the motto is in effect

adventuring to montreal - updates and potentially video to follow

In regards to the tressy doll growth mechanism, marysville's marathon bathroom is equipped with a rotating reusuable cloth towel apparatus.

-- Post From My iPhone

i cannot turn this paper in

Being Hungry Sucks Dick

You will not be able to convince me that the Food Stamp Challenge was anything but a publicity stunt for those governors and senators and other public officials. Our class provided a microcosm of the same problem linked to inaccurate political generalizations; of my twenty-odd classmates, I was the only one who considered the role of appealingly priced fast food in the malnutrition of poverty. here’s the thing. mcdonald’s spends millions and millions of dollars creating appealing and persuasive depictions of not only the food itself, but also of the seemingly great lifestyle that comes alongside such a distinguished choice in greasy hamburgers. lentils are boring. us Americans love us some variety, and as such, I wanted to explore the effects of consuming items purchased solely from the value menu.
in my preparation for my week of dollar menus, I decided to track my mood and appetite for a few days to try and begin my with a baseline. one thing I chose to do was spend eight of my twenty-one dollars on a bottle of a vitamin blend that provides essential fruit and vegetable nutrients to ensure th
let me tell you something. the dollar menus are full of great deals and almost always tasty snacks. really, truly, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. it seems great, you drive up to the window, hand them a dollar and six cents, and they pass you a steaming double cheeseburger or a mcchicken or two apple pies. it’s easier not to wonder how the hell they can make money charging a dollar for a lot of hamburger meat, because the implications are likely quite troubling and would like discourage my patronage.
the single largest problem with the self as an ethnographer of one’s own situation is that of validity. from the overarching issue of conducting research and making observations that accurately address the intending topic of eating the poverty diet to the more minute aspects of designing a meaningful way to capture and organize data, it is nearly impossible to meet an acceptable level of validity. unfortunately, it is impossible for me to entirely abandon the fact that I am an upper-middle class college student, and as such, I’m not able to understand the yet esoteric feeling of poverty.
inarguably, the food stamp challenge is about simulation, not recreation, and that’s okay. my foray into the world of government nutrition programs has taught me a number of things. in reflection on my week, I have decided that the single most important piece of knowledge I have gained was a direct result of acknowledging that my background was inseparable from my experience. rather than attempting to deny the inherencies of my person and societal status, I realized that keeping these characteristics at the forefront of my mind led me to understand that, for me, this ethnography was not about describing my regular life and my food stamp challenge life, but to describe the intersectionality of the two. not only would it be pretentious for me to deem myself a reputable source for the woes of poverty, but it would also deny the fact that where I started from is also a crucial part of how I chose to present my data. this is not a paper about living in poverty. this is a paper about a rich, suburban kid playing at poverty.
perhaps my week of fast food exclusive consumption was no favor to my body, and yet, there was always the lingering comfort that everything I was doing was a choice. there are safety and comfort in control.
this exercise in ethnography illustrates the difficulties of being a social scientist. even the best designed, most naturalistic observations are unable to skirt the numerous threats presented simply by the virtue of its origins in research. whether the breakdown happens at the individual level, with the ethnographer failing to accurately or completely record information, or at the community level, where participants feel pressured or react with a response bias to sensitive subjects, one thing is clear. as much as we like to think as (amateur) researchers that our work is more or less objective, there is real danger in attempting to mask natural influences by feigning ignorance of their existence.

who needs patches when you can color your leg the same color as your pants?

my grandfather finds equality in new configurations.

the renaissance humanistic movement of the early fifteenth century centered around the words of Leon Battista Alberti, who held that "a man can do all things if he will." within this theoretical framework, individuals who strove to excel in disciplines of intellectual, social, artistic, and athletic concern were held as gifted or genius. today, we use the term renaissance man as a means of describing individuals who embody the innate and infinite capacity for learning described by early humanists.

