But Call Me Betsy

Of good and bad and indifferent quality. I'm still figuring out the process... First, Emma Carol. Click on the little audio button in the top left if you want sound. This is called "The Many Faces of Emma Carol," but there is really only one. The one with the constantly weepy eye. Then, we made a Vine at a local pizza restaurant showing bunnies multiplying. It's called, "What Bunnies Do." And finally, here's six yoga postures, done on the fly.

In case you haven't heard, there's this new Dove campaign that capitalizes on women's insecurities  about how they look while simultaneously pretending  to be trying to show women how beautiful they really are. The ad says, essentially, that most women don't see themselves as beautiful, aw, how sad, how awful that you should not believe your beautiful, because being beautiful is one of the most important attributes of a woman, Feeling beautiful (i.e. feeling desired by men) equals confidence. When really, why shouldn't feeling powerful equal being confident as it seems to be equated for men? Why should woman's confidence be based on the exterior and a man's worth on how important he is? Do straight men think about they appear to women all the time? Do they wonder what kind of face they have--what the shape it is? Does GQ magazine give them ways to classify their bodies as pear, hourglass, apple or tube or rectangle shaped? I don't think th...

When I was in Florida visiting my parents last month, my mom asked me to go through some of my things from long ago; take what I wanted to keep and get rid of what was garbage. I found some things that I still can't part with--a note my friend Jen wrote on an airline sickness bag, my baptismal candle, this tiny green ceramic frog that used to mean so much to me, and then some of my old writing, such as this palm-sized notepad from 6th grade that I kept. Mostly, I wrote stories based on characters I liked from books or TV shows such as Little Women and Remington Steele. My characters were almost always adults. The women were beautiful, and the men were handsome and sometimes dastardly and they were all very very rich I must run soon to work, but I leave you with an excerpt. This is a fan letter I wrote but never sent to Warren Beatty, probably after seeing Reds with my parents. Dear Mr. Beaty (sic), I got your address from my friend who knows this editor man. My third period...

I don't think I'll be moving out to LA. I think all of the things that they say about LA in movies is true. Everyone is full of it, everyone is trying to get noticed, egos are on the line every second of the day, every time you walk down the street. I'm thinking about this because I have a friend at work whose aunt used to date a recognizable musician, someone from a band you've heard of and they have that one song whose chorus you sort of know. Anyway, he was once normal looking--he has a movie star cleft chin and blue eyes, but recent photos of him show that he's been through the plastic surgery machine. He has that mask-like face and perfectly straight, gleaming white row of teeth. And I can just imagine all the b.s. he hears all the time around him--"no, you look great, you look great. That new album is going to go gold!" And I imagine that tons of people go out to LA thinking because they had the lead in their high school play in Clearwater, Flor...

Do you recognize the post title? Yes, that's right. It's from The World According to Garp. I haven't read it in a while but I think it's what the little boy thought everyone was saying when they really meant, Beware the undertow. Mishearing them, he had visions of this giant toad sitting at the bottom of the sea, looking up for little boy legs to gobble down. Dreamed last night that I was rooming with four undergraduate girls who were super young and cute and partying and I came home to find that they drank all of my Kahlua and filled it back up with water. They wanted to go out again and I said I would go with them, but I wasn't dressed appropriately--wore my raggedy looking sneakers next to their cute yellow and orange delicately strapped sandals. A guy friend of mine who was going with me had an embarrassingly large spaghetti sauce stain on the front of his white pleated shirt (the shirt was just as attention getting as the stain). Then later, I was trying...