Awaiting Renewal

Today I have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s licence renewed. My current licence photo is 10 years old, so old that the carefree woman in the picture always takes me by surprise. Her hair looks unnaturally shiny. Her smile says, ‘I have nowhere in particular to be. Let’s go grab a cocktail!’ Today I have to say goodbye to that lighthearted girl, and welcome her older, more harried replacement. Today I have to stand in poorly marked lines with impatient strangers, reading signs about what we can and cannot do, what we should and should not expect.

Last time I got my licence renewed, the first picture was so bad that the DMV guy laughed out loud. I was young and carefree then, so it didn’t bother me. ‘Show me,’ I commanded. He turned the screen around. My eyes were half-closed and my mouth was screwed up in a weird knot. Remember that scene in Election (1999) where they press pause just as Tracy Flick, the wannabe school president played by Reese Witherspoon, looks drunk and deranged? It was like that. The next photo turned out great, though, because I couldn’t stop smiling about the first.

That’s not the mood I’m in today. Today, if the same thing happens, I’ll stew. They’ll take a second crappy photo of me and no one will be laughing. To them, I’ll be just another angry lady to tag and release back into the wild freeways of Los Angeles. When you visit the DMV, you realise that you can bestride the narrow world like a colossus for only so long — namely, until you’re about 39. After that, you’re not special anymore. You’re just another indistinct face in a sea of the nobodies. (...)

My father talked a lot about not wanting to get old. He visited his parents regularly, but it often depressed him. He didn’t want to live the way they did, growing stooped and wrinkled, smoking and bickering as they circled the drain. He seemed to have an unusually strong fear of ageing and death. He was very fit, and he was always juggling three or more girlfriends at once, one of whom was usually under 30. Old age made him anxious.

Twenty-odd years later, I realise that most people feel this way so strongly that they’re hesitant to say it out loud. We can’t quite believe that we’ll grow old, too. At a certain point, we start counting the years we might have left, if we’re lucky. We become more pragmatic. We take what we can get. We don’t need big signs to tell us what we should and should not expect. (...)

A lot can happen in 10 years. You can’t be carefree forever. But when I was just 33, I thought that I would never have the bad taste to grow old, let alone allow it to depress me. I thought I was better than this. What is youth, but the ability to nurse a superiority complex beyond all reason, to suspend disbelief indefinitely, to imagine yourself immune to the plagues and perils faced by mortal humans? But one day, you wake up and you realise that you’re not immune.

When my driver’s licence photo arrives a week later, it feels like an omen of my impending decline. My hair is limp and scraggly, I have dark circles under my eyes. I look like the ‘after’ photo in one of those photo essays on the ravages of crystal meth. I have the blank but guilty look of a sex offender. (...)

I go online looking for inspiration, but all I find is evidence that everyone in the world is more energetic than me. Thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, I can sift through the proof that hundreds of other people aren’t slouching through life. They’re thriving in their big houses in beautiful cities, they’re cooking delicious organic meals for their children, and writing timely thank you notes to their aunts and uncles and mothers for the delightful gift that was sent in the mail and arrived right on time for Florenza’s third birthday.

Forget those weary strangers at the DMV. This country is apparently populated by highly effective, hip professional women, running around from yoga class to writing workshop, their fashionable outfits pulled taut over their abs of steel, chirping happily at each other about the upcoming publication of their second poetry chapbook — which is really going to make the move to the remodelled loft a little hectic, but hey, that’s life when you’re beautifulish and smartish and hopelessly productive! (...)

Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewellery, speaking to at-risk youth, painting bird houses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali.

by Heather Havrilesky, Aeon | Read more:
Images: Nadine Rovner/Gallery Stock and Calif. DMV

Jaya Suberg
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Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Nostalgia
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Ayako Okuda (b. 1980, Osaka, Japan). Untitled, 2011
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California's Flawed Water System Can't Track Usage

[ed. This is insane.]

Call them the fortunate ones: Nearly 4,000 California companies, farms and others are allowed to use free water with little oversight when the state is so bone dry that deliveries to nearly everyone else have been severely slashed.

