Baby I Was Born This Way

Let’s say that all famous literary characters were born in 1985. What would they be doing today? Let’s imagine.

Anne Shirley (of Green Gables) is always cold. She has her own Etsy shop, where she sells flower headpieces and an assortment of wedding “tablescape” items, including her most popular piece, a wooden bluebird with a musical note in its beak. She is still a virgin, but gets aroused when watching The Tudors or reading historical fiction of any kind. During college, she studied abroad in Ireland and it totally changed her life.

Sherlock Holmes was diagnosed with ADD at age seven, but dislikes taking medication and has been trading pills for BJs since middle school. He was recruited by Bain & Company halfway through his freshman year at Columbia. He travels between Sao Paolo and Shanghai for work, and is gender-indiscriminate when seeking the company of an escort.

Humbert Humbert is that pale, greasy guy who always wears inappropriate hats, like a fedora or a tweed newsboy. He clears his web history every day.

Alice in Wonderland is a Phish head who likes to take her shoes off. A quiet girl, she nevertheless possesses remarkable party stamina and quietly orders five drinks minimum every time she goes to brunch.

Rhett Butler de-pledged his fraternity in the middle of hell week and, after pretending to be Rhett Butler the poker player a couple of times, became addicted to playing the game online. He amassed $20,000 that he intended to use to start a jalapeno vodka craft distillery, but the girl he was hooking up with lost the money when she was playing on his computer and didn’t think it was a real game. He has vowed to stay away from girls he meets at Bikram from now on.

Atticus Finch won the “RA of the Year” award for four years in a row. Halfway through 2L at Duke, he took a hiatus and flew to India, where he took residence in an ashram. His blog, http://insearchofpeaceandrighteousness.blogspot.com, has not been updated since January.

Daisy Buchanan lives in her parent’s pied-à-terre in Manhattan and, thanks to her trust fund, has been successfully crawling up the ladder of unpaid art internships for the last three years. Although her stainless steel fridge is plastered with printouts of Gwyneth Paltrow, she has developed an appropriately cynical sense of humor about her lifestyle and is the secret author of “White Girl Problems.”

Nick Adams actually exists. I am sure there’s a guy out there named Nick Adams who acts exactly like Hemingway’s character would. Nick Adams, the real one, works at a family friend’s wind energy company and just broke up with his sweet, laid-back girlfriend because she kept asking him “What are you thinking, right now?”

The Little Prince is a tweaked-out Grindr addict who lives in San Francisco and conducts “space Pilates” classes, where all the equipment is shaped like planetary objects, and each session takes place in a dark room lit only with glowsticks. He is dating Peter Pan.

Nancy Drew just got her real estate license and is worried that her friend Georgia is fooling around with Ned. She goes to the gym every day but totally hates her ankles and has hired a physical trainer just to slim them down. When she’s drunk, she has a tendency to take off running and return with shoplifted candy that she calls “clues.”

Romeo and Juliet were taken straight to the ER after their tragic teenage double suicide attempt. The pair recuperated fully in the UCLA teaching hospital. Saddled with two children, the couple’s most recent fight was over whether to watch American Idol or the Mavs-Thunder game. They stalk their elementary school crushes on Facebook and wonder why they rushed into things so fast.

Lord Voldemort received a Fulbright scholarship in 2007 to study the intersection of voodoo, microfinance, and modern medicine in Haiti. He raped the dog guarding his hostel and hasn’t been seen since.

Never Have I Ever Seen Oprah

Generally, I’m willing to try anything once, stopping short at injectables, carb-free living, and anything that could result in more than five years of jail time. I’m also generally willing to read anything, even things I don’t like, the latter being part of my quest to fully understand Republicans.

But there are some things I can’t bring myself to do and some books I can’t bring myself to read. Here they are, in correspondence.

I have never watched Oprah. Thus I’ve never read Tuesdays with Morrie. One peek in that book at Starbucks was enough to make me feel like I could make fun of it forever.

I have never worn Spanx. Thus I’ve never read Skinny Bitch or He’s Just Not That Into You. Life’s too short for things that make you disappointed in your natural self, which is the one that carefully assesses whether that’s Manchego or Gruyere on the cheese tray.

