even Adam. And have you seen Adam?

Oh hi, bunny.

Mmm. But still, during the live show Adam wasn’t wearing his sweater, and the fierce singer with the sharp grey eyes captured my attention.

I think her eyes are hypnotizing me…

Then, this past Monday, The Voice quarterfinals aired. Lindsey sang Katy Perry’s “Piece of Me” (thing I just learned: I don’t know how to spell Katy Perry’s name, which I feel sort of proud about) and was generally badass, although the song is a bit “eh” in my opinion.

Oh yeah, and she looked awesome. Her costumes are pretty much just better than the stuff the other contestants wear.

Because The Voice is all about my not getting bored, they had a surprise instant elimination at the end of Monday’s show in which each coach who’d had singers perform had to eliminate one of their team members on the spot. Brutal. Fast moving. The excellent opposite of Idol’s dragging-on-forever-how-is-that-person-still-here (non-)eliminations. Point for The Voice.

Christina Aguilera is Lindsey’s coach and I was really afraid she’d send Lindsey home because the other three performers on her team are very showy — big, big voices. There’s opera singer Chris Mann (whom I actually quite like), middle-aged soulful singer Jesse Campbell (who is technically very good but who just doesn’t excite me), and pop-princess wannabe Ashley DellaRosa or something like that (who has a good voice but whom I just find bo-ring. She sounds like every other pop diva on the radio, only with less personality — though she has been improving lately.) To the shock of people who actually give a shit about this show, Christina eliminated Jesse Campbell, who these giving-a-shit people, including the other coaches, had dubbed a frontrunner. Whatever, Lindsey was safe!

Then the live eliminations of Tuesday rolled around. Each coach had three singers. America voted (like on Idol) and the singer from each team with the most votes was safe, while the other two had a “last chance” to sing for their coach, at which point the coach would save one and send one home.

Opera man Mann did a mostly entertaining if not terribly interesting Coldplay cover on Monday night, which America apparently liked because he got the most votes, leaving Lindsey and her quiet weirdness to battle the pop belter.

Ashley Pop Singer sang an engaging if predictable version of Gaga’s “You and I,” while Lindsey followed with a performance of Mike Posner’s “Please Don’t Go,” which was at turns quiet, sly, powerful, desperate, and just generally fucking moving (can you tell I’m getting into this?). Though she managed to finish with some lovely final notes, Lindsey was in tears by the end, and so was I. And so was her coach, Christina.

Tears = good sign?

A few agonizing minutes later, Christina restarted my heart by announcing that she was saving Lindsey and sending Ashley home. I cried. Then I cheered. In my living room, alone.

So here’s the moral of this rather meandering story: Lindsey Pavao is talented and also a FOX, so you should support her on The Voice (though it is not on FOX, but rather NBC, to clarify) because apparently I care a lot more about this show than I thought I did, since I was in tears watching her perform/when I thought she was going to be eliminated.

Next week Adam and Cee Lo’s teams are competing, so Lindsey and the rest of Team Xtina (and Team Blake) get a reprieve, but in two weeks, it’s the semifinals. Help me keep my heart rate manageable: vote for Lindsey. You can vote on Facebook. You don’t even need to use one of those old-fashioned “telephone” things. Hell, you don’t even need to watch the show. On Monday April 30, after 10 pm (but before 10 am on May 1), just go to The Voice’s Facebook page and click to vote for Lindsey like 10 times. It’s easy, it’ll help my mental health, and let’s be honest, you’ll be on Facebook anyway.

And according to my brother/the imaginary friendship with her I’ve created in my head, Lindsey is a pretty cool person in real life. Plus, how can you resist this face?

Help me? Please? I’m just so damn adorable, like a bunny.

You should be watching The Voice: It’s like television candy, with glitter

I recently started watching The Voice on NBC. Or rather, on Hulu, but they tell me it’s made by NBC. This is the televised singing competition judged by Christina Aguilera, the guy from Maroon 5, some handsome country singer, and That Guy Wearing a Cape.

To elaborate, from left to right, we have:

1) Adam Levine, lead singer of Maroon 5, known for his sex-heavy lyrics, his tattoos, and those Adult ADD commercials he’s doing now

2) Christiana “I was totes on the Mickey Mouse Club with Britney and JT and Baby Goose before I became a superstar” Aguilera

3) Cee-Lo Green, half of Gnarls Barkley and the slick pipes and sharp wit behind the best breakup song of all time, “Fuck You” (on the coaches’ voice-over intros on The Voice, Carson Daly refers to this song as “Forget You” — the title of the radio-friendly censored/neutered version that basically destroys the song. When Gwyneth Paltrow sang “Forget You” on Glee, I wanted to punch her in the mouth even more than I normally want to punch her in the mouth.)

4) Blake Shelton, apparently a super famous country singer who is married to another super famous country singer

“But isn’t The Voice just a rip-off of American Idol?” you ask, from which the follow-up question for people who know me is “Why are you watching it?!” Often people say this because they know I hate American Idol. Sometimes they say this because they think television other than Mad Men is a waste of time (I watch Mad Men, too!) or they think anything that needs electricity to run is inherently abhorrent (I have a poet friend who is a fairly hard-core luddite, and super pretentious about it, too, which is obviously the best part…there are downsides to having super arty friends.)

And yes, I hate American Idol. Why are they still searching for the next American Idol when they already found him? (I heart you Adam Lambert.) But yeah, watching American Idol makes me feel physically ill (true story). It’s basically a televised celebration of mediocrity, judged by the astonishingly dull (and Steven Tyler). Seriously, Randy Jackson is so predictable that they could put a giant brown teddy bear in his seat and play a recording of him saying, “I dunno, I wasn’t really feelin’ it dawg,” and no one would notice the difference.

Unlike that Neilsen juggernaut, however, The Voice doesn’t actually have “judges,” it has “coaches.” This is actually a significant difference because each of the four coaches personally chooses singers for her/his team and then works with them each week, setting up each contestant to battle the singers from the other coaches’ teams. Or that’s what eventually happens. First, there is a series of “Battle Rounds” in which two members from a given team sing a duet, then their coach chooses the singer he/she prefers and sends the other one home.

That’s one of the great things about this show: they’re always getting rid of people left and right. Sweet; I’m not interested in the average performers. During each of the four weeks of “battles,” half the singers go home, and then during the initial “live shows,” viewers vote (like on Idol) to keep half the singers, while each judge can save one remaining person from being kicked off the show (so to tally, that ultimately means that a third of the people go home from each of these live shows).

I know. That was confusing. That’s one thing about The Voice: it’s not dull because nearly every week they change how people get kicked off/kept, so you’re too busy trying to keep up with the gorram rules to get too bored. After the initial audition weeks in which the coaches pick their teams, the show progresses as follows:

Battles (4 weeks): 6 out of 12 singers kept each week

Initial live shows (2 weeks): 8 out of 12 kept each week

More live shows: unspecified number go home each week

Thus, over the course of six weeks, they go from 48 performers to 16. Mitt Romney would be excited by that rate of dismissals. After they’ve whittled the pool down to 16, I’m not sure how many people they’ll let go each week because I just started watching this shit and I’m just happy to have understood the rules up to this point, but eventually someone wins, and that person’s coach gets bragging rights through the next season, while all the other coaches get the right to whine about the winning coach’s bragging rights.

Each of these coaches brings his or her own flair to the show — and I’m talking flair, not the personas American Idol judges have, like “The Mean One,” “The Female One, i.e. The Nice One,” or “Steven Tyler.” I mean, Steven’s fun, what with his outfits that look like he found them in a dumpster in 1978, but The Voice has more than one sartorially entertaining celeb.

Christina dresses like Wet Seal and Bebe threw up,

And this is the best thing she's worn all season. Honestly.

wears rhinestoned cocktail coasters on her head,

treats her breasts like flotation devices that won’t work if they aren’t exposed to air,

and appears to live in Barbie’s Dream House,

complete with a Diva Throne.

But while Xtina has some crack-tacular outfits, Cee-Lo isn’t satisfied with her brand of trashy glamour. He goes for full-on Spectacle.

He wears pink satin pajama suits during the day for his important meetings and rehearsals, the same way other people wear, you know, suits.

Cee-Lo also has a throne, only his came from Ethan Allen rather than Kim Kardashian's imagination.

He wears what seems to be the red sequined version of the above ensemble for performing with the other coaches…

…and in celebration of the first live show, he wore a wig and whatever else this is:

Look at the sleeves!

That is some intense fringe. I adore this man.

The biggest star on The Voice, however — other than Christina’s breasts — is a furry companion of Cee-Lo’s.

This is Purrfect the cat (no, I am not shitting you; that is the cat’s actual name). Cee-Lo brings him/her out for all of his chats with the camera, stroking the cat Dr. Evil-style. Or to be more historically correct, Blowfeld-style. (I deeply impressed a professor of mine a few weeks ago when I immediately and easily answered his question about what character Dr. Evil is parodying. I was raised on James Bond; my dad is so proud right now.)

While Cee-Lo and Christina are metaphorical disco balls, Blake Shelton spends his time wearing vaguely Western-looking shirts, saying “y’all,” making wisecracks, and being sweet to the contestants, while Adam Levine waits for the female portion of the audience to stop screaming every time he talks and then similarly makes wisecracks and says sweet things to the contestants, only while wearing more rocker-ish ensembles and without saying “y’all.” Adam and Christina also bicker like children. Children that want to do each other. Anyway…

I failed to mention earlier that the coaches choose their team members through the Blind Auditions, so called because singers preform onstage while the coaches’ backs are turned, and if a coach likes what she/he hears and wants that person on his/her team, the coach pushes a button and the chair turns around to face the performer. If only one coach turns around, the singer automatically joins that coach’s team, but if more than one chair turns, the contestant gets to choose which coach they want to work with.

The Blind Auditions’ force the coaches to judge based on voice rather than looks whether they like it or not (this doesn’t last, though; image comes into play later when the contestants are competing against each other, though that seems fair to me since music is a business, and the audience at a concert doesn’t watch with their eyes closed). Partly due to this limiting of first impressions to voice alone rather than voice plus appearance, along with each of the coaches’ having a distinct individual style, The Voice is populated by singers much more varied, unique, and even strange than the regular cast of Idol characters. Opera singer Chris Mann is learning to adapt his killer chops to other genres, while contestants like Charlotte Sometimes, Erin Martin, and Lindsey Pavao have weird and wonderful voices that actual sound unusual.

So despite the fact that it’s hosted by life-size plastic doll Carson Daly — who would give white bread a run for its money in a Contest for the Exceedingly Dull — I’ve found The Voice to be an entertaining, quirky show that features singers with actually interesting talent and coaches with idiosyncrasies galore.

The Voice: like American Idol, only interesting.

Sometimes it's just amusing how extremely different the coaches are from each other. I mean, look at that picture. These four would not have been friends in high school.

In Support of Beards

No, not the fake girlfriends gay men have to keep their sexuality secret (I just accidentally typed “sexcret.” This should be a new word.) I’m talking about the hair that grows on your face, if “you” are a man with the consistent ability to grow face hair.

This is not a beard:

If the mustache, soul patch, and chin-strap bit don’t connect, it’s not a beard. It’s unfortunate furry patches that are obscuring your face.

And I gotta say, I hate the term “soul patch.” I also hate actual soul patches. It’s like having toothbrush bristles sprouting from your chin cleft.

Anyway, my last post (from a long-ass time ago…sorry about that) focused on pretty men who hide their pretty with heinous facial hair and my annoyance/outrage at said hiding. After writing the post, however, I thought that it perhaps gave the impression that I don’t like facial hair. This is untrue; I simply don’t like ugly facial hair.

A recent conversation with some girlfriends started out focusing on what type of men we each like, which soon morphed into debate over beards, with the question being yay or nay (or yay with a caveat <= that last one’s me). Friend #1 likes outdoorsy men that tend to have bushy-ish beards, wear flannel, drive beat-up pickups, and work for environmental causes. Friend #2 likes clean-shaven men that have their shit together. I tend to go for artsy types with close-cropped beards, and I like beards that are kept in check and regularly trimmed.

In fact, in many cases, a good beard makes me more likely to be attracted to someone.

I think a big part of that is that facial hair is a fashion statement, and the way you trim it, or fail to trim it, works to communicate what identity you want the world to recognize in you. So a guy with a close cropped beard that I’d be checking out is communicating, “I’m an arty hipster-type who probably likes Neutral Milk Hotel and whiskey, and who has more than four pairs of shoes and an apartment with a lot of books.”

When I tried to think of examples of this type of beardy man, the first name that came to mind was Matt Berninger, the singer for The National. He’s the frontman for one of my favorite bands; he has a gorgeous, gravelly baritone (I like Justin Timberlake as much as the next person, but why does every current male singer have to be a tenor?); and when I saw him perform, he was drinking from a tumbler that he periodically replenished with a bottle of white wine (I really like it when performers drink onstage; I don’t know why, especially since, as I singer, I wouldn’t want to drink anything other than water or maybe tea during a performance; maybe I just like that they’re less tight-ass than I am).

