stereogrammed

Yesterday was the first day I wore my rather embarrassing new running shoes. Publically embarrassing because I wore these Nike Air Pegasus to run errands rather than do my usual 7 miles, making me the kind of slovenly hausfrau that I usually get snotty with. But more secretly embarrassing: if you got up close to my feet, you’d have seen that the shoes’ bright red soft foam-fleshed tongues were monogrammed. As Courtney Love once said about herself, I say: “I’m not very good at asserting myself.” I custom-ordered these personalized runners from nike.com (shipped directly from the manufacturer in China!) despite the fact that I was the kind of kid who hated putting my name in anything. When we were forced to permanent-marker names onto gym tee-shirts or have mothers sew our names onto art smocks, it felt like defiling the purity of the object with the mere awkwardness of my identity: I hated asserting myself, my name, so tangibly. Even as a kindergartner, I was a Virgo. So it was the remnant of that feeling that came out yesterday when I was walking around with shoes that said, when I put my feet together: “JOONY SCHECTER.”

But in having this particular monogrammed thing, I wanted to create a different experience of a monogram. I felt like there had to be something between the polymorphous commercialism of the logo-monogram and the WASP-fascist possessiveness of the initials-monogram. In both of these traditions, the monogram functions as an aggressive assertion of the sureness of self. Corporate monogramming congeals the capitalist value of a company into one aesthetically attractive distillation of its name. The compacting of the company into cute little letters you can hold in your hand allows the consumer to transfer the company’s power upon the body through a public display of the wearer’s high credit line. (Even if it’s just posing: like my very FAKE Louis Vuitton Murakami)

After the advent of corporate monogramming, monogramming cannot simply be a practical way to never lose your bags. When you get your initials embroidered on to your possessions, you are saying that your name is as important as a corporate logo, and deserves to be branded on this poor helpless brainless shoe/ bag/ sweater/ handkerchief. You are asserting your ego to the world by displaying your power over the object. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, this idea is pushed to its limits, egotism morphing into terrorism: the monogrammed belongings of a beautiful and headstrong dead first wife are quite literally “possessed,” afflicting, even without its owner, psychological violence upon the meek and insecure second wife.

But what I like about Rebecca (not just the film, but the fictional character as well as the negligee case) is that here, the object seems to have liberated itself from enslavement to human and ironically, exacts revenge through collaboration. The objects monogrammed with Rebecca’s “R” are in a kind of ontological limbo. Even though their owner is no longer existing, the things bearing her monogram carry on as if she were still alive. They do what we imagine Rebecca would have done to the nameless second wife were she still alive. The monogrammed objects themselves constitute the feminine body of Rebecca. In the film, we never see Rebecca, but everyone in the film talks endlessly about her. So in fact, she is a text, a kind of living monogram. Or more accurately, it is the monogram that actually gives her flesh as a text.

This is the kind of monogramming that I’d want, but is there a way to merge flesh and thread through words without having to be dead? Is there space in the world of monogramming to have something that allows you to navigate between the free-for-all (who can afford it) legibility of the logo (self as object/ text to be possessed) and the taunting opacity of the personal initials (self as self-possessed body)? Something that allows you to be read as if your limbs and scent were printed words, and yet not compromise the fact that the sheets upon which the words are printed are in fact flesh, and inexpendably flesh: to have those words make sense as text, you need my body. This desire is part of a bigger desire to reassert that which is obvious, but is often taken for granted: the mind is an organ, a part of the fleshly body, just as the fleshly body is an alphabet waiting patiently for syntax and orthography.

Perhaps what was really embarrassing about wearing my monogrammed shoes was that I was kind of OK with it: that I in fact didn’t feel the full-on Virgoan embarrassment I should have felt. These shoes are the first things I’ve ever had monogrammed, and they are not monogrammed in the purest sense of the practice since “JOONY SCHECTER” is neither my initials nor my real/ official name. Does it count as a monogram if the name you’ve put in thread is actually a fiction? What if your things were monogrammed to assert not your ego but your alter ego?

Here’s another way to think about this business of fictional monogramming: Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Spanish Vogue, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana dress silkscreened with the image of Marilyn Monroe.

