The Skinny On Showtime

Dear Showtime's Executive Producers and Casting Agents;

Dudes. (I assume you're mostly dudes.) I dig your shows. Weeds? That's a great show! It's funny! Andy Botwin makes me giggle, and you got Zooey Deschanel to come on and talk about her period. Mega props. Mary-Louise Parker's character has great clothes, and Celia is one of the best filthy mouths on TV. Californication? That's kind of a trainwreck, to be honest, but it's watchable and Duchovny, to no one's surprise, makes a pretty decent asshole. Dexter is a good show, what with the killing and the deadpan voiceover and the Michael C. Hall being all scary and sexy. Dexter is great; you can practically feel the Miami heat radiating through your television tubes. It makes a nice contrast to Dexter's icy emotional state.

Those are just the shows I watch; you have a great lineup. The Tudors, The L Word, Nurse Jackie, Queer As Folk - all shows with serious critical cred backing them up. People love your shows. Not just the critics - regular TV-watching folks, people who used to be loyal to HBO, are checking out your lineup. You done good.

On behalf of the television-watching public, I implore you just one small thing. Don't change a thing about your writing stable or your settings (I love Dexter's Miami, for instance), keep your fantastic actors, and definitely give whoever does your costumes a raise. But please, for the love of toast, feed your actresses a sandwich.

Showtime is a cable channel, which means they can flash titties around like it ain't no thang. But the Showtime ladies are uniformly skinny, which means they aren't really flashing a lot of glorious breasts. Most of what I see seems to be ribcage. There are a couple exceptions - Celia on Weeds isn't a size four, and we've seen her rack a few times; LaGuerta from Dexter stays fully clothed, but isn't a tiny slip of a girl. But by and large (or small), the women on Showcase programming are seriously skinny.

I'm not mad at skinny, but I do get annoyed when it's presented as the only option for women under the age of, like, thirty-five. Showtime's men get to be fat, bald, creased and disheveled. They're allowed to be imperfect physically, because their characters are imperfect. But while the same imperfections of spirit are bestowed upon the women, they're still expected to be thin, young, and smooth. And thin. Very, very thin. Obese Americans now make up one-third of the population; two in three are overweight. But those people aren't represented on my TV screen. Why not? Hell, even average weight isn't shown too often; it's the 18.5 BMIs that populate the TV land. It normalizes a seriously abnormal aesthetic.

Like I said; not hating on the skinny. Jealous? Sure. I've struggled with wanting to be thinner, but my body has insisted on being this weight since I was 22. It's my destiny. It's not a bad one. I used to think ribcages and protruding clavicles were attractive, but it recently occurred to me to start thinking like a straight dude. Sure, some of them like skinny girls...but a lot of them like big racks, round asses, tight leg muscles. They don't mind a bit of convexity in a woman's stomach. I'm not saying that straight men love obese women (although some do, and although that can be kind of complicated, props to them) - just that having a shape and having some meat on our bones isn't a bad thing. It's actually pretty hot.

But I wish I saw more women on TV who weren't teensy weensy little girls. I want women. I want breasts, hips, asses. Maybe even - dare I say it? - a stomach. Showtime, if you're going to flash some ta-tas, I want them to be, you know, real ones. Worth it. I'm tired of counting ribs - give me something sexy.

How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?

I want a dog. I say this and people ask, "What kind of dog do you want?" I tell them I want a medium-sized black one with pointy ears and a bandanna, and they grin and back up a couple steps before saying, "You know a dog is a lot of work, right?," like the work I currently do best at is fingerpainting in the locked ward.

I'll admit that most of my previous dog experience comes from repeated viewings of the Guestian masterpiece Best In Show, and rolling around on the sidewalk with a fat Leslieville malamute that is just too adorable for words. Since my dad doesn't like dogs - he's afraid, which is natural, seeing as how they're cousins with wolves - we didn't really have them when I was a kid. Before my family moved to Japan, we had a mellow German Shepherd; Brea was given away because owning a large dog in Tokyo makes about as much sense as a bachelor owning a minivan.

My family has owned a series of mentally ill cats since we returned from Tokyo. Kasha ran away; Maggie used to hang out under the refrigerator when she was a kitten, and remains, eighteen years later, as skittish and spooky as ever. Molly has a fetish for sparkly pompoms, and will bite you when you feed her. My sister has done her best to damage them further, notably by taking them to inappropriate activities against their will. She once stuffed Maggie and Molly inside her parka (as she was wearing it) and took the dynamic duo sledding for half an hour.

