The Jigtastic Journal of J. Na Na

"Jojo lemme tell you somethin’.  The worst thing you can do… is mess with someone’s food."
–wife Justine to son Jojo after he tries to snatch some ice cream she has snuck while in the middle of a workout with a personal trainer 
  "Run’s House"

What is it about coming back to work after a nice long vacation that makes you feel, oh I dunno, a li’l homicidal? 

Is it the knowledge that awaiting me will be the stock same pile of work and whiny voicemails to answer?

Is it the thought that I’ll be forced to plug away at four more days of the same until another weekend comes?

The newly discovered hole in my right shoe during my rainy trot to work this morning didn’t help things, but a little ginseng drink or two later, and I’m feeling better, thanks.

I went to Super Soul Sundayz at L’EndUp Sunday, which has replaced Devotion.  A gayer crowd and the much more me-appealing vocal, funky, ghetto-type house c/o of my very favorite DJ, David Harness.  I’ll still have to check out Devotion, even though it’s several blocks away in a slightly more ghetto-y district of SoMA….what am I saying, the all of SoMa is pretty much ghetto and unsafe.  *long inhale* yes…

I’ll be damned if I know where the year went.  All I do know is we’re well nigh at December, and things seem all too unerringly familiar.  I’d wanted this to be a year of changes, and believe I made a fraction’s fourth worth of progress during the year.  Mostly by chance and circumstance, though, so I think 2006 will merit more effort on my part, more putting the foot forward.  It’s one thing to have New Year’s resolutions; it’s another to have high-wheeling ideals you hope to inhabit posthaste, even if they’re not entirely realistic. 

There’s an added tap on the shoulder in all this that is my impending thirty-ness.  Yes, I’ve still one more birthday to go before the big three oh, but achievements reached in your twenties seem to loom larger on the scale of impressiveness by mere fact of youth.  You know, “He won this, makes this much, [insert dramatic pause] and is STILL only 26.”  Stupid, I know, but you know what I mean.

Not to mention that “I thought you were older” has gone from glowing compliment to severed smack-in-the-face insult.  And “He looks young” (yes, I still get those, too…well, once recently when I tried to get into a club without my ID) stokes the ego far more than it should.  I used to preach the benefits of growing older as long as you still looked good.  I’d forgotten how trying to look good is a disturbing obsession of mine.

It’s funny how when you’re little, you just can’t wait to grow up.

Then you hit 13, that first landmark that makes you a bona fide teenager.  The sealed off world of PG-13 movies suddenly opens up to you, and you begin to feel a hint of self-pride as you start your way towards becoming an adult.

Then it’s 16: driver’s license time.  Certainly a big one.  A half-way point of sorts.

Eighteen is less of a thrill since it’s just kind of a teasing point until you turn 21.  Yeah, you can vote and you’re officially allowed to have sex since you’re a “real adult” now, but you still can’t drink or go clubbing.

But 21…yeah, 21 rules.  Everytime I look at an ad for a club and see that 21+ sign in the small print, I am reminded of that dreadful time when it served as the lock-and-chain centerpiece to the jackpot vault of fun that was clubland.  I’m still thankful it’s not a problem anymore.  And actually less impressed by the world on the other side.  (Conversely, club ads that say 18+ have taken on a whole new meaning: once celebrated beacons of respite to my under-21 self, now warning signs of overarching puerile playgrounds to my over-21 self.)

I guess 25 would have mattered more if I had a car and could benefit from the lowered insurance.  But it, and latter half of your twenties, actually just kind of serve as a final wrap up of what could still viably be called your youth.  Not a bad thing, just something.  And less to it than we make of it, I think.

When I used to tell people I was an English major, their inevitable follow-up question was, “Oh, do you want to be a teacher?”

No.

I wanted to major in fucking English.  And minor in goddamn socio-cultural linguistics. 

It was the only subject in school I was good at, besides band (first chair flute—hey!).  And when you consider that language is the bloodline by which the human social animal survives, having a command of English doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.  But where to draw the line between “having a command” and “being a jackass”?  Well, come on get lingual with me now as we decide whether you’re rollin’ with your ABCs straight Smart or done had blown a grammatical gasket and are ridin’ a syntactic Fart:

1. It singes the hair on my sack every time I hear Barbara Walters close out another episode of “20/20”.  Pronouncing the second “t” in “twenty” does not make you more educated.  It makes you more of the Middle Ages.  There’s a reason we dropped that last “t” for the more chill “d” sound—it makes the word easier to say. Otherwise, you may as well go the whole hog, Babs, and finish off the show by saying, “This is Barbara Walters.  Good nih-guh-hh-t.”

Smart or Fart?  Fart forthwith…

2. Semicolons are probably the scariest punctuation mark out there.  But if you learn how to use them, they can be your friend.  I’m the only person at my 2000+ employee company who uses them in emails.

Smart or Fart? Smart; or simply semicolon-wise, if you prefer.

3. Is it ironic or just coincidental?  Choose wisely, young anchovy.

Smart or Fart?  Smart if what occurs deters from what’s expected.  Fart if circumstances simply resemble past experience.

4. Why in the hell do singers from middle-class, Wonderbread-type backgrounds litter their song lyrics with double negatives?  You don’t really not talk that way, do you kids?  Using the word “any” in place of that second negative in the verse won’t kill off the soul from the song if it’s sung from the heart to begin with.

Smart or Fart?  I don’t know no fart worse…except maybe that last sentence before this one, which brings us to the harrowing matter of…

5. Ending sentences with prepositions.  You wanna sound like a real jerk off in front of your friends?  Come off like a complete snob to someone you’re trying to impress?  Then go ahead, make a concerted effort to keep your every utterance from closing with a preposition.  Fight the good fight, if you wish.

What should you end them with?  Then?

No one knows.  ‘Cause you get so caught up in the tape and scissors of “that which” and “for what” in wrapping up your little gift of grammatical perfection that no one sticks around long enough to hear it.  For what good is this MLA-ordained rule of words?  For shit, that’s what.  For papers in college.  For proving that you know it, nothing more.

Smart or Fart?  Smart if you know it.  Fart if you show it.

Oops, guess that means I’m full of hot air, too.  Just call me by my drag name: Flatulence Grammatica.  The “e” is silent; too bad I’m not. 

I’m sorry, but I just find Gwen Stefani outright annoying.  I tried to like her, really, but if it isn’t her helium-fueled singing voice that’s bugging me, it’s that dizzying funky, chunky garb she dons like some overgrown Punky Brewster.  So many colors, patterns, and designs set against the inevitably bared, mannequin pale midriff, and topped off with a blasphemously trendy bindi dot thingy.  Enough already.

Talan from “Laguna Beach” is engaged to blond horse Kimberly Stewart, daughter of singer Rod Stewart and runner-up party pal to Paris Hilton.  You know, I was still trying to keep my bearings up now that the season has ended (*sniff*…*snort*…), but then you go and drop this nasty whammy on me?  The distastefulness of it all makes me miss Kristin even more.  Kristin: my alpha female idol…

The next time some super beautiful model or actress does an interview in which she claims she was a gangly ugly duckling as a child (*ahem* Eva Longoria!  You wanna sorta tune in here, sweetheart?), she should immediately be slapped three time fast for being both trite and passively boastful.  Fuck you and your “Woe was me when I was young, but if my friends could see me now” bullshit.  We don’t need to hear that.  For once, I’d like to see one o’ dem bitches respond honestly to a question about their secret beauty regime.  Something along the lines of, “Oh, no regime here.  Just the right combination of smoke, lights, mirrors, makeup, hair, and Mr. Botox by my side, holla!  Plus the luck of the draw with genetics to a lesser degree” (cue smile). 

Am I the only person who would give, like, ten—nay, twenty—years of my life to look drop dead gorgeous?  Terrible thing to say, I know, but being super pretty seems like it would be, I dunno, pretty cool.

Until recently, it’d seemed that Logo, the “gay network”, just played a non-stop reel of “Priscilla”, “Jeffrey”, and “Trick”.  But now, the little queer network that could has added its first original series called “Noah’s Arc”.  It’s something like a gay, black “Golden Girls” set in West Hollywood, and features lots of pretty black people that you would never see assembled en masse in the real WeHo, and a happenin’ gay black hip hop club that does not really exist.

Dramatic license?  Sure, I’m all for it, even when infelicitous.

But when you have the main character—be frocked for the night in absurd punk attire, replete with kilt and ‘frohawk—bemoan to his friends, “Don’t you see?  Were just aping the same gender-polarized archetypes perpetuated by straight society in an attempt to blah blah blah…” you done lost my vote of confidence.

So you want to “say something” with your show, “convey a message” of some sort?  Well, you can make a point without stabbing it in the heart and startling people.  You’ve got a stage, set, and cast of actors.  Now you’ve just got to design the right dialogue to naturally frame whatever truth you’re trying to relate.  People know more than you may think.  Find the right way to shed light unto their eyes without banging their head into the pavement with pedantic pabulum.

Too, let’s watch it with the hair and make-up, okay?  You’ve got Noah, the main character, popping up every few seconds with a new ‘do like some Mary J. Blige video: Buckwheat knots here, soul ‘fro there, gangsta girl corn rows up in my grill nyah.  No one has time for that in real life.

And you should immediately incinerate all cases of that Count Chocula mannequin make-up used on the series regulars.  It bespeaks an eerie smoothness that distracts the eye and unsettles the mind.  I realize the people on TV are meant to look perfect, but they should still look like they have flesh, you know?

That said, it’s still a good show, with my favorite character being the tubby black queen”

(After Noah tells him how a “straight” friend and his girlfriend want to have a threesome wherein she would be the “conduit”):

“Conduit?  What, like Whoopie Goldberg in ‘Ghost’?  ‘You in danger, girl.’”)

(Upon arriving to make breakfast, and catching Noah and “straight” friend quickly dart into the bathroom):

“Noah, you got some brown sugar?  You got your brown sugar there, girl?”

Funny.  Very.

Do you recall when you first found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real?  It was a bittersweet revelation, not so much dismaying, not all that surprising when you considered the facts…

You do realize that the thrill of things like bungee jumping and roller coasters is in the possibility that you may die horribly while doing them?

My senior year AP English teacher said I had an Abraham Lincoln-esque way of stating facts in triplicate form, much like this entry.  I couldn’t think of a third quirky-cute thing to add here, so I thought I’d just put that.

I’m reading a book called "Flowers for Algernon" where they do an experiment on this dumb kid to make him smart.  The book is written as a series of journal entries by the dumb kid, and he can’t spell for shit, so it’s giving me the worst headache to read.

I am so happy to have tomorrow and Monday off.  Holla scholar!

Of all the horror films on TV this weekend broadcast in honor of Halloween, the truly scariest was the bone-chilling docudrama on the sex slave trade called “Human Trafficking” on Lifetime.  The film, which lasted for maybe about three hours, felt like it went on forever, in the same unfalteringly brutal manner “Schindler’s List” did.  It is crucial that this international abomination of an industry be brought to the public’s attention, especially in the U.S.  As the female lead in the movie, an FBI agent, says at the end in a press conference, a human being can be sold repeatedly for sex, whereas a drug can only be sold once, making it a vastly more profitable venture.   And, she says, most of the people who are buying these sex slaves are people in the U.S.

So why isn’t our government, which spent so much time blustering around the issue of gay marriage and funneling billions of dollars into this “war” we’re having, doing anything about this issue?   Where is the righteous zeal with which they waged the “Just Say No!” campaign of the ‘80s, and coined the term “drug wars”?  At least with drugs, the participants are willing, if not addicted.  Those forced into the sex slave trade, many of whom are children, have no choices.  They are not even treated as humans. 

Somehow I think this issue should take precedent in the purvey of our national concern as opposed to getting back at Iraq for 9/11.

All I could think while watching the movie was what kind of punishment should be doled out to those caught and convicted of this crime.  Or more specifically, what kind of punishment they’ll really get after they die.  I hate to say it, but I really think they should be slowly burned alive in public, maybe with their limbs twisted off first, but medicated so they remain alive and can feel some measure of the unparalleled, soul-mangling pain they’ve caused others.  And to have such brutality televised as a warning to others who might have such demonically entrepreneurial interests.  It makes me sick to my stomach to say something like that, and to post it publicly, but read up on the subject and I’m certain you will agree with me.