TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I’m not one prone to great passions. Rather, I try to live like Switzerland: neutral, isolationist, leggy. Like workaholics whose doctors tell them to slow down, to chill out, to reduce their blood pressure or risk heart disease and stroke, indifference is an attitude I’ve had to cultivate. I’m naturally more anxious than indifferent, but a concerted effort toward neutrality gives me a rather Zen attitude about life. At least, that’s how I look at it. Friends, family, and girlfriends have argued that I’m not Zen, I’m just too damn lazy to care about anything, but I consider my basic desire to stay out of it a personal strength.

I began my path toward neutrality at seven, a nervous age in which I often had panic attacks because one of my bike tires was white and one was black and spent most nights sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed like a golden retriever. One day after school, I mentioned to my mother that is was a shame we lost the War. What war, she asked. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War and for weeks she had been listening to war correspondents on NPR while looking outside at the ubiquitous yellow ribbons tied around our neighbors’ trees–ribbons indicating a son or a cousin or a father in Kuwait. The War of Northern Aggression, I replied. Duh. My mom quickly explained that it was actually called the Civil War and we didn’t lose anything–our ancestors were still bootlegging potato liquor in Dublin until the 20th century. Thus began my introduction to slavery, which was not an aspect of the Civil War my second grade teacher emphasized. This wasn’t surprising–the mascot of my elementary school was a Confederate general with the same facial hair and politics as Robert E. Lee–and so my mom decided to take over my history education. After that evening’s lesson on the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement (with a brief detour for suffrage and bra burning), my mom warned me about the dangers of looking at the world as North versus South, him versus her, us versus them. Nationalism, sectionalism, religion, ideology, alliances based on nothing more than the shape of your nose or your favorite sports team: this is why wars happen, she told me, pointing to yellow ribbon tied around a tree in the next door neighbor’s yard. We should try to be more like Switzerland, she said: secular, progressive, and not out to steal anyone else’s damn resources. I took her advice, and that’s how I’ve been for most of my life; like Switzerland, as calm and even-keeled as a Walt Disney in a cryogenic chamber. Currently, however, I live in a part of the world marked by a great and unavoidable passion that sparks waves of love and hate all around me. The cause is basketball.

Two years ago, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, a city of a quarter million people, 15 percent of whom (including me) live under the poverty line. Durham used to be known for tobacco and then it was known civil rights and now it’s known for food trucks and lesbians. Durham is home to Duke University, where the endowment is 5.8 billion dollars and the cost for one student to attend for one year is 56 thousand dollars, 23 thousand dollars more than the median income for those of us who live here year round. For this privilege, Duke pays no taxes. For the most part, life as a Durham resident has little to do with the university; this is even true when you live, as I do, in Walltown, an adjacent neighborhood that the University kept at bay by building a wall around itself. There isn’t a moat separating the two, but the lines are clearly demarcated. Yes, Duke students clog the aisles at the grocery store and throw their keg cups in the street, but Durham is not a college town. Duke, it seems, prefers it this way, ensconced within monied walls of academia. Summers in Durham, when all the students have gone back to Connecticut–those are best.

Part of my hatred for Duke is situational: before I moved to Durham, I lived eight miles down 15-501, in Carrboro, North Carolina, a town of 20 thousand people, 19 percent of whom live under the poverty line. Carrboro is literally across the tracks from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and while the two towns are culturally different–Carrboro passed a resolution opposing the PATRIOT Act, Chapel Hill made national news when police brandishing assault rifles stormed a vacant building taken over by protesters last fall–both townships have a common love for UNC basketball. When I first moved to Carrboro, this surprised me. My friends there were as politically radical as my friends elsewhere, and since when do radicals care about sports? How could these people who play in rock bands and make art and grow weed care about anything as inconsequential as basketball? It seemed so anti-intellectual, so non-thinking, so barbarian. My own alma mater, a liberal arts school most well-known for its high ratio of banjo players and white Rastas, may have had a basketball team, but who knows? The student body was too busy tripping on mushrooms in the botanical gardens to care about sports, although I do seem to remember a vibrant ultimate Frisbee scene.

I refused to care about basketball when I first moved to Carrboro. Sports, which exist solely to create winners and losers, are antithetical to my default neutrality. But UNC basketball is so universally loved there that it inspires passion even in those whose only nod to athleticism is hula-hooping on the co-op lawn. I tried to stay neutral, but the central winter pastime in Carrboro is watching basketball with your pals at the local bar, and so, in the midst of my first winter there, in the midst of insisting on my indifference, I found myself watching ESPN, working on my bracket, and really, really hating UNC’s biggest rival: Duke. As a friend–a woman who plays in bands, never wanted to be a cheerleader, and often says that Carrboro is where basketball and punk rock meet–predicted would happen, I became one of us. In March 2009, the year the Heels won the National Championship, I ran across the tracks to Chapel Hill with 30,000 other fans–30,000 other barbarians–to celebrate our victory.

