Right On, Lynda Barry.


As usual, Lynda Barry

rules. If you can ever get your hands on a copy of her storytelling album "The Lynda Barry Experience", by all means listen and soak up her fabulousness.

Postmodern, or Just Plain Confused?

Last week will definitely go down in my memory as one of the most surreal series of events in my life.

Tuesday at work, I learned a little about tapeworms of the civil war, and translated a Latin phrase from Aesop. Wednesday the guest lecturer in my publishing class was Harlan Ellison’s editor and the head of Di Capo press. The editor managed to totally disillusion me about publishing but also kept me almost dumbstruck out of respect for the man who had made many books that I have read. On Thursday Harvard took the employees of my building on a fieldtrip to the Children’s Science Museum in Boston. R2-D2 from Return of the Jedi was there. We watched an IMAX movie and ate cake in a building that sits in the middle of the Charles River.

Then the President declared war that night, and the next morning this memo was slipped under my apartment door:

“Dear Resident: In light of recent warning issues by Washington that Boston could be the next target of terrorist attacks this weekend, we are writing you to inform you that Barrington [building management] will be on alert this weekend….In the hopefully unlikely event that a situation this weekend impacts your building, we ask that you remain calm….”

I am going to keep this brilliant memo for the rest of my life.

Nothing seems to make much sense lately. A girl in my publishing class was totally bitchy to me for no apparent reason just before the lecture started Wednesday, making me feel like I was back in Junior High. I’m going to be 25 soon and yet a comment from a peer in class somehow still managed knock me all the way back to being 13, strange and lacking confidence. I wanted to slap her like Laura slapped Mary in _Little_House_, not because of what my classmate said or how she said it, but because of the way she made me feel. After the class I bought comics to make me feel better, one of which explained why Superman couldn’t rebuild the twin towers of Metropolis after an alien attack left them broken and smoking. I wonder how much lead time DC gives its artists.

The Harvard field trip was fun, just as fun as getting paid to go to the Science Museum can be, especially when they not only pay you to go the science museum but then let you have gourmet cake and ginger ale in the VIP room with a fabulous view of Boston and Cambridge. I love my job.

Sadly, when I got home from the science museum and sat down to eat dinner, the guy who calls himself our leader declared war. He then appointed some other guy to try to protect America by squeezing terrorist organizations. Aral cried and I just said “No!”. We both were upset because we’re worried how much personal freedom we’re going to have to give up. What’s the difference between terrorist organizations and girls who make ‘zines saying the president is a stupidhead? I guess the government might tell us soon.

It was only ten o’clock, but I went to bed Thursday with a raging headache and woke up with a nightmare about 3 am. I dreamt I smelled burning rubber, and something else, too. Something burning, my building? It was hard to go back to sleep after that.

Then, today, Friday, the previously mentioned memo telling me that my “managing agents will be prepared to offer what resources we have to assist with any situation that might transpire”. Oh, really? This week would have been wonderful – full of learning and cake and Harlan Ellison’s editor – if not for the fact that a tide of overwhelming nationalism and a president who seemed to be delighted to declare war hadn’t warned me that Boston was a target this weekend.

I’m fully aware that last sentence didn’t make any sense. Neither did this week. Usually when I experience a series of events this unrelated in rapid sucession, I wake up shortly afterward.