I revisited the term in an attempt to provide a fitting description of Mark’s brief, but accomplished, life, though I still remember the first time I heard it. we were in baldy’s second hour class (at Greengates in Mexico), and he was talking about leonardo davinci, calling him the prime example of a reh-nay-sonce man. when I looked down at the backwards cursive blueprints printed in my textbook, I didn’t think of beards or walking on water, but instead of my grandfather’s broad, square hands.

my grandfather, hulki aldikacti (all-duh-kahtch-tee), has lived a life that would make any renaissance humanist proud. he was born into a wealthy family in 1934 in Istanbul, Turkey; in his early life, not only did he excel in school, but was also an accomplished gymnast and had already constructed his first motor boat by scratch at the age of twelve.

by the time he was eighteen or nineteen, my grandfather had finished university in turkey, and decided to move to the united states to study engineering here at the university of michigan. the picture of him leaning against the car was actually taken somewhere on campus sometime in the early 1950’s. my grandfather’s drive to produce work that represented nothing less than his absolute best effort led to his employment at general motors (no pun intended).

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/08/science/detroit-innovation-in-bold-stroke-produces-car-with-shell-of-plastic.html?sec=health

in 1983, the above new york times article was published. the Pontiac fiero represented my grandfather’s constant search for efficiency and innovation. its design was unlike that of any previous produced automobile; rather than using steel body plates which were expensive to repair and produce, the fiero relied upon dozens of plastic plates that could be replaced easily and cheaply. with its sporty look, energy efficient engine, and low sticker price, the fiero was chosen by car and driver in 1984 as one of the ten best cars in the year, and was also chosen to be the indy 500 pacecar that same year. my grandmother was excited because she got to spend the weekend with that year’s indy 500 celebrity sponsor, paul newman.

alongside his successful career, my grandfather had always pursued his interests in art and design. when he decides he wants to do something, he follows through; his garage is full of tools and machines to do everything from delicate woodwork to carving marble sculptures. sometimes we laugh at him, because he goes through phases, for example, the arctic tundra, and we all get a marble polar bear or a painted wooden penguin. his work is beautiful, though, always beautiful.

I was at their house three summers ago, when all of a sudden a UPS truck pulled into the driveway with the biggest box I had ever seen. as the ups guy, my grandfather, and I struggled the box into the garage, he told me he had decided to build a boat. when he said boat, he wasn’t talking about a little rowboat, but rather a twenty four foot long mahogany bottom old-style chris-craft. a year later when it was finished, he took us for a ride. my grandfather was not a good driver; my father’s imitation of a little girl being towed on a tube in front of us involves shrieking “daddy, don’t stop!! go faster!!”

our house is full of the things he has created. if you were to visit for dinner, you would first encounter him in the intricate, hand-carved mahogany front door, and if you were served hors d’oeuvres, you might notice the coffee table he made for my mother’s sixteenth birthday, and when your plate was set in front of you, if you looked down, you’d see a garden in the wood beneath the glass.

when he turned seventy-five, he told us he wasn’t taking any shit from anyone. it was funny, not because he said shit (one of his favorite words), but because he couldn’t take shit from anyone if he tried. my grandfather does not tolerate anything less than honesty and as such, despite his strange tendencies and fox news habit, moves through life with fairness. everything he does has a purpose, and for that, among other things, I am proud to be his granddaughter.

no, anthony kiedis, i wish i saw

When I went into the waiting room, I thought I’d be comically out of place as a twenty year old at the most heavily advertised hair replacement center in all of Metro Detroit – Doctors Tessler and Aronowitz, Hair Replacement Specialists. Imagine my disappointment when I entered the office in southfield only to find it filled with homely, badly dressed west bloomfield girls and their mothers. Perhaps the dermatology was a discretionary practice in order to disperse the excess of self-consciousness across a broader demographic of embarrassment.

The nurse led me back for my consultation after I had filled out a number of forms designed to determine my desperation’s depth and suggested I take a look at the booklets full of poorly printed before and after pictures. I quietly assumed the lackluster image quality was an intentional but gentle hand hold to lead the words hair and plus apart, to close the door softly after plugs. Dr. Arnowitz arrived a short five minutes later, which was remarkable for any doctor’s office, especially so because I was not paying for my initial examination. As I stood to shake his fleshy paw, I found myself puzzled with his counter-intuitive male pattern baldness, but refrained from commenting on the remarkable sheen of his liver-spotted scalp, although I may have reflexively squinted a little.