But more than I love UNC, I hate Duke. All of my well-cultivated neutrality flies out the window when I think of Duke University. I can engage in conversation with people across the political spectrum and still maintain my equilibrium, but Duke, I cannot stand. I hate Duke students, I hate Duke fans, and, mostly, I hate Mike Krzyzewski, or as he is known to both fans and foes alike because his name is too damn hard to pronounce, Coach K. Coach K is the perfect foil. Nothing about him is neutral. His vocal support of religion and the military, along with his income, makes him the embodiment of all that I think is wrong with the world. My feelings for him are universal, as I found when researching Duke basketball for this article. This is illustrated by the following screenshot:

Coach K is the devil. Coach K is a rat. Coach K is a cheater. And, most offensive (to gay people), Coach K is gay. Let us contrast this to Roy Williams, beloved coach of the Tar Heels, a man with the sweet face of a plot hound who bought romance novels from the bookstore where I worked during the terrible season of 2010, when his team had the record of a third rate liberal arts school. Even then, Roy was friendly. He came in after depressing practices and embarrassing games, but still posed for pictures and signed autographs and graciously agreed things were not going well. That March, when the UNC men’s basketball team was as vibrant as a banana slug and Duke won the National Championship, I discovered the corollary to success. Every game that Carolina lost, every game that Duke won, found half my friends sobbing into their beers and the other half taking a Valium and going to bed early. And this, I realized, is why I am Switzerland: the disappointment isn’t worth the joy. My days as a fan were over, but my hatred of Duke only escalated when I moved the eight miles to Durham. For me, it’s not about basketball. It’s about privilege. I hate Duke because Coach K is worth millions and my neighbor lost her house; because Duke doesn’t pay taxes and Durham has no jobs; because this place for the rich is so close to the home I struggle to afford; because it’s right there, beyond the wall, a dark blue reminder that I’ll never be neutral. Maybe that’s what my mom wanted me to take from our afternoon history lessons: there’s a time to be Swiss and there’s a time to put on your school colors and scream.

Recently, a friend who was organizing a benefit party for Protect NC Families, an organization working to defeat North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One, called me. She said that she wanted to have a tipping booth at the party and asked if I would be willing to man it. Sure, I said. I wasn’t quite sure what a tipping booth was, but I pictured myself carrying around a gold jar full of cash donations. I was later informed that my hearing is awful and what I actually agreed to do was a kissing booth, not a tipping booth. This took more thought. Was I willing to risk mouth herpes for a good cause? Not really. And besides, what kind of people pay to kiss someone on Saturday night at a bar? Drunk people, and I’m almost 30. I’ve kissed enough drunk people. We decided instead to do a compliment and advice-dispensing booth, which would be more helpful and less contagious. My friend Camille joined me in the booth, which was partitioned off with a red velvet drape so it looked like we were telling fortunes or reading Tarot cards, and we made over $100 in tips, which put the total over $4000, all of it going to Protect NC Families.

In the midst of dispensing compliments and advice (What a beautiful neckline: you should always wear v-necks; it doesn’t matter if his girlfriend sucks: don’t make out with him until he dumps her; you found your dream job but it means a pay cut: get food stamps.), a queer woman entered the booth with a concern: a representative from Protect NC Families had just spoken and he didn’t mention gay people at all. Instead, he talked about how Amendment One would affect all unmarried couples. And this is true. Amendment One would, according to the ACLU, “take away the ability of committed couples to take care of one another when making medical, financial, and other important life decisions.” All unmarried couples, gay and straight alike, could potentially lose the right to adopt their partner’s kid, make end-of-life decisions, etc. It’s awful. But the woman who approached us was pissed because that’s all they talked about–how this is going to affect families–not the fact that this issue only exists because of homophobia.

Lots of organizations are using this tactic. ACLU mailers don’t show gay couples: they show pictures of heterosexual couples with babies and without wedding rings. A friend of mine is making promotional films for another national organization working to defeat the amendment, and after he interviewed a lesbian couple who has been together for 50 years, his boss told him to edit out all references to their sexuality. This is politics and I get it. These groups are appealing to the middle, to the people who might not advocate for gays but don’t want to see the rights of unmarried straight people curtailed. But it feels like our concerns are being neglected, and unnecessarily so. The people who are going to vote against this amendment are our allies. They would still be here, drinking and dancing and paying for compliments even if this amendment solely disenfranchised the gays.

The congressmen who introduced this bill and the people who vote for it may think that you, your mate, and your bastard child are going to spend eternity in Hell with the homosexuals and the Jews, but you are not the real target of their hatred or their legislation. I speak for all gays when I say that we sincerely appreciate the thought, work, and money that so many people have put into this, but the ACLU, Protect NC Families, and the other organizations fighting against this amendment need to acknowledge those of us who do not have the option to marry if the bigots on the right and in the government win. Straight people may be affected by this, but they will be able to work around it if they must. It’s not about you. It’s about us, and it’s time to start listening. That’s my advice. Tip jar to your right.