I have never used an ear candle or a Neti Pot. Thus I’ve never read The Secret.

I have never owned a Burberry scarf. Thus I have never read The Jewish American Princess Handbook.

I have never visited an author’s grave. Thus I’ve never read Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past.

I have never bought a country music CD. Just kidding, I’m from Texas. I bought a Faith Hill CD in fifth grade and listened to it every day. But I will never read Heaven Is for Real.

I have never used a Blackberry. Thus I’ve never read either The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. 

I have never worked or considered work outside of the “creative class.” Thus I’ve never read anything by James Patterson, Danielle Steele, or Nora Roberts.

I have never shopped at Lululemon. Thus I have never read If You Think He’s Cheating… He Probably Is.

Op-Ed 2: Peace Corps Boogaloo

My op-ed in the New York Times has been leading people here (hello everyone!) so I wanted to add some tertiary information to reflect my personal perception of the experience. I won’t deny that I spent plenty of nights just seething with rage at every man I saw, and plenty of days screaming “Fuck Peace Corps” into my hardy third-world Nokia. But neither Kyrgyzstan nor Peace Corps is exclusively comprised of hordes of swarthy rapists and bureaucratic co-conspirators–something that I hope my article conveyed. Despite the never-ending stream of turbulence and cynicism that permeated my anomalous year in Kyrgyzstan, the experience was humbling: dirty, embarrassing, transcendent, grounded in staunch, painful idealism till the end. And maybe more than anything, it was funny!

1) Top Kyrgyz names (transliterated from Cyrillic): Mufftuna, Chewbak, Temirlan (pronounced “Timbaland”), and the 2 million school girls named the equivalent of Moon Angel and Pretty Sun Rain.

2) My students and Kyrgyz counterpart teacher, on the scale of 1 to incredibly inspirational: off the charts. They have been hard at work in the Chykalov “We Love Reading” Library, and I think there’s a waiting list for Russian Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia. May they never cease to pronounce “8″ as “H” and “cake” as “cock.”

3) “She’s Kyrgyz but she’s really good at English.” -Everyone at the bazaar

4) Kyrgyz students’ favorite yoga pose: Warrior 3, inexplicably. Giggles per mixed-gender yoga class: 4000-10000. Best pose translation: “Princess Bird” instead of “Royal Pigeon.” Here is a photo of average Kyrgyz yoga attire and venue (jeans on a glass-studded concrete block).

5) Average # of people in a taxi at any given time: 10-12, fewer if sheep or chickens are also along for the ride. We once saw a live goat get stuffed in a plastic shopping bag and then placed under the seats of a minibus.

6) Best national game: polo with a sheep’s head as the ball.

7) Best Kyrgyz words: “monpussy” for candy and “buttcock” for mud. Also, how cute are my host siblings?

8: Worst part of Peace Corps safety training: the day when they showed us pictures of STDs that included captions with phrases like “ham-colored floor” and “pussy nodules,” the first word of which is a Rorschach test determining which you like more, sex or medicine.

9) One serious: I really don’t think the Peace Corps main office has nearly as much to do with this issue as do the individual country directors and staff. As we all found out in Kyrgyzstan, a bad CD (i.e. one that hasn’t ever been a volunteer) makes for an awful time. A good one is fantastic.

10) Last: cheers to every single person who is still serving in Kyrgyzstan. You are all amazing. I hope I never black out in an orphanage again.

Hyperreality at the Horse Races

To the right is a before-and-after Photoshop of a Campari ad starring Jessica Alba. Here’s a visual illustration of an image becoming a simulacrum. A simulacrum is an image that doesn’t resemble anything in reality, whose intent is not to represent reality but to signify something to the viewer–in this case, that you should buy Campari, that you should live more glamorously, that you or your girlfriend should get a personal trainer and some prescription eyelash serum in order to look more like Jessica Alba.

As Baudrillard maps it out, there are four steps separating images from simulacra. In the first step, the image is a representation of basic reality. It’s important to note that Jessica Alba’s un-retouched original is already a step past this. 