In addition to this concern kept company by buck-toothed dentists, overweight physicians, and male lesbians, upon squirming in his floppy handshake, I had a horrible thought. Maybe the softness of his skin was not maintained in the priestly regiment of non-scented, hypoallergenic hand creams so as not to abrade the comfort hungry parish, but instead a result of touching people’s greasy heads all day; this notion of a different type of all-natural moisturizer forced me to fake a cough while I actually gagged a little. While he flicked my hair around in search of the scar, I was a little jealous that he got to meet my bald spot when my acquaintance with that part of myself was essentially a glory hole finger fuck when I got nervous.

Maybe I wouldn’t have picked the scab so much if its single sense (touch) accessibility, or maybe limitation, wasn’t so fascinating, and sometimes it even felt like I was pulling out infant segments of skull. It got so bad and uncontrollable that nubs for fingernails wasn’t prohibitive enough, so my mother knitted me a tiny hat small enough to be mistaken for a misguided yarmulke. Two weeks earlier it had healed enough for my own dermatologist to deem that particular pasture of my head to be infertile and salted in the form of overabundant scar tissue growth, which is how I ended up at Tessler and Aronowitz. Upon his referral to the Hair Specialists of Metro Detroit, I saw the entire Bernstein family, even the cross-eyed one, in my head, and wondered how many people good ole Sam had sent over to T and A.

My inability to decide whether it was funnier to be a twenty year old with hair plugs or a twenty year old with a bald spot on the top of my head began to shift, as if Aronowitz’s description of the hair transplant process – involving slits with scalpels, microscopes, and tweezers – was easing out the clutch. It sounded gross and not at all funny in its pattern of two grand wait three months two grand wait three months two grand wait three months. Even though I’d never met the bottom boundary of my scalp either, I knew a change of location wouldn’t change that.



sever the corpus collosum with
pruning shears you find in the
garage but wd-40 the blades first
so it is one snip and not a series of
nibbling perforations -
it is impossible to nest when
everything is so shiny



i've thought about the hypotheticals involved in the grief and in the end i see new figurines and rawly unapologetic manifestations that seem to reflect an unintended beauty of pain tracing effortless tracks dabbed by the presence of others and i think i don't want to watch but my vision is distorted enough that it becomes an obligation as if it is my duty to observe and take notes on the natural behavior of those who have themselves forgotten themselves and all others besides him and those who resemble him


but i thought mostly of you in the front seat like i was in october and what made brendan lose control - for mary it was a ladybug - and if you knew like i did of the imminent violence and i hoped to god that you hadn't and cried every time i imagined you pulling your legs down to protect yourself and how it didn't matter whether or not you had implored god to stop time or at least the forward momentum that would kill you because before your eyes could even track the halt your body removed your sense of perception there wasn't time to register or name the feeling of your squishy internal organs (you'd always had a soft heart) compressing unnaturally against the inside of your rib cage betraying the strength of the rest of you or maybe instead just a testament to the fact that you always drank your milk and i cried even more when i thought that you were so good that you wouldn't even be mad at god for being a fucking indian giver and i cried even more because that made me more selfish than god.


UPDATE

Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the early 15th century that, "a man can do all things if he will." This phrase, borne from the minds of Renaissance humanists, places humans as limitless in their capacity to learn and succeed across a broad variety of activities. These days, we use the term Renaissance Man to describe individuals who embody this principle. In thinking about Mark, it seems to be the only accurate way to describe him.

Mark's talents as an athlete, artist, and student are inarguable; he's always been good at everything he's tried. His exuberance for almost everything was nothing short of infectious, and he is inseparable from the adventures of my childhood. Although I probably wouldn't have thought about leaping down Sleeping Bear Dunes or building a hovercraft in the garage or trying to make an ice rink on the Rouge River, I was always glad I'd gone along with Mark's enthusiastic ideas.

Above all, though, Mark's greatest attribute was the sense of equality and fairness that guided all of his actions. Even at age seven, he was telling my younger brother and I to stop picking on our younger sister, and for my brother to stop being grumpy towards everyone. I am convinced that his kindness was not only effortless, but rather inherent, as evidenced by the turnout at his visitation and funeral. What I admire most is how blind Mark was to labels or prejudices of any sort, and how genuine his belief in the goodness of others was.

Mark truly was the type of person we all strive to be, and the world has lost a wonderful son, friend, brother, etc. The best way to honor him, I have decided, is to try and live my life with the love, compassion, and kindness Mark lived his with. I feel honored to have spent so much time with Mark Reedy, and give all my love to his family and all those who were as lucky as I was to have known him.