Their special status dates back to claims made more than a century ago when water was plentiful. But in the third year of a drought that has ravaged California, these "senior rights holders" dominated by corporations and agricultural concerns are not obliged to conserve water.

Nobody knows how much water they actually use, though it amounts to trillions of gallons each year, according to a review of their own reports by The Associated Press. Together, they hold more than half the rights to rivers and streams in California.

The AP found the state's system is based on self-reported, incomplete records riddled with errors and years out of date; some appear to be using far less water than records would indicate.

"We really don't know how much water they've actually diverted," said Bob Rinker, a manager in the State Water Resources Control Board's water rights division. (...)

More than half of the 3,897 entities with active senior and riparian rights to water are corporations, such as the state's biggest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. which creates hydroelectric power, and the Hearst Corp., which has water rights for its remote, Bavarian-style forest compound called Wyntoon.

Also among the biggest rights holders are rural water districts and government agencies such as the water departments of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

San Francisco, whose water rights date to 1902 when its mayor nailed a handwritten notice on a tree, also uses free Sierra Nevada water to generate power for its airport, schools and firehouses.

This year, the state cut water deliveries to farmers and cities by 95 percent, and the federal government also imposed sharp restrictions on its water customers. But companies, farmers and cities with water rights that pre-date 1914 were exempt this year from mandatory cuts, even though they collectively are the biggest water users in the state.

by Jason Dearen and Garance Burke, AP |  Read more:

Image: Jae C. Hong/AP

America Dumbs Down

South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America. Forty-three other states had already laid claim to various dinosaurs, trilobites, primitive whales and even petrified wood. It seemed like a no-brainer. “Fossils tell us about our past,” the Grade 2 student wrote.

And, as it turns out, the present, too. The bill that Olivia inspired has become the subject of considerable angst at the legislature in the state capital of Columbia. First, an objecting state senator attached three verses from Genesis to the act, outlining God’s creation of all living creatures. Then, after other lawmakers spiked the amendment as out of order for its introduction of the divinity, he took another crack, specifying that the Columbian mammoth “was created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field.” That version passed in the senate in early April. But now the bill is back in committee as the lower house squabbles over the new language, and it’s seemingly destined for the same fate as its honouree—extinction.

What has doomed Olivia’s dream is a raging battle in South Carolina over the teaching of evolution in schools. Last week, the state’s education oversight committee approved a new set of science standards that, if adopted, would see students learn both the case for, and against, natural selection.

Charles Darwin’s signature discovery—first published 155 years ago and validated a million different ways since—long ago ceased to be a matter for serious debate in most of the world. But in the United States, reconciling science and religious belief remains oddly difficult. A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. (...)

If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings—Aurora, Colo.; Fort Hood, Texas; Virginia Tech—efforts at gun control have given way to ever-laxer standards. Georgia recently passed a law allowing people to pack weapons in state and local buildings, airports, churches and bars. Florida is debating legislation that will waive all firearm restrictions during state emergencies like riots or hurricanes. (One opponent has moved to rename it “an Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse.”) And since the December 2012 massacre of 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., 12 states have passed laws allowing guns to be carried in schools, and 20 more are considering such measures. (...)

If ignorance is contagious, it’s high time to put the United States in quarantine.

by Jonathon Gatehouse, McLeans |  Read more:

Image: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

[ed. Good times.]
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Eddie Vedder

[ed. What?! A ukulele but no fishing pole?]

In Other News

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Henri Matisse, The Path in the Bois de Boulogne
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Elvis
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I can only assume that what photographer Porsupah Ree captured here are binkying bunnies. A binky is a playful and happy expression made by a rabbit in which it jumps in the air and twists its body around in a convulsive fashion.

Porsupah Ree  via:

Lady on the Beach, Astor Salcedo
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My Mom

[ed. See also: The Love of My Life.]

