That early start always used to make me feel like I had an advantage.  Now I feel frantic and inferior because it seems like everyone is “wrapping up” their papers with three weeks to go.  THREE WEEKS TO GO.

That’s the problem with filling a tiny program with entirely high-achieving, motivated, accomplished people: you lose all sense of proportion and reason when it comes to getting stuff done, and instead just try to get the most stuff done, setting the bar far higher than it needs to be.  This leads to weird consequences: I’ve awoken three times now in the middle of the night, either dreaming about studying or writing papers, or with the urgent sense that I need to study or write papers right now at 3:30AM. None of this is placated by the fact that I have an A in all of my classes, or that I have plenty of time to get everything done.  I have not hit my apathy point where I feel like the end of the semester is so close that everything is out of my hands- instead, the beginning of my academic panic phase has come early this year and is painfully prolonged as a result of syncing with everyone else’s academic panic period.

Stress is the also reason why women sync menstrual cycles, you know.  And it’s a 90% female cohort.  Let your mind contemplate the full horror of that implication for a moment.

The only cure I can think of: I need to go hang out with some lazy, unmotivated people and regain a sense of what constitutes a healthy amount of stress.  Volunteers?

I love when they want to go in every direction but the one their parent is trying to lead them.

Today there was an extremely rare event on the bus: it was full of realy good-looking people who looked like they probably smelled nice, who I would have liked to have sitting beside me so that I could admire their beauty.  I had an empty seat beside me too.  But in a horrible twist of fate, the empty seat was covered in water because the bus was leaking, and all these beautiful men and women kept almost sitting down beside me but then realising that the seat was wet.  It was disappointing and I spent the bus ride looking around plaintively like some sort of transit pervert.

Usually my bus is just full of mouth-breathers who slouch onto my seat as they fall asleep en route to UBC.  Why is it, on those days, that there is always a dry, inviting seat next to mine?

What do you think would look better?

1. The Mia Farrow-in-Rosemary’s Baby pixie cut, or
2. Something like this (with the bangs!).

I’m not doing it until I can go back to Victoria where I like the girl who cuts my hair (she doesn’t ask me about reality TV or make awkward small talk! It’s priceless!) so I have like three weeks to commit to something.  I’m just pretty much over of this asymmetrical thing that I have going on right now.

Do you think it’ll get the kids reading Rilke?  That would probably be good for most people. However, it’s a relief that the brooding hipster cohort probably doesn’t listen to Lady Gaga and is probably immune to persuasion via her tattoos; the last thing the world needs is a bunch of melancholy, purposeless young people being influenced by The Sorrows of Young Werther. However people who enjoy the music crappy noise produced by Gaga probably could benefit from some the balance of some heavy German poetry and sobering existential prose.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep, under so
many lids.

Just deleted 130 people I never talked to, most of them people I went to high school with who added me/were added in that first Facebook blitz where you went around friending everyone who you vaguely recalled knowing.

Mmm, delete, delete, delete.

I was mulling this over in the shower just a few minutes ago, so I’m apologizing in advance for presenting a such a nascent topic for discussion.  I was thinking about fashion bloggers- like everyone who likes easy-to-digest content, beautiful clothes and attractive people wearing them, I read them regularly- and the weird demands placed on them by readers, which are very much like the weird demands placed on celebrities.  They are, in fact, the same kind of figure, but while bloggers tend to interface directly with readers/fans via email, celebrities do it through carefully managed, very scripted mediums.  And scripting your interactions, when you are a public figure, is essential, because you are dealing with a kind of insanity.

It’s insane that following a public figure (actor, model, musician, blogger) creates a one-sided illusion of intimacy.  Readers not only admire what the public figure does, but who they are. They begin to feel as though they know them personally.  They create icons out of them and aspire to be like them.  And then, inevitably, they begin to feel as though they have the right to make demands, as though a person you do not know but who you are familiar with from a distance owes you the courtesy of meeting your demands.