From The Detroit News: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/forums/newstalk/lettersindex.php?relatedURL=http://www.detnews.com/article/20100217/OPINION03/2170332#ixzz0gCyRQKYt

the parents learned why their kids texted so much

i knew ten minutes ago that my parents had lost themselves in grief. nearly forty eight hours have scraped along since the schism separating life with mark reedy and life without mark reedy. we have cried in every space we have occupied since, unapologetically, but maybe just uncontrollably. my sister and i had gone to the mall to purchase somber funeral outfits (crying in the car on the way and in the jcrew dressing room), while my mother and father undertook the task of sorting through thousands of photographs to find just the right ones for a slideshow or a collage (it was still unclear then). as technology began to fail them, my parents grew more and more agitated, though we didn't realize the magnitude of their frustration and distress until we arrived home an hour later. both were shouting fuck and sobbing. it wasn't the fucking computer or the fucking printer or the fucking ink cartridges, and emily and i knew this and softly ushered them out, taking the baton for a brief shift as the semi-clear-headed representatives of the bodden family.

we have managed moments at best. i have felt as though i have toed the bordered of this thing in the past, looked out across it from its boundaries and envisioned traversing its space, and yet, my foresight was always flawed by its shallowness, or rather, by my unfamiliarity with the true nature of its terrain. friday night, around midnight, john and i were at the fleetwood; our food had just been set in front of us. my mother sent me a text message, and when i read it, i stood immediately and turned out into the parking lot. before the phone had begun to ring, i was already keening, unconsciously, maybe, ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod, suffocating dynamically and in real time, stumbling away, unconsciously, pleasecomegetme. it seems primal in its nature, controlled more by the limbic system than the cortex, distinct from us, impervious to such human constructed concepts such as social norms.

there are 1,194 members in the facebook group my brother created for his best friend. i can hear my mother talking to him through the wall, like when we were little and every night our parents would do the rounds and come and lay next to us in bed for however long that day's activities merited discussion. i'm not waiting for her to come in here tonight, though, because michael needs her more. in his devastation, he has questioned the existence of god and rationality and fairness, and in some ways, i think the heaviness clenching my ribs is a sort of protective response. he and matthew have never looked more like their five year old selves, but my older sister compulsion to keep him safe and away from pain isn't enough here, which makes me even more upset.

the machinations of grief are just beginning to unfold, each moment of recognition of a new implication adds a spinning particle to the disarray. i wonder when things gain enough momentum to find form and structure and when we will be able to stop crying all the time and when we will sleep without benadryl. these hours have shown some beauty in their tragedy, a certain pureness of emotion that seems without parallel in its unconditioned, ragged, and boundless glory. we have remembered so many ways of communication without even trying. i'm crying again. more later.



http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=307522046536&ref=nf

it's good to be a freak

even though I was only nine,
I knew it was not an appropriate solution.

we were out behind Adam and Ally’s pseudo-chalet house
swinging spastically at a Garfield piñata
while their mother of matching orange hair and
sleezy (though I was not yet familiar with that term) stepfather
with a cheap polo shirt stretched over his paunch
(it was difficult to determine whether her eighties blow-out or
his more-than-ample gut was more obscene), drank
red and white cans of beer and smoked cigarettes (which
I can now safely assume were probably Marlboro menthols,
the preference of trashy smokers everywhere),
neither of which seemed particularly adult or
even responsible, for that matter, activities for
the sole supervisors of fourteen obnoxious kids
to engage in, especially when a metal baseball bat
and blindfolds were being used in conjunction.

lucky for them, no one got pegged in the head. it
probably would have been as hard for them to
explain as it was after the mishap when someone
let Tommy Lee host and supervise a birthday party
for a gaggle of small children.

what actually happened was infinitely less tragic,
anyways, at least for them. I, on the other hand,
had a terrible realization forced unasked on me.

at this age, I was still at the mercy of my mother when
it came to dressing. Photographs from this stage show
me husky and all-around awkward, partly because I had
decided to cut my bangs and the growing-process was
not in any way cute (although it was worse when Emily
decided to cut hers alone in her bedroom and her little
kid hands using little kid round-blade safety scissors
kept trying to get them straight until her bangs weren’t
much more than a little fringy forehead border, but she
was only four so it was endearing), and partly because
overalls were such a prominent part in my wardrobe.

