a sense of joy and then a panic

1.  I cried watching a rare music video on MTV this morning at the Boston Back Bay Hilton. It was “Runaway Love” by Mary J. Blige and Ludacris. I think I only started crying when the pregnant girl who couldn’t tell her parents ran away and was crying on the bench. I’m taking after my mother – seeing people cry makes me cry. And then I realized that the point of the video was to blame the home and family environment for these girls running away, and when contrasted with the flyers of missing girls, smiling in their class pictures… as if their families actually wanted them back, and why? They didn’t want them enough, didn’t take care of them enough, the first time.

2.  Apparently Al Sharpton’s ancestors were enslaved by relatives of Strom Thurmond’s ancestors. Sharpton was on the Daily Show and made an excellent point – that every time he signs his name, he’s using the name his forefathers were given as slaves. That’s a legacy that won’t go away.

3. The Colbert Report posed the question: “is the Anna Nicole Smith story getting too much press?” At first I was impressed by Anderson Cooper’s chide to the rest of the news media: “There’s a war going on, there’s a war going on,” and laughed at the radio personality John Gibson, Jr., who took offense to that, because, well, the Anna Nicole Smith story is a real drama. As Colbert says, “That’s right, and news is drama. If Anderson Cooper wants more people to pay attention to his war stories, then he should make them more dramatic. Double-D playmates behind enemy lines in Iraq.” Then they played a snippet of Anderson Cooper somberly saying, “And new developments in the Anna Nicole Smith story…” in his 360 show. “Welcome home from the war,” says Colbert. Indeed. 

4.  I can’t afford so many stores, I realize in the Copley Place mall. I’ll never get to Neiman Marcus, to Barney’s, to Club Monaco. But I hope to someday get to The Banana Republic.

5.  My spring LJ layout is going to center around the song “Sunny Came Home” by Shawn Colvin.

6. The bully-bitch who terrorized me and Lexi in elementary school, who has already friended me on Facebook, recently wrote on my wall. She doesn’t know if I remember her. She says we went to school together. She remembers I wrote a story called Magpie in third grade. Am I at Columbia now? She hopes to hear from me soon. Smiley face. I’m so tempted to reply with a brackish, “how could I forget you, Nonon, you were the bane of my existence. Every day when I came in I hoped to God that you would not be in class, because I knew you would force Lexi to be your partner even though she and I were best friends, and because I didn’t want to listen to you badmouth the first person to leave the room, to call me a goody-goody two shoes for refusing to help you cheat, to talk about your recent trip to the Netherlands and the stupid fluffy pink pencil case you got there.” But for some reason I accepted her Facebook friendship. And now here we are, friends without a memory. Is she desperate to have more friends or is it another power ploy of hers? The teachers always thought she was a popular leader, because we all looked like her friends. And when she forced two of the kids in our class to make out in the library, they were the ones that got in trouble, not her. And none of the rest of us said anything. Bullying is one of those things that teaches you how to look away.

7.  So AC has a girlfriend. I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand I suppose I’m happy that he isn’t alone, since he seems so adorably socially inept. And it’s not like I really thought there was any possibility of anything between us. I told my mother that it’s not him per se, it’s knowing that men can be nice, well-mannered, intelligent, interesting. He’s more of a model, an ideal, a type. But at the same time I’m starting to realize how much it just… sucks knowing that I really can’t be with him. In my dream last night he was handing something I had written for class back to me and I was reading the comment on the back, and it was this huge long note that ended with, “okay, sweetheart?” and even in my dream I could feel how good it felt to read that, like this warm emotion just pooled in my rib cage. I can’t tell how much of “this” is the ideal that he represents, and how much is actually him.

8.  I’m proud of my mother. I want to remember this. I’m so proud of her. She came back to this country with next-to-nothing and now she’s a manager of Graduate Studies, getting paid to go to conventions in Boston. We’re the actual “Gilmore Girls” – we’re the way that show should have gone. Things haven’t always been easy, and we’ve both developed much tougher skins, and we’re bitter and jaded, but we’re competent. We’re capable. We’re both so fucking introverted but we have made our lives work, considering. I didn’t turn into a screw-up in high school even though no one was watching me. I got myself this far. Because she was getting herself this far.

9.  Quote of the Day: from a Law & Order defense attorney responding to a comment Serena Southerlyn, one of Jack McCoy’s assistant D.A.s, has made – “Wow, Jack, they get prettier and smarter.”

10.  Lyric of the Day: “real guys go for real down to Mars girls” – Outkast’s “Roses