Pretzel Pose

I am not a fan of group activities. That's why I don't live in China. Take that, ghost of Mao! I reject you! I totally deleted all your text messages! So I was apprehensive about going to a hot yoga class in Greenlake. I don't like when people yell at me to correct my posture unless they are Wii Fit's computer animated trainers and they balance their critiques with motivational remarks like "Great form!" and "Way to go!" Even when Wii yells at me to "Straighten up!" I barely blush because, after all, I'm standing in front of a television in my basement.

Also, I am against Yoga culture. Namaste my ass. Yoga's whole "calm" aura is really grating. I don't believe people who do Yoga are really as calm as they say they are. I think some of them have issues that are not necessarily resolved by turning their body into a pretzel.

But I couldn't pass up I Love Hot Yoga's 10 session trial (just 30 bucks for a month of unlimited Yoga!). Some things, I figure, you really just have to give a try. As I waited outside the doors of the Yoga studio apprehensively, I scanned the faces of the departed for signs of heat exhaustion or mortification.

The studio was as dark and hot as a mother's womb. The women in the studio were on their backs, breathing heavily and purposefully as if they they were trying to rid themselves of evil spirits.

"Will people please make space in the front of the room?" the yoga instructor asked us in a slight guilting tone, as if we were already members in her moderately dysfunctional family.

I bent down and tried to touch my hands to the floor. It hurt a little bit, and I came back up. I've always treated my body as fearfully as one treats stray dogs or drunk Australians. "Are you sure you can do that?" I'm constantly asking myself.

Still, I did all the bends. I became a pretzel, a cadaver, then an airplane, a boat, a tee pee, a lounge chair, a tree with a penis, and the statue of liberty. My face got sweatier and angrier than a woman giving birth to triplets. On multiple occasions, I thought I was about to die. "This is it," I thought, "and the last thing I'll ever see is that nonsensical Lululemon logo."

By the end, I smelled like a sailor but I felt supernaturally relaxed. So relaxed, in fact, that I sat outside a Starbucks and stared at a cute boy until he stared back. I got his number.

I am now a fan of group activities. Sorry for ever doubting you, Mao. The only way to really burn ass fat, it seems, is with a slightly scary Bikram instructor standing over you and correcting your posture in a room that's 103 degrees.

I'm Graduating Soon

Can you believe it?? CAN YOU?? I CAN'T! I was just talking to my friend Jeremy about this. I was having a very wayward youth moment. Forgive the Daria-esque deadpan. "I've gotta do stuff when I graduate, you know... be things." "You don't have to graduate to be things" "Yes I do Jeremy, that's why I spent so much money on this."

But seriously guys. The following is a tentative list of future accomplishments:

cure youth in asia
save the pigeons
cut twigs on all the trees so they don't bring hurt to people's eyes.
teach old people how to sext
bring back the clog
eliminate all awkward pauses, fill in the dead noise with lady gaga's bad romance
cure death

It's going to be hard. But that's why I'm getting my B.A. in English.

Inside the Head of the Racoon Down the Street

Hi. I am a racoon. I know you are not. I'm just going to sit. So still. Right now. By the door.

Oop. You just moved. I was just moving my head because you moved.

Hi.

Your house is bright. Your garbage: So yummy. Was that organic chocolate? I'm full or I'd eat your leg. Mmmmmmmm.

Leg.

Was that your friend practicing her ridiculous dance by the window? She looks like a hooker.

I'm a conservative racoon.

Are you going to walk towards me or away from me?

Oh well, I'll tell you anyway. Today I was listening to NPR and it made me angry. Someone British was talking and it made me realize how much I hate Americans. Whenever a Brit is talking to an American, it's always just so much clearer who's the moral one! Anyway, they were interviewing this man about this great tragedy in some third world, an American by the way, and he kept on saying how he was so enamored by the way these poor people had held up despite the crisis. They had such nobility, he'd said. As if all poor people have nobility. My head wanted to explode! Hadn't he read all those essays in the back of "Heart of Darkness!" DISUGUSTING! If I could sign language some grotesque emotocon I would!

By the way: I don't respect your life.

I saw you watching that Buddhist film last night. I saw you wanting to laugh. And you call yourself a multiculturalist! Your whole lifestyle is a sham.

I know you mistrust me because of that thing I have going on around my eyes, but really you should mistrust me because I don't respect your life.

Sigh.

I'm done.

But you really are a silly people.

All I do is eat your garbage....

La, la, la.

You're still looking at me.

Do you think you're just staring at two disembodied floating shiny fireflies?