As a result, I have a wary respect for my cats that borders on fearing them outright. I like other people's cats; I pet kittens on the sidewalk and cuddle with friend's cats on their couches. But cats don't really do it for me. I admire their independence and like petting the soft ones, but cats always seem to be rushing off to appointments or doing nefarious things in my closet.

I'll admit that I'm not really invested in pet culture as a general rule. The "fur kids" phenomenon that single people and couples without kids indulge themselves in is a little loopy for me: I don't want my pets to be my children, or my boyfriends. I want my pets to be my pets. Companions? Sure. Well-behaved roommates? Okay. A constant source of poop and shed fur? That just sort of comes with the territory. But I don't want my pets to wear outfits or sleep in my bed with me. I'm not looking for a surrogate baby. That creeps me out.

But the desire for a dog remains. Why? Who knows? I've had housemates with various forms of pets - I've lived with lizards and cats, gerbils and hamsters. Other houses in my sprawling co-op have lived with rats, snakes, and small, yappy dogs...sort of a bizarro food chain in some locales. People like pets. They like taking care of something, they like being outside themselves. Plus, the cuteness is a pretty big selling point. There are pets that are not totally cute, of course: the rodent family is kind of smelly, ferrets are pointy and icky, and don't get my started on the snakes-and-tarantula people. Those people are nutjobs. Dogs are standard issue kids of pets. I want one of those.

It might just be that I'm romancing the idea of a pet because my lifestyle right now can't really incorporate a dog. I live with, like, a jillion other people, and have zero cash monies because I am underemployed. A dog represents stability, keeping it together, having a plan and a schedule. Cats, while more flexible an option, always seem like they're running a business from your basement; like you're just their landlord. The only time I get any lovin' from cats is when I feed them. That's not nice. Dogs seem interested in the world around them. I like that interest. Plus, the cuteness.

We'll see what I can get. Maybe I'll sign up to be a dog walker at the Toronto SPCA; maybe I'll befriend a cabron with a pooch so I can spend some time rasslin' the thing. Maybe I'll get my life sorted out and get a freaking dog, like I've wanted to for years.

Porny

I've been reading/listening to a lot of Dan Savage, and it is mind boggling what people freak out about. Straight boys hitting on their gay friends by accident! Girls who want semen in their nose because they live for the rush of the unperformed sex act! College students who have fallen in weepy, snotty love with men a generation older than them! It's all so fascinating. I love human sexuality, and the cross-section that Savage Love features is hairy and juicy. Insert your own joke and grimace at the attendant mental image here.

My favourites revolve around porn and cheating - people are nuts about that! Wives and girlfriends worrying that, if their main men partners like to look at naked ladies (or naked gentlemen, if their men have some complicated sexual preferences), it means that they're cheating degenerate bastards with some sort of mental disorders and they need to be Clockwork Oranged into not watching it anymore. Porn is dangerous, say these ladies. Futhermore, porn is cheating.

Okay, I might be more lenient about the definition of "cheating" than most people, but I would argue that most of the sex-having population isn't getting their panties in a bunch over the idea of pornography. It's a slippery slope, the anti-porn people might say. Porn leads to strip clubs, and strip clubs lead to hooker, and hookers lead to...I don't know...the clap? Getting knifed by a pimp in a dumpster? Or porn leads to thinking about other women, and that leads to kissing other women, and that leads to bending them over the chesterfield and having sweaty midafternoon cheater sex with other women.

Bullshit. Porn leads to masturbation, the most innocuous of all flagrante delictes. I'll hold a warning finger up to silence the people who would argue that masturbation isn't good in a relationship; my body, my choice, right? I can't catch anything from my own sex toys, my partner can't impregnate his hand, and people's rocks need to be gotten off. Sometimes partners get out of sexual sync with each other, for whatever reason: busy work schedules, the flu, a bad few months, an infant, whatever. I've been blessed with friends who can concur that a high sex drive is a blessing and a curse; sometimes, when the sex isn't quite as forthcoming as we'd like, we tap into our bodies, ourselves. As we all should, regardless of relationship status or sex drive, when we need to.