My mom runs fast for a 65-year-old. She’s small — 5 ft even — and clocks in at just over 100 lbs. Her compact frame slays in the juniors section of American department stores. I see her sprinting toward me as I stand on the corner of Austin’s busiest intersection, on its busiest fortnight — the two weeks it plays host to South by Southwest, the annual multimedia conference. It’s just after 11pm and traffic is an absolute shitshow. My mom’s always been sporty but since she stopped dyeing her hair she looks her age. As she gets closer, I worry that her brittle avian skeleton is going to crumple atop the hood of a swerving SUV. Being picked up by my parents is an experience I thought I’d grown out of entirely. After all, I am 33 years old, live in New York and am here on business. But they live just an hour outside of town, and I pulled the trigger on hotels late enough that I’m staying with them. They’ve been stuck in traffic for two hours coming to get me.

I was on the phone with my dad, both of us barking over the imperious GPS voice — him in a road rage and me in a full-body eye-roll — when my mom bolted from the car to run ahead, figuring I’d be easier to peg on foot. I’m watching her beam and wave big, while running hard and yelling my full name in English, just like that: first name; last name. My parents both do this as though it’s for my benefit. Like, calling a child by their full government name is super-casual. Like, it’s not a dead giveaway as the weirdest, most ESL affectation in the world. I’m waiting with a 24-year-old colleague that I hired straight from college who idolises me and I’m worried that my mom will hurt herself and that people will see. The whole thing infuriates me. I refuse to eat the snacks that she’s tin-foiled from home.

I love my mother a not-normal amount. It’s all twisty because she tried to kill me when I was young. Just kidding. My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort. She nails me on all of it, asking one billion follow-up questions until I get behind my eyeballs and engage. She forces me to call distant relatives, dialling the phone and pressing it into my cheek while my eyes get hot and watery. She pulls rank all the time and once judo-flipped me onto my back in a grocery store to remind me where things stood. She is my favorite and it makes me crazy. You can tell that she was popular in school, but I am a fundamentally more popular person. I care more and I’m great at rules. I’ve known it since the first grade.

When I was small I thought I was just cooler than my mom because of how foreign she is. She’s really foreign. You’d think it would kill her to get store-bought snacks, she’s that foreign. She grew up in a Korea filled with Koreans, married a Korean and then moved to Hong Kong in her mid-30s. I was 11 months and my brother was two years old. This was back when Hong Kong was a British Crown colony, which meant we were living in Asia with heaps of Australians and bronzed Europeans who dated Filipino women. It was all very James Clavell and linen shirts. In any case, I speak four languages and am a ruthless assimilation ninja. I will renounce all kin in the name of camouflage because everything is a contest and I am a disgusting sell-out. It’s the twin moon to my being popular in any context provided I put my mind to it. I’m sure there’s a field of corn withering somewhere in my soul that fuels this despicable talent, but everyone’s got to die of cancer some time, right?

My mother, on the other hand, speaks English poorly with a screwy, poncy Korean British accent, as if she learned it from watching one 1960s Merchant Ivory movie on repeat. She’s also ridiculously formal, deeply private and not a joiner. She transitions poorly. The move to Hong Kong with two wee kids and an absentee partner was rough. My father had elected to set up a shipping company. He was out of the country for eight months of the year, and sometime around my tenth birthday I discovered that he spoke conversational Russian for reasons that remain murky. All this is to say that he wasn’t around a lot.

When I was five, I compound-fractured my arm, pulverising my elbow. I was on a play date at my mom’s friend’s house and so naturally blamed my mother. I actually remember lying on the floor, howling accusations of neglect at her while she frantically summoned an ambulance that arrived with a squad car and a firetruck in tow. I was already having a tough time adjusting at school, and it looked like I would miss weeks of class. I found speaking in English disorienting because we spoke only Korean at home. I even preferred Cantonese to English since we’d attended a local Chinese school for a week while waiting on test scores to admit us into a British private school. Forced to wear a massive cast during my fifth month of British school, I began referring to myself in the third person — my English name — announcing, daily, that ‘Mary would not be going to school.’

