apropos of anything

They say the only thing ruder than rudeness is pointing out said rudeness. You’re supposed to smile and pretend Rude Person is in fact the epitome of politeness.

So hypothetically speaking (of course), is it rude to extricate yourself from a rude situation? As in, if someone you know does something you find to be incredibly rude, and you choose not to partake in the something, does that make you ruder than the rude person? What if your lack of participation hurts Rude Person’s feelings? How many times do you smile and pretend before you transition from Polite Person to Pushover?

I honestly cannot decide. On a related note, I’m curious how many emails/phone calls this post is going to net me from people who think I’m referring to them when really, I’m just being hypothetical.

On an unrelated note, why do Ken and Ivan insist on continuing to mock my Cocoa Puffs?

Except running through my pipes, that is.

Shortly after 5 p.m. last night, the water to my end of the complex was cut off. I still don’t know the details, except that the guy who just moved in was washing his car immediately before it happened. I know New Guy isn’t responsible, but by the way he won’t stop hovering over the increasingly large hole across the street, I think he feels a little guilty anyway.

(As I type this, I’m watching the series premiere of the new Fox show Vanished. I hadn’t planned on it, but they started off by panning over Atlanta (the “vanished” is the wife of a Georgia senator), and I was all, awww, the Nations Bank building! So here I am with Vanished playing in the background, although it’s pretty obvious the show is shot in L.A. because y’all, the Biltmore doesn’t look like that and doesn’t have fancy script lettering on shiny glass doors. But I digress.)

I was in the middle of making dinner when it happened. One minute, I’m rinsing out my measuring cup, and the next, I have no water to wash a bowl. One of my hands was covered in oil from punching down my focaccia dough, but the other was clean enough to get to a stopping point. The dishes are still piled up in the sink (no water!) and the countertops are crumb-free but a little stained (no water!). Let us not even begin to speak of the toilets (NO WATER!).

(Okay, now I’m just confused. Some of these scenes in Vanished are obviously in Atlanta, but others I can’t place at all, even though they’ve got trademark buildings looming in the background. Are the buildings CGI’d in, or do I just not know my city? And why can’t I remember whether MLK intersects Pryor?)

Actually, the water came back sometime while I was at work (unshowered because… no water!), but I haven’t gotten a chance to clean up yet. All last night I kept expecting the electricity to go out too because that’s what’s supposed to happen when you don’t have water. I honestly didn’t realize how much I took water (running or piled up in tubs) for granted until I didn’t have it anymore.

(This show is kind of boring.)

From a CNN story:

“U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the plans were ’suggestive of an al Qaeda plot,’ and President Bush said the arrests are a ’stark reminder’ that the U.S. is ‘at war with Islamic fascists.’”

What’s up with the adjective, Mr. President? Why does it matter which religion your alleged fascists ascribe to? And what, exactly, makes them fascists? And are you really going to pretend you’re not secretly grateful this latest incident allows you to trot out your tired old speeches about “evil” and “terror” and why it’s okay to slowly strip the American public of its civil liberties?

Terrorists are terrorists are terrorists are terrorists. Who they pray to at night shouldn’t really factor into the equation.

As The History of Love opens, Leo Gursky says every day he makes a point of being seen because he doesn’t want to die on a day that nobody saw him. He goes to movies and spills his popcorn as soon as it’s handed to him, goes to Starbucks and changes his order half a dozen times, trips and goes sprawling on the floor in a store. He expects to die alone, probably in his apartment, and he wonders how many days it will be before the super notices the smell. He has no family, but he does have a burial plot, and he carries a card stating as much for when the inevitable happens.

Leo Gursky feels like he’s invisible. He probably is.

Initially when I finished The History of Love, I didn’t agree with the critics who consider it to be superior to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but it really is. The thing is, it’s just so inevitable and sad whereas Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has a tiny bit of uplift to it. Leo lives a life, possibly not even an unhappy life, but not really a whole life. Not exactly a happy life. He just lives. He poses as a nude model because of the incredible prospect of having so many eyes on him, studying him, all at once. So many people seeing him. And in the end, the thing he wants most to happen doesn’t happen, at least not the way he thought it would.

Is it enough that a thing happens? Does the happening not matter if we don’t know that it happened? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?

And then there’s Alma, who anchors the other thread in the book. Alma, who is named after the main character in a book her father gave her mother, who has a weird little brother and a lonely, introverted mother, and whose father died of pancreatic cancer. Her brother, Bird, is reminiscent of Oskar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, except he’s more annoying than loveable. Oskar, I want to hug; Bird, I want to slug. Sometimes. And then I feel badly about it because he’s one of those kids — we’ve all known at least one — that really just needs someone to pay attention to him, someone other than his teenaged sister who’s still trying to figure it all out for herself, but his brand of eccentric is such that he’s amazingly off-putting. I know I should be more sympathetic, but I can’t be, and I think that may be part of the point.

Alma’s lonely too, a little. Bird’s lonely a lot, only he doesn’t know it. Their mother has wrapped herself so tightly in a cocoon of loneliness she never even notices her loneliness is by choice. None of them are completely invisible because at least they have each other.

Leo doesn’t have anybody.

On Sunday, a story about lonely Americans ran over the AP wire. It seems we’ve all gotten so busy we don’t have time to cultivate relationships, resulting in thousands of Leo Gurskys all over the country. I have to wonder, do we really see the people who share our space? How many invisible people have I not seen just in the last twenty-four hours?

And is it fair for me to dislike Bird while I love Leo when Bird is also just trying not to be invisible, even if he doesn’t realize that’s what he’s doing?

This book has gotten in my head even more than Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close did, despite searing fewer lines and images in my head. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I haven’t even begun to process the themes of love and loss that the critics are all raving about.

When I was a kid, I thought the world was generally a happy place, with a few patches of sadness. Now I’m pretty sure the world is generally a sad place, with a few patches of happiness.