My pal and I, years ago, joked about making hipster porn: heavily accessorized topless girls making out on some disgusting house-party couch. I think it works, actually. There's also soft-core fixed-gear bike porn, for your cycling pervs. Everyone needs a niche. There's also the whole gamut of pornography that is people having sex, getting tied up, being pregnant, sucking on each others toes, getting splashed in the face with veritable bucketloads of semen, and whatever other disgusting and totally normal things like to think about when they pleasure themselves. Some things are porn in disguise: I remember being, like, eight years old and seeing a drawing in a magazine that wasn't sexual in the slightest...except it make me feel strangely excited.

Looking at naked people doing naked stuff on a screen, or in a magazine, isn't stepping out and having sexual relations with those people. It is a form of sex, sure, but it's sex that everyone is entitled to, no matter who else is bringing them pleasure. In the same way that not all porn looks like naked bodies and penetrations, not all sex is PIVMO sex. Every couple needs to define cheating for themselves, but too narrow a definition and you'll end up with a frustrated partner. Putting the kibosh on porn, or worse, making it some pathological flaw, does a disservice to your partner. They are no longer the master (or mistress) of their own sexual destiny.

Is there a time and place for porn? Sure. Your kids don't need to know your sexual tastes, nor do your roommates or your parents. If you're electing to look at porn and masturbate in lieu of an interested and willing partner(s), you might want to think long and hard about why. If you and your beloved are in a rocky romantic patch, it might be insensitive to load up the DVD player and let 'er fly in plain sight. But let 'er fly at some other time; when you have the house to yourself, when he's in the tub, when the kids are at grandma's and it's just you and your pleasure device of choice. It's your right. If you don't need porn, scrunch your face up and think your filthy thoughts. That's your right, too.

And if your favourite person happens to walk in while you're mid-scrunch, invite them to join you, if you want, or finish up and get back to the vacuuming. No sighs, no deprogramming, no accusations of cheating or gnashing of teeth. Just a realization that your partner is the owner-operator of his or her body, and that sometimes porn is the fuel that gets the engine to turn over.

This Tastes Terrible

I have to confess something. No, I'm not pregnant - unless it's with some sort of fruit salad, which would be just disgusting - nor am I secretly married and/or divorced, a la Emmy Rossum. Although, can you imagine having, like, a secret husband? Would you pretend not to know each other at functions? Would it be a turn on, the secret marriage, or would be it be a huge pain in the ass? What does one wear to a secret wedding? (Actually, I've been to a semi-secret wedding, and if that event was any indication on how things are done, brassieres are optional, and the hangover is pretty much guaranteed.)

I digress. No secret weddings over here. No, my confession is this: I have terrible taste. I have bad taste in music, comic books, clothes, hairstyles, dates, alcoholic beverages, movies, hobbies, and paint colours. My only saving graces is that I have excellent taste in books and friends. Everything else? I suck.

Take, for example, the song I've been listening to on repeat for most of the week: Raghav is a Indo-Canadian pop star most successful in the UK, and his latest single is a flossy piece of summer fun. This is on the heels of that ridiculous "One Life Stand" song, which is a total club anthem and therefor awful by definition. I've been listening to that a bunch lately, too, because I hate my ears and my brain equally. But the songs are so much fun! They're dancing songs! Dancing is fun!

I have a huge crush on comic books generally, but I have to admit that some of my very favourite sequential art (I hate that pretentious term, and myself for using it) is the family-friendly newspaper strip Foxtrot. Don't judge me! I bought the anthologies secondhand, although I would have gladly paid retail for them, because I love them. And I, hipster jerkbag that I am, am ashamed of that love.

We judge each other based on our likes and dislikes. When I find out someone likes the Beastie Boys, or Firefly, or The Walking Dead, my brain starts pinging and saying, "This person is cool!" because I like those things, and because they have a certain amount of cultural currency and credibility. We can talk about zombies, or License to Ill, or some other cultural touchstone that defines us as idiot hipsters. When someone pipes up with the fact that they love Celine Dion, there's an awkward pause as we try to parse it out. Like, for real love? Or ironic love? It's confusing. Is Celine Dion so uncool she's...cool?

Other things? Not so much. I find my clothes in other people's closets and on the side of the road. Normal people shop at The Gap; I scrounge for my outfits like an animal. My last haircut was a DIY affair, a product of boredom and done with my dad's mustache trimming scissors. I think I look great, but I am notorious for thinking I look great when, in reality, I look the "before" picture on a makeover show. Because I'm sartorially dyslexic, I can't really tell the difference.

