I was pacing around a few whiles ago, reading that article in the Times magazine about the NIH and that poor woman who is falling to pieces, and bellowing at the page in front of me. There was so much in that article that seemed wavering and odd. Like this idea of looking and looking for a new diagnosis. Why? I honestly don’t understand. A diagnosis exists as a tool. Approaching it as an end seems nonsensical unless as an excuse to fundraise for Pediatric Restless Leg Syndrome. You arrive almost immediately at a weird continuum where we have to start making proclamations about what a “healthy” body looks like in comparison to a diseased body. So, what does a “healthy” body look like? Structurally perfect in every respect? Free of genetic mutation? Probably not going to drop dead within the year? No complaints? Going to live forever? Able to cheerfully undertake the full catalogue of human activities without pain or madness: defecating, running, reproducing, crying, eating, orgasming, toe-touching, differential equation solving, back handspringing, tight rope walking?

I don’t know why the Times Magazine article reminds me a personal blog entry I read once in which a doctor complained about a list a patient brought to her appointment. The list was written in a jerky, trembling hand and included a handful of nebulous symptoms like dizziness, headaches, back pain, and stomach aches. Anyhow, at the bottom of the list were written a series of nervous and confrontational notes in full sentences, addressed to the doctor. The patient, sounding frenzied, demanded certain lab work and refused to take any more medication. I am inventing some of the detail; I can’t recall it word for word and I don’t particularly want to link to the specific entry because the writer seems like more than a decent person. However, her diagnosis here was a piece of misogynist crap as common and invisible as air. The patient is hysterical (the laden historical translation), she likes being a patient and will never be well. Ah, the bad boyfriend school of diagnosis. If you don’t find me irresistible, you must be gay! Damn, I felt sorry for that poor patient. I imagined her panicky preparation for the appointment, breathing deeply and rehearsing the list of symptoms every magazine on earth solemnly asserts, at the ass-covering imperative of their legal department, you should “talk to your doctor” about; picturing herself standing undressed and un-speeched, just like the previous appointments, sweaty-palmed and acquiescent during the entirety of the six minutes then cursing herself afterward for forgetting to offer the list of clues that would surely have resulted in the One True Diagnosis; deciding it’s a better idea to write everything down so she doesn’t waste the six minutes and the fifty dollar copay again… I feel sorry for the doctor too, but not nearly so much. The doctor is invested with a degree of power unfair to both her and the patient. She carries a license and degree that give a terrifying weight to the indifferent bad boyfriend diagnosis.  I need to come back to this when I have a moment, to try to articulate why I was so bothered instead just pounding away. In the meantime, lest this should read as a doctors suck rant, props to our family doctor, who saved the baby from a lot more pain, and to my father whose dinner table diatribes on everything from hormone replacement therapy, to h. pylori, and what happens when you play on the railroad track, nearly always turn out to be news twenty years later. Though the railroad thing was pretty evident right off.

Is online conversation engendering a return to a more oral culture, where the last word acquires a different kind of importance? Words upon words upon words. Look into history of oral culture and comparisons. See Walter Ong and secondary orality… What on earth did I have in mind when I wrote this? Is this even my handwriting?

What was I doing in either 2003 or 2004 you wonder? Watching TV apparently:

On Sunday night on PBS there was a documentary on the Miss America pageant that was surprisingly interesting considering it was mostly in black and white. It was chock full of feminist historians with glasses, untamed hair, and little-known facts, popping in at intervals to provide commentary on the unholy tale of the little Southern Baptist lady who made the whole event real high-toned by adding the talent component. That was the point at which the girls began to represent scholarship, as they do today.

About an hour into the thing, right as they were getting to the dirt on the swimsuit competition, they cut from Gloria Steinem’s sage mien to Isaac Mizrahi. He’s burbling cheerfully on about how this is by far the most degrading part of the process. How his heart bleeds for those poor young girls teetering along nearly naked in those ridiculous heels…. Long pause… “Although if they have to walk around in bathing suits, it’s for the best that they have to wear heels. Heels make anyone’s legs look so much better.”

Next, the first night and the hind end of Steven King’s Rose Red, a miniseries about a flesh-eating house. “Sixteen bathrooms– and growing!” the commercials intone ominously. There are hours of dialogue in which the protagonist, a sexy young tenured professor of paranormal psychology also with unruly locks (so much frizzy hair on TV!) and her bumbling nemesis, the British head of the psychology department who wants to get her fired and occasionally slips into a Mid-western twang whilst bringing out nuggets like “old boy” or “I say there,” sneer at each other for twenty-minute stretches. Just when you think it’s over, you get some more close-ups of acting. The scene in front of the house where they say “God help us, it knows we’re here” lasts for like twelve minutes. They show each person close-up, then far away, then everyone from the front, then everyone from the back, then they sort of spin around everybody and do a few more close-ups and a flash-back. You should watch it. It’s amazing. But if you didn’t, you can still bid on the props and set on Ebay.