“Marilyn Monroe” is neither brand nor name in the traditional sense. It is the name of a human, but being the name of a famous human, is immediately recognizable and open to commercialization. Wearing “Marilyn Monroe” on her skirt, Lohan is asserting an aspect of herself that identifies with Marilyn (last year, Lohan posed nude for photographer Bert Stern to recreate Stern’s infamous “last sitting” with Marilyn): young white woman setting herself in aggressive ambivalence against a celebrity industry which simultaneously creates and destroys her. Thus, the monogram on the textile is “MM” but it telegraphs “LL.” Lohan expands upon and expresses her own feminine identity through the fictionality of her wearing “MM.” When her hair and make-up replicates MM and she is wearing a dress with the face of MM, Lohan is fleshing out the fictionality of her monogramming as “LL” through textual redundancy which becomes a decadent, heady textual overload. And in the paparazzi candids of the shoot, LL looks so happy:

I think I was trying to do the same thing yesterday, to feel similarly happy. I composed my outfit from the feet up: “JOONY SCHECTER” demanded fictional monogramming all over. So with the shoes I wore a vintage Hole concert t-shirt with the big pink “Hole” logo on the front:

A word shaped to invoke the band’s self-defining aggro-femme album Live Through This, but in the same vein, quite simply an aggressive self-declaration as feminine space of void. Which was then piled on top of a pair of A.P.C. “Supreme” jeans that have the words “Fuck ‘em!” stitched on the edge of the right back pocket:

Words of post-punky nihilism, monogrammed too close to the seam that covers over that alternate soft-cheeked fuckhole. Taken all together, the words on my clothes were redundant in a way that provides volume and dimensionality: monogrammed in stereo. The song: JOONY SCHECTER’S FLESH IS MADE OF TEXTS OF AGGRO-ODD FEMININITY. And I just remembered: the only thing in which I like writing my name is the first leaf of a book I just finished reading. This is not so much an act of declaring possession as it is a lick or a kiss for a loved one. And I’ve always wanted to grow up to be a book.

a new me (not really)

OK, so, as a part of my sabbatical project in San Francisco this spring, I decided to become the little match.com girl. It has been a bit demoralizing. First, the medium of internet search engine does not stoke me erotically: I don’t really know what height/ weight/ income/ religion/ eye color I would like my man to have. As Barbara Stanwyck says in The Lady Eve, I’d like my future husband “to sort of...take me by surprise...like a burglar....” Then, this morning, as I rolled down to the bottom of the profile of some boy whose picture was kinda burglar-cute, I found something a smidge abusive to my self-esteem:

Turn-ons: Brainiacs, Dancing, Erotica, Flirting, Money, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

I know you’re not supposed to create a self-portrait based on the tickings of a match.com survey, but really, how can you not? What is this guy saying about me? That boys with long hair (like me) are dummies with no rhythm and no sexual or flirty or sarcastic sophistication who are on welfare and like to jump off naked into the Bay?

A bit dejected, I trolled a bit longer, eating my split ends between gulps of coffee and cigarettes. (Smoking is not popular also among internet daters, by the way.) Then I started encountering more and more of these long-hair-haters. The long-hair-phobic bachelors I’m going to share with you are actual profiles of gay men on match.com. I wish I made them up. There’s a lot more of them than four. But anyway, here’s Bachelor #2:

Turn-ons: Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Dancing, Flirting, Power.

Turn-offs: Body piercings, Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos.

And yet again, long-haired boys are dummies who can’t dance or flirt. What is it about long hair that signals automatic dumbness? With this guy, since I am tattooed, I am even less matched. For him, having long hair goes along with having tattoos and body piercings and kissing in public. Of course, this is another instance of gay men’s femmephobia. The femmeness of long hair is yoked to traditionally non-normative styles of body mutilation (piercing, tattos) and body exposure (PDA, skinny dipping--again). It’s no coincidence that out of the gazillion faggots on match.com, I’ve seen only a handful—OK make that three, including myself—with hair down past the ears. What’s crazy is how the simply physical aesthetic of femininity that is long hair is then set in conceptual opposition to these socially (over)valued qualities: “Boldness/ Assertiveness,” “Brainiacs,” “Power.” This is standard issue sexism operating as sexual preference among gay men. This is no surprise. Here is the surprise: Bachelor # 3:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Erotica, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm.