One of my friends read those hideous Twilight novels because she was interested in them from an anthropological perspective: what are these books? She didn't read them because she was looking to be entertained or because she thought Stephanie Meyer was really going to rock her world or whatever. She was reading to see if the books had merit, if the current fooferaw was based on anything actually, you know, good. Her report to me is that they are total garbage, which I could have probably guessed. But I'll admit to devouring The Babysitter's Club when I was in elementary school, and reading Sweet Valley High novels well past the age when I should have (I read them into my twenties. What's up?); if I was 15% dumber, I bet I would be all over those stupid books.

I think everyone has their bad-taste moments. My dad loves terrible beer; my sister has tipped me off to a lot of crappy music. I have friends who, by their own admission, dress like "lesbian gym teachers." I feel bad for people who are always in good taste. It must be exhausting to be that with-it all the time. My forays into bad taste are like little vacations from my usually awesome state of being. Tacky little cruises into the sea of bad taste, where the souvenirs are gauche jewelry and earnest comic books. Y'all should join me sometime; the water is just fine.

The Story Of My Upcoming Badass Tiny Scar

A few months ago, I went in for my good-Canadian routine physical, the kind of thing that all women are supposed to get once a year to ensure they're not growing horrible little cells or they haven't contracted an STI. I usually go to a pretty blonde doctor, one who looks very J. Crew and healthily tanned, but this year she had mysteriously vanished and was replaced by a woman who weighed about ninety pounds and had a ponytail. If not for the wrinkles, I'd have thought she was sixteen. Call me crazy, but I like my doctors to look like they might be old enough to be high school graduates, let alone done with all that pesky medical training that comes after.

Anyway, she took my blood pressure and made some brusque small talk ("You're an English major? Huh."), and then I lay down on the paper-covered table and she got down to business. For those of you not blessed with a vagina, or who are too scared to go on the regular, a physical is a minor sort of thing. The doctor spends about five minutes with a speculum, another 90 seconds using her hands, and then "you might feel a pinch," which is the swab being done. It actually feels nothing like a pinch. It's weirdly indescribable, although the closest I might come would be "stabby, but in miniature."

Usually, the whole thing is done in, like, ten minutes, and you wipe the lube off your lady bits and put your pants back on and spend the rest of the day feeling just a little bit weird. This time, though, there was a deviation from the script.

"Are you pregnant?" she asked, hand firmly ensconced in my vaginal canal. Immediately, the mental klaxons started blaring.

"Um, no?" I said. Because my brain had immediately gone into panic mode (which renders it into a totally unhelpful jell-o-like state of affairs), I wasn't immediately able to say it like I meant it. So she asked me again, and I repeated "No!" only this time I sounded panicky. I sounded like I was lying. About being pregnant. To a doctor.

"Well," she said, as she took her hand out of my body (note to the vaginaless and the afraid-of-doctors: that is exactly as weird as it sounds), "your uterus is big. I'm going to order some tests." I shrugged. I was a student. Tests don't scare me. Bring 'em on, I said. I'll get all A's. Big uterus? Pfft. Maybe it's big because it can barely contain all my awesomeness. Why do I carry my awesomeness in my uterus? Dunno, but it's awesome!

There was an ultrasound, which was basically a ultrasonic dildo pinging around in my bits, and no less than three technicians who were concerned at their inability to find my left ovary. They kept coming into my little fabric-walled cubicle, peering at the monitor, looking at me, and then leaving to get someone who hadn't left their X-Ray Specs at home. I left feeling unsettled, mostly because I didn't fit the demographic in the waiting room: youngish and pregnant, or older and cancer-bald. Me and my big uterus and my AWOL ovary slunk outside and had a little cry on the steps of the building, because apparently things were not okay in there.

When I went back to the doctor a week later, she was mystified. "This isn't really what I deal with," she told me, which is fine. It's not really what I deal with either. I asked about cancer. She sort of shrugged and was like, "Er, probably not. But I'm not promising you anything," which my jell-o brain interpreted as yet more reasons to freak out. While she was saying things about follow-up appointments, my brain was yelling "YOU HAVE CANCER, IT'S EVERYWHERE, IT'S ON YOUR HAIR, HOLY SHIT," so it was sort of hard to hear. My brain apparently reacts to the possibilty of cancer the same way it reacts to getting pooped on by a bird.