Also, Matt Berninger’s face looks like this:

Sign. Me. Up. I’m also a fan of this picture of him holding his daughter:

It's a child! What do I do with it?! HELP. ME.

I love the look of sadness combined with sheer panic.

Okay, so the daughter here (and the wife I also know he has) means this one’s off the market.

Well, there’s always George Clooney, a perpetual bachelor. Though the man has skin so flawless that he doesn’t have to wear makeup on camera (What kind of devilry is this?! ), he also can pull off a nicely trimmed beard.

Oh, I'm sorry, does this beard make me look even more handome and distinguished?

While the above photo from the 2012 BAFTAs is obviously lovely, I’m particularly partial to the below shot, which is more candid and taken while The Cloonester, his father, and some former senators led a protest in Washington D.C. to draw attention to the ongoing violence in Sudan, calling on alleged war criminal Omar-Al Bashir to stop said violence and allow humanitarian aid workers into the country.

Your humanitarian aid workers can enter my country any time. I mean, what? Wow...that was in incredibly bad taste.

Jon Hamm also looks damn handsome with a beard, but I’m starting to think Jon Hamm would look damn handsome with squirrels stapled to his face and a traffic pylon as a hat.

The man is brilliant comic actor as well as a dramatic actor, and he looks like that. Let’s pray to God he can’t sing…

I wonder if Jon Hamm and John Slattery hang around the Mad Men set talking about how they could have a sexy beard competition if it weren't for the show they're in the middle of taping.

Depending on the man, I can sometimes get behind the “bald head but with a beard” look. Black guys have a better chance of pulling this off; in second place, hipster-y white dudes.

My personal favorite example is Common. Holy hell.

THAT MAN. HIS FACE. HOW IS HE THAT BEAUTIFUL?!

I’m also often greatly in favor of the scruffy look, in which a man doesn’t go full grizzly but rather seems to have lost his razor for the past few days.

Mr. Miley Cyrus (ick), a.k.a. Gale Hawthorne (okay fine, his actual name is Liam Hemsworth) is greatly benefited by this look. 

As a side note, I think this is the prettiest and the classiest Miley Cyrus has ever looked. At least she takes the Oscars seriously.

Hemsworth is very pretty (I prefer him with his Hunger Games dark hair rather than the blondish he’s usually got going on), but there’s something about his prettiness that is too smooth, that makes him look manufactured, a la Chace Crawford, although significantly less so (and even Chace’s alien “good” looks aren’t enough to keep his character from becoming totally superflous on Gossip Girl). Some stubble makes Hemsworth’s face look less like it sculpted from plastic by some overworked peasants in China. He looks so good here; keep it up, Gale.

Of course, some men with faces so pretty they seem unreal should definitely not have scruff.

Matt Bomer is unnaturally handsome. My dad started watching White Collar when it first came on (great fluff show — lots of fun), and the first few times I saw it, and thus Matt Bomer, I kept saying, “Why is the Rolex model talking?”

Matt Bomer’s face can handle only the bare minimum of scruff. I think even this might be too much.

John Cho is another example of someone who should always go sans stubble.

I've chosen this photo from People's Sexiest Man issue because well, hello, he certainly is, and also because I think the photo inset at right of him as a kid is super adorable. I had those same bangs until I was 12. True story.

Some, though, really do look good in scruff.

Jake Gyllenhaal

ON THEIR FACES.

Penn "I dressed like this on purpose" Badgley

Pardon me while I go throw up.

Okay, so I have become much more amenable to chest hair as of late. When I was a teenager, I didn’t like it. I think was largely due to the fact that I was raised with the shiny chests of young Hollywood males, specifically Hayden Christensen. (I was obsessed with him after the second Star Wars prequel. I know; it horrifies me too. Some of my early crushes, like Ewan McGregor at age 10, also due to Star Wars, I still think were spot on. Others, like Hayden, not so much…)

At age 13 or whatever, my girlfriends and I were a big fan of the scene in Attack of the Clones when Anakin wakes up from a nightmare (shirtless!! teehee!!).

My mother found my attraction to guys with shiny, shaved chests appalling. Choice quotation from our discussions of this issue: “I don’t like bald-chested men!”

Since Hayden briefly pulled me to the dark side, however, I’ve come to prefer chests in their natural state, hair and all. Or rather, I’ve come to find chest hair itself attractive. Assuming his torso doesn’t look like a shag carpet.

Now, when a guy’s chest is all smooth and shiny, my thoughts tend to run as follows:

1) What are you, twelve?

2) You probably had to get that waxed. You chose to get your chest waxed and then went through all the trouble to do it. Yeah…we’re not gonna work out.

That said, I’m not a fan of the deep-v trend and all the man-cleavage, especially when it comes with bonus chest hair. I mean, is this joke:

And we get a mini snapshot of Jessica Szohr trying to tame her ratty extensions. These two were a hirsute hurricane as a couple.

So to sum up the post thus far: beards, yes, depending on the man. Scruff, almost always yes. Chest hair, yes; hairy man cleavage, no.

One final tip on how to pull of the “I’m a scruffy rake” look. Just look to Bradley Cooper. He knows his look is working…

SO FLUFFY! Until recently, Cooper had two rescue dogs that he'd named Samson and Charlotte (good names, I approve), but recently Samson died. Luckily, Bradley and Charlotte can have each other when they need consoling.

…but even a face like his can use a little help. Let’s take that scruffy man and add a scruffy dog. Perfect.

What’s Wrong with Handsome?!

So I have this friend. He’s very pretty. Like, his skin was made by elves and his hair spun out of rose-gold by fairies.

No, not that kind of fairy.

Moi???

Except…well, okay, that works too.

My point is that this friend has been genetically blessed when it comes to his physical appearance. He has those ice blue eyes that are so piercing they kind of scare you, and his strawberry blonde (though more strawberry than blonde) hair is so silky and perfect that I’ve talked with a number of friends about it, and we have all admitted to sometimes getting distracted just staring at his hair, seeing the light glance off it, watching him run his hands through it — see, I’ve wandered off into a daydream just thinking about his hair.

And this isn’t just a “break me off a piece of that” kind of situation. A straight guy recently made an envious comment regarding this hair, which was basically like, “How is that possible? Come on!”