What’s meant here by basic reality? Well, let’s remember that an original image of Jessica Alba on a yacht for a Campari calendar is not a representation of reality: it’s a representation of fantasy, something which only a million dollars, several teams of stylists, and a celebrity-industrial complex could create. Basic reality is this photo: an ordinary teenager in her bedroom surrounded by (and believing in) simulacra of a woman’s body and life. The un-retouched Jessica Alba photo is already at step 2, where the image masks and perverts a basic reality.

Step 3: the image masks the absence of a basic reality. It “plays at being an appearance.” This is the way we’d view this image if we saw it in a magazine. We know it’s a product, we know it’s fake to some degree, so we happily participate in its fantasy-making. We process it only via the things that differentiate it from other simulated images, relating to it by where its features fall on the consumerist ladder (really, a white jumpsuit? or what kind of douche drinks Campari anyway, etc).

Step 4: the image bears no relation to any reality whatever and is its own pure simulacrum. You can see in this image how Jessica Alba’s body and face, already so hot as to be unreal, must be further perfected by the Photoshops before the image is ready to be reproduced a thousand times in a magazine. Simulacra are so common as to be almost unremarkable today, but it’s important to remember that this photo, going up on thinspiration boards everywhere and taped to the refrigerators of the insecure, is (like most images of female celebrities) a copy with no original.

Here’s a more obvious example of a simulacrum, to the right. Riding the wave of the American public’s endless desire for the hyperreal, this girl has been processed into an (already highly falsified) image of an adult beauty queen; she then takes photos that do not represent anything and stars in Toddlers and Tiaras, which is not a reality show as much as it is a hyperreality show. Like all that glorious trash, it represents not the reality of American life but the churning wheel of simulation in which the most outrageously false representation of reality wins.

I read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality before I came to Charlottesville, where I have been chugging beer 24 hours a day for two weeks. It began at Foxfield, an event that is many things but certainly not real life. Eco, in his book, talks about Disney World: “It’s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness.“

And that’s Foxfield for you. It, the Frat Christmas, is one of my favorite days of all time, but in the minds of everyone who goes there to party, it’s hyperreal.  Year after year people make the pilgrimage to Charlottesville with the aim of reproducing the Foxfield tradition, which in itself consists primarily of reproducing a tradition that never quite existed in the way we enact it, and has only the faintest connection to anything equine.

A sidenote: in the above photo of my college roommates, one of us has been expertly Photoshopped in so we can pretend she was there this year. A copy with no original. Gloriously hyperreal!

The hyperreality of Foxfield is its biggest draw. It is stuffed full of simulacra; it itself is a simulation involving all four of Baudrillard’s steps. You begin on Foxfield morning looking shitty and feeling terrible from the night before, you make yourself acceptable-looking to mask the reality and begin participating in the reproduction of the Foxfield imaginary; you start drinking at 9 AM to ease your hangover. You arrive at the grounds and participate in this adult playspace where everyone is cute, everything is awesome, all your friends are there in the same place and you revel in this mix of trash and class unique to highly fabricated events: say, shotgunning beers in a sundress and floppy hat on the top of a pickup. With all your friends. And you are too drunk to remember the particulars, so you need the photos to make this hyperreality seem like real life. As Eco says about Disney World: “There, you here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.”

I have issues with the ubiquity of simulacra in today’s world, and in some very minor ways I try to stay away from it: my boyfriend and I recently watched TV on a TV for the second time this year and our mutual extreme reaction leads me to believe that we’re going to be Luddite cranks before 30. But when TLC’s current lineup includes Sister Wives, Pawn Queens, Police Women of Broward County, Spouse vs. House, Extreme Couponing, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and Mother Knows Sex–how can we live? What’s wrong with us, America?

It’s impossible to escape, even when there’s a surface movement that attempts to. “Farm-to-table” dining: yuppie hyperreal. Volunteerism and voluntourism, temporary, and functioning so often with the end goal of photos and resumes: well-meaning hyperreal. You can try to live correctly, but you can’t help but take it with you.

So the answer is Foxfield, the best kind of hyperreality: the kind that is impossible to take seriously. If, as Eco says, hyperreality creates life as “a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing,” you will find me parked in the Foxfield aisle of the virtual marketplace until it becomes truly embarrassing. See you all at the corn dog stand.