School was awful. I had to leave during the middle of the day for physical therapy that involved swimming and returning to class with inexplicably wet hair. Lunch sucked. My mom would pack the dumbest garbage. She once smeared bits of raw garlic left over from makingkimchi onto white sandwich bread, thinking that’s how the garlic bread advertised at Pizza Hut was born. I waited until she got off work that night and yelled at her with rank breath. I’d eaten most of the seemingly innocent square, elated that a sandwich had turned up at all in a lunch box that usually contained punishment food that sometimes had eyes. The stress of navigating school as a teeny-tiny uncomfortable person with an enormous gimp wing was taking a toll.

One lunch, I was dragging myself around the playground when I saw my mom standing by the fence, waving big and calling my name. I wanted so badly to ignore her. She was supposed to be at work and I didn’t have physical therapy that day so I was immediately suspicious. As confusing as her presence was, my curiosity did not outweigh my desire to be left alone. Especially by her. I began to back away so she started shouting loud enough to be heard over the playground din. I shuffled towards her with every intention to roundhouse-bludgeon her with my plastered arm. She held out a paper box. It was a McDonald’s happy meal: a cheeseburger one, which was my favorite. The offering was so out of character that I considered it a bribe. I wondered if my parents were getting a divorce since that was huge at my school at the time. I asked her what was going on. She mentioned something about how she wanted me to have a lunch that I liked.

I then did what any normal kid would do and yelled and yelled about how embarrassing it was to have her at school with me during lunch of all times. She presented me with a sack of cheeseburgers that I could give out to my friends. I refused the damp bag and screeched about how it was so cheap that she didn’t spring for bright red boxes with toys for them as well. I made her take the burgers back with her. If I were an actress and had to think of something sad to make me cry in a scene, I would think about this moment. This and the time I was 13 when I kicked my mom across a room and ran away for two days because she tried to ground me — for breaking curfew after my friend Jacinta stole money from her dying grandmother so we could rent out a nightclub and write the names of those blackballed on the sign outside. For the record: I don’t know why people have kids.

by Mary H K Choi, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Mary HK Choi

Faking Cultural Literacy

[ed. TL;DR = Too long; didn't read]

I can't help it. Every few weeks, my wife mentions the latest book her book club is reading, and no matter what it is, whether I’ve read it or not, I offer an opinion of the work, based entirely on ... what, exactly? Often, these are books I’ve not even read a review or essay about, yet I freely hold forth on the grandiosity of Cheryl Strayed or the restrained sentimentality of Edwidge Danticat. These data motes are gleaned, apparently, from the ether — or, more realistically, from various social media feeds.

What was Solange Knowles’s elevator attack on Jay-Z about? I didn’t watch the security-camera video on TMZ — it would have taken too long — but I scrolled through enough chatter to know that Solange had scrubbed her Instagram feed of photos of her sister, Beyoncé. How about this season of “Game of Thrones” and that nonconsensual intercourse in the crypt? I don’t watch the show, but I’ve scanned the recaps on Vulture.com, and I am prepared to argue that this was deeply offensive. Is Pope Francis a postmodern pontiff? I’ve never listened to one of his homilies nor watched his recent “60 Minutes” appearance, but I’ve seen plenty of his @Pontifex tweets retweeted, so I’m ready to say his position on inequality and social justice is remarkably progressive.

It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching “Mad Men” or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else’s live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day. Our cultural canon is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks.

In his 1987 book “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” E. D. Hirsch Jr. listed 5,000 essential concepts and names — 1066, Babbitt, Pickwickian — that educated people should be familiar with. (Or at least that’s what I believe he wrote, not having actually read the book.) Mr. Hirsch’s book, along with its contemporary “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, made the point that cultural literacy — Mr. Bloom’s canon — was the bedrock of our agreed-upon values.

What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

NPR’s April Fools’ Day web story “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?”went viral on Facebook, where pranksters in on the joke linked to the piece and others then argued that they do too read and indignantly shared the link with exhortations to “read the story!” without actually clicking on it themselves to see that the only content was the revelation that the whole thing was a prank: “We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this ‘story.' ”

According to a recent survey by the American Press Institute, nearly six in 10 Americans acknowledge that they do nothing more than read news headlines — and I know this only because I skimmed a Washington Post headline about the survey. After we’ve skimmed, we share. Commenters frequently start their posts with TL;DR — short for Too Long; Didn’t Read — and then proceed to offer an opinion on the subject at hand anyway. As Tony Haile, the chief executive of the web traffic analytics company Chartbeat, recently put it, “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.” (He tweeted that.)