And yet recently, my pretty friend has been letting his hair grow too long. Whereas he once had that slightly shaggy “I’m an artist!” haircut, he let the bangs grow until he had to sweep them awkwardly to the side in The Zac Efron:

I know, Zac Efron, squeal!, or whatever, but seriously people, this is not how you want your hair to look.

I'm actually frightened by how much my friend's hair looks like this. This may be a picture of him wearing a Zac Efron mask.

At times, loathe though I am to speak of them, his hair even approached The Justin Bieber:

Aw, what a cute little lesbian. http://lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com/

Even The Biebs has since realized the error of his hairstyling ways, and I don’t think “Justin Bieber!” when I think “someone who makes great fashion choices.”

I’m sure you can imagine, given the mental picture I’ve painted for you, why I recently commented (nicely! casually!) to said friend that his hair was getting really long and asked if he was planning on cutting it (he’s the kind of person I can see going off into the woods on a “spiritual quest” for the weekend and then turning up three months later, not realizing how much time has gone by and surprised people have been worried about him, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d just forgot to cut his hair).

But, horror of horrors — he told me he was growing his hair out! To waist-length! On purpose!!! And that he was always going to wear it down because he doesn’t like when men wear ponytails!

I remember that I excused myself from the room to go vomit, but I must have actually stayed, since he then revealed to me that he’s had long hair before and that, in fact, he used to have dreadlocks! He took his straight, shiny, magicked-into-existence-by–woodland-fairies hair and made it into a dirty mass of wtf are you doing, white boy? 

At one point when he had dreadlocks, he also had a bushy beard, and when he saw his mother for the first time with these new style choices, she took one look at him and burst into tears. True story. (Also, he said that he no longer grows beards because the beard splits in the middle of his chin and gathers into two points. May I quote Joey Tribbiani when I say, “That goatee makes you look like Satan.”)

Now, my friend has no reason to give a flying #&$% what I think of his hairstyle, me or anyone else — although we are the ones who have to look at him all the time — but his desire to go from “Hellooooo there” to “I think that guy is going to try to steal my purse!” got me thinking: what is it that makes really handsome guys work to uglify all their natural pretty?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately since it’s been awards season, and despite the fact that the Oscars are better than Lunesta at combating insomnia, I somehow watched all of it. And all of the Golden Globes. And I think I watched part of the Emmys? Although I avoided the Grammys like the plague because I hate that shit — also, I want Chris Brown to crawl under a rock and die.

The point is, I watch these shows partly out of masochism (who doesn’t love watching mediocre art beating out good art for the title of “year’s best”!) and partly out of my love for fashion. I watch for the dresses, and the hairstyles, and the jewelry, and the shoes, and oh yeah, the suits and other men-type-things.

Unless you’re Ryan Gosling in that olive green suit from the Ides of March premier, or Darren Criss in that cranberry slim-cut, or any other sexy man in a suit that I want to pour into my glass and drink, mostly men at the Oscars (etc.) succeed through understatement, i.e. by simply not doing anything wrong.

The other night I ordered an olive in my martini, but he did not come with it.

Ditto every Cosmo or vodka cranberry I've ever had.

If you’re a man at the Oscars (etc.) and I don’t remember what you were wearing the next day, that’s probably a good sign — not an incredible sign, you didn’t wow me, but still, high five for you — a sign that you wore a black tuxedo that fit you well enough, rather than putting on something too crazy.

Since menswear excellence is often based around less-is-more (or around Tom Ford — everything that man makes is stunning), it’s other parts of male stars’ appearance that stand out to me. Lately, it’s their panic to cover up handsome.

And why? What, pray tell, is wrong with handsome? I’m a huge fan of handsome! Why are you taking the handsome away from me?!

If the media is going to push unrealistic beauty expectations on us at every waking moment, I might as well have some pretty men to show for it!

The Oscar Man Fug that had one of my best friends texting me in horror occurred on the face of one of my all-time favorite pretty, pretty men: Bradley Cooper.

Baby, WHY?! Let’s hope and pray this was for a movie. And we know it’s not actually for the role of Satan because that 3-D Paradise Lost flick got cancelled, thanks be to all that is good and holy.

Others, however, can’t so easily hide behind the “It’s for a role!” defense. Take, for example, Ashton Kutcher, who’s role on Three and a Half Men recently led to his being forced to fix his horrifying face. And by that I mean cut his hair and evict the rodents living on his chin.

Hey there! Sorry about destroying your ability to see! #lolz #megadouche

Now, while Ashton Kutcher is majorly not my type (and by that I mean that he is astonishingly accomplished in the art of douchebaggery), he does actually have a pretty face. You know, when he allows it to go outside.

I'm actually surprisingly cute, right?

That look is okay. The guess-how-long-it’s-been-since-I-showered! look? Not so much…

No high-fives for you. Go get the electric razor.

Christian Bale is another one that I’ve been having trouble with for a while. Look, I know that he’s a very good-looking man. I’ve seen Batman Begins. I’ve seen The Dark Knight. I’ve seen 3:10 to Yuma, and The Prestige, and Public Enemies. I even saw Terminator: Salvation, though I can’t imagine why. I’ve seen Newsies. I’ve even seen Pocahontas, and in Pocahontas he’s sexy as a cartoon!! And yet, when I see him at any public event lately, I can only think, “What did I see in this guy, again?”

Seriously, what did I see in him? Oh right, that’s what:

Mmm.

The movie-star-on-his-off-time-skipping-a-shave-or-two is a pretty common occurrence in tabloid photos/in actors’ actual lives, and that makes total sense to me: if it’s your job to look perfect every moment, I can see why you’d trash the razor and eat entire pizzas given the chance. However, I think this should stop at a point.

Yes, sometimes when I’m working on a paper (graduate school = now I’m a perma-student), I don’t leave my house for four days and I don’t shower or put on makeup or wear anything aside from pajamas or sweatpants, and my bangs are all twisted on top of my head and I get that twitch in my eye…but the point is that after I finish the paper (or happen to look in a mirror), I take a shower and put on some real clothes. Also, though I do frequently grocery shop after I go to the gym and thus venture into public with no makeup, a red face, and sweaty, sweaty hair, I usually don’t want to punish strangers for having to look at me.

And I think, given these recent photos, that Shia LaBeouf has reached the “punishing strangers who have eyes” stage.

via The Daily Mail

If I hadn’t been prompted by the headline to know that this was Shia LaBeouf and you’d asked me who this was a picture of, I’d have replied, “Some homeless guy,” or “A hipster.”

