How Duran Duran ruined my world (and still secretly rocks it)

While poking around the internet on a lazy afternoon, I came across the VH1 online box set of Duran Duran videos. Interspersed between the videos are commentaries from band members. I think I was 11 when I first fell in love with Duran Duran, and I’ve never looked back. Well, I have, hence the perusing of online nostalgia, but you know what I mean.

I almost never come across a woman who lived consciously through the 80s that doesn’t remember this band. Love them or hate them, they were everywhere. You couldn’t pick up an issue of Teen Beat or Tiger magazine without staring at one of their handsome mugs. Thank God.

Duran Duran were responsible for shaping, in large part, my view of the world outside of Rensselaer, IN, my hometown. Rensselaer is a small town in the middle of farming country, population severely limited. Here are the details, for anyone interested in seeing what living a version of “Footloose” was like: http://cityofrensselaerin.com/.

You can fill in the details of small town life with your own imaginations. (Think loads of boredom, peppered with cruising down main street and hanging out at the tennis courts with wine coolers.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was a bona fide dork. GEEK. I wore glasses and fit into ‘pretty plus’ size clothing. I sucked at gym class, won the 7th grade math award, and I pretty much thought I’d go to my grave without ever having been kissed. To me, the world of Duran Duran videos were OZ. I may as well have been wishing to be Dorothy, whisked away in a storm to the heart of New York or London, to battle the evil reigning fashion models for the heart of John Taylor. (Oh, sure, I went through a ‘Simon LeBon’ phase, who didn’t? But, it didn’t last. My eyes and tiny preteen heart stuck like glue to John.) Instead of ‘Over the Rainbow’ I had ‘Save a Prayer’. (Needless to say, it took me awhile to figure out what a one-night stand was, but they made it seem romantic.)

Here’s a peek at why they were so exciting:

So, what did I do? I got it into my head that to have a good life you had to be or have these things: be model pretty, have oodles of money, live in a big city, travel to exotic places outside of the U.S., and have a rock-star boyfriend. Smarts and a sense of humor? Well, they might help you get there, but let’s face it – people only say they want intelligence and someone to make them laugh after they’ve experienced a bad or boring fling with a vapid, but gorgeous, person. And by 7th grade I had already learned the cold, hard truth: being smart was not going to get me a boyfriend. Period.

Anyway, flash forward a million years, and I’m living in New York City. Duran Duran is basically responsible for almost every decision I made until the age of 28. Why lie? Here’s the proof:

Which is me trying to look sexy/angry on a photo shoot in St. Maarten in 1995. Or how about this:

Get a load of those SHOES! Wow. Or, doing my best Rio impressions:

I spent the better part of my youth figuring out that life is definitively NOT a Duran Duran video. First off, New York was great, but not all that cheap. Secondly, being a model was fun for awhile, but not all that glamorous (maybe the 1000 models who have actually made it big would disagree with me). Third, while I came THIS CLOSE to actually meeting John Taylor before a solo gig in 1998 while I was also working as a reporter (I still have the taped phone conversation, where I desperately tried not to gush), I never dated a rock star. Or any stars, actually. A lot of bankers and business types, but no stars.

In other words, it took me a long time to recover from my love affair with Duran, and the rest of the 80s if we’re completely honest (I’m still holding out for my Sixteen Candles birthday cake with Jake scene). But, in the long run, I’ll probably always have a tiny shiver when I hear the first chord of one of their songs. Shit, I dated British guys exclusively throughout the 90s, in part so I could hear the Duran accent. (I’m sick, I realize.) And, truth be told, there’s nothing really wrong with the occasional hit of Duran Duran, it keeps me young-ish and sexy. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Duran Duran is, for better or for worse, part of the soundtrack of my life and the birthplace of my wanderlust for life outside of the borders.

A tribute to my former life . . .

I just saw this compilation on a gossip site, and I knew I had to post it myself.