it was a great day for a birthday party, which was lucky
for the twins’ guardians because I’m not sure how they
would have entertained the lot of us confined in what would
probably have felt like a hamster cage at Petco.
when it was time to smack at a piñata, a debate always ensued,
because there had to be some way to decided who got the
coveted second hit after the birthday kid. sometimes it was
in order of age, which usually wasn’t advantageous for me given
my July birthday, but our squabble ended with height
ascending order. the parents always chose that because it seemed
fair, but it meant I always went last unless someone’s much
older brother was there, so i generally resigned myself to
the fact that I was not going to get a turn, though I always
held my breath hoping all the other kids would mess up
(the same way I do when I play Scrabble ).

I stood at the back of the line, behind J.D. Gurganus who
had just moved from Georgia so I didn’t trust him or want
to talk to him, scuffling my feet in my ritual nervous
alternating toe-taps. the grass was long, probably longer
than township ordinances allowed (Bloomfield Hills has a lot
of stipulations because its residents are classy and it is a
nice place to live and anyone who visits must recognize that
immediately, so grass must be neatly manicured at all times
or else they’ll send you a letter, and if it goes unanswered,
they’ll send the maintenance crew over to shear your lawn,
after which they will send you an absurdly high bill) and it
had been a hot summer and the Lightbody’s were poor and
couldn’t afford a sprinkler system that would ensure a green
as lush as a country club golf course, so when I felt a tingle
on the bottom of my foot, right in the soft arch part,
I immediately propped my ankle on my knee to try and
dislodge the sharp piece of grass that was surely causing
my aggravation. because I was only in fourth grade, I didn’t
immediately begin to shout WHATTHEFUCK?! as I probably
would now, but instead, silently cursed my mother for making
me wear those stupid, dorky velcro-strapped Tevas even though
I didn’t want to and now had a reason to never put them on again,
while doing a one-legged squat hop over to the “adults”.

when I tapped the stepfather on his hairy, fleshy bicep,
he chugged the rest of his beer and crushed the can before
turning to look at me to ask why I was hopping around like
a retard and could I please do that away from him. the mother’s
hair bounced as she waved her cigarette lazily to point me vaguely
back to the other annoying-but-far-away kids, and when I
whimpered a little and unvelcroed my sandal to show them the bee
that was still attached, she exhaled smoke as if to say ohhh goddd.
the stepfather belched loudly as if to say i’m just the stepfather,
this isn’t my problem, can you please deal with this so I can crack
open another brewski. the mother narrowed her heavily lined
cat eyes at him, so he groaned and leaned over to look at my foot,
affording me an overly personal view of his sweaty comb-over which
was only slightly better to look at than his sweaty, hairy asscrack.

the stepfather breathed hot and emphysemically on my ankle for
a moment and turned to the mother and asked her for a
cigarette, he knew what to do, he’d seen it somewhere that this
was how you deal with bee stings, could she please stop questioning
his authority and give him a goddamn cigarette already.
I was skeptical, she was not, and as he poured the dregs
from one of the ten beer cans littering the table onto the glass
and ripped open the end of the cigarette to shake its innards into
the puddle, I realized this was cause for concern. in my head
I tried to think, well perhaps I’m wrong, they’re adults, they
must know what they’re doing, but I was just lying to myself,
and I knew it as I watched the stepfather’s fat finger stir the beer
and tobacco bits together into some sort of nasty salve that I wanted
nowhere near my skin.

they made me sit there for a few minutes to let it soak in,
although what actually soaked in was that Ally and Adam
Lightbody probably sucked because they were being raised by psychos.
there aren’t any pictures from that party, but I will always remember
it as the day that I came to understand that when I said that my
parents were the worst, what I really meant to say was that they
were annoying because I knew they actually knew more and better
than me (I’ll grudgingly admit now that the despised overalls were
actually a little cute in their dorkiness).

I never went over to the Lightbody’s house again, because even though
I felt sorry for the twins, I didn’t feel sorry enough to subject myself to
the guilt I would inevitably feel about how much better my parents were
than theirs.