Shia’s not in the upper echelons of “Bring the smelling salts! She’s fainted!” handsome, but he is definitely not bad-looking, and he has this strangely sexy vibe that I’ve never been able to pin down. And if you can look like that bum/painter above or like this:

…guess which look I think you should pick.

Plus, my best friend K has run into him in Burbank and apparently he’s super chill and a great sport, and he dated Carey Mulligan for several years whom, if you read the site regularly you’ll know I totally adore, so I’ll continue like Shia — or as we’ll soon be calling him Shi-Yeti.

But while Shia LaBeouf is a young guy who seems like a bit of a wild card, some of the other “Keep the handsome away from me!! The power of fame compels you!!!” menfolk are less young and far more handsome.

Brad Pitt is potentially the worst offender of all, in that he been hiding his handsome behind bad haircuts and bad facial hair for years, and also because he has the most handsome to hide.

So close, and yet...

I despise his hair. Despite the fact that he probably has a stylist following him around his house adjusting his hair/clothes, Pitt’s long hair always manages to look like it hasn’t been washed in a few days.

And don’t tell Angie (or the tabloids), but I’d suggest that in the above picture (his official 2012 Oscars nominee portrait), he looks like he’s channeling ex Jennifer Aniston during her early Friends years. 

Short in the front, long in the back for no reason? Yep, it’s The Rachel, only without the proper styling — Brad forgot to add the mouse and blow-dry the top with a large round brush! Shame on you, Brad…

Also, that goatee has got to go. My favorite photo from the 2012 Oscars red carpet is the following one, because Brad’s facial expression is admitting what Brad himself refuses to admit: that facial hair is heinous.

"Please! Get it off me!" - Brad's face

We know you’re not 25 anymore, Brad, and that’s okay! We know you won’t look like you did in Thelma and Louise,  but you can still look like this:

Or like this:

Don’t let Angelina’s perma-perfect alien-skin get you feeling down about your wrinkles — you’re an earthborn human so you’re going to age, while she doesn’t seem to have that problem.

You’re still handsomer than 99.99999985% of men. Who have ever lived.

Brad, we love you, not as much as we love The Clooney, true, but we love you. So please, bring back the short hair and the clean shave, or even just the short hair!

But whatever you do, don’t go back to this:

I stand corrected. THAT goatee makes you look like Satan.

How (Not) to Get Your Writing Published

I’m currently reading submissions for a bi-annual literary journal, sifting the “stellar” from the “has potential” and the “just get it away from me.” Since I’m currently an unknown writer sending my poems out to various publications, whispering, “Like me, like me, like me” when I mail them, I know the vulnerability of putting your work into the hands of someone potentially willing to publish it.

I’ve been writing poetry since early childhood. My premier preschool-era poem still hangs on my grandma’s wall; it is entitled “Happy Birthday Grammo” — my spelling was not all that at age 4.  Despite my two decades of writing since then, however, I’m still an “emerging writer,” in that I’ve never published a book. Or published in a lot of journals. Or developed a following. Okay, “emerging” is a generous term; I’m still very much in the early stages of getting published beyond my grandmother’s living room. And since I’d like people to read more than a single poem written in magic marker, I really hope that people at various journals and publishing houses are going to give my work a chance.

Especially since at any other journal I’d be the submitter, when I’m reading submissions sent to the lit mag I work for, I truly try to give each one the benefit of the doubt, assuming each poem will be good until I’m proven otherwise.

But sometimes I’m proven way otherwise.

My friend J made this stamp as a gift for another friend, who is an editor for a literary journal and who also teaches poetry to undergrads. I don't care if it's a joke -- I'm starting to want one of these.

Over the last two months, we’ve been processing significantly more submissions than normal because we’ve been reading all the entries for our annual editors’ prize. I’ve read over 500 poems that have been submitted for the contest, and that “benefit of the doubt” period I try for is getting shorter and shorter. (Are you familiar with the concept of the nanosecond?)

There are a number of things submitters do that immediately set their poem on the slippery slope to the “no” pile. (Subsections of the “no” pile include the “hell no” pile and the “oh, please, please let me never think of this again” pile.)

To help you, the submitters, (but mostly to help me and other editors deal with this crap less in the future), I’ve compiled the following points to help you avoid ending up in one of the nine circles of rejection hell.

1. Read the gorram directions.

a. If the journal’s submission instructions say, “Please submit no more than [insert integer here] poems/stories at a time,” what should you do? That’s right! Your should submit twice as many as they ask for because anyone anywhere would be happy to read more of your poems!

No. My biggest piece of advice for submitting to journals is to go out of your way not to piss off the people who will be evaluating your work. If I open your submission file to discover that you’ve included eight poems even though we only allow six at a time, I’m immediately annoyed, and I think two things: 1) This person did not read the directions, and 2) This person thinks that he/she/ze is above the directions. Well, guess what? Since I work for the journal, those are my directions, and your ignoring them is like giving me the middle finger while I’m doing you the kindness of trying to consider your work seriously, even if the title is “One in a Million” (Note: actual title for a poem I recently read — try to avoid cliches, especially in the title: it’s your first impression).

You don’t want me thinking you’re lazy, negligent, or arrogant before I even read your poems.

b.  If the instructions say, “Oy! These are going to be blind submissions! Don’t put your name on the manuscript!” then my suggestion is: don’t put your name on the manuscript! If you’ve submitted to a contest or an editor’s prize or anything else that asks you to remove your name from the file holding the poems/stories, but you ignore this and put your name and contact information on the first/last/every/any page of your manuscript, the person reading your submission can and probably will just reject it without reading it, since you didn’t follow the rules.

Conversely, if the mag asks you to put your contact info on every page of the manuscript in order to make it easier for them to contact you later, do that. If you don’t follow the directions, everyone will know how poorly you did on the “listening” portion of the STAR tests as a child.

2. Submit all your pieces of writing in one file, unless the directions indicate differently. Why? Multiple files are a hassle for us.

Many publications now allow you to (or even prefer you to) submit online. Writers usually do so by uploading their work to a dropbox feature on the journal’s website or through a service such as ManuscriptHub, or Submishmash, or Submittable.

We use ManuscriptHub.com, and after writers electronically submit their work, our readers must then download each file in order to review it.