I have two basic reactions to this video. One being that I feel a bit sorry for these girls, as I know how humiliating it is to screw up on a stage. Two being that I feel a little happier about myself. At least I’m not doing this for a living anymore. From fashion to fowl diseases. Life is strange, no?

New fiction – but beware, it’s a little NSFW

I’m posting a link to a new fiction story by my author-boyfriend. It’s good, but it’s a bit dirty. After all, it is published by Nerve. However, this is a big deal. It’s literary smut, people, and it pays.

So, as I’m putting the finishing touches on my uber-serious article on bird flu, please check out some summer reading at

http://www.nerve.com/fiction/sloan/the-opposite-of-animal/

Keep posted for an upcoming preview of my article, and a future link as to where you can find it. Though, sadly, unless you’re at a university with subscriptions to most academic journals, you’ll probably have to pay to read the entire article. I realize that most non-academics don’t subscribe to Language and Politics. Though maybe they should. . . .

Procrastination, Part Deux

Well, I still have that article to write on bird flu. I’ve managed to do some more research, gather articles together, and I even know what I am going to use to ground and structure my argument. However, I still haven’t written anything. Oh, I have some lame segments, perhaps the beginnings of an introduction, but I just can’t seem to get my stuff done.

For an illustration of why, please check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk

If this isn’t you, then please contact me right away and tell me the secret to getting your stuff done.

Affordable Apartment Hunting

When you are looking for an apartment in an overly-crowded city with a high standard of living, your life can quickly become frustrating and unbearable. I lived in New York City for about 8 years, so I know this rule of modern life well. However, I was much younger then, and I’m trying to be more zen about things these days. Though the San Francisco Bay area is giving me a run for my money – literally.

Tiny 1-bedroom apartments in decent neighborhoods tend to go for a minimum of $1300. 2-bedrooms are $1500 and up. The further you get from “decent” and the closer you get to “I think I might be able to buy some cocaine on the street near here”, the cheaper it gets. Sad to say, I am not hip enough to live in a neighborhood that lights up like Christmas on the police’s Crime Tracker website. I am just not that tough.

I think that knowing and admitting your weaknesses are the keys to all success in life. If you know that something is not right for you, then listen to that instinct. There are things that can, and should, be gotten over, like the fear of public speaking. The fear of being mugged is not one of them. Know the difference and be okay with it. Some people have a commitment to living in fringe neighborhoods, I am not one of them. Perhaps this will harm my street cred as an anthropologist, but I don’t care. There’s a difference, in my mind, between a field site and a home site. What I could put up with for a short time while doing research, I couldn’t necessarily live with interminably.

We saw some things that we could barely afford, but were lovely. And I mean lovely. If we had taken the apartment we had been offered at first, we would be living large, but without any leftover money for food. Which is a potential problem, don’t you think?

So, in addition to knowing what you can live with, you probably need to know what is essential and what is simply craving. Do you need a fancy new refrigerator? Probably not. French doors leading out to a huge patio? Nope. A place that would really wow them at dinner parties? Uh-unh. Stick to the basics: affordable without taxing your monthly income, safe, clean and nice. I’ll leave the fancy and the grand to the Joneses, and sock the extra $800/month away for vacations. (We all have our vices.)

We’re now waiting to sign a lease on a very affordable 2-bedroom on a cool street, away from campus and from the undergrads. Tips on moving in with your significant other will no doubt follow in the next few weeks.

The 10 Driving Commandments

OK, I admit that as a baptized Catholic (clearly not a practicing one), I could not resist posting this.

Today the BBC reported that the Vatican had just issued the “10 Commandments” for driving (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6768395.stm), as part of the “Pastoral Care of Road Users”. This was something that I could not resist checking into, as both of my parents were practicing Catholics and both died in cars (though at separate times and of separate causes). Here are the commandments in their entirety, as taken from the Vatican’s website:

Drivers’ “Ten Commandments”

61. In any case, with the request for motorists to exercise virtue, we have drawn up a special “decalogue” for them, in analogy with the Lord’s Ten Commandments. These are stated here below, as indications, considering that they may also be formulated differently.

I.	You shall not kill.
II.	The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
III.	Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
IV.	Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims of accidents.
V.	Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
VI.	Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
VII.	Support the families of accident victims.
VIII.	Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
IX.	On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
X.	Feel responsible towards others.

Now, I realize that I am usually mistrustful of religious decrees, but if this actually reduces the incident of ‘road rage’ or reckless driving, then I am all for it. People are crazy on the road (especially in China, where people are buying more cars than ever before and have less experience driving and dealing with traffic problems). I, for one, am always nervous driving in cars. Of course, this is because I am all-too aware of what can go wrong in them. I am, as a result, a bit of a safety pusher and consistently urge all of my friends to drive safely. If the scary films we watched in driver’s education didn’t scare them into defensive driving tactics, then perhaps the story of my mother’s early and tragic death might.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if it takes you 15 additional minutes to get to your destination. As long as you get there, consider it a job accomplished. On this point, I am in agreement with the Vatican. [The previous statement is one which I never believed that I would write in my lifetime, so please, no wry commentary. I am still a recovering Catholic, and a card-carrying science believer, and have not fallen off the anti-organized religion wagon. Yet.]

The Negative Side of Having “Potential”

Summer is stretching its long arms out in a near mind-crushing expanse of potential. Classes are over, the days are longer, and I have a summer stipend which means I have nothing but time and sunshine in which to write. I have no deadlines and no one expects me to show up for work at 9am. I don’t have any reading or writing assignments, which means that I ultimately get to choose what I read and what I write. I am absolutely free of constraints.

This sounds nice, I know, but really it is crushing. There is nothing as depressing as having “potential”. If I were to die tomorrow, my epitaph would most certainly be, “Here lies Theresa Marie MacPhail. She had so much potential.”

po·ten·tial (pə-těn’shəl)
adj.

1. Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent: a potential problem.
2. Having possibility, capability, or power.

n.

1. The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being.
2. Something possessing the capacity for growth or development.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the quality collectively known as “potential”. I believe it was my second grade teacher, Mrs. White, that first officially labeled me as “having potential”, and she was quickly followed by my mother and other various members of my family. Teachers, it was true, loved me. I was (and this is taken directly from my report cards, which my mother saved in a special folder): bright, eager to learn, a good reader, above grade-level, a pleasure to teach, and perhaps a bit too talkative. I was good in math, science and English. In sixth grade, I was the first girl to win the math award (which is, surprisingly, not as cool as it sounds for a gawky 11-year-old). My first year in high school, I was the only freshman in a sophomore geometry class (again, they didn’t think I was half as kick-ass as my father did for this accomplishment). I got placed in an advanced English class my senior year – there were only 10 of us. Unsurprisingly, I was ranked 9th in my class (and I went to a high school with a campus – so you can do your own math here). My chemistry teacher tried to convince me to become a plastics engineer (seriously), and I wanted to be a journalist (past English teachers were all-too ready with the “potential” comments). I was a geek. Better yet, I was a geek with potential.

I still am. Clearly, since I am a graduate student with a summer reading list that includes Kant and Baudelaire. But, that damned potential keeps lingering over me like a dark cloud, ready to burst open. And yet it doesn’t. Down here, at my computer, it remains the Gobi desert. Each year, the potential encroaches, taking more space and reducing visibility. Some days, I can’t even see one week into the future, it’s that thick with potential disaster.

While at Stanford the other day (a place brimming with potential), I picked up a copy of a book by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, called “Stumbling on Happiness”. I was feeling depressed because I was in a bookstore filled with literally tens of thousand of books and I was thinking about my own stalled writing career. I was in the China section, reading the back cover of a book about China by a journalist who was at least five years younger than me and it was his SECOND book. In addition, he was the China correspondent for the New Yorker. Did I mention he was five years younger than me? I felt like crying. Here I was, with all of my POTENTIAL, and there he was, out there in the world, with all of his fulfilled book contracts.

It is Mr. Gilbert’s interesting opinion that we are, and have always been, bad predictors of what will make us happy. We also, interestingly enough, think about our futures for approximately 12% of our waking hours. This is not the future as in “What will I have for lunch, tuna or chicken salad?”, but the future as in our potentials. Will we have enough money for retirement? Can we afford a house in two years? Should we have a baby? Will we be fat and wrinkled at 60 unless we go to the gym today? Potential, it seems, is something that human beings are programmed to bear. Potential is, however, not what we think it will be.

Now, I am only on chapter one of this book, so I can’t claim to know the end or explain the details of Gilbert’s point. However, I have already felt a bit relieved to know that I am not in this “future” boat alone. Misery really does love company. I worry. All the time. About everything. So does everyone else, it seems. Even that guy in China who has published two successful books. Right now, he’s in Beijing wondering if he’ll ever fulfill his potential. The potential that his 8th grade English teacher told him about; the potential that his wife is always bragging to her friends about; the potential that he knows he has inside of him, sitting there like a flame ready to ignite.

How to Survive a Road Trip

Having just completed the long journey from New York City to Berkeley, California, in a car, I can tell you that road trips are difficult. You see a lot, you do a lot, you are stuck in a space that is four feet by four feet for hours at a time. Some of it is mind-blowingly beautiful, some of it isn’t. Some of it is interesting and quirky, some of it isn’t. Sometimes you love the person you are with, sometimes you don’t. The truth is, road trips test the mettle of relationships. Any relationship – family, best friends, lovers, coworkers. You cannot be in a car with someone for that long and not get to know things about them that you never would have otherwise. Like the fact that refried beans give them gas. Or that they really, really like taking pictures, which requires you to pull over the car. In light of this, I’ve decided to try to compile a list of do’s and don’ts to help others who might be considering a summer road trip of their own.

1. DO decide ahead of time what the stereo rules are. For example, you might decide that the person driving is in charge of the radio selection or that you share time 50/50. Do not leave this until you are sitting in the car listening to banjo music for a six-hour stretch.

2. DO decide ahead of time how much you will drive. Are you sharing it equally? Is it a rental car, so everyone can get a go? Or is it someone’s baby, which means that you are far less likely to have a turn at the wheel? And when (and if) you do, you will be nervous the entire time that you will somehow be responsible for a scratch (or worse). I drove less on this trip, but it wasn’t my car. This made both of us happier.

3. DO negotiate pit stops. Maybe the person/s you are with do not want to see the famous Corn Palace. Do not assume that everyone else is as interested in checking out the “largest ball of yarn on earth”. However, be aware that if you make someone stop at the ‘1800s town’, you might have to go on the ‘old mine’ tour. It’s a give and take.

4. DO NOT eat five times a day at scary fast-food restaurants and highway dives. Also DO NOT eat everything that you think you want. I promise you that the rules of basic caloric intake still apply on a road trip. If you do not follow this rule, you will end up approximately 5 pounds heavier per/1000 miles.

5. DO NOT play “Do you know what is wrong with you?” in the car. Ever. I guarantee that for every bad thing you discover about your driving partner/s, he/she/they have discovered at least one about you.

6. DO NOT have outrageous expectations. Plan on being disappointed at least some of the time. The truth is, Mount Rushmore is neat, but kind of boring. The Midwest is flat and the desert is only exciting for about 20 minutes, give or take. DO leave room to get excited about the things you discover along the way that you didn’t count on. It turns out that the 1800s town was actually pretty cool.

7. DO spend more money on a good hotel room. A good, clean bed is worth the extra $20. Trust me on this one and look up bed bugs on wikipedia.

8. DO plan on spending more money than you thought. You never calculate the beef jerky you buy at the rest stop, the $25 entrance fee to Yellowstone, or the $20 mug you buy to commemorate your experience.