Those are my eyes.

Okay. Well. If you're just going to stand there, I'll continue.

Now I'm no intimidatingly muscley man myself, but I'd say you need to exercise more. I can tell. I see those shoulders. So hunched. I know, I know. You think it's more complicated than that. You think that happiness is some magical combination of funny SNL clips on Hulu and good books and bars with cute boys and the right cologne...but really you just need to work out more.

If you lived in the Himalayas with those Buddhists you watch in movies, you'd feel naturally energetic and happy every day because you'd be picking wheat and tying prayer flags and things like that. But you don't. That's why you're a mess.

(Racoons don't feel guilt. I don't regret just saying that. BTW!)

Also: okay. Now I know I'm going to sound like your mother (if your mother was a hip therapist who understood cultural phenoms like facebook and the debilitating power of the internet) but seriously, no more endlessly thinking about what kind of status update you want to write and then refreshing your Gmail inbox obsessively to see if someone's commented on your facebook status update. Have a little more self-respect. Phew. I really had to say that one.

Why can't you be more like that girl who played the fat girl in Precious? You saw those interviews. She has self-respect.

Basically, I wish you were a black woman.

Are you about to lunge for me? I hope you know I just stepped back so I could spring forward with renewed vigor and appetite for human flesh!

You're getting closer. You know I have friends in the honeybucket next door? I do. Really. You heard that story about how we ganged up on that old lady in Florida and ate her hair? We'll totally eat your hair. No more Mr. Jew Hair!

Oh, you're getting the mail.

Oh, and now you're gone.

So silent now.

So at peace.

Now I feel bad.

I think I need a more creative job where I can vent my frustrations through some kind of art. Not even for the attention. I just don't like being this angry all the time.

I'm going to go make a bath and listen to Feist.

Yes, I'm a hipster racoon. Bitch, don't even start.

Jersey Shore Season Finale Recap

This is what a feminist looks like.

Unless you've been plugging your ears and screaming "lalalalala!" when anyone speaks the words Jersey Shore, you surely must know about that gaggle of Italian Americans who live in a beach house, drink vodka smoothies and punch pedestrians who look at them funny.

You must also know about their star, Snookie - the legal midget with a self-tanner mustache and Amy Winehouse beehive bun who dances by herself on beach boardwalks to attract muscle men she affectionately calls "Juiceheads."

Last night's episode, the season finale, provided much of the expected shaudenfreude. Everyone yelled at each other for an hour because of various things - snookie yelled (and cried) because she ran into an ex while dancing embarrassingly alone on a boardwalk, one man with a metallic rose on his shirt yelled about this dude he punched in the last episode, and Jenni (Jay Woww) yelled because, for some reason, all of the hot muscle men failed to come to the beach boardwalk that day.

One lesson I took from the show was this: if you have muscles on your body, you can pretty much have a relationship with anyone in the world. What a grossly inaccurate impression of life you consistently provide, MTV! For example, Mike "The Situation," who has shoulders longer than a piano (and is what, forty years old?) found a bikini-clad 18-year-old girl on the beach and then proudly announced to all viewers the two of them would be dating for the next four months. See, she has an "eighteen year old ass" and he has a Bally's body, and really isn't that all you need to make a relationship? In the world of MTV, yes.

The show ended on a sweet note. To comfort Snookie about her boy problems, all the boys sat on her butt like it was one huge whoopie cushion. Then Mike, "The Situation," made out with her face in a hot tub. Snookie- the little cherub - sat in the hot tub and laughed. Because she felt self-conscious after all that kissing in front of millions of viewers? Because she saw semen floating in the water? "Don't think", said the editing. "Just stare at her boobs."

And then it was over.

Besides making me feel like I needed a cigarette (preferably one filled with crack), the show didn't have much affect on me. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't feel violated, nor depressed about the state of humankind. Compared to the Jerry Springer Show, Jersey Shore is Oprah- all it did was make me laugh and feel all warm inside.

Los Angeles

"EWW! EWW EWW EWW!" screamed my roommate Zara from downstairs. Zara was on bathroom duty and today was the day she had chosen to clean the black mold in our bathroom.

I'm not a particularly morbid person but black mold makes me think about my own demise. Maybe it's the name: black mold. Sounds like black plague, black licorice, Black Sabbath. Black mold is the queen sheeba of terrifying things. If all upsetting things you rarely think about were graphed on paper (randomly choking on a strawberry, developing a severe allergic reaction to snickerdoodles just as soon as a plateful ends up on your table) black mold would surely rise to the top of the Y axis, and beyond, because it fucking flies in the air, is invisible, and can make you hyperactive while hurting your brain.