Rose Red herself appears to be constructed completely from Home Depot parts. Not only do the hollow core aluminum doors bang open with suspiciously empty thwumps, but the 200 year old fake-trad “wrought-iron” ivy-covered front gate is operated by a remote control that the beautiful young professor has stuck over the front visor of her SUV. Then I fell asleep. So much for Sunday.

But I tuned in again for the final episode on Thursday. To the untrained eye it appears that nothing much happened in the intervening three days. Actually some stuff happened. We’ve become aware of a flinty streak of academic avarice in the character of the BYP. She cares more about validating her own theories than she does for the unfortunate souls around her. Eventually she gets it in the neck, but not before telling us in a lugubrious voiceover, “We say haunted, but we mean the house has gone insane.” Meanwhile the other characters get killed off, play pool, lose their fingers in supernaturally slamming doors, and drink iced tea from a cobweb-festooned Maytag refrigerator (circa 2001). A pasty-faced young girl with psychic powers is holding the doors closed. She is wrestling with inner demons and stuff as evidenced by her etiolated features and rolled back eyes. Eventually the alive characters go home and come back Six Months Later and it’s pretty much over.

The same Thursday night, sex sold: chicken, Rogaine (Will she feel the same if I’m bald?), Vaseline, and a cruise, but not Polygrip. At intervals the local news previews enticed us to tune in later to find out: what airline may be grounding flights, what the weather will do to your morning commute, and who is returning to pro wresting. I recognized the photo of Hulk Hogan they dug out of the morgue.

The moral of this story is that TV is more interesting than you think it is. Don’t be a snob. Also, don’t try to understand it. With the sound off American TV is a lot like those cryptic Japanese game shows with a lot of inexplicable laughter, pointing, and people falling in holes.

New work from Miranda July: The Hallway. It’s weirdly immersive… I was looking at this piece on her website and there are a bunch of hilarious comments like, I knew her in high school and let me tell you she’s nothing special at all. Whew. I guess we know who hasn’t changed since high school.⁰¹ Thank goodness the rest of us were allowed to. Speaking of comments, I was watching the new Amy Pohler show on Hulu (no comment here) and for some reason stopped to read the comments there too. (I am on a comment and review reading binge. It’s odd. I will stop now. There are so many more interesting things to read.) There was one lengthy analysis of how making fun of Native Americans isn’t funny. Well, well. I guess not.

Douglas Coupland’s Canada House.

Keith Starky, Explaining Twitter, via everywhere on the whole internet. Who actually hasn’t linked to this yet? Still, viola! as they say in Texas.

I need hair help. My adorable little boy haircut has reached an awkward age and needs to be sent away to boarding school for a while. Must commission the interns to read Japanese hairstyle magazines for an Interim Solution.

I am also wondering about the mechanism whereby babies (And possibly the mechanism whereby I presume to extrapolate from my baby to all of baby-kind. Maybe I’ll save that for another day.) forget one thing in the process of learning something else. My peerless aurelian genius child is a chatterbox and has been since before he could even move about much. But when he started to crawl (actually he never crawled, he sort of dragged himself along on his ventral side for a few months, as though ascending a very steep slope) he stopped talking altogether for a while. When he began to walk, he seemed to temporarily lose a lot of his vocabulary, and lately as his fine motor skills are exploding, seems to have forgotten some of what he cared enough about even to discuss in his sleep a few months ago. He used to talk about colors nonstop, but now if I ask him what color anything is, he answers rojo offhandedly, gives a light laugh and changes the subject. Esponja? he’ll ask pointedly.

Sometimes when I look at the work of an artist I like or talk to friend or someone I worked with who has been more single-minded than I have over the last ten years, I get this momentary pain. They’ve built something so tangible now, while I’m still so short of that. For a panicky moment I wish I’d had more discipline, I wish I’d started earlier and stayed dedicated… But I really don’t. I like working this way, it doesn’t feel like work, while the other eats away at the edges of my mind until I feel all crumbly inside. Really the only thing I wish is that I’d realized long ago that the inability to concentrate (or the lack of interest in specializing?) might be an advantage. It might be a good thing to always be pursuing relationships that are invisible to other people. I wish I’d stopped trying to force myself to behave a long time ago. I’m sorry it took so long to learn.