Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

Every time I get held up by rubberneckers (people who slow down on the highway to practice Schadenfreude by taking an overactive interest in other people’s injuries and auto accidents), I impatiently search the top of my eyelids for an answer to the human condition. Is the imagery of “rubberneckers” -people stretching their necks out to get more of a bad thing- a Darwinian evolutionary reference to giraffes with longer necks? After all, these are technically people who will get to carry their seed on to another generation, having trumped fate by not being the one to get into an accident)

I don’t understand why the New England Journal of Medicine continues to conduct pointless studies attempting to establish correlations between things like consuming diary and picking bad stocks. Personally, I’ll be happy the day they find a link between conducting pointless studies for a journal named after a Northeastern American region and the increase chances of getting cataract. Since that is out of the question, I would ask for the next best thing: A study about people who find an unhealthy interest in the roadside misfortunes of others.

I myself have taken every opportunity to interview rubberneckers on what makes their pleasure a daily passion in life. What exactly is it that is so special about seeing someone’s property destroyed, or their family members being carted off in an ambulance? They shrugged and said, “can’t blame me for having natural human curiosity.”

So I then asked if their natural human curiosity ever made them wonder what goes on in the mind of a bird as it glides over an airplane, or an oyster feeling the roof of its eater’s mouth, what goes on inside a Palestinian boy’s head as he reaches for his first rock, the silkient glide of sea water over sand as it pulls back to the ocean, or the instinct, the assuredness of the whale dipping under the ice after it’s final breath, not knowing how long or how far it’ll have to go before it reaches the next opening for air, or just the fellow from the projects who has his finger on the trigger when the gun is aimed at some new york city actress when she said, “what are you going to do, shoot me?”, did their human curiosity ever made them ask what a street vendor has to do with all that hot food when he has to go to the bathroom (and where does he go?), how does a person in west congo find the reason to get up out of bed each morning, what Coltrane thought when he tasted blood on the 98th minute of improvising on Impressions, what a T’ang poet heard in the wind as he sat on the side of the mountain under the moonlight with his jug of wine, or the white disc a sewage worker sees at the end of the day as he climbs up the manhole, you know: that elation. And while we’re at it, can people who work six days a week actually bid each other to have a good weekend? Did their natural human curiosity bring them to places like these?

Here’s the answer: “I don’t have time for that. I need to check my lottery numbers.”

A few days ago, I asked a bunch of my friends to help me out with what they considered Old School. My first dance song, for example, was Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing.” And to this day, I have always wondered why Jewish Moses needed Ten Commandments when Black Moses only needed one theme from Shaft. My first record was a Four Tops record my dad brought back from school. I shook my five-year old bootie harder than the day Junior left Sound Factory. What I was looking for- for lack of a better term - was time relativity shift. We’ve all seen younger generations toss around phrases -that’s been dormant for twenty or thirty years - as if they were the latest hippest jive talk on the suburban block. Many days, I wake up each morning fearing the day where I’ll open a copy of Vogue and find that defensive lineman-sized shoulder pads are going to be back in this season’s daywear collection.

What I was hoping to see was an overlapping of generations: What one group considers Old School, would actually be considered New School by another at a different time. Makes sense, since Absolute Simultaneity in the theory of relativity shows that it’s all about which side of the bed you got up on.

What I found interesting was that ideas, fads, and objects make comebacks. After all, the earth is round and we are all coming around sooner or later. Another interesting thing I noticed was how music and technology were the two most obvious milestones in time travel.

Here’s a true story that happened to me only a short time ago

I’m not sure why anyone would read this book and attempt to get anything out of it other than a 415 page Blog from an educated woman, who wrote in the decade that brought us over-sensitive, granola-eating, needy, tree-hugging, Iron John men. Halfway through BITCH, it occurred to me that the book wasn’t so much a collection of writings that praised difficult women as it was a double-entendre on the title: The book is a bitching session, a style that has become de rigueur among today’s dime-a-dozen online blogs from nobodies in particular. I guess that’s why the publisher wastes no time in announcing that Wurtzel is a Harvard graduate on the back cover, and the author herself, sheds her clothes and strikes a Maxim magazine pose on the front, two safety measures just to distinguish her rant from the ones you hear from homeless people out on the streets (she makes an observation that we, as a society, are intrigued by the madness of beautiful people, but find the same affliction in homeless people appalling and disgusting). After all, Wurtzel continues to harp on the importance of beauty and youth in our society, drawing one example after another from Hollywood movies, Vanity Fair interviews, Vogue magazine, tabloid gossip, Rock and Roll songs, Dylan and Springsteen, the Bible and the Torah.

A scene from the movie WOLF is quoted, where Nicholson says to Pfieffer: “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting: you’re rude, you’re hostile, you’re sullen, you’re withdrawn. I know: you want someone to look past all that, at the real person underneath. But the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you’re beautiful.” (pg 163). I thought this was telling in a way that explained why the cover of the book had to be presented in its titillating way. Wurtzel doesn’t condemn using looks to get what you want in life. Here she is on page 114: “Knowing she can get her way with her wiles - that, for instance, the mechanic down the block will repair the dents in her new convertible for free and Dad will never have to know that half the time she drives like she’s asleep at the wheel. she will use flirtatiousness, her feigned naïve helplessness and whatever other effects she has learned from the movies, to get what she wants. Nothing wrong with this. Nothing at all. If you can get through life batting your lashes, it beats the hell out of carrying your own bags.”

Certainly, it made it difficult for me to distinguish whether the anxiety-stricken last pages of vulnerable sentiments were authentic or just an act. It gives the phrase: “Cry Wolf” a unique angle.

One of the things I bemoan about going to dance clubs involves this little catch-22: When I dress in flashy “clubby” chic, I would not be able to express the joy of dancing through my body, limbs, and silhouette form. On the other hand, if I wanted to shake a leg and cut rug, I’d have to dress down. Then where’s all the fun? Meditating upon this, I come across a crucial item in a visible segment of the collective transgender consciousness: The idealization of that which constitutes the authentic experience of the gender being coveted. As a person who bounces around different types of dance clubs throughout the city, I have a chance to make immediate comparisons between the accepted mode considered mainstream, and the fringe culture known as “other” (or to well-seasoned readers of the Village Voice, “Anything Goes”).

If I walk into any trans*-friendly or trans dance clubs, it would behoof me if I found one single gal who wasn’t wearing skyscraper heels. We could be 6′5″ and we’d still insist on 7 inch platform heels (I wear Oxfords these days, which I endearingly call “trannychaser repellant”). I guess that explains how Fredericks of Hollywood stays in business. I have no problems with this, as a person’s fashion sense is ultimately their own territory, but I do have to say that when they get up to dance, the stilted, restricted, tiny, inexpressive tip-toe moves those heels allow them opens an entire vista from the first Betty Friedan sentence to the last Naomi Wolf observation on the limitations of being a woman in our society.

Now if I go and check this image against the “official” version over at a hot clubby spot down the street, do you know what all the “it” girls dancing on raised platform cubes with spotlights shining on them while men are going gah-gah over their all-thatness are wearing?

Sneakers.