9. DO NOT go anywhere without having GPS, two maps and a book of Holiday Inn locations. You never know where you’ll end up.

10. DO maintain a zen approach to everything. It helps to mumble “I’m zen” to yourself as you bring your hands together in Angeli Mudra. As a suggestion, do this at least once after every comment that starts with, “Well, I’d rather . . . .”

11. DO bring sunscreen, a hat, and have a bottle of water in the car. Also, it helps to have a cup you can pee into in an emergency. When you see the sign that says, “Next rest stop 118 miles”, you can rest easy.

12. DON’T pack too much. You’ll be happier when lugging your shit into and out of the car every night. You probably don’t need those ‘dress shoes’ anyway.

13. DO try to remember you’re not perfect. Neither are any of the people in the car with you. On a long car trip, you’d probably want to shove Jesus, Ghandi and your grandmother out of the moving vehicle anyway.

These simple tips should help you to muster through any road trip. However, please note that these rules do not apply to traveling with children and/or teenagers. For that, you’re on your own and I wish you Godspeed.

Pig Death Mystery Solved

I take it back. There is disease news to disseminate from the road.

Officials in China have confirmed that the microbe causing the mysterious epidemic in Guangdong, in which 300 pigs have died, has been identified. According to the Xin Hua news agency, it’s apparently a common pig illness called ‘blue-eared pig disease’. The People’s Daily reports that:

The PRRS virus entered China from overseas in the mid 1990’s and has recently shown signs of mutation. It cannot spread from animals to people and is said to be under control in the district.

Tests for the disease are available, and a vaccine against the disease has received State approval and is to be distributed soon, said the statement.

Meanwhile, Yang Weixin, head of Silao Town, where most of the pig deaths occurred, denied overseas media reports that more than 80 percent of the 10,000 pigs in the area had died.

He said the pigs produced there were mostly consumed locally. Media reports said sales of pork in the affected area had dropped significantly since the outbreak.

For those of you more interested in epidemiology – like myself – you can find out more about the disease from this veterinary site:

http://mark.asci.ncsu.edu/HealthyHogs/book1993/mccaw3.htm

Year of the Golden Pig – with an ironic twist . . .

The New York Times reported last week that an epidemic was killing pigs across the border from Hong Kong in mainland China, in two areas in Guangdong province.

This is ironic because this is the year of the pig in China, and the mystery disease allegedly began to surface immediately after the New Year celebrations. I’m no expert, but even in their golden year, this doesn’t bode well for pigs. Efforts are being made to slaughter the infected pigs and to prevent any spread of the disease.

All joking aside, however, this story raises new concerns about the age-old issue surrounding Chinese transparency and global health issues. The entire Southeast region of China has residual fears from its bout with SARS in 2003, and Hong Kong authorities are especially concerned about the issues both of accurate and timely reporting and effective containment of outbreaks. Although this disease does not appear to have any of the same symptoms of either SARS or bird flu, concern remains since pigs’ immune systems are very similar to our own. Pigs are often key links in the natural chain of disease transmission, which is why this story is causing so much alarm in Hong Kong in the first place. Authorities both at the WHO and in Hong Kong are worried that China is not being quick enough to disseminate information and, when an official report is finally released, it is perhaps not entirely forthcoming.

The link to the full story is here:

www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/asia/07cnd-hongkong.html

Good thing I wrote my fiction novel (Eye of the Virus) about a pandemic early! Gallows humor is my forte, just to be clear. I’ll keep an eye on this story, but unless it’s serious (in which case we’ll all know more about it because CNN will pick up the thread and the panic button will be pushed), it will largely fade into the “needs further investigation” file. As somewhat of a layman disease expert, I know that something will eventually break through our largely inadequate surveillance system, but I hope it’s not in the near future.

But I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it behooves me to be optimistic about any predicted catastrophes.