My head hair reminds me of what gorilla hair would look like if you poached it.  I’m not sure why it necessarily has to be poached, but the dead gorillas you see in Dian Fossey documentaries lack a luster to them that I think befits the current color of my hair.

In the months that it was regrowing, it was curious shade of gray that we all we struggled to label.  Andy proactively tried to remedy this.  He turned to me from the passenger seat of Dy’s car and looked at me intently.  “It’s like duckling gray,” he said helpfully.

How proud am I to tell him that it’s now been upgraded to poached gorilla black.

I don’t think I can ever adequately describe Chicago, at least in relation to whatever I’ve experienced it to be.  In many ways, it has reverted back to what I adamantly saw it as when I first visited at seventeen, which is complete and utter freedom from the trainwreck that vaguely resembles my parents.  But that in itself is a juvenile comparison (read: unremarkable, boring); if pursued further, it would turn into nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to complain about my folks.  Plus, Chicago is not the correct platform to describe their attitudes about things that all parents inevitably worry about, such as how camping is the equivalent to pre-marital sex, which in itself automatically makes you a dirty, dirty whore.

I recently visited Chicago for about two weeks, and decided to journal my days in detail.  To be honest, most of it consisted of scribbling maps to combat my lack of directions (fail), or half-assed sketches of the Eliasson exhibit over at the MCA (spectacular fail).   But I did chronicle my days faithfully–from comparing radiation tattoos with Carl, to looking at homo smut with Corey, to wandering Graceland Cemetery.  I could walk Chicago forever, I wrote over and over again.  I could stare at the skyline forever.

“I have no idea what that even fucking means,” I told Lukas.

Because this is conveniently ignoring the fact that I had lived in Chicago for six years, the last two largely monopolized by an unhappiness that never amounted to anything interesting.    I think I once summed up my experience as a “peripheral abuse of alcohol and cigarettes,” which while technically correct, doesn’t say much, if anything at all.  I suspect the main source of my unhappiness stemmed from Alex, and maybe the realization that my degree that I spent well over $60K in would be pretty damn useless.  For awhile, Chicago was some kind of terrible.  For awhile, I didn’t notice the city at all.

But I suppose it’s all about context, also known as being back in Los Angeles and once again passing by the most underwhelming skyline I have ever seen in my life.  The thing about Los Angeles is that I could never really see it as anything else but long stretches of highways, suburban lawns,  and the occasional underpass crack addict.  The skyline–which I use as my north star in any given city– consists of a couple of buildings visible to varying degrees but usually shrouded in smog, and ultimately leading to jobs I never cared for and an art scene I always found difficult to involve myself with.  If my problem with Chicago was that I had always failed to legitimately see it as a city, my issue with Los Angeles is that I couldn’t see it as anything else.

Coming into Chicago again, where I aggressively insist on doing things to it forever, I suppose this is the first time I ever noticed that it could function as more than a collection of past fuckups and indiscretions.  I spent a good chunk of my days wandering downtown, doing dumb shit like touching buildings, taking pictures of Greek columns, babbling about Beaux-Arts facades, and getting kicked off the BP Bridge for staying too long.  I was, to put it politely, pretty fucking happy.  Surely that is more than I ever got from my current position, where I blankly stare at the skyline before looking away uninterested and completely unmoved.

Andy once mused that the artifacts that we carry contain of some sort of civic identity–for instance, weaving through the subways of Shanghai, we seemed to consistently run into those inexplicably lugging around large stuff animal plushies.   It was a curious lifestyle I have not witnessed anywhere else, save for maybe the supermarkets of Chicago.  He then went on to wonder what objects define us now, wherever we are.

Funny you should ask.

Every couple of years, I make a habit of emptying the contents of my bag, perhaps taking a picture of it, then discussing it in earnest.   No seriously. I kind of make it a big deal.   While the junk I throw in my bag is not necessary indexical of where ever I am–my mp3 player and copy of American Psycho are universal, as far as I am concerned–it does provide an accurate snapshot of that particular moment in life.  When those pictures were taken, I was 24, living in Chicago and apparently really into Kraftwerk.  I was in art school writing my graduate thesis, which is to say I had a tendency for pretension, music elitism and other occupational hazards.  I was one of those girls you’d see with the funny haircuts walking to class on Michigan and Monroe and, generally speaking, kind of an annoying shit.  And I’d like to think this is more than discernible through the contents that I carried.