It’s not lying, exactly, when we nod knowingly at a cocktail party or over drinks when a colleague mentions a movie or book that we have not actually seen or read, nor even read a review of. There is a very good chance that our conversational partner may herself be simply repeating the mordant observations of someone in her timeline or feed. The entire in-person exchange is built from a few factoids netted in the course of a day’s scanning of iPhone apps. Who wants to be the Luddite who slows everything down by admitting he has never actually read a Malcolm Gladwell book and maybe doesn’t exactly understand what is meant by the term “Gladwellian” — though he occasionally uses it himself?

Whenever anyone, anywhere, mentions anything, we must pretend to know about it. Data has become our currency. (And in the case of Bitcoin, a classic example of something that we all talk about but nobody actually seems to understand, I mean that literally.)

by Karo Taro Greenfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Daniel

Nice Houses I

Summer Houses in Slavik
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Nice Houses II

Villa in Nagano
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The Only Time I’ve Ever Been To Connecticut

There were many nights when I would worry myself out of a dead sleep and think Christ, I’m not doing it yet, and I’d think, doing what, and I’d think back, the thing I’m supposed to be doing, the special thing, I’m not special yet, and I’m going to die if I don’t do it, and I’d think well what is it but I refused to elaborate.

So I went on a lot of informational interviews. Anything not to be paralyzed, anything to not go to In-N-Out, anything that would help me find the thing that would help me not feel like I was dying if I did it. I wanted to work every minute I was awake, or at least go through the motions of working — getting dressed and making phone calls and returning emails.

This is what we in the business call setting the scene. It feels pretty set now, so I’m going to take us back to Connecticut. I was in New York with a backpack full of honey-peanut Power Bars I’d stolen from my dad’s office (he always keeps a Trader Joe’s bag full of them in his closet) and little else, and I’d asked around in the vaguest of ways for informational interview leads. (“Does anyone know anyone who’s good at their job?”)

Someone knew someone who did, and sent me the name of a man. The man in question was presented to me as a sort of career counselor; I later found out he was more of a CEO headhunter for high finance. I received a hastily-tossed-off email forwarded from the woman I sort-of-knew in common.

Have you ever received an email from an important man over the age of forty? They’re tremendous. It’s the least professional thing in the world. They spell your name wrong, they spell at least four other things wrong, one of the sentences just ends without finishing itself. It’s a mess. But he said, “Oh, you’ll be in New York, come down to Greenwich, it’s very close, [Common Acquaintance] will meet you at the train station.”

Greenwich did not seem very close to New York to me, but then I also didn’t expect it to be pronounced “Grehnitch,” so the day was full of surprises.

The first thing I noticed, when she brought me to the office, was that the walls were covered in oil paintings of yachts. The second thing I noticed is that every man in the building was at least 45 and had an office overlooking the bay (or the sea, or the river, or the inlet, or whatever it is that’s in Connecticut), while every single woman was under 25 and penned into an open-plan set of cubicles. Just like in the past, I thought. Then: But I’m a woman under 25. This does not bode well.

The Important Man was not ready just yet. I was led to an inner room with more oil paintings of boats on the walls, and also a photograph of the Important Man with Ronald Reagan. I was offered a soda, and I demurred, which is the one mistake I will admit to having made. I should have taken the soda. Do you know how often in life you are offered a free soda? Elderly financiers do not regularly proffer free sodas to pleasant-faced bloggers; this offer has never been repeated and I have regretted my choice ever since.

The Important Man entered the room; the Important Man shook my hand; the Important Man sat down. A woman brought him a Diet Coke in a glass, with ice and a red-and-white striped straw, just like in Diet Coke commercials. He never once touched it. Perhaps it was a power play. She seemed only to exist to bring him Diet Cokes. It made me wish I had a Diet Coke of my own, but I dared not ask now.

by Mallory Ortberg, Toast |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Signs from the Near Future
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