Each submitter has his/her/hir own folder, and you will have assuaged me if I open your folder to find only one file (.pdf or .doc/.docx or something please — if I have to figure out how to open up some bizarre file type I either 1) won’t, or 2) will be incredibly annoyed by the time I actually get to your writing). If, however, I open the folder for submitter #4559 and find four separate files, each of which holds a poem about one page long, I will be muttering obscenities to myself as I open them. (You only want this to happen after I read your poem, as in, “Fuck! This poem just tore my heart out and fed it to a vulture and then put the vulture through a wood chipper!” This is how I react to things I like; I’m weird.)

3. I am judging you based on your font. When I open your (one, please just one) file, the font is the first thing my eyes register. Before I can evaluate your title or even the poem’s visual form, really, I either notice your font or fail to notice your font.

a. If I fail to notice it, that means you used Times New Roman: good job. Times New Roman is totally innocuous — it’s easy to read and is the default font for Word documents.

b. If I notice it and it engenders a happy feeling in my chest, that means you used a font other than the old standby of TNR, and one that is aesthetically pleasing but conservative. Examples of this include Georgia, Palatino (my current favorite), Garamond, Cambria, and plain Times (somehow slightly more beautiful than TNR).

Poets care an inordinate amount about font and spacing; I’ve had multiple protracted discussions with other poets about which fonts we prefer and why, as well as the benefits of 1.15 spacing and the evils of double-spacing a poem. You might think we’re ridiculous, geeky control freaks to spend time alone in our rooms thinking about fonts, and we probably we are — but we’re the obstacle between you and publication, so we’re ridiculous, geeky control freaks with power.

c. If I notice your font and it engenders a tight, burning feeling in my chest that makes me look for the nearest chair or small child to kick, that means you used something absurd — a flowery script that I can barely read or some pseudo-handwriting that looks like a kindergartener scrawled your poem in crayon (unless you are a kindergartener writing a poem destined for your grandmother’s wall, this is unacceptable). I will not take your poems seriously anymore. I will read for evidence to support my new belief that you are a dilettante/moron/cat that stepped on the keyboard while Jane got up to make a cup of coffee.

4. I’m judging you based on your poem’s visual form. Never center-align your poems. Never. Just don’t. It shows that you’re an amateur.

The only acceptable center-aligning that I can think of occurs in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, in which she center-aligns a series of ceremonial poems/stories that interrupt the prose at various points, and these are center-aligned to emphasize that they are spoken, i.e. this is oral tradition: Native American myths spoken throughout the generations. And even in the midst of this brilliant, astonishing, acclaimed novel, I still cringed when I came upon poems placed in the middle of the page.

5. If you haven’t racked up any demerits during numbers 1 through 4, congratulations! I am now actually reading your writing without any negative feelings!

But now I’m judging you based on your title.

Coming up with a title can feel like lot of pressure. I mostly suck at it. The easiest thing is to use a very simple title and thus dodge the bullets of “cliched” and “overdramatic.” If you write a poem about a cornfield, call it “Field;” a poem about a lover, call it “For Thomas” (feel free to substitute the name of your own lover).

That “One in a Million” poem? My expectations immediately fell from this-person-could-be-the-next-Anne-Carson to writing-from-a-Katherine-Heigl-movie-level. Similarly, don’t call your poem “Tortured Hell that Is My Soul” — you don’t want me thinking this is a discarded Dashboard Confessional song from 2003. (Keyboard confessional: I secretly loved DC back in the day, and I’ll still rock out to “Vindicated” if given the chance.)

A title prepares readers for the poem, primes their expectations. A title can lead grammatically into the first line of the poem (I have a poem called “She Asks Me How You Are,” and the first lines are “And I tell her / you’re wonderful”), or a title can provide vital information (W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which centers on the Nazi invasion of Poland on that date, which marked the beginning of World War II) or convey a tone (“In Vermont No One Can Hear You Scream” and “The Things I Do When I Am Not Doing You,” both by Gregory Sherl, who great and you should check these poems out right now — go on, click the link).

Your options for titles are myriad, but the safest is a one or two word title that is quiet and doesn’t distract from the poem. Of course, if you can come up with a title that does something more than be innocuous, kudos! Just so long as the thing it does isn’t “sound like a 13-year-old’s diary.”

I’m a big fan of the super specific, super long title. James Wright was a master of these. Great titles of his include “In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned” and “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” the latter being one of Wright’s most famous poems (and one of my absolute favorites). He also has a poem called “In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems,” which consists entirely of the title: there is no poem; the horse ate it!

Of course, you can use a subtle title such that the poem’s ultimate tone or content comes as a surprise. When I first read Matthew Dickman’s “Grief,” I certainly wasn’t expecting the first line to be “When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla.”

There are so many options for titles, and you should feel free to experiment. I had high hopes for a poem I read entitled “If Proust Had a Facebook Account.” Just remember that the title is a reader’s first opportunity to get an impression of your writing; you don’t want that impression to be, “Did he copy this title from his great aunt’s needle-point pillow?”

7. Rhyme. If your poem sing-songs like a nursery rhyme and isn’t a re-imagined nursery rhyme that has the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe on welfare, there’s a problem. Use rhyme carefully (and, when in doubt, sparingly).

8. Be careful with controversial topics. I will cringe if you mention Jesus, or write a poem about 9-11. Writing political poems or other poems with an agenda is very hard. Read an anthology of anti-war poems: most of them will be heavy-handed. A poem (while in progress) needs the facility to change and grow and expand according to its own artistic needs; having a very definite message or moral that you want the poem to convey stifles the possibility for the poem to surprise you, its writer.

This is not to say that a poem dealing with a controversial event or issue cannot be successful — I write political poems sometimes — but if I’m distracted from the actual language and content of the poem thinking, “This is an Iraq War poem,” or “This poem really, really wants me to believe in Jesus,”  your poem will fail in terms of both art and message.

9. Be individual. This is the most difficult task I can give you; the pressure to be entirely unique as an artist (and a human being), to do something no one has ever done, to create a phrase no one has ever used, can feel immense. Don’t feel overwhelmed — simply develop habits that will help you make your voice distinct from the voices of others. Namely, read. A lot. Read all kinds of things — poetry, novels, nonfiction, humor, genre fiction, news — but pay special attention to others writing in your genre, be that genre poetry, the short-story, or what have you.

Pay attention to images and words that you see repeated amongst different writers so that you can avoid over-used images or words or phrasal constructions. People at our journal were joking recently about how many poems we get that compare hands to starfish, and low and behold, one of the submissions I was reading this week actually used that metaphor. I found myself laughing quietly while reading, as well as expecting this poem (the starfish/hand image came in the first few lines) to be rather uninventive and unsuccessful. I hope no one reading my poems is reacting to them that way.