Fast forward it three years, I now sport a large multi-purpose bag that vaguely resembles a diaper bag.  If I were to identify Chicago with my dilettante adventures in academia, my time in Los Angeles would surely tell a different story.  The post-colonial rhetoric and ridiculous amount of cosmetics have now been deposed by identification cards from my cancer treatment, various business cards of my doctors at City of Hope, and stray foreign currency that I never had the chance to exchange.   I suppose there is something incredibly distressing–or at least somewhat compelling–about this transformation.   It surely doesn’t say anything specific about Los Angeles per se, although on occasions the city does resemble one large scar tissue.

But if anything, it does point to the absurdity of my time here.   And it makes me wonder what were to happen if I were to leave…?  Just like how 24-year-old Karen with the Kraftwerk buttons in Chicago doesn’t exist anymore, could I say the same about 27-year-old Karen with a dead tumor once I am no longer in Los Angeles?

me: I am reading the wiki of Jeffrey Dahmer
Andy: this is what you do to kill time.

Well…yes.   Throughout the years, I would occasionally read the biographies of certain serial killers, then casually tell Andy about them.  And throughout the years, Andy seemed consistently unsurprised by this because apparently his friend April is prone to doing the exact same thing to him.  Evidently we both believe Andy is a little more uneducated than most about the nuances of serial killing history, and we feel compelled to help him rectify this.   Still, I wouldn’t say I’m terribly fascinated by serial killers, although once or twice I stumbled upon a particular killer’s bio only to realize that I’ve read it before.  This time around, I only wiki’d Dahmer because I just finished Klosterman’s essay about what it means to have casual brushes with people who turn out to secretly destroy human beings on a regular basis.

Last night, I had a longish conversation with Lukas about the Zodiac killer.  Because he has never been caught and no one knows of his identity, we started to wonder which of our friends could also plausibly be a serial killer (again, always willing to engage in hypotheticals).  I chose our friend Brendon, in part because he is much more aggressive than the average person and, in my opinion, much more emotionally capable of doing crazy shit.  But also, he is unnaturally meticulous about whatever task he is put on, to the point where I once asked if he was borderline autistic.  Brendon is the type to get away with murder because he properly cut off the fingernails of his victims after any ensuing struggle.  I wouldn’t say he was exactly ecstatic by my answer, but he wasn’t particularly upset either.  He simply seemed kind of pleased that I had called him meticulous–which I found a curious response after someone just accused you capable of murdering for psychological gratification–and then went on to most likely draft his fantasy baseball team.

Lukas, however, focused more on the actual logistics of serial killing, which could only mean he invariably chose Jason.   Who do we know that is capable of covering up any digital tracks (oddly enough, he always claims Jason would know how to do this not because he studied, say, computer science all throughout college, but exclusively because he was the dorm rescon)?  Who has the monetary means, not to mention an enormous house out in the desert?  Who has the free time to plot out his ideas?  And who is much more calculated so as not to end up a spree killer (Garrett) or a mass murderer (Jimmy)?  By these particular criteria, Jason was quite flattered by the designation.

I found it amusing that neither friend seemed offended by their alleged potential for serial killing;  likewise, Klosterman claims there is something innately profound in knowing someone who is unable–or at least unwilling–to adhere to discernible boundaries of wrong and right.  I suppose he’s right in a comic book kind of way; after all, they make for tremendous villains and also reassert how normal our own values are.  But his argument as it applies to real life is suspect, simply because I’m not sure how insightful it is to know someone who would be absurd enough to decapitate, then eat my head (Dahmer), sodomize me then shove my corpse under a crawlspace (Gacy), or attack me with a nail gun before cutting off my limbs (Bateman).  Whenever the idea of serial killers is brought up, I can’t help but think of two things,  the first being James Gandolfini’s resigned soliloquy to a bleeding and tortured Alabama about how he has grown so accustomed to killing that he only does it now to “watch their fucking expression change.” The second is the moment of Kovac’s rebirth into Rorschach, and his realization that there is no deeper meaning at hand when someone is awful enough to kill a little girl then feed her to his dogs:  collectively speaking, we are more than capable of doing fucked up things–it’s just a matter of scale of how fucked up and whether or not we are inevitably caught.

As far as I am concerned, there is nothing actually there to understand.

Our pal Chuck Klosterman asks you:

Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with a thick rope.  He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile.  And let us assume that–for some reason–every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes.  You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots.  Would you attempt to do this?

I posed Klosterman’s moral dilemma the other day to Lukas, whose more endearing qualities include his willingness to discuss every far-fetched hypothetical as if they are legitimate situations.   For example, there is a conversation floating around somewhere that documents  him and Jason debating whether there were more chickens or illegal immigrants in California, taking into account chickens per square meter, the size of the average coop and the maximum number of chickens that can possibly be raised in said coops,  the average chicken yield per farm, the amount of Californian farmland, and the estimated number of illegal immigrants.  In comparison, our discussion about Klosterman’s horse-kicking was rather brief, partially because it was about 2 am, but mostly because I interrupted him and immediately posed another Klosterman gem (someone will break your soulmate’s collar bones with a crescent wrench every three years unless you take a pill that makes every song sound like it is by Alice in Chains; would you take the pill?!  IF I WOULD, COULD YOU!?).

That being said, we came to the conclusion that neither of us would attempt to kick a horse to death in under twenty minutes, mainly because there is no feasible way to do so.  It would not only leave you with the same full camps of mistreated prisoners of conscience, but now also ostensibly with a severely brain-damaged horse courtesy of your steel-toed boots.   Plus, how exactly does Amnesty International define political prisoners?  What if I inadvertently release the guys from Asian Dawn?  I thought about it a little more today.  As a political organization criticized for being Western-biased, how does Amnesty fact check its claims?  What about evidence from closed countries?  And what about those imprisoned before Amnesty started in 1961?  Or those imprisoned after you manage to kick this horse to death?  Would they too be included?

I imagine if I researched this route further, I would’ve gained some insight into the abuse of human rights and all the efforts in mitigating it.  But as it were, I went off a different tangent, which I suppose only serves to prove how profoundly unaware I can be.  Namely, I really just wanted to know if it is indeed possible to kick a horse to death in twenty minutes or less.

It is a well-circulated fact that I’m really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them.  I am aware that horses do not exclusively constitute as farm animals, but nor are they theoretically exempt from farm life either.  I am also aware that taken out of context,  “I’m really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them” makes me sound grossly barbaric and, generally speaking,  a really fucking awful human being.  Regardless, for a good month or so, I tried to educate myself in all the different primal cuts for cattle, then on the various captive bolt pistols used to euthanize livestock (to allow the animal to bleed out and prevent the meat from spoiling, obviously).  I’m also quite interested on how to de-wing/de-feather ducks and geese, which I’m told can be done under a minute.   I’ve insisted for quite some time that I would like to take up an apprenticeship at a slaughterhouse, which is usually dismissed as silly and impractical, especially coming from someone who barely clears 100 lbs and has no discernible skill in either taking care of or disposing animals.   I’m not terribly concerned about this, since it is still a substantially better response than, say, everyone worrying about any latent violent tendencies I may be harboring.  Mostly, my argument is that proper skills in sanitary and efficient butchery would have an obscene amount of utilitarian value.  It would also make me indispensable in the event of a post-apocalyptic situation, assuming that I would survive the initial fallout and that we are speaking of McCarthy’s or Atwood’s apocalypse and not James Cameron’s.

With absolutely no medical background and a total accumulation of one class  in biology in my life to account for, I eventually enlisted the help of my cousin Brian, who is a third-year veterinary student at Michigan State.  After patiently explaining to me that it takes time for blunt force trauma to eventually progress into a life-threatening hemorrhage, he then revealed this:

me: what about that miniature horse [that he necropsied] that might’ve died by a normal horse kicking it in the head

was death quick or no?

Brian: COD was undetermined

but i think maybe something to do with spinal cord ?

what usually happen is they get kicked then flip over on their backs

and land and something causes them to die

i dunno what exactly

Brian: that horse died instantly i believe

The money shot!  Congratulations, you just killed a horse to please Amnesty International, and/or are really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them.

No one, it seems, found it necessary to tell me how terrible a collection of writing my old blog was.  On the most part, I was determined to document every detail of my existence, which by graduate school had lapsed into a peripheral abuse of alcohol and cigarettes, and by 2007, was really just an unremarkable repository of pictures I took from various trips.  Personal blogs are kind of like how Dennis feels about listening to people’s dreams, which in turn is akin to flipping through a stack of photographs: if I’m not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don’t care.

Not to say it was a complete waste of effort; for instance, there are occasions where I talk about art in a way that could vaguely come across as interesting, and there is also good footage of me beating Lukas in Wii Mario Party.  But any insight is grossly overshadowed by how angry a lot of my writing appears to be and my inability to wield this anger in any meaningful way.  In hindsight, I’m kind of embarrassed by how silly it all reads now, not necessarily because I spoke in weird abstractions, but because I so unapologetically subjected a small but faithful readership to it.  At the time though, I think I really just wanted someone to ask me about Alex.

Context, I suppose, is everything.  What then may have passed for a valid source of misery is now just another forty-degree day.

I’m well-aware that I am simply rehashing various artifacts I once posted on Facebook.  That being said, I’ve managed to decently whore this out on other platforms as well, usually prefaced with, “Look, Tao wrote me a poem!”  I should point out that I told him to do so in the first place, and that you tend to get your way about 100% of the time if you begin any sentence with, “I have cancer.”

Anyway, this is the same Tao who once ceremoniously scribbled “heart cox!” on the back of my neck before I drunkenly insisted that he should write “cunt” instead.  It is also the same Tao who wandered around the Hong Kong subways as Optimus Prime.   And as far as I am concerned,  the same Tao who still considers some women much more fuckable than others.  Yep….that one.

Cheryl recently became engaged this week (congrats!), which leaves me ostensibly the last of a group of friends who is not either engaged or completely hitched. I became predictably uncomfortable by this, and throughout the week I would blurt to no one in particular, “Jesus, all my friends are married!” Lukas then helpfully adds that I am now closer to 35 than I am to 18. I should note that this conversation occurred when I was at a Dress Barn of all places, shopping for something to wear for someone else’s wedding.

Perhaps naively, I always envisioned myself as a Celine: in her early 30s, neurotic to the core, in a successful but somewhat mediocre relationship, and happily traversing the world doing fantastic things. It was nothing short of ideal because it was my vision of aging gracefully. I would have smart dinner parties with academics who were all happily bitter, we would frequently gallery hop, and then, maybe in between quoting Jack Burton, we’d talk about how much we all loved Chris Ware, even if his lettering is sometimes indiscernible. Occasionally, I would go away to a foreign country to do a fellowship, where maybe this time around I would not be diagnosed with cancer. All the while I would magically still look 25 because I don’t seem to age. And while I am able to make the concession that all this is still very plausible and within reason if I were hot and heavy in a relationship, the reality of this becomes impossible with the add-on of kids and my inability to provide for anything more than a transient lifestyle. Plus the majority of my friends don’t particularly subscribe to this lifestyle, which makes being poor really boring if you have no one to do it with. I also conveniently ignored the fact that Celine was miserable and resentful of all the men who dated her, found nurture in her, and then subsequently ended up marrying someone else. She also left her kids in the car with the windows rolled up for six months.

She is, without a doubt, what I aspire to be.