I went to the gynecologist, a person who does deal with this shit. He was like, "Well, there's something in there, but I can't tell what it is." He then threw a bunch of words with -oma and -oid on the end of them into the conversation, but I was so addled I could barely sit up. My friend Liz, who just got accepted into nursing school and who was my number one pick for dealing with this kind of medical mystery tour, was nodding and asking questions and being a grownup, while I was clawing at the neckline of my shirt and turning gray. Turns out, he doesn't know what it is either. He was like, "Surgery will tell us!" which I said yes to, and then he mentioned that it's the size of a grapefruit.

Next time you're at the grocery store, pick up a grapefruit. It doesn't have to be one of those Floridian monsters; just a regular old grapefruit will do. Now imagine this thing embedded in your abdomen, two inches to the left and one inch down from your navel. Weird, yeah? After I left that appointment and some of the blood came back into my head (and cried a bunch more), I went out and bought a grapefruit. I was going to eat it, to show my abdominal lump who was boss, but that idea grossed me right out. I eventually threw it away.

I'm having a hard time conceptualizing this mass. While it probably looks fairly gross, what I'm picturing is, like, a Diet Coke can just wedged in there. Or maybe a lost and hibernating bat. Something foreign. Something sort of repulsive and sort of cute at the same time. Conceptualizing the mass in vaguely gross and hilarious ways is distracting me from thinking about the surgery. I'm oscillating between pretending to be blase about the whole thing and feeling fucking terrified. I've never had anesthetic before. I've never had morphine before. The nurses told me I couldn't ride my bike for a month after, which, like, hello: that's what I do. The only time I've ever had stitches is when I ran my face into a wall playing tag at a friend's house. I'm not afraid of blood or pain or stitches or throwing up in the recovery room; I'm afraid of feeling crappy, forever.

My Bill Cosby pudding brain keeps shrieking about all the bad shit that could happen, and that is getting super tedious. My more rational and tender and, frankly, better brainparts all keep trying to remind me that this is getting dealt with. The lump, whatever it is (I'm rooting for bat, just because it would freak my gyno right out), was found. The surgery, whatever that's going to be like, is happening soon (August 12!). The shitty feelings of post-surgical recovery are fast approaching, but that means they'll also be going away that much sooner. And the fear of the unknown will disappear, because these worries will become known entities.

I know this is long. Thanks for reading. Sometimes it - the lump, the fear, the story - just needs to come out.

Thank Someone It's Someday

The whole concept of Thank God It's Friday kind of cracks me up. In Dubai, the standard work week and deity are different (Sunday through Thursday and Allah, respectively), leading its office drones to proclaim TAIT! As a waitress, my work week runs from Tuesday through Saturday; since Monday is traditionally a nothing-doin' kind of day in Stratford (come for the theater, stay for the mind-numbing dark days!), most of the bistros close. This tends to result in the bars in town having boozy Sunday nights, as all the waitstaff in town shamble out to get epically drunk, a by-product of having to deal with demanding elderly customers and psychotic kitchen staff all week.

However, even though TGIF doesn't apply to me and my service-industry brothers and sisters, I appreciate the idea of a marker for the end of the work week. When I was in elementary and middle school, ABC used to run the TGIF Friday-night lineup, which was a great way for tweens to blow off some steam at the end of a hormonally fraught week of school. It was like, science, sex ed, horrible lunch period of existential despair and unpopularity, French, math, interminable Guantanamo Bay bus ride, Boy Meets World. Ahhh. The comforting world of Cory and sexy Topanga, narcotizing the week away. Bliss.

There's even a restaurant chain devoted to the idea of making Fridays into a celebratory casting-off of the work week. Granted, I hate T.G.I.Fridays and its plastic food, but they've absolutely been able to expand the concept of the Friday night treat over seven nights: oversweetened daiquiri slurries paired with jalapeno cheese poppers have, for a large segment of the population, come to represent the "dinner" in the "dinner-and-a-movie" algorithm that is a wholesome Friday night. Or, in the case of some lucky Sydney office workers, a productive Friday afternoon.

I look forward to Friday, even though it's not the end of my work week, because everyone else seems so relieved. My parents kick back with a couple beers, my sister visibly relaxes, my friends regale me with stories about their work week. Some of my favourite websites leave little Hansel-and-Gretel treats to peruse over the weekend. Fridays means dinner out, a chance to stay up late and be on our own time. Friday at 5:01, the whole weekend is ahead of you, shining and glorious. I love that feeling of possibility. Maybe it's a movie night, or a date. Maybe it's a trip to the cottage for the weekend, or the city. Maybe it's a barbecue on the back deck, taking the kids to grandma's for the weekend, a whirlwind trip to Vegas, or simply just a chance to grab some takeout and watch some DVDs. May I suggest some Boy Meets World? It pairs very nicely with the start of a weekend. I know from experience.