10. All my submission advice up to this point can be summarized in one point: don’t alienate your reader. If you can avoid any red flags that shout “This writer is an amateur!” or “This writer didn’t read the directions/doesn’t really care about this!” or “This writer is either a child that doesn’t speak English or a goldfish!” then you are in business.

Finally: get your stuff out there. Don’t be intimidated by all my bitching and raving; be careful and be attentive, but put your writing into the world. Though the editors and other staff reading journal submissions can seem scarily critical, as if they are just waiting for a reason to hate your work (and I probably just added to that intimidation factor — sorry about that), all we really want is to love your work.

When I see a poem with a font like Renaissance-era calligraphy, I’m annoyed, yes, but mostly I’m sad. My annoyance comes from being disappointed: I was hoping that poem would be spectacular.

The people reading your submissions want you to succeed, so fly, little bird, fly! into the wide literary sky!

Avoid cheesy imagery and terrible rhymes like that last sentence and you’ll do wonderfully.

I Do Not Trust People Who…

I’m a judgmental person. I like to think myself as “discerning” rather than “judgmental,”  but let’s just call it like it is.

I try, however, to keep my criticism to myself (and close friends) — with the blatant exception of this blog. I can certainly be a bitch, but ripping someone a new bodily orifice because she admits to liking Mumford and Sons is just unnecessary.

Plus, maybe it’s my intense love for media so bad it’s good, or so overblown it’s great, but I don’t want other people to feel as if I’m looking down on them for watching The Vampire Diaries. Perhaps the base impulse here is my desire not to have others look down on me for watching Pretty Little Liars. Or Gossip Girl. Or Beauty and the Geek (man, I wish that show still existed). I have so many guilty pleasures I’ve just started calling them pleasures.

But I have known quite a few people over the course of my life that are unapologetic elitists. Or “pricks,” to use the common parlance. This is one of my least favorite personality traits, so naturally, I keep trying to date guys who possess it.

But really, I hate people who are dickish about what other people like. If the woman who works two cubicles down from you loves Taylor Swift, unless she plays “Love Story” on repeat without headphones, shut your damn mouth.

All that said, while you are free to like and dislike whatever you want (you are quite probably wrong, but that’s your prerogative), I do think it is fair to judge you based on what you know about and do not know about. If you think Camus is a perfume, I will think less of you.

Thus, below you will find a list of knowledge gaps, behavioral tendencies, and character traits that mean I will not trust you.

I will not trust you if

1. …you cannot quote Mean Girls. I don’t expect everyone to have memorized all ten seasons of Friends like I have (except for my best friend K, I do expect this of her. Luckily, she doesn’t disappoint), but Mean Girls is one of the movies of my generation (I will give you a pass on this point if we have a significant age gap). If you don’t know what I mean when I say that “My father, the inventer of toaster strudel” would not approve of something, our senses of humor are not going to align.

Why is this line the best thing ever? I don't even know. Speaking of: this is the best valentine I've ever seen. Thanks, Feminist Ryan Gosling.

2. …you don’t know who Paul McCartney is. During this Sunday’s Grammys, featuring an appearance by the man himself, the twittersphere blew up with this mess:

via Buzzfeed -- to be read with a keen sense of disgust and a fear for the future of humanity

I can forgive the people who haven’t heard of Bon Iver — although that ignorance demonstrates that we probably can’t be close friends, and we can definitely never date — even if they (well, Justin Vernon, so “he”) won their “Best New Artist” Grammy in 2012 when their first album came out in 2008. But Paul McCartney?! Paul McCartney!! Please God, tell me you know who the Beatles are.

I hate when older people say that the younger generation is taking the world straight to hell, but come on, is this a generation that have not only never heard the Beatles, they’ve never heard of the Beatles. Hello, Hades, I hear you have good pomegranates here…

3. …you do not like Adele. It’s fine to be sick of her songs getting overplayed on the radio — especially “Someone Like You,” which is an incredibly emotional and touching song and which I don’t want to hear after some Bruno Mars shit while I’m shopping for groceries. If you genuinely think that Adele is not a good singer or a good songwriter, even if her style is not necessarily for you, you have the musical IQ of Paris Hilton (remember “The Stars Are Blind”?) and are the emotional equivalent of fossilized dinosaur dung.

I didn't watch the Grammys, but I am happy she won all of the things. She deserves all the recognition she can get, even if the Grammys are a pandering mess that often make the Oscars look like the paragon of artistic taste.

4. …you do not like/watch television. My perverse fascination with The Bachelor aside, I truly think that television is an unfairly maligned and undervalued art form. The structure of multiple episodes produced over a long period of time allows TV shows to develop characters in a manner that other more limited media, such as film and even (non-series) novels, simply cannot approximate. This is not to say that television is a superior art form to film, but it can achieve things film cannot, and vice versa.

There’s a reason I sobbed wildly during the season 5 finale of Bones when Booth and Brennan finally express their love for each other and then not only do not get together, but depart for different parts of the globe for the next year. I care deeply about these two as human beings, and while I know that they are fictional characters that do not “exist” in our traditional understanding of the term, I do think that fictional characters engage us emotionally in important and useful ways, and as someone who loves stories, all forms of stories, I love a medium that allows narratives of human lives to be explored and examined over such a protracted period of time.

Anyone who doesn't think these two should be together was tragically born without a heart. Or the brain region responsible for feelings of empathy, as Brennan might more accurately say.

Plus, no one who’s ever seen Battlestar Galactica can say that television is an inferior art form. That show is like a philosophical treatise. With bonus Tamoh Penikett.

BSG's confronting the notion of fear of the Other would make the show incredibly necessary and beautiful, even if its many other nuances were absent.

I have friends who would like to spend all of their time climbing trees and growing organic food, and who are genuinely not interested in TV, but these people similarly are not interested in/do not like/do not know anything about film. The other day I was talking to a friend about a poem I wrote that features Ryan Gosling’s dog, and she said, “Is that an actor?” She wasn’t putting me on — this is simply someone for whom electronic media, including television and film, are not even peripheral to her life.

However, 9 times out of 9.78, if you are the kind of person to say, “What is this ’30 Rock’ of which you speak? I don’t watch television,” you’re probably an elitist asshole.

Most redeeming thing James Franco has ever done.