Generally speaking, I have no misgivings about the various guys I’ve had some semblance of a relationship with, although one in particular (for the sake of the argument, we’ll call him “Daniel Paik”) was most likely the stupidest person I ever met of someone with reasonable intelligence. Another came suspiciously close, but I think I’m confusing that with his terrible music collection, so we’ll give him a pass. But they were all rather nice and quite successful in their various ways, and I would like to think we had some sort of meaningful exchange along the way. Even Danny boy had his moments; for instance, he was prone to having very direct conversations with me, and never hid behind any posturing. I only wish it was about something more profound (his feelings about healthcare in the United States? Should the government divert more of its resources to fund arts education? Why do you think Jason Todd was such a hated Robin in the DC Comics?) than his unabashed use of muscle-building supplements. And I do like kids in a general kind of way; they have fantastic imaginations for people who are typically unread, plus everything they say is just kind of inadvertently hilarious.

It is fast becoming obvious that I am destined to have lots and lots of cats.

…Which I suppose is not a terrible alternative. Back in the heydays of Harbin, our instructor asked us (without irony, because irony does not exist in China), “What is happiness?” (什么是幸福?). I mumbled some bullshit about doing what you want in life, which is a great response if you are a tween with an alarming sense of self-awareness (alas, I was 25 years old). Kelly, on the other hand, came up with a coherent argument that kittens are happiness, and while the details are vague now, I do remember her saying that you can pet them when you are stressed, or even hug them, and they will make you feel great. Simple, precise, and best of all, with a proven track record of success. Good one, Proctor.

Anyway, it is somewhat impossible to end this without resorting to some sort of platitude about relationships and the increasing social pressure that I very indignantly feel that no other female in her late twenties can possibly understand. Plus, I’m fairly certain I alienated the male readership of this by whining about things they can’t anatomically or emotionally relate with. It is also a lot more difficult than I anticipated to tie the paragraph about kittens back to my original argument. And I admittedly just kind of want to play DS right now. Even so, I genuinely do find Celine’s lifestyle admirable and attractive–I imagine it is the kind that allows for a cat not as a forced stand-in for human companionship, but because they are just kind of great to hug in between dinner parties and gallery hopping.

Originally posted February 20, 2009

I recently reread Arcadia, after insisting for the past ten years that I would. It is not as difficult as I last remembered it, although to be fair, I was kind of an idiot at 17. At the time I most certainly didn’t appreciate Stoppard’s jab at academia, i.e., the relentless pursuit to be published, or battling egos over what is an accurate account of useless information, in this case 19th century Romantic history. And just like I am always last to know a song is about cunnilingus when it is completely obvious (Blues Explosion’s “Mars, Arizona” and Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” come readily to mind), I somehow overlooked that sex played a very significant part of the plot.

But as things were, I was sort of this awkward asexual being at seventeen, so I inevitably found more comfort in the play’s other ideas. I realized little has changed in a decade; I spent all of last night trying to understand its themes of Euclidean geometry, fractals, and the second law of thermodynamics to varying degrees of success. At one point, 13-year-old heroine Thomasina declares that the equations she learns in math only “describe the shape of manufacture” and thus sets out to discover the equation for nature: a bluebell, or perhaps a leaf. And why stop at nature? Why not find the algorithm that plots out the course of the future? I would kill to read the essay I wrote ten years ago (actually, I’d really kill to read the essay Andy wrote), but I bet you I copped out and wrote about something bland like the discrepancies between Classical and Romantic temperament.

Jesus Christ. Boring.

Mindfuck aside, Stoppard adamantly claims sex as the best interference there is, especially against equations that potentially outline our fate. It’s not a particularly revealing thought but the humanist interjection is welcomed nevertheless. It is much more appealing, and infinitely easier, to believe that we are more than the sum of our parts, and that our fuck ups and love affairs are discord instead of predictable discourse. Because, Stoppard asks, what exactly is the point of knowledge, and more broadly epistemology, if it is invariably used to prove nihilism?

Originally posted February 3, 2009

The Rieff article kind of bothered me all day.

At one point, Sontag declared that she was not interested in enhancing the quality of her life, but rather any means necessary in saving, or at least prolonging it. Maybe I took more of the Richard Posner approach—fighting to the end for what I perceived as scraps of life seemed counter-intuitive to me. I’m not quite sure what I would’ve done if not only chemo ended up failing me, but also second- and third-line treatment as well: I would hope I’d be healthy enough to fly to Berlin and spend my last remaining days there.