I was contemplating this the day I flew from Los Angeles to Seattle. I was flying Christmas day and the airport was empty except for smatterings of Jews and Asians. We should start a club, really. And then I spotted my fellow Seattleites: a huddled mass of fleece jackets and stiff shoulders gathered to the right of the terminal, in the one area with no sunlight.

I opened an LA Times and picked at my wilting Starbucks panini. I was not in a particularly flirty mood. I was thinking about mold and my own demise. And then I heard this over the P.A.:

"Mistah Blum! I repeat: Mistah Blum! Will Mistah Blum please come to gate 75?"

Read that in the voice of a sarcastic drag queen and you'll understand the thrill of what happened to me. Was this gorgeously flaming homosexual flirting with me?

I'm not a good flirt. At gay bars I look combative. I pick the pettiest corner and wait until I see someone who might have something sardonic to say. After I've extracted enough social commentary to fill a novel, I go about the seduction process.

I'm not sure if I've ever been a good flirt. After coming out, I look back at my childhood and think "who was this boy and did he flirt?" Everyone asks you, after you've come out, if you ever liked a girl, ever, ever? No, I didn't. So who did I flirt with when I was a child? I'm not sure. Dolls? Maybe dolls. That sounds quite sad. I hope I didn't flirt with dolls.

"How are we today, Mistah Blum?"

"I'm good,"

"Would we like an aisle or a window seat today, Mistah Blum?"

"Window please."

"Are we traveling alone, Mistah Blum?"

"Yes we are."

"It will be sad to see you leave, Mistah Blum."

"Stop it! You're embarrassing him!"

"No, this man is a celebrity! He wants the attention!"

"I don't want to leave L.A."

That last line of mine was a risk. I admitted it: I didn't want to leave L.A. I was flirting the only way I know how to flirt: by being painfully honest. In Europe, they loved it. Here, it tends to freak people out. But not this man. "You could stay at my place." he responded. I seriously contemplated the offer, then laughed. He was offering me a way out and I pretended I didn't notice. He knew I didn't want to leave L.A. He knew I couldn't not be honest about that. In fact, he seemed to like it.

Still, I shut it down.

"Thanks, but I have to go back to, err, school."

Lamest response ever. I didn't even sound excited about it. It was like rejecting a free Disneyland trip for a dentist appointment.

The plane was a noticeably more somber affair. I sat next to a woman who's eyes never left her Stephen King novel. She shut the window as if she didn't want to be reminded of the swaying palm trees waving goodbye.

If I could do it all over, I think I would have taken him up on his offer. He told me he lived in West Hollywood. It could have been interesting.

"It's Giving Me This Great, Weird Hope Right Now"

My friend Anna sent me a youtube today. I hope you like.

When Embracing Technology Makes You Look Ridiculous

I love Wii Fit because the shiny graphics distract me from the fact that I'm sweating profusely and panting and it will be hours before I've obliterated hamburger patty meat fat from my veins. HOWEVER, the HOOLA HOOP activity on Wii Fit involves a boogying / humping movement that can only be described as "slomo seizure / sex with a ghost". Which is fine (because who cares? and dead people were hot once) but maybe a little bit confusing for a lawn-raking neighbor. I should have invited him in.

Today in Phallocentric Advertising by Hospitals

Scroll down Myballard to see.

Wolf Boy

First, you have to imagine you're watching television really late at night. Maybe you just realized, after dozing off, that you've been watching a knife infomercial for the last hour and a half, so you switch the channel. A boy - around 5'7, gangly, hairy - is running through a field with a stick in his hand, darting out from behind tree trunks. The booming, authoritative narrator asks "is this a child or has he devolved into an animal?"

The boy / animal is me. My cable television acting career began and ended when I was still in school in D.C. At the time I was going to the George Washington University, which stretched a meager four blocks in the northwest corner of the district and cost 50,000 dollars a year. The least I could do for my mother was come back with a dream resume - the kind that wouldn't even need a shpritz of Versace cologne to convey its importance and sophistication. It would say, proudly, that I worked at National Geographic. Maybe I'd even bold that part, or use italics, or the graphic of a golden picture frame. No one would ever have to know I worked for the television branch, spending hours on three sentence emails and taping my boss's Frappacino receipts on pieces of paper to be copied in the copy machine.