Gone are the traditionally masculinized qualities of power, brains, and assertiveness. In this guy, they have been replaced by the fetishized markers of marginalization that were a "turn-off" for Bachelor #2: body piercings, tattoos. (For good measure, this one adds “Thrills” and “Thunderstorms.”) But now even these historically marginalized qualities (including bad weather!) are set as erotic against long hair, which is still linked in erotic negativity with “Public displays of affection.” What is that about? That femmes want you to kiss them in public? (We do of course—you better prove your fucking love!!) This guy, while seeming to be a rough-and-tumble thrill-and-twister seeker, still has a closet in his brain: to be seen kissing another male in public is a turn-off for him, and one that is linked to male femininity. At least this time, I am granted sarcasm.

But lest I begin to feel more justified in myself as some symbol of renegade sexuality, I encounter Bachelor #4:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Erotica, Flirting, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

This guy loves everything, in everyone...except faggots with long hair. At this point—having run through too many profiles whose “Turn-ons/ Turn-offs” were exactly like Bachelor #4, I thought, Shit, is growing my hair long really worth the trouble?

Well, fuck yeah! I love my hair! But then I thought: Well, since my sexuality is, after all, homosexual, maybe I should start compromising a teensy bit, right? So in that spirit, I’ve created (as you see above and below) my new look for the new year:

-Hair pulled back: I’m not going to cut my hair. But I will scrape some Kiehl’s Clean Hold Styling gel (it has silk powders and Vitamin E, and has no alcohol but still holds like Elmer’s glue) through my hair, tie it in a knot and call it a day. Besides, when you combine it with...

-White t-shirt and light blue jeans: ...it’s very inmate in a medium-security prison, no? The shirt is vintage Meatmen concert tee. I’m usually decked out in black tees worn with dark indigo or grey jeans, so it feels fresh to do a white and light combination. These jeans are Acne Hep in “Beyond,” but I also have been loving Earnest Sewn Harlan in “Morrissey.” I’ve really been feeling light denim these days, ever since I saw a great picture of my friend Jackie H. as a teenager in the late ‘80s, with crazy Kate Bush-y crimped hair and white t-shirt with high-waisted light jeans. So inspiring. I want my future to be the vast history of girlhood.

-New tattoo: Bettie Page memorial:

I just got this tattoo over at Everlasting Tattoo. It’s my own design of Bettie Page that I drew early last year. This month, I added the tiny “B.P.” in her pubic area to memorialize her recent passing. All my tattoos are of girls I feel myself to be, but this one is the first girl who is topless. It feels quite sailor-macho to have bare breasts on my bicep, but not macho in a male way. I just finished reading Thing of Beauty, Stephen Fried’s surprisingly well-researched biography of the 80s supermodel Gia Carangi, and it was quite a style inspiration. In the book, Gia, who was a dyke, is alternately described by friends on one hand as “androgynous” and “boy-girl,” then as “the perfect homosexual” and “the purest lesbian I ever met.” I want to be the purest lesbian you have ever met.

-Dark brown/ plum lipstick: Because after all, a girl can’t compromise her femininity that much. It will be hard to give up, or at least timeshare, my regular Bettie Red. But this new shade—Shu Uemura BR 798—is so perfect. It’s certainly very goth, but also almost the same shade of lipstick my little sister wore in the nineties (she lined her lips with almost black lip liner of course). I love the idea of being in my thirties and looking like my sister at age 18. More of my future as the history of girls. Also, I saw a beautiful series of photographs of my living idol, Lindsay Lohan in the upcoming February issue of Interview magazine, in which she is wearing the darkest, plummiest lipstick ever. The pictures are in black and white, and her lipsticked mouth reads as black. I wanted lips that read as black if I were rendered in black and white.

I want to look like I drank goat’s blood. I want to look as if I drank a whole bottle of a 2005 Reynolds Family Winery Merlot in one sitting. I want to look as if I’d been gorging on chocolate covered cherries...or really dark, pretty poop.

So here I am, my long hair tamed and tucked under! Maybe now I don’t look as sarcastic-rhythmless-skinny-dipper-homeless-airhead! Come and get me boys!!!!!!!