Which inevitably leads to what I always had a morbid curiosity about: how exactly do you die of cancer? How does your body shut down? Are you lucid? Do you feel any conscious pain? Given the extreme optimism of my prognosis because I was young and had the “good kind of cancer,” none of the doctors found it necessary to tell me what were to happen if I were not to win. Even when my oncologist told me that a transplant was becoming more of a reality than a semi-distant abstraction, it never occurred to me that it could fail, or I could very plausibly die of a simple infection during the process. Reading a general biography for Sontag’s death yielded little: “Sontag died in New York City on 28 December 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia.” Rieff, however, chronicled his mother’s final days more generously, and in the end, God does reside in the details:

About 48 hours before the end, she began to fail, complaining of generalized low-grade pain (possibly indicating that the leukemia was in her bloodstream). Shortly after, she came down with an infection. Given the compromised state of her immune system, the doctors said, there was little chance that her body could stave it off. She remained intermittently lucid for about another day, though her throat was so abraded that she could barely speak audibly and she was confused. I feel she knew I was there, but I am not at all sure. She said she was dying. She asked if she was crazy.

By Monday afternoon, she had left us, though she was still alive. Pre-terminal, the doctors call it. It was not that she wasn’t there or was unconscious. But she had gone to a place deep within herself, to some last redoubt of her being, at least as I imagine it. What she took in I will never know, but she could no longer make much contact, if, indeed, she even wanted to. I and the others who were at her side left around 11 p.m. and went home to get a few hours’ sleep. At 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, a nurse called. My mother was failing. When we arrived in her room, we found her hooked up to an oxygen machine. Her blood pressure had already dropped into a perilous zone and was dropping steadily, her pulse was weakening and the oxygen level in her blood was dropping.

For an hour and a half, my mother seemed to hold her own. Then she began the last step. At 6 a.m., I called Nimer, who came over immediately. He stayed with her throughout her death.

And her death was easy, as deaths go, in the sense that she was in little pain and little visible anguish. She simply went. First, she took a deep breath; there was a pause of 40 seconds, such an agonizing, open-ended time if you are watching a human being end; then another deep breath. This went on for no more than a few minutes. Then the pause became permanence, the person ceased to be and Nimer said, “She’s gone.”

There was unimaginable relief when I realized it could be a relatively merciful process—you certainly feel it, but perhaps with limited agony. In the six-plus months of treatment, I had the misfortune of being completely lucid for just about everything: from my bone marrow biopsy, to my needle biopsy, to my vocal injection, to the post-chemo hangovers, to all the infections my body was unable to fight off, to the allergic reactions from various drugs, to post-op healing, to enduring hundreds of shots. The idea of experiencing something exponentially more acute than any of that depressed more than terrified me because I had become exhausted of the pain. It gets familiar, but certainly never old. For a very long time, I saw death not as a cessation from the pain, but simply as one big culmination of it before the inevitable end.

There was, however, the one incident where I had the luxury of not being lucid , i.e. I had died without actually suffering through the process of dying. Almost ruefully, I admitted to friends that it felt like nothing because absolutely nothing happened, although doctors tell me that on the contrary, everything happened. There’s no real poetic way to describe it than one day I was alive, and then I wasn’t, and then I was again. And then I wasn’t. But then I was. In many respects, I considered it the easiest time I had, especially compared to the shit show my friends and family went through waiting to see if my lung would re-inflate and if the tumor would retard enough to get the fuck off my trachea. I came away from the experience with no profound spirituality or deeper understanding of anything. It simply happened, and I shrugged and moved on.

Which brings me back to Rieff’s article. There was a certain naivete in reading it because I believed that he would talk about his mother’s illness in more philosophical and poetic terms. Cancer is much easier to digest when viewed as an abstraction, or at least the literary equivalent to a baby seal. Instead, Rieff chose to focus on the appeals to her insurance company, the impossibility of drawing the line of what is medically futile, the unequal access to healthcare in the United States, and finally, in intimate detail, the course of her decline. In the end, perhaps it is that what bothered me about Rieff’s article: while Sontag’s obituaries were quick to celebrate her life as one of our most important essayists, Rieff made no concessions in documenting the process of her death.