One day, for some inexplicable reason, I was invited by my boss to sit in a board room with the head of the National Geographic Television Science department to talk shop about the next episode in a series called "Is it Real? The show was a pseudo-science program that explored "the gulf between fact and fiction." "Is it Real?" is a question asked to viewers of the show...a question that is answered in every episode with a resounding "no." Ancient astronauts? Not real. Psychic pets? Not real. Spontaneous human combustion? It's actually called sleeping while smoking. The show's promotional materials showed a dark figure stalking the woods, his frame blurred by a shaky camera. Was this man bigfoot or a boom mic operator? The point was not to ask too many questions, but rather succumb to the mania of conspiracy theories knowing they would all be debunked.

The name of the particular episode we were discussing, stressfully, was "feral children" and the topic of feral children is actually not funny so let us pause to not laugh and feel guilty. The idea of feral children is a myth we've created to distract ourselves from the fact that there are sometimes abused children who are abandoned in forests. They usually do not end up adopting the characteristics of gorillas, except in television shows like "Is it Real?"

So far, the producers had found two creepy parents on craigslist willing to let their newborn babies be filmed for the "pre-wolf" part of the show. But they'd been weirdly unable to find a child actor to play Victor; a French boy neglected by his parents and left in the woods. They'd found grainy, supposedly authentic, footage of Victor howling at the moon and breaking his parent's china, but they needed an actor to re-create the very real moments when Victor survives in the forest on his own by hunting for bears and deer using only a large stick and his manly, hairy hands.

"I'll do it," I blurted to my supervisor. Then I deleted my google appointment with anthropology class on Friday and practiced knocking my head against a wall and drooling on myself.

My obsession with embarrassing myself began in childhood. I began life staging humiliating musical spectacles for my mother. When I was ten, I would set up a stage lined with books in our upstairs, turn the lights on and off, fall off chairs of various heights, and perform a seizure on our oriental rug. My mother was confused, but usually pleased. "Yay!" she'd say at the end of every show "But what did it mean?" In elementary school, I was the one on the sidelines at the soccer game holding a make believe microphone and narrating the game to an invisible cameraman. From far away, I probably looked schizophrenic but up close I hope I at least sounded professional.

But after trying out for a few plays in college, I felt discouraged about my future acting career. I'd tried out for a part in a nouveau musical by Jason Robert Brown and was told by the casting director at my school that I was "too Jewish" and "too gay" as I hung my head and thought "well, Christ, that's all I got." I actually thought East Coast people would appreciate my faux-new-york-Jewish-mother accent in a male protagonist.

But I had deleted the bad auditions and painful childhood from my brain the very moment I had accepted the part of Victor of France, wolf-child. I was in D.C. and soon I was going to be on TV. Suck it, C-SPAN. See you in hell, 700 club. Hello late night cable stardom.

That Friday I arrived extra early at National Geographic wearing a Victor wig and a black t-shirt, because I thought it looked actorly. My producer squeeled. We packed into a van and left for the fields of West Virgina.

Up until this point, I'd always thought of D.C. as the boring, ugly J-Crew sweater-wearing brother to New York City and gave no thought to the hick land surrounding the city. But as soon as the van left National Geographic International Headquarters, I realized we were actually just a hop and a skip away from red-blooded heartland Americuh. General Stores, swamps and Lyme-disease abound. "What if someone sees me running and yells 'there's a gay!' and shoots me?" I asked my boss. "I dunno, try not to swish?" she said.

We stopped our van next to a generic field and my boss handed me a loincloth, a tub of Nesquik and a bottle of Dasani. I was instructed to go to the gas station bathroom and drench my loin-clothed body in clumpy cocoa powder. The image of blackface came immediately to my mind, but I immediately dismissed it. I took off my glasses, because wolf children don't wear glasses, and poured the fake-dirt-water all over my body.

The idea of running, glasses-less, through a forest was actually not that scary to me. I'm fine with looking out at the world and seeing a Seurat painting. In fact, when I first got contacts I was depressed at how ugly everything looked. But running doesn't make sense to me. I've never understood how to jog. Where does one find the motivation? It's not like someone is chasing you. It just looks silly, and think about it: you could die. What if your shoelace comes untied? What if you have a heart attack?

But, alas, I summoned the passion, the creative gods and yaweh and Drew Barrymore in Scream and the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are and this naked lady and I ran. And I ran and I ran...

Then came the fishing scene. I reached my hands into a stream and pretended to grab fish. "Gotcha, water! I'mma come and getchu, rocks!" The funny thing about method acting is that I absolutely have no fucking idea what I'm talking about.