What kind of demands are these?  Well, read interviews with celebrities for a start.  We want details, the kind of details you know about people with whom you have friendships or relationships.  You want to know where they eat, and what they do in their spare time, and what their insecurities are.  It helps if there is a personal tragedy or two (dead family member, cheating partner, childhood trauma) because then you can relate (“everyone has pain”) and feel sympathy, which confers a kind of intimate power.  There’s a reason why in interviews all celebrities say the same things, over and over: “I’m really boring”, “I’m actually really insecure”, “I don’t have a strict diet or exercise regime”, “Relationships are important to me” “I don’t smoke/drink/do drugs”— these are deliberately, carefully inoffensive.  They are designed to breed the kind of faux intimacy that readers/followers crave.  Faux intimacy has become the key to success- it’s the reason people buy magazines and CDs and go to the movies.  It’s not enough to be good at your craft, you have to be a good person, very attractive but with professed insecurities and flaws that are relatable and not alienating, with widely accepted values and no glaring moral defects.

That’s the weird part.  It should be enough to be a good actor, musician, even blogger.  But it isn’t.  That’s celebrity culture feeding into the demands of a deranged public that believes you have the right to demand that your icons live up to your standards for people.  It’s insane that people read fashion blogs and deride the (mostly very young, very pretty, very thin, mysteriously well-funded women) for being too skinny.  Who cares how skinny they are?  Why should that matter to you?  Well, it matters because you have made them into an icon, and now you demand that they cater to you by being someone you can relate to, someone who makes you feel good about yourself.  When someone writes a comment on a blog post saying, “You’re too skinny!” what they are saying is, “You make me feel bad about myself because you are representing something I cannot achieve or do not agree with.”  And that should be a crazy act, because you do not know this person, and they do not owe you anything.  You have no relationship with them, recognized or not.  And yet the whole system of celebrity culture thrives because people buy magazines and read blogs and go to movies on the assumption that this imaginary relationship exists.

I speak to blogging, in particular, because I can’t imagine how bewildering it is that someone’s blog becomes popular and suddenly they are inundated with emails and comments critiquing their income or lifestyle or appearance from perfect strangers who feel as though, vis-a-vis the blogger’s presentation of one aspect of their life, they know them, they are owed something by them, they can be outraged when their expectations are not met and their feelings are hurt.  Jane of the immensely popular (even with Kanye!) blog Sea of Shoes recently disabled her comments because ” it’s creepy to think that a few real people pour so much energy into investigating my personal life”.  And it is weird.  Really fucking weird.  Over time a celebrity leviathan has grown to terrifying size, and it’s unnerving to think how many otherwise sane people take part in what is unequivocally an insane cycle.

Another thing- one I won’t touch on, because this is already too long and too sloppy- is reality TV.  A specific example is Jon and Kate Plus 8, or any of the shows created to showcase the marriages of celebrities.  The popularity of those shows, the number of magazines dedicated to their inevitable unraveling as a result of public outrage that their icons do not live up to the standards of their followers— that’s a whole new level of craziness.  Jon and Kate get divorced, and everyone wants to know whose fault it is.  So that they can blame someone.  So that they can direct blame and outrage at a stranger in an incident in which they were not involved, nor harmed by.  Think about that.  Imagine a world where celebrities admit to doing drugs, having abortions, getting drunk and fucking strangers, driving recklessly, forgetting their parents’ birthdays.  Imagine the public dismay, the resounding public disappointment.

Every time I read an interview and a celebrity says, “I’m really a very boring person” (I can think of four off the top of my head that I read recently), they are saying, “Don’t feel threatened by me!  I am just like you.  Now consume my product.”  And we do, vigorously.  Every time I hear someone say, for example, “I hate Megan Fox/ Kate Moss/ the Jonas Brothers” I wonder what it means that people can feel such strong, personal rage against a person they don’t know, who has never done anything to them and almost certainly never will.  When I catch myself doing it, I wonder what it means about me.  I feel like if you stop to think about it, it would disturb anyone.