7286: feminine anger

“There’s not much you can do with leggings, but I’m doing everything I can.” -Lindsay Lohan

As I face another New England winter, I decided to try a little experiment with hosiery, taking inspiration from one of my favorite sculptures, Snore, by Bruce Conner. (Some of my biggest style and role models have been, not stars, but artwork.) The piece, which lives in San Francisco’s De Young Museum, is a body created out of splintery boards, nails, red thread, and wads and stretches of used / dilapidated pantyhose. I love how Conner turns the symbol of feminine delicacy and propriety—perfectly maintained nylons that are supposed to cradle perfect female legs—and turns them into bulbous tumors worthy of the Alien movies, and coverings for bodies that can be the foundation of a house, or mafioso weapons of intimidation.

I’ve written here a few months earlier about the joy of run-pantyhose, in its affront to traditional femininity. Shortly after I wrote that entry, I was walking with my sister in the Castro wearing black run pantyhose when some North Face fleece-wearing white faggot walked by me and yelled out sneeringly, “You have a run in your hose!” Why did a faggot feel like he had to call out a mark of punk femininity? Why was he so threatened when clearly he had no physical relationship to femininity, holding hands with a similarly fleece-wearing white faggot? The manifestation of his threatened feeling was confounding to me. So I was like, Whatever. But my sister turned around and barked, “Yeah it’s called style, asshole!”

If the faggot was responding aggressively to my particular femininity, I loved it that it brought out my sister’s own mastiff-like feminine aggression. This notion of feminine anger is something about which I’ve been thinking a lot lately. This semester at RISD, I taught a class called “thingamajigirl: objects, humans, femininity,” which explored the conceptual crossings made between the idea of “girl” and the idea of “thing” in patriarchal societies. As I worked through my syllabus, I realized that I put together some texts that were PISSED—even though that was not why I chose them. In Flaubert, Terry McMillan, Natsuo Kirino, Toni Morrison, week after week I found myself reading—and reveling in—instances of feminine rage, feminine anger.

Feminine anger is often marked (by men) as hysteria or loss of control, when actually it is an emotional strategy of dealing with the frustration that is the world of men. Teaching the course, I happily got to read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for the second time in one year. This time, it is the following passage that glowed neon-red at me:

Providence, she thought, was intent on hounding her, and drawing strength from pride in her own conduct, she was, more than ever before in her life, filled with a sense of her own worth and of her contempt for others. She felt ready to take on the whole world. She wanted to lash out at men, to spit in their faces, to crush them, every one....

Previously, I’d loved Emma Bovary for the faggoty drama of her shopping-addiction and sexual frustration. But now, I saw a whole new side of her: this rage, this laser-focused force of anger that gives engine to her life. In its own time, Madame Bovary was considered a dangerous book for female readers for the female sexual desire that it portrayed. But now I wonder if the real dangerousness of Emma lay not in her horniness, but in her anger.

Recently, I came upon a beautiful persona that synthesizes what I’ve been thinking about with Madame Bovary and Snore: Diane Lane as a 15-year old pissed-off-proto-punk girl in the 1981 film, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (Thanks Tara J for telling me about this!) In the film, Lane plays Corrine “Third Degree” Burns, whose memorable uniform is: see-through blouse, vintage cardigan, panties, pantyhose, ankle socks, and booties.

Third Degree Burns’ outfit is interesting because it is not symbolic of her anger at the world: there is no safety pin or metal spike in sight. But what it does is provide a medium in which to explore her anger, by turning the submissive sexuality of “good girls” inside out. The softness of the 50s cardigan, offsetting the hard eye-makeup and hair, provides a strangely perfect frame for her angry self-presentation. Emma Bovary and Third Degree Burns have a lot in common: they do not sublimate their anger into softness, they allow feminine softness to serve as a language with which to express their anger. Men expect angry girls to look angry: they don’t expect softly feminine girls to express switchblade anger.

LOOK SOFT, BE HARD.

In our culturally paranoid age in which teenage anorexia is thought to arise from reading too much Us Weekly and In Touch and their toothpicklimbeddrugaddled starlet-heroines, is Lindsay Lohan our Emma Bovary, the worst role model a girl can have? Rehabed twice before legal drinking age, decadent shopper, graffitting public restroom walls with messages that equate Scarlett Johansson as a vagina, becoming a lesbian in act if not in name: yup. In a recent interview, Scarlett Johansson said that she doesn’t understand Lindsay’s “anger.” LL may not be a great role model for the daughters of middle-class suburban families, but that’s precisely why I love her, why she is my role model of feminine anger.

Lohan gives a totally underrated performance in Robert Altman's last film, Prairie Home Companion. Playing the Plathian nihilist (someone asks her, "What kind of songs do you write?" Her answer: "Suicide.") daughter of a country singer, Lindsay takes the stage for an impromptu version of "Frankie and Johnny" that reinstates anger as its rightful place in the song:

LL demonstrates precisely the kind of look-soft-be-hard ethos of feminine anger: wrapped in a granny shawl, singing an old bluesy tune about a woman betrayed, she replaces the desperation of the original lyric--"she shot him once, twice, three times" with a succinct aggression (not to mention a surprisingly powerful Garlandesque belting): "she shot the bastard in the heart." This is the LL I admire, I long to become.

This is a kind of love letter to LL, so I’m not going to delve into all the Dostoevskyan specifics of her private life and public trials (Except I do think that her referring to Barack Obama as “our first colored president” is not a racist gaffe as some have simplistically and unfairly labeled it: how can it be racist when she spends the rest of the interview singing her love and praise of him? Clearly, she meant to refer to him as ”a person of color,” [rather than “black” or “African-American”] to refer to the kind of post-racial blackness his election represents. Syntactical slip-up!!). Instead, I want to think about the dangerousness of the idea of “Lindsay Lohan” in a culture that still desires its girls to behave a certain, prescriptive way.

I’m the girl that censorship laws try to protect and cannot: I will try anything I read. Including spending $100 on a pair of leggings. I’m waiting with Buddha-like patience for two presidential things: for Barack Obama to be officially sworn in as the President of the United States, and for my 6126 by Lindsay Lohan leggings in “Mr. President.” One of them is a sure thing, the other depends on my status on the waiting list, and both will affect the way I carry myself through the world this winter and spring. Until I get my own knee-padded black leggings, I will make do with my layered ripped hose—which I will christen, in honor of LL: 7286.

Lindsay christened her leggings line “6126” as an homage to her idol Marilyn Monroe (MM’s birthday: June 1, 1926). What do leggings have to do with MM? Nothing. But I like that: Lindsay is seizing upon the masochistic myth of Marilyn and injecting it with a new feeling—ANGER—of which Marilyn could have used a healthy helping. The leggings I’m on the list for cites Marilyn’s famous breathy-sexed up rendering of “Happy Birthday Mr. President” (Or rather: “Mr. Pwesident”) to John F. Kennedy. Marilyn famously sang the song in a wiggly white gown studded with curve-accentuating crystal beading. LL’s “Mr. President” leggings refuse the coy, fleshy sexuality of Marilyn in favor of something harder. Compare the dress to the leggings:

The“legging” version of Marilyn is black lycra, with black quilted leather knee-pads. It’s naughty for sure: rather than swathing female sexuality in infantile translucency, the “Mr. President” leggings are built for a girl ready to kneel to give head. But oral sex is not necessarily passive (teeth!) just as it is not necessarily male-servicing. Moreover, its sharp black color and the utilitarian, race-car driver aesthetic of the knee-pads also grant its wearer an athleticism that doesn’t imply a supplicant kind of femininity. The leggings suggests that feminine sexuality is a dangerous sport that requires strength, audacity, and fearlessness on the part of the girl who will practice it.

portrait of a lady (house mix)

A couple months ago, I sat (and stood) as a model for one of my students, Chad Houle, a photography major who’s working on a great project about gay men and domesticity. (Check out his work at chadhoule.com) When Chad approached me about sitting for him, I was a bit nervous, for multiple reasons: will I look cute enough? Am I really a "gay man"? But the most visceral nervousness rose from the simple prospect of being the object of a stranger’s photographic eye. The last time someone plopped me down in front of a camera for a formal portrait was (not counting those endless squares of yearbook mugshots) was more than fifteen years ago, when someone in my family had the brilliant idea for a family mugshot. I was in full adolescent awkward glory, with rough black hair that looked like it was cropped with a lawnmower, and sporting a mustard-colored corduroy oxford shirt (yikes). But worse than that was the fiction of our “happy” family—my sister and I, our two (pre-divorce) parents, smiling like zombies for the fuzzy-wuzzy portrait. So psyching myself out for this new portrait of myself as a single divorcee, I was apprehensive about what kind of a fictional remix I was adding to my current state of being.

The above is an outtake from that session. Here I am in my Providence apartment, sandwiched between my wall of books and shelf of fetishistic inspirations: a red wooden Japanese doll, a Jenny (Japanese Barbie) doll, a flyer for my first warehouse dance club in San Francisco (circa 1996), a pen in the shape of a lipstick, a cassette single of Mariah Carey’s “Love Takes Time” (1990), a postcard of Marilyn Monroe in her last film, a nearly-empty container of Gucci Rush perfume (a perfect pinkred rectangle), a 1978 first edition of the poet Ai’s book “The Killing Floor." In the photograph that Chad chose as the final portrait, I very much recognize myself: still the filling of a fetish-and-book sandwich, I'm leaning against the mantle, one leg bent, looking like the perfect combination of mistress of the house and tweedy librarian. But I heart the outtake for a different reason. I look tired. Or perhaps more accurately, I look boneless, like a rag doll flopped on a chair.

Mistress of the house/ librarian is fiction not because it is fake but because it is an idealized goal for and of myself. The boneless ragdoll, on the other hand, is a bit of reality. Because in truth, I’ve since moved out of this bookcase-lined apartment on the West Side of Providence. The “mistress” aspect of my lady persona was factually fictional, since I this apartment was not mortgaged, but rented. Emotionally, too, because in my year of living in this place, I never felt it to be “my own.” Not only because I was renting, but because I had a very intrusive and disruptive neighbor downstairs who loved her television so much that she needed to share her programming choice with me almost every night, all night by turning up the volume to some ungodly level. And when my landlady decided to sell the place, she had her realtor come into my place and perform little acts of violence. After my friend TLS saw images of the place online along with the ad for sale, and she said to me, “I didn’t know that you had got a new print up over your fireplace.” I was like, “But I didn’t?!” Apparently, the realtor had gone in and covered my poster for the seventies softcore film “Emmanuelle: Joys of a Woman” (tagline: “Nothing is wrong if it feels good”) with a cheesy Monet print. And when I got back home from one of the open houses, I’d see that they had hidden my gay magazines under more "innocuous" ones. I understand the need to sell, but hello, it’s not like the perspective homeowners have to buy my poster of French porn flick and the latest issue of “Butt” magazine along with the place. It all made me feel very un-grounded in the very space that was supposed to be “home.”

Now, all of my books have been shoved into wine boxes and along with bins of clothes and what bits of dishes and furniture I have, tucked into a storage space for the year. I'll be a bit nomadic for the next year (I'm teaching in the Fall; on leave to write in the Spring). This coming year will be a bit nervy for me, for a lot of he same reasons I was nervous for the portrait. Given the emotional instability of my “home” life as a kid, I think I’d been searching not so much for a boyfriend as for a husband. That is: someone with whom I could express in the concrete materiality of physical space and objects the emotional bond of love. I thought I had found it in my ex-husband, and to give both of us credit, we had a good long run (nearly 9 years). But once single, I found myself unable to disconnect the emotional synapse between emotionality and living space. I felt that as a thirtysomething, I needed a “HOME”: an adult dwelling space that could speak for the mistress-librarian in me.

But seeing Chad’s portraits of me helped me realize that I have to re-learn my emotionality as a single woman all over again. I once read in an interview with Lindsay Lohan about the joys of living out of a suitcase...and a storage space. She talked about how unstable such a life is, but surprisingly joyful: when she returns to the storage space, she finds all sorts of things she didn’t know she owned!! Like a little Christmas every couple months! So of course I will take inspiration from Miss Lohan, and learn to take cozy comfort in a few suitcases and a storage space that waits for me faithfully like a long-distance lover...all the while looking for a lover who will be independent of me but always boxedpacked and ready for me—a boy like a storage space.