Eventually, of course, the show ended up on cable. I gathered together my three college friends and the dude from down the hall and hyperventilated all over myself. My mom called me frantically five minutes before the show and asked, "would you say you're on for fifteen seconds or more like thirty seconds?" "Mom, I don't know, I didn't edit it." "Was it fun? Did you have fun?"

The show started. My face flashed on the screen for less than a milisecond. A gajilliosecound, maybe. "That could be anyone," the dude from down the hall said. "Yeah, but it's obviously me. Can't you tell?" "I guess. The dude is running awkwardly."

My mother called. "We're so proud of you." My five seconds of television exposure was treated with greater reverence than my last report card. Which was fine. I'd left acting to become an academic and what had it actually given me except a sense of my own intellectual inferiority? I was not riding above the commoners on a carpet composed of thesis papers. I was just a cog in a machine. Or a prisoner, being watched by Michel Foucault's panopticon. Or some other analogy that reveals my intellectual inferiority. In any case, it wasn't pretty.

But this was something tangible, something real that I had accomplished. I had run, I had hit my head against a tree, I had plunged my hands into a stream. Flies had followed my cocoa powdered loincloth. Maybe I even had lyme disease. I finally felt like a productive member of society.

"Thanks mom," I said just as someone in the background said "He runs kind of gay." I said goodbye to my mom and joined my starter friends gathered around the TV. They had already changed the channel to Jon Stewart.

On Euro Gays

Before I moved to Berlin permanently, I spent a winter there in 2008. The weather was the same as Seattle (rainy, hazy, full of bleak) but everything else around me was different. I was dating one of those mythical, sophisticated European gay men. His name was David, and he thought I was crazy.

David wore Capris and smelled like magic. He lived in a white modernist cube in a crumbling building above a major intersection in Mitte, near his Yogi friend "Greg". On weekends, he'd leave the apartment around midnight and come back at four or five am, at which point he would make bok choy with soy sauce and sleep until 2 in the afternoon. He was 35. I was 21 and terrified of life. We were an odd match.

David was completely over everything I was still under. He wasn't pretentious at all about his job (he was an editor at Reuters). He wasn't paranoid about sex. He was an "independent thinker." Talking to him was like being stripped naked. He'd make you see all your silly biases and petty fears for what they really were...it was both painful and exhilarating.

David took me everywhere. We'd go to abandoned warehouses filled with paper mache and dancing. We'd go to strobe-lit caves of wonder. I tried dancing like a German (there's less irony involved) and I definitely tried drinking like a German. I felt awe at this adult amusement park of art and leisure. On the drive back to his apartment, I'd stare out the rain-streaked window at all the grafitied and crumbling buildings, wondering what crazy, naked art projects were going on inside.

David was different than most of the gay men I'd met in America. He wasn't a bitch but he wasn't afraid of being a smartass. He was incredibly secure in himself. He had a confidence I feel so many young gay people in America lack. In short, I was mesmerized by him.

One night, David and I got into a fight. We were at a bar, talking to an old flame of his, and I began to feel like a used, snot-encrusted hankie. I suddenly believed he had slept with the entire city. "I've lived here a long time!" he responded. "So, of course I've known a lot of people." The necessary expiration date on this age-imbalanced relationship came into sharp focus. The next day, I wrote him an email apologizing for essentially calling him a slut, but it was clear we weren't cut out for each other at that stage in my life.

I left Berlin soon after; not because of David but because of money. But before that, I went to the aquarium. The aquarium in Berlin is in the middle of a big hotel. It's an odd place because it's a tourist trap in one of the least tourist-trappy places in Europe. At the end of the tour, you take a long elevator up through an enormous cylinder of water and fishies. They call it "the Aquadome." As the elevator rose, I watched as all the little goldfish swim around, casually humping each other, makin' babies, laying their eggs on make-believe coral. I thought of David. I'd been harsh. What he'd done was more of what being gay men begs us to do: sleep around. He'd followed his loves, and lusts, and I'd judged. "I'm such an American," I sighed to myself.

Back in Seattle, the gay bars were the same. The caste system based on looks prevailed. But I began to let go, just a little bit. I was more open to meeting new people. I didn't sleep around a lot, but I began to let go of some of my preconceptions. Berlin had relaxed me, and David had inspired me. His confidence brought a whole new meaning to the now antiquated and hollow term "gay pride." I truly felt proud of my sexuality when I was around him. Thinking back, one of the reasons I moved back to Berlin was because of how he changed the way I looked at the world. I wanted his life, and now -- in some ways -- I have it.