Enemonic

The title of this blog, "Hipsters Are Boring," was originally intended as a slam against Chuck Klosterman, whose books made me totally crazy. Not even crazy in a grab-strangers-by-their-lapels way - I am that nuts about David Foster Wallace, Brian Lee O'Malley and Coke Zero, for all of which/whom I would organize parades - but not about Klosterman. Him, I would cheerfully fight. I've long felt that women have "people we don't like," while men get to have enemies (I think it's a holdover from that whole nice-woman bullshit from before my time), but this woman has some enemies.

I love a good loathing. Not mano-a-mano type stuff: that gets too weird. I have friends...former friends...people who exist in a gray zone between awkwardness and anger....but they're not really enemies, they're just people who make me sad. No, enemies are people who have wronged you on an epic, inarguable scale. People like, say, Margaret Atwood.

Atwood is my enemy because she gets all these accolades and awards, and as far as I can tell, is terrible. I don't mind terrible. I'm often terrible myself. But Atwood offends me because her prose is so often stolid and her dialogue reads like it was run through Babelfish, and yet she still gets nominated for everything under the sun. Kudos! Why? She still gets to look all coy, and offer her opinion on stuff, and people gobble it up like she's some sort of Canadian feminist oracle. Look. I know she looks like a witch (a look I embrace), and yeah, The Handmaid's Tale was sort of entertaining in a post-apocalyptic vein, but Oryx and Crake? Seriously? No. That book was weak sauce. And it gets taught, in real universities, with professors and shit. Like, it got treated like a real piece of action. And it's not.

Atwood and Klosterman are enemies of mine in a particular genre, "the writer who seriously for real doesn't deserve it," which, as a semi-sort-of-aw-shucks sort of writer, totally burns my brisket. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of writers who inspire me. They produce work that isn't perfect (nothing ever is, right?) but manages to transcend imperfection to become some other kind of perfect. Their books are smart and sassy, lovely and lonely, gorgeous and gross, and they form my connective tissue. Atwood? Klosterman? Please. Their words fail to connect with me, and because they've been lauded as "must-reads" and we've been told that anyone who hasn't read them should just throw themselves on their swords right now, so much shame should we feel, I'm pissed off. I feel like that jerkwad who pointed out the emperor has no clothes.

What makes it worse is that maybe everyone else is looking at a bespoke suit, and I'm gazing at Klosterman's (probably) hairy ass. What I mean is, maybe I don't get it. And I'm the only one.

That's the thing about enemies. Each of my enemies has been carefully culled from a large pool of contenders, selected for their unique ability to totally enrage me. I might be alone in that rage. Mark G. Yudof, the president of the University of California school system, made my list because of a particularly douchey interview in the New York Times Magazine, but people clearly think he's worth talking to, or else the interview wouldn't have run in the first place. Michael Cera used to be on my enemies list, but he's been begrudgingly downgraded because of his involvement in the (fingers-crossed) awesome Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. His nebbishy one-note characters irritated me greatly; maybe in this flick he'll have grown some stones and figured out how to rock.

Enemies aren't easy to dismiss; there's a respect layered in with the irritation. While Atwood makes me roar with rage, I understand her appeal. Same with Chuck Klosterman. Both have a charismatic style and a look-at-me attitude that, as a writer, I wish I could tap into. Both writers, and Yudof, and Cera, have charm. They can work a room. They believe wholeheartedly that what they do is fucking amazeballs. Do I have that kinds of unshakable belief in my writing? No. I'm jealous of that, and professional jealousy makes me feel mentally ill and like I need to go eat my body weight in Dreamsicles. Hence the enemies list.

It's not like I'm going to show up on Atwood's doorstep with a homicidal glint in my eye. For one thing, after all those Dreamsicles, I'm not going anywhere fast. But also because, while I would love nothing more than to have all her books be revealed as the cause of obesity, and for scientists to discover that reading Klosterman while pregnant leads to stupid babies, I also need them. They make me push myself, just a little. They give me something to aspire to. If I ever get there, I'm sure some horrible quarter-life crisis blogger will be calling me terrible and uninspired, with bad writing and deep personal flaws. And then I'll just look over at my mantle full of "undeserved" awards and smile like the Cheshire cat. Much like Margaret Atwood does now.