Hackers Are the 21st Century’s Sexy Pirates

"Hero Time is Gone," by Lora Zombie

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / […] who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes  — Alan Ginsberg, “Howl”

Twenty-first century America is sick for heroes. Wars no longer happen on our soil and thanks to television news, their romanticism has seriously waned. Our revolution was long ago, and our dissatisfaction with the nation becomes foggier without a clear outside opponent — what to do when we have seen the enemy and the enemy is us?

We’re so sick for greatness, we lap up any celebrity, modernity’s sad facsimile of the hero, and Tim Tebow’s been controlling our national emotional life.

While Arab protestors risk their lives fighting oppressive regimes, the biggest American protest movement in a generation is portrayed by the media as a bunch of dirty people camping in a park.

When corporations are legally people and money seems to mean a lot more than speech, it can seem impossible to make a dent in the monolith of corporate control. I write emails, I sign petitions, I go to protests, and it mostly seems like it’s doing jack shit.

Well, someone’s doing something…and it’s not exactly legal.

Some background, in case the rock you live under doesn’t have wifi: On Wednesday the internet mobilized to protest the (dangerously vague and logistically flawed) anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA (from the House and Senate, respectively), with a widespread blackout. The MPAA, which has been heavily lobbying in support of both bills, disdainfully tweeted its response, noting, “Internet blackout against U.S. law fails to enlist big sites“; little-known website Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed its blackout landing page, while an unpopular search engine called “Google” had 4.5 million people sign its online petition against the bills.

A reported 75,000 websites took part in the blackout — including Reddit, Mozilla, Craigslist, GOOD, and Boing Boing, among many others — which had politicians running for the hills. By the end of the day on Wednesday, 18 previously pro-PIPA senators had dropped their support, including seven co-sponsors of the bill, while SOPA co-sponsor Representative Ben Quayle of Arizona changed his stance, along with several other members of the House.

But Thursday saw the feds flexing their muscles, as the Justice Department shut down file-sharing giant Megaupload in what it called in a statement, “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States”, seizing servers and assets (including the personal property of founder Kim Dotcom), and serving arrest warrants for Dotcom and six others associated with the site.

Then the internet got pissed off. Less than 24 hours after the electronic equivalent of a sit-in, things got aggressive. Via a series of direct denial of service attacks, cyber-collective Anonymous — which has been referred to as a group of hacker-activists, or “hacktivists” — brought down the websites for the U.S. Department of Justice, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Universal Music, U.S. Copyright Office, and the FBI.

In their words, “WE ARE THE 99% – WE ARE #ANONYMOUS – YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED US #Megaupload“.

Now that’s hot. 

"We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." Anaphora is hot.

You may not agree with what they stand for, you may not agree with what they do, you may think they are a bunch of nerdy criminal punks — but still, that’s hot.

Twenty-first century, let me introduce you to your new hero: the hacker.

Hackers are the pirates for the internet generation.

Corporate America may seem to have a stranglehold on our political process, but the internet is democratic — not just in that it’s democratizing publishing and music, or that it’s making information more available, but in that it allows the actions of people without special financial, social, or political capital to have serious and palpable consequences.

Hackers are the new pirates. Figuratively and legally. A popular site was dubbed Pirate Bay, and some of what they do is legally called “pirating.” Unlike actual pirates, however, hackers can take regular showers, maintain dental hygiene, and won’t get scurvy.

Yes, Johnny Depp is sexy as hell in Pirates of the Caribbean, but think about it: do you really think he smells sexy as hell?

Mmm, fish and 30 days of body odor buildup!

Cyber pirates can comb their hair and eat something besides salted, dried meat and the crumbs they find in their beards. They can launch an attack against The Man, then sit down to watch Top Chef with you over takeout Chinese.

Of course, there are modern-day pirates more in the vein of “Arg, matey! Give up your cargo!” but they’re a bunch of unwashed Somali guys with automatic weapons and a lot of emotional baggage. I’ll pass.

I’ll take an online pirate over a maritime one any day. An average citizen fighting The Man and actually having some effect? I think a Facebook friend put it well yesterday when, commenting on the Anonymous takedown of government and corporate websites, she wrote, “illicit sure, but nerd-knights = sexiest.”

America, I’m here to tell you these are the kind of heroes women can get behind. Or on top of. You get my drift.

And when I say “women,” I don’t just mean the geeky teen with a 4chan account, or the accountant that was goth in high school.

The women who think hackers are sexy are not just classic geeks. They probably don’t code. They don’t play World of Warcraft online, don’t have Deviant Art pages or cats named Spot. Sure, maybe they can quote Buffy or have twitter handles like “YouHadMeAtHelo” or “WhoWatchestheWatchmen”, but they also play sports, and wear perfume, and go to parties. They read Glamour, they read The New Yorker, they read comic books, they read Nabokov, they read cereal boxes. They are many and variable, and they think internet activism is hot.

The hacker-hero is a new breed of coder, a bad boy without that annoying drug habit.

This is not the computer nerd from most 90s movies. I’m not talking about some overweight white guy in glasses whose ass has fused with his desk chair and who seems to live solely in the dark, like a mole rat. That guy does the protagonist’s bidding while taking sad sidelong glances at the impossibly hot female lead.

I’m talking about Justin Long in Live Free or Die Hard, a hacker with a quick wit and a tongue to match, nerdy-sexy a la Adam Brody’s The O.C. character, Seth Cohen, whose explosive popularity suddenly made “geek chic” a thing in the mid ’00s.

You just said something witty, didn't you?

I’m talking about Lisbeth Salander, a hacker with chopped black hair and a nipple ring, not so much antisocial as asocial, silent but vicious.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Yeah, I'm equal opportunity Stieg Larsson.

I’m talking about a hacker that can cut you, but probably won’t because we’re baking pies tonight and we’ll need the knives later.

Also, this hacker isn’t necessarily male. She doesn’t have to be Sandra Bullock in The Net; I’m picturing a sexy young black woman with a short afro and a neck tattoo, or a pale white girl with dark, pixie-cut hair and an affinity for jewelry with animals on it. I’ll take a femme-y hacker, with a side of Guy Fawkes mask — to go.

Hackers: the new pirates, only cleaner, better educated, and less likely to kill you in the morning.

Good night, Westley. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning. (Well, okay, I'd like to break off a piece of this pirate...)

This isn’t the perpetual-friend-zone guy helping you take down that compromising picture your ex uploaded to the internet; this is the guy you’re taking the pictures for.

And as for me, I like to think of my imaginary hacker boyfriend looking like Matthew McNulty.

The Man with the Dragon Neck-Tattoo...Who's Mine So Don't Touch Him or I'll Cut You