I haven’t been writing lately and there are reasons for this–the most significant being that writing is a pain in the ass. There are things I dislike more than writing–for instance, public laundromats and the self-flushing toilets that Whole Foods just installed like it’s an interstate rest stop–but writing is there with them on the list of my least favorite activities. And yet, even though I’d happily go months writing nothing longer than a grocery list, when I have to turn to the person beside me in yoga class and introduce myself, I always say that I’m a writer. I do this because I think it makes me sound like I have a rich inner life, when all I really have is a lot of TV to watch and some unfinished essays waiting for someone else to pick them up. The most literary thing about me these days is that I’m poor.

Some people say they must write; they feel incomplete without it. I hate those people. To me, writing is like walking very slowly on a treadmill. After a thousand steps, you smell bad, you’re tired, and you’re right where you started; as soon as you finish one sentence, you have to start the next. Even my motivation for writing is problematic: I do it for the attention. Everything I write beyond to-do lists and my own signature is meant for an audience of some sort. The one time I felt truly excited about writing was in graduate school. I was a terrible student–I never purchased any textbooks and I didn’t attend my own final presentation in one class–but every lecture that I went to was uninterrupted time to write. As long as I looked up every once in a while so my teachers thought I was listening, I could get 2000 words down in a single class. But now that graduate school is over and I spend all day working on other peoples’ terrible manuscripts, the last thing I want to do when I get home is pick up my own. So I watch TV instead.

These months of silence, however, have not been entirely without creative expression of a kind. Earlier this year, I started a Tumblr called Babes of NPR. The concept is simple: a picture of an NPR personality with a caption about who they are and how good they look. Example: Doualy Xaykaothao: Hard to spell, easy to look at. Coming up with captions is far easier than attending group therapy for recovering meth addicts in order to write a story that four people read including my sister, and only then because I told her she was in it. Even better than giving me an excuse not to write (I would finish that story about sleepwalking topless into my neighbor’s house but I have captions to do.), Babes of NPR has had a brief flirtation with Internet success. Granted, the amount of attention BONPR has received is small in the context of the Internet, where a Japanese cat named Maru has 100 million followers and is on the Emperor’s Christmas list, but it’s has gotten attention from exactly the audience I want: the babes of NPR themselves.

I launched the site in the beginning of February–and by “launched,” I posted a picture of Ari Shapiro with the caption: White House Correspondent/gay/Jewish/North Dakotan/babe, and then flooded Facebook with the news that I had just done something clever. It took more than a single picture of Mr. Shapiro (who is legitimately hot, not just public radio hot), but after a few more posts and Facebook blasts, NPR employees–the very people I was inviting the Internet to objectify–started noticing. A week in, I left my desk for a few minutes after my boss’s dog ate a box of frozen chicken nuggets and farted us all out of the office, and came back to an inbox full of emails. Hundreds of them. It turned out that a producer at Fresh Air had tweeted about BONPR, and all of a sudden my audience went from the few people I badgered into looking at to actual strangers, who, I hoped, would tell their friends, who would tell their friends, who would tell their friends. I saw my inbox and shouted that I was going viral, which both confused the hell out of my co-workers and turned out not be true.

My expectations from that very first spike in hits were huge, and continued to rise. I was interviewed by websites and newspapers, strangers found me on Facebook, and I got tons of submissions. It was exciting. When I got notifications that Audie Cornish, Peter Sagal, Ari Shapiro, or Mo Rocca mentioned BONPR on Twitter, I sent them to my parents. After Scott Simon re-tweeted me to 1.2 million people, Finally, I thought, I’m doing something my mom can tell her friends about. I started to get visions of turning BONPR into something culturally important. I would make a Babes of NPR calendar and donate the proceeds to public radio; no, a coffee table book! A heavy, expensive coffee table book with blurbs by Ira Glass and Alec Baldwin on the cover. Maybe after the coffee table book comes out I’d be on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Or, better yet, Fresh Air, discussing what it’s like to be Internet famous with Terry Gross. I stared planning the forward to the coffee table book: about how, thanks to my parents’ politics and their radio, I was a baby of NPR; about how this book was my way of giving back to public radio, my way of thanking the people whose voices are, literally, more familiar than my own.

But beyond a few special moments–getting a shout-out from Peter Sagal on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, reading a write-up in the New York Observer (“Oddly funny, moderately creepy”), hearing Ira Glass’s reaction (“Oh, this is just sad. Oh, look at this. Holy fuck.”), and receiving a t-shirt in the mail from NPR headquarters–nothing much has happened. This is the nature of the Internet: something is big for five minutes and then Snooky gets pregnant and we move on. My expectations rose too quickly, nothing really happened, and so my enthusiasm has dimmed. