Laundrophobia.

I first realized I had a problem when Julien came home one day to find me carefully navigating the dripping stalactites of wet clothing hanging from every available surface in our bathroom, bedroom, and kitchenette in order to move freely about the apartment.

The rabbits were being terrorized by mysterious droplets of water coming from the Heavens above their little abode and splashing right on their little bunny butts unexpectedly, causing them to leap into the air and then scatter. They huddled under tables and inside their little grass huts and watched helplessly, confused by this water coming from the sky. It was their version of a locust plague, and I'm sure at least one of them is a devout believer in Bunny Jesus after the incident where a pair of soaking wet pants came splatting down into their enclosure.

In an attempt to avoid the laundromat, I had washed every article of clothing in our laundry basket in the actual bath tub, like a confused 1930s washerwoman, and then hung them out to dry with the aid of neither clothesline nor outdoor air. I had been intimidated earlier by the wide array of clothes-drying products in the local hardware store, and thus neglected to buy any lest the hardware store guy think I was stupid or something. Likewise, I didn't want our neighbors seeing me putting out clothes on the fire escape like an idiot, so our wet clothes hung in our apartment for a few days, while I, forcefully cheerful, insisted that they'll surely be dry any day now.

In the winter, I would wash my underwear in the sink under the guise of it being delicate and the label clearly said to hand-wash. Hanging it, along with some socks and slips and shirts that I included "because I was already doing a wash" on my little mini drying rack and setting it in front of the radiator with a space heater running next to it worked perfectly for me. Julien did a bigger wash on weekends, to avoid my "helping" him with some of his clothes, while I cowered in the apartment, opening and closing the wash-pins I'd bought because I'd seen them at my grandma's house before and knew how they worked.

This isn't an issue with washing clothes. I've done my own wash since I taught myself as a really young girl, after an unfortunate incident where the one pair of pants I owned and wore every day got so big from over-wearing that couldn't keep them up at my waist and I simply had to wash them. But I didn't know how, so I just sprayed them with an ungodly amount of Febreeze that I'd found and dried them with a hair dryer, so that all day people around me were asking what smelled like someone urinated on dryer sheets. It was me. I smelled like that.

It's partly a problem with my current neighborhood. When we moved in and I was carrying a heavy something from the subway to the apartment, I had a man come up behind me and whisper "don't drop it, don't drop it" in my ear as he followed me for a block. I'm harassed on the street daily, to the point where if I don't have to leave the apartment for anything very important, I just don't.

But mostly it's an issue I've always had when I have to do "normal people things". I've always been an alien, and so there are times, almost every day, when I just feel like an impostor masquerading in a human body, and it's always in the most banal situations. Throw a woman pooping into a bag on the subway at me, and I am cool as a cucumber. Tell me to organize a ragtag team of artists to stand on the street and sell pick-up lines for twenty-five cents, and I'm in my element. I have photos to prove it. Ask me to yell at some bastard on the street, and you will find no better person. Make me do some grocery shopping, and you might as well have sentenced me to death. I will avoid it until I am literally sucking on crackers to make them last all day. I'm a creative person because I've had to discover how to use the resources that I have instead of going to the Rite-Aid, in front of everyone, to purchase what I need. I get nervous poops when shopping for kitchenware, like at any moment my skin is just going to unravel and I'll be exposed for the lizard-person I am.

I've since conquered grocery shopping because of the bunny rabbits (they need to eat every day, apparently) and Julien (I can't just feed him lettuce, apparently) and because I would be dead by now if I hadn't. Also, I can do it after hours, far from the watchful gaze of daytime people. Similarly, I've moved on from carrying all my money bundled in a pink Disney Princess wallet to putting it in a banking institution, which I attend regularly in the dead of night to use the ATMs when no one can see me. I can even order at Starbucks, although I'm somehow still bad at it.

But anything that I can secretly do in the privacy of my own home without having to expose my dirty laundry to the world, I will go way out of my way to do, hiding from normal people who don't even have to think once about their daily routines, while I'm still just the troll living under a bridge. I live there because I can do my laundry in the river.

Excuse me...?

…Excuse me? Did you just speak to me? Well, then I assume because you’re a complete fucking stranger yelling at me while I have my headphones in that you were warning me of some imminent danger or asking for directions or helpfully bringing to my attention a school of ducks that have been following me. Oh, no? You just wanted to tell me that you would destroy my pretty little ass?

Let me stop you right there. We’re gonna break this down for a minute, sir.

Now, both you and I know damn well that there is not one thing that will come of this interaction besides me being uncomfortable and annoyed (or, uncomfortable and enraged, as the case may be) and you feeling like some sort of big man for yelling disgusting things in the street like a drunken maniac. We both know that you don’t really think yelling at strangers in the street is step one of our society’s delicate courting ritual, so why exactly do you do it?

What’s that? Oh, I’m supposed to take it as a compliment. I’m sorry, who the fuck are you? I’m supposed to take your opinion as a compliment? You, the guy hanging out in front of the grocery store, with nothing to do in the middle of the god-damn day. You, the random guy in a suit on the subway. The hundreds of yous, lined up on the streets outside my apartment, constantly watching and leering, making sure that I can't make one move without a judgement, a comment. What kind of power trip are you on that makes you think your opinion is worth anything to me?

And that’s exactly it. You have no power. You’re nothing. And so for this brief moment, you’re using my body to make you feel like you have some kind of control. And really, that’s just sad.  

This Fucking Shithead: An Expletive-Filled Character Study

Ohhh, Mary. Mary, Mary, Mary.... Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.

Mary, quite Contrary.

Mark my words, I will fucking destroy you.

As many of you know, Julien is working towards his immigration into the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. As part of his journey into Americanhood, we have taken on an immigration lawyer. The lawyer is fine, whatever. He's a little brusque, and somehow Julien always comes away from our meetings understanding three times more than I do even though they're held in his second language, but he's more accustomed to dealing with bureaucratic bullshit than I am, so that's reasonable. Again, whatever. My beef is with his motherfucking clerk, Fucking Mary, who I feel comfortable pinning as the worst person I have ever met in my life. I'm actually pretty sure her first name is actually "Fucking Mary" because there is no other way to refer to her.

I hate this woman. I hate her so much, guys.

First off, let's just begin with her office. The entire complex is a little run-down and cluttered, sort of like a Film Noir detective's office when he just moves in and has no time for yer lily-footed feather-dusting, because he's got murders to solve and dames to forcibly kiss. This office doesn't have quite the level of urgency as all that, so it's more like old cases are just quietly rotting in the piles of boxes that form a winding pathway through the cubicles.

Fucking Mary. She has her own office for some god-damn reason, and it is absolutely wallpapered in full-page print-outs of horrible, random, repetitive photos of her ugly and terrible child. The roly-poly little rat is pictured in many of the photos wearing a grey velour sweatsuit, because that's exactly the kind of thing terrible people stuff their ugly children into. I mean, I guess track suits are comfortable for kids or whatever, but grey? You don't put a kid in the color grey unless you hate that kid, or you're so devoid of interest or passion yourself that grey is the sort of color you see and think "well, it's a little too bubbly for my taste but for a child it's fine." Also, I'm using the term "wallpapered"quite literally here: the printed-out pages (of course the ink is running dry in most of them, because why make the effort to change the fucking cartridge for something you and your clients have to look at every single day?) line the wall from floor to ceiling, layered in the way that psycho-killers layer photos of their potential victims from the floor to the ceiling. It is exactly that kind of creepy. Who knows if it's even her child? I certainly didn't ask.

When the lawyer showed us to her office, he actually had to pick up a stack of rotting boxes himself and move them out of the room so he could fit another chair in front of her desk, while she just sat and watched this old man that she works for lift heavy things. She then proceeded to absolutely suck at taking basic information from a human, which sharp minds will note is the only fucking thing she ever has to do in her entire job description. Between misspelling every place-name, even after it's been spelled painstakingly several times by both Julien and myself, then misunderstanding the most basic and simple facts of life, she is actually slightly less useful than a broken Esperanto version Speak-N-Spell in terms of filing immigration paperwork: infuriatingly repetitive, disconcertingly inhuman, and somehow more confusing than if we did the whole thing in Russian.

Then she had the kindness to list all of the reasons Julien was going to be deported and probably also beaten and arrested for daring to apply for citizenship. She listed all of these reasons in the sort of lilting valley-girl voice reserved for the likes of Cher Horowitz, despite being a grown-ass adult with a fat and ugly child. She's a perfect storm of gratingly annoying and defeatist-by-proxy. I swear no one has enjoyed giving bad news so much since the Marquis de Sade announced his pending prison sentence to himself in the mirror.

Also, she has the human interaction skills of an annoying, prying child. When she got distracted during the interview process and began asking personal questions that happened to be a painful topic for me, she followed it up with this maddening, unrelenting series of "why? but why? why? why? why not? why?", that I seriously thought for a second that I'd died and fallen into some sort of Hell of Repetition. She actually sat there and made me cry with frustration, then with an entirely blank look on her face, as she stared at me like a dog stares at its owners playing chess, without comprehension or relation, she waited a beat and then, without a hint of irony, was like "yeah, but... why?" Which was when my brain switched off. That's it, and now I'm unsuccessfully climbing over Julien and precariously stacked bunch of immigration claims from the 1980s to get to the door, shouting through tears about how we're just going move to god-damn France, then, as I try to free one of my feet from a moldy box I've stepped in.

She's in the office a grand total of two and a half hours per day, and most of that is spent adding more curling, yellowed scotch-tape to the printer pages that are coming undone on her wall. We know that she's in the office for two and a half hours, because we've been forced to graph her in-office hours on several charts in order to actually get in touch with her at any point ever... you know, about the incredibly time-sensitive documents that she's in charge of, that dictate whether or not Julien can stay in the fucking country. We've actually been at the Starbucks on the corner, after a nine o'clock meeting with the lawyer, and watched her stumble into work at ten-thirty, with a coffee and a danish in hand. Pro tip: when you're already a half hour late for work, you should probably not be holding a coffee and a danish, especially when you're already a drooling fucking idiot.

I know that she's supposed to be in at ten because after weeks of "just missing" her when we were calling about the status of Julien's working papers, we finally started to take note of the times when we actually could call her. Those times are precisely: Ten fifty AM to eleven-thirty AM, after she's crawled late into work, forged a path through her rotting boxes of casework to her disgusting grimy desk with empty yogurt containers all over it and settled herself in for twenty minutes but before she takes her three-hour lunch break at eleven-thirty to buy more danishes and yogurt spoons, because she definitely isn't washing any of them so she just has to buy more. You can also sometimes reach her from two thirty to three forty-five (before she leaves for the day), if she didn't take her afternoon to rummage through the dumpsters outside of the apartments of short, fat Italian-American middle-aged men that just lost a lot of weight to find more industrial-colored track suits for her spawn.

We had a specific issue with our immigration papers, in that we moved from one apartment to another in the middle of the process, so we made it deadly clear to Goddamn Fucking Mary that since her department receives a notification whenever the government mails the paperwork to us, she absolutely must call us to tell us so we can make sure we've received it in one of the two mailboxes because otherwise Julien might get deported. Now, reader, I know you're a sharp pencil. Can you tell me what happened every single motherfucking time paperwork was mailed to us? That is correct, I would pick up the phone after having nervously checked with my roommates in my old apartment and run to pick up the papers that had been sitting there for three days, and pleasantly remind Mary what a waste of air and natural resources she is. She would then, without fail, oh yeah! remember to tell me about the last piece of paperwork that she forgot to tell me about, which we had picked up two weeks prior and notified her about at the time. She'd then remember the last phone call, and so on until we all die of confounded stupidity. We're all dead, of stupidity, and it is Motherfucking Mary who has killed us.

Dream Phone: No Fun With Frenchmen.

If the American 1990s were a mountain, Dream Phone would be its mystifying, captivating, hot-pink summit. Dream Phone was a culmination of every ion of 1990s American culture wrestled into a cardboard box with pictures of cute boys all over it. It was 1991 when the Dream Phone was released, and after that the Nineties basically brushed their shoulders off and said "we're done! Let's pack it in, folks, it's all down hill from here."Dream Phone was the Nineties Stone Tablets handed down to Nineties Moses (Zack Morris?), if that tablet were black with neon geometric shapes and hot pink script drawn all over it: the outline for all that was good and pure and right in 1991.

It was a board game, basically. It was Clue, except instead of finding a cold-blooded murderer, you ticked names off a crib sheet to figure out who, who, who, had a crush on you.

There are photos of "cute" boys around the board, and I use the term loosely because they are cute by definition of the Nineties: a system of judgement that has sadly gone by the wayside. So basically it's a bunch of enthusiastic young men with fades and Flock-of-Seagulls haircuts. And neon lettermen's jackets. And neon mesh sleeveless T's. And neon visors. And shades. O, the shades! Basically, anything you can picture your dad wearing to embarrass you at a family outing to the zoo, these guys are sporting totally un-ironically. Above the photographs, and I can not stress enough that these are actual photographs of young male models of the nineties who are now all adults with crippling cocaine addictions or dead from all the cocaine afforded to young male models of the nineties, there are silhouette illustrations of each respective gentleman highlighting (in neon, but do I really need to keep specifying that?) either an article of clothing that they're wearing, something funky-fresh that they are eating such as maybe an over-decorated cupcake or a slice of pizza (the proud traditional food of 1991) or some overwhelmingly nineties-y activity, like fucking surfing.

They all have nineties-y names, too, but I'm not sure exactly how that's possible. It's just barely twenty years ago, and yet if I say the name "Chad", you and I both know that dick is from the nineties. I guess he and all the "Jamal"s and "Bruce"s of the world just died there, because there sure as hell aren't any of them in this decade.

Anyway, there's a giant pink electronic phone in the center, and you have to dial the numbers of the boys (calling BOYS? OOO YOU SO BAD) and narrow your list down to the one guy who has a crush on you. They'll give you clues that start out loud and turn into a whisper. For instance, it could start out "HE'LL EAT ALMOST ANYTHING...." and then, softly, like a butterfly lighting on your waiting ear: "but not hot dogs." Sometimes you get a phone call from one of your girlfriends with a clue, and sometimes one of the guys is a total and complete asshole and just hangs up on you. "I know who it is, but I'm not telling! Ha, ha!" It doesn't look anywhere near as obnoxious as it sounds, you really have to hear it. It's been more than once that I've accidentally reset the game after throwing the phone against the wall over that dick. And I don't even know which one it is, because all their voices sound the same. One day...

It's worth noting that you just push a button to start the game. You don't program the number of players into it, and so the one guy who has a "crush on you", actually has a crush on whoever figures it out first and calls him. This fact absolutely enraged my male feminist friend who bought me the original 1991 game for my birthday. It took him a full minute to overcome the shock that his crush wouldn't be personalized if he won. I guess it is kind of tragically romantic to think of the other identically robot-voiced Nineties Studs waiting inside the enormous Dream Phone, pining for their one true love, hoping against hope that she'll piece together the clues. The real tragedy was that it took a man to be insulted that he didn't get a personal trophy: the countless girls who've played it through the years just accepted it.

So, I have the Dream Phone game. And it's hilarious. And it's even more hilarious when playing it with a bunch of American men, because the ridiculous, over-the-top, girlishly gleeful design of the game stands in stark contrast to how these men are supposed to behave. I have photos of a straight Canadian man (basically American, let's be real) and a gay American man, posing with the gigantic pink phone in enthusiastically girly poses, and they're adorable and funny and snarky.

Do not play this game with a French man. 

Here's the thing: French men will ruin this god-damn game for you. They will play the game with a genuinely earnest, if slightly confused, politesse that makes it fucking useless. You will take one look at the French man across from you, studying his photo of fucking "Brad" to get the phone number right, dialing this enormous pink nineties cell phone without a hint of irony, and waiting patiently for his clue before diligently marking it down on the crib sheet, and you will feel an emptiness that you haven't felt since your singing Power Rangers motion-activated bedroom door sign lost its juice and started sounding like the Power Rangers were melting.

Because honestly, this game sucks. The only great part of it is the ridiculous absurdity, and it's completely lost on the French. First of all, it's sort of difficult for them to sort through the bits of Americana that are earnest and the parts that are satiric or ironic, so in the name of etiquette they sort of have to carefully avoid eye contact with any Americans in the room whenever there's an absurd and outrageous bit of culture staring them in the face, lest they risk insulting one of us and getting killed in one of our "mass shootings", the festivals we hold regularly to celebrate freedom.

The French just aren't raised on the sort of brash commercialism that Americans know intimately and subtly enough to be able to parody, and, to be honest, they don't commodify and over-infantilize their young girls to the same extent that we do here. They don't understand how we mock the shamefulness of being a silly girl (or a girlish boy), because it isn't ingrained in them to be ashamed of being a girl in the same way. Of course, I'm not arguing that French society is a Utopia of equality and harmony (if you've read the news lately, you can't abide that), but on an individual level, I have noted that French women, at least, tend to be comfortable in their own skin in a way that I rarely notice in Americans. An American woman might give you a sidelong glance to make sure her butt is cuter while the French woman is concentrating on the notes of cucumber in her cocktail. American women are suspicious of men if you give them a compliment. They disagree vehemently and assume you're only saying it in order to have sex with them. If you tell a French woman she's beautiful, she'll say "merci beaucoup" and move the fuck on.

It's not our fault. We're raised to believe we're silly, and incompetent, and our value lies in our appearance. Even when an American girl has a wonderful, supportive family with a kick-ass father with his values in the right place, our culture is so saturated with media--lazy media that uses shortcuts and stereotypes to push a product--that a girl can be helpless to succumb.

I don't want to extemporize too much, so I'll just make this note: Obviously, this is not the case across-the-board for every American woman, every minute of every day. It's more like a foul disease that we have to keep at bay, that can grip us when we least expect it. It's not an absolutely curable disease, like the chicken-pox. It's more like depression, with a daily maintenance requirement: awareness is key. The most ass-kickingest, strident, powerful, awesomely smart, rock-and-roll women I know have their moments when all the insulting rhetoric and idealized bodies and men on the street get to them, and it doesn't make them any less powerful, but in fact, stronger for the wear because they've endured.

I've known a few French men who have been blindsided and confused by this American behavior; that American women will pigeonhole the French as sexual predators, or Pepe La Pews, simply because Frenchmen find it useful to say things earnestly, while their American counterparts, products of a media-saturated extended adolescence, will childishly berate the women they find attractive, or act like they don't exist, because they've never grown out of the phase where you pull the girl's pigtail when you have a crush on her. "I find you wonderful" has become a reason for suspicion.

So, I suggest to these Frenchmen to pick up a copy of Dream Phone 1991 Edition, for the low-low price of like seventy bucks on Ebay, and discover for yourselves why American women don't know how to digest your straight-forward approach. Because in a world where we're all competing for the one Robot Chad who's available to whichever the hell one of us gets there first because we're all the same anyway, we can easily sometimes forget our own worth. Which is a fucking bummer, dude.

Judging a Book by its Cover: A review of a book I've never read.

I was on the subway when I noticed the book that the man across from me was reading, entitled "Women" by Charles Bukowski, an author with whom I am not familiar in any capacity. You tell me if that's a tragedy. Now, I have no interest in this book. In fact, I would have scoffed mightily at the title had the man reading it not had crazy eyes. In truth, I've never read a single word beyond the title and author and I won't even be bothered to look up a synopsis, yet I'm going to tell you what it's all about and why it's fucking stupid.
This is a book written by a white man. I can gauge that from his Polish surname, but moreover from the  oblivious title of the book. And even though his name is Polish, I'm going to wager that he's American, or at least Americanized and definitely a product of Western culture, and that this is not a translation. I will also wager that he was born to a Christian family, and not Jewish.
Allow me to justify my stereotyping and assure you that I'm only playing with the fact that because I've grown so familiar with sweeping generalizations against me, I've discovered the only assumptions you can ever really properly make are the ones about individuals with real social capital, not in small part because these are the characters that we, as a whole, identify with. We see them clearly because our story is told from their perspective.
If I'm wrong about the author, it's because stereotyping is wrong and easily misleads you, obviously. If I'm right, it's only because I'm so accustomed to hearing the same perspective in every media, historical, and cultural outlet that it's as familiar to me as my own, including the prejudices that those in power hold against me and others that might allow them to assume they could write a book entitled "Women" and have the audacity to think they could speak at length about all women. I couldn't make the same judgement from the perspective of a homosexual man, or a Middle Eastern woman, because their stories are not embedded in my life and culture to an extent that I could understand them like I do white, American, English-speaking, straight, Christian men.
For example, a Jewish boy in France hears about their historic rebellion spurred by rich Christian schoolboys, and he says "we fought for liberty!", while his Christian counterpart hears a story about the trials of Jewish boys during World War 2 and says "that's him and his story". A white American girl sees a movie about a magical little British boy who saves the world, and she says "this is our story about magic!" but her brother won't go see the magic claymation movie with the female lead character because "that's a girl movie." A black boy spends his entire time in history class learning about the white men who built his country of birth and very little time exploring the stories of his own lineage's vital part in it except as a shameful footnote to the main story, a lesbian girl only sees people like her in caricatures and insults. It's only the straight, white, Christian men who are properly humanized. We know these people intimately--the main characters in the stories of our lives, the heroes in every adventure--because we see ourselves in them. They represent humanity.
So, back to "Women". Since this is a novel ("A novel" is written under the title) and not a how-to book ("How To Women: a working title"), I'm willing to bet that it's a book about a bunch of romantic trysts, and part of my reasoning is a result of the dinky little drawing on the cover of the bottom half of a woman (the important part) adjusting a high-heeled shoe. You might say "well, of course it is a book about sexual adventures. It's a book about women, so of course it's about the sexual gratification of the author." To which I say, why the fuck do you equate the two? Yet I would literally bet my back-up hard drive that this is not a book about a diverse collection of female scientists, doctors, waitresses, photographers, civil servants, artists, and lawyers who wear high-heels, including a moving portrayal of the author's mother and sister and their respective trials and tribulations. I am equally certain that it's a book mostly about working-to-middle class white women, with maybe a token Asian girl thrown in for good measure, and maybe also a tragic, drug addicted street urchin.
I will also assert that not only is this a book about a string of romantic trysts focusing on white women, most likely using ill-informed tropes, but that because women [subtext: easy women] are viewed as an indulgence in which to partake in the same vein as drugs and alcohol, that this author is also some kind of drug addict or alcoholic or something. And that he isn't very well-off financially as a result.
You might say betting that an author is a poor alcoholic isn't exactly upping the ante much, but I'm really just pointing out the direct correlation between "women" and "indulgence", as if we were a thing to be enjoyed. When was the last time you saw a personification of lust and it was a well-hung muscly man in a tangerine speedo? You have never seen that. And if you have, I would like to know where you hang out please.
Don't take away from this that I think it's wrong and shameful to write a book about a series of your romantic trysts and one-night stands. You can write whatever the hell you like, I'm not the story police. In fact, I would absolutely read it if your choice of title and cover art wasn't a perfect storm of lazy and uninteresting thought. What I am the god-damn police of is naming your book "Women", as if your stories represent the whole of womanhood itself instead of, you know, several women as viewed through the skewed and biased lens of one very-important man. I mean, generally, as a rule, if you could add "amiright?" at the end of your book title and it wouldn't change the connotation too much, it's time to re-think your material. I would advise conscientious readers to steer clear of any other vastly generalized books this particular author may have written, such as "Black People" or "The Gays". You can't claim to speak for everyone in a categorized group when you don't damn well speak for everyone in that group, especially when you yourself are not a part of that group. Or, I guess, you can claim it, but just get ready for the shit-storm once you do.
Unless Charles Bukowski is dead. In which case, rest in peace little buddy. Don't you worry your pretty little head about the womenfolk no longer.

Why "The Great Gatsby" trailer infuriates me.

Here we go.

Like every other red-blooded American citizen, I consider The Great Gatsby to be one of my favorite, if not my favorite classic American novel. I adore classic Americana, and it's so sadly scarce nowadays due to the super-ironic, hyper self-aware sort of media that we've been putting out for the last maybe decade or so that I've become very defensive of a particular model of Americana that I believe encompasses the truly great parts of American culture. Americaaaaaa, fuck yeah!

So, anyway, the Gatsby trailer comes out like a year ago, and then they pushed the actual release of the movie back six months, which is always a good sign. Qualitaaayyyy. For those of you who don't know, The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald about the futility of the American dream, in a freaking nutshell. It follows a level-headed narrator, Nick Carroway, as he moves from the humble Mid-West to the jazzy, flashy Long Island and encounters a mysterious man who is mysteriously rich and mysteriously hung up on a girl from his mysterious past, who happens to be Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, because why not? Daisy is married to a hulking ex-football star who is cheating on her with a full-figured and vivacious woman, Myrtle, who is in turn married to an unreasonably depressing blue-collar worker, noted for being constantly covered in dust. Nick is basically flung into this world of excess with Jordan Baker, the sassy sarcastic friend of Daisy, as his spirit guide.

A few things about Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan: these women are fully-fleshed, fascinating, multi-layered personalities who absolutely drive the story. Nick Carroway is a string of reasonable and thoughtful observations of the people around him, and who wants to hang out with that guy? Not the reader, that's for sure, or we wouldn't ask him to skip through a brief rundown of his life for three months to get to the good parts with the parties, and the drinking, and the characters! But Jay Gatsby may as well be a cardboard cut-out for how stiff and weird he is. His personality is a stream of posturing, and his entire character is just a stand-in for the point Fitzgerald is trying to make about the hollowness of American culture. Meanwhile Daisy is flirty, and charismatic, and flighty, with a bit of that absurd cleverness that we adore in figures like Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. Her characterization is a work of art, she is why the Great Gatsby is a classic novel; not its wooden, representative namesake. And Jordan-- her cool-headed, blasé demeanor makes her our perfect Virgil for this exposition, if not a perfect personality, as Carroway discovers to his dismay. And that's just it-- she isn't perfect. She's terribly flawed: selfish and dishonest and cold, but clever and witty and interesting all the same.

And here's where I run into trouble in the damn trailer for this movie: where are the driving forces of this novel? Jordan is relegated to one line by an actress clearly playing her as some kind of two-dimensional gossip, and Daisy is a wilting flower, no pun intended. I mean, while Daisy is not exactly a bastion of strong-willed womanhood in this story, she's not some fawning maiden, either. She's witty, she's incredible: her lines are the best in the book, hands down. Where is the "do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" or "I hope she's a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." In the trailer, she's just overcome with love and lust, in a sensual make-out scene in the woods somewhere that is never written in the book because it's too easy, it removes the layers of dimension to have Daisy and Gatsby just lay it all out there like that. It's sexual tension that creates great and sophisticated art. The tension, not the release. Tension is complicated, and difficult to master. Anyone can do release, it's completely easy.

Which brings us to the hyper-sexualization of the female presence in the movie (always the women). There are go-go dancers in Meyer Wolfsheim's ancient, decrepit old club where he ruminates on his colorful and dark past? Please. The film makers are simply taking the little memorable snippets from the novel: Drinking! Parties! Glitter! Lights! and bulldozing all of the gorgeous, layered, delicate intricacies that makes the story great, so that what we're left with is an over-simplified, jarring, shocking spectacular with no particularly interesting characters or story. It's pretty pictures with no substance, and you could literally do that with any source material so why do this to an American classic? Why make this an option for particular uninformed teachers to show in a classroom to get kids interested in reading? Why make this a thing that readers associate with the novel, why make it harder to grasp the delicately woven spider-web of the book-- make it easier to ignore in favor of the glittery, flashy distractions? I know the answers, of course, and it's ironic because that's exactly the problem that the book warns us against: giving up a rich inner life for the superficial outer trappings of money, over-sexualization, greed, objectification-- and it's one of many reasons why I adore this book. This movie is making it a really meta representation of itself.... and yes, I understand that movies are not always exactly like their trailers and there's a chance this travesty is going to pick itself up and dust itself off to be a fine film, but the marketing is not a good sign. Unless the scenes in the trailer are entirely cut from the movie, I have few hopes. I guess it's true that the best thing a girl can be in this world is a beautiful little fool.

A new experiment called: drink some Pastis in the afternoon and recount a shameful story.

There's one restaurant in Italy that I can never return to ever in my life, but I can't remember which one it is because I was too drunk, but it's somewhere in Florence. I just hope if I ever find myself in Florence again I'll have the good sense to ask all the waiters there if they've ever seen me or someone like me throw a glass of wine in someone else's face, and then I will know to leave immediately and never return.
I didn't even have a good reason to throw a glass of wine in this person's face. Or at least, at the time, I didn't have a good reason. I found out later that he had been cheating on me for three weeks, which is a fact that I wish I had known at the moment that I was throwing wine in his face, because it would have made the event seem justified, or even awesome. But no. I didn't even really have a reason besides the fact that I was in such a hideous and terrible relationship with this person that I just hated so, so much that when I got drunk enough, I actually just threw things at his face in public. Liquid things, to clarify. Liquid things, and it only happened once, but Holy Christ did I hate this person, for incredible and valid reasons that do not belong in a throwaway comedic article.
We weren't even alone. I met him and a mutual friend in Italy after he had been traveling through Europe with his adult puppet show for a month, and I waited until said friend went to the bathroom before whipping around out of nowhere and tossing some wine across the room. In fact, splashes of it hit the people behind us and there were actual gasps in the restaurant before everyone realized that they were Italian and saw this shit every day, and went back to their meals.
Yes, he was a puppeteer in an adult puppet show, which is exactly what it sounds like and more or less as confusing. And there were some parts of it that were absolutely delightful, I am not going to lie, but I can and will credit none of them to my no-good, very bad ex. When you have a drag queen singing into a microphone with a three foot ponytail of hair hanging off of it and teacups elegantly dancing to Au clair de la lune, I am just sold, and that's the truth.
So he was a puppeteer. Maybe he still is, who cares. But he was not a good puppeteer. He traveled through Europe with this team of artists as the equivalent of a swing or an understudy, waiting in the wings for one of the talented puppeteers to get a tragic hand cramp or whatever happens to puppeteers so he could swoop in at the last moment and proceed to be astoundingly terrible at puppeteering.
Now, I'm no expert. I don't even know what string you pull on a marionette to make the things go, but I do know what humans look like when they're moving, and unless it is a very specific stage direction, they are not supposed to look like really shaky, arthritic old men that drag their legs behind them when they walk, gingerly slapping the items around them while their head looks in the complete opposite direction, if it is in fact possible to slap something gingerly. If you've ever seen a bad puppeteer, you know that it is possible. To be fair, people-puppets are probably some of the hardest to maneuver, but when you're piloting a UFO, for instance, and it spends the majority of its time onstage halfheartedly turning slowly in the air with one end drooping sadly until it finally crashes into a wall in an act of desperation, and then a succession of curtains that you're captaining get hopelessly caught every single time they try to open like a kindergarten graduation's Hell of Repetition, maybe it's time to hang up your delightfully wacky checkered blazer and rainbow beanie with a propeller, Mr. Quirky Artist, and stick to gluing red sparkles on the devil puppet's enormous foam dick.
The girl he cheated on me with, consistently, for three weeks, before I threw wine in his face, was another puppeteer in the group, and a more successful artist. They had had an "art routine" or whatever together where they dissected stuffed animals, that bled for some reason, while they themselves were I guess scientists or something dressed only in cellophane. So. I guess I should have seen that coming, and I would have, if she wasn't such a nonsense human being. Every time I saw her, she was embarrassingly, cryingly, nakedly drunk, tripping over her stilettos that she couldn't walk in sober and having everyone ("everyone" in this sense meaning "me") take care of her ass even though she was like, twenty-eight years old. I was maybe nineteen, and bewildered as shit. Secondarily, she was also physically unattractive and smelled like Trix cereal. I know because she very frequently leaned all over me, while a drunken mess, and publicly molested me more than once. But, it's okay, though, guys... she was drunk. It's okay to grope people when you're drunk. (It's actually not.) My mean Belgian friend told me that some men, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, like to sleep with really plain women while they're with attractive ones. Being mean, he never directly indicated that it might be the case with my relationship, but it made me feel better all the same. Thank you, mean Belgian friend.
I once went to this girl's birthday party, in which she was in fact turning twenty-nine for those of you following along at home. The invitation said to bring "glitter and fun crafts", again, to a twenty-nine year old's birthday party. I mean, I'm all for being young at heart but do you have to drag everyone down else with you? Furthermore, fucking glitter? By the time we found her shitty apartment in the bowels of Brooklyn, she was entirely naked, having had her body painted by guests as a party activity, which we sadly missed. At this point, she was drunkenly painting figure eights on the walls of her apartment and absolutely covered in god damn glitter, which if you don't know, never comes out of anything no matter how hard you try and if you ever get any on you, congratulations you have been sentenced to a life of glitter-face. Even if you scratch off your own flesh, the glitter will somehow find its way permanently into the bloody wound you've carved into your own body. Basically, fuck glitter, is what I'm saying.  Anyway, when she saw us, she came right up to us and gave us both our own big individual, naked, glittery hugs.
I decided then and there that I needed to be the most stoned and drunk I ever was and ever will be.
I'd only smoked the mary-juana cigarettes before, and so when someone passed me a bong I wasn't sure if there was something different to it, and I asked the girl next to me. She gave me the snottiest, judgiest look I've ever seen since, and I've glanced in a reflective surface while I'm talking about interpretive touch-dancing. I very clearly remember saying "alright, get over yourself" before like, inhaling from a bong? Is inhaling what you do? I don't remember, but I'm sure inhaling was a big part of it.
Etcetera etcetera etcetera, the girls at the party started like, mean-girl "complimenting" me on wearing a sheer blouse, like they were surprised because they think of me as the biggest prude on Earth, which if you know me, you realize this is patently untrue in many ways, although I will grant them that I don't get naked at parties and have people paint me. They started saying my blouse was "so risque", while their drunk friend tripped naked over the one stiletto heel she was still strapped into, the other having been lost to time and the elements. At once point they dragged a bag of wine out of its box and told me to drink from the spout and slap the bag "like a baby". This was a little bit before I was going to a lot of hipster parties and before it was kind of a thing to slap items like you might an infant, although for the life of me I still have no idea what that shit is about. I just got backed into a corner, feigning ignorance and entreating that I can't slap it like a baby, because I just wouldn't slap a baby. Seriously, guys?
I stumbled out of the bathroom later to have Weird Guy McWeirdyPants waiting for me outside, insisting that my boyfriend made out with a guy in the other room while I was gone. He followed me for a bit, insisting, until I decided I was so fucking leaving it wasn't even funny.
Anyway the moral is, get your story together before you throw a drink in someone's face, because you might need an interesting story to tell Italian Customs when you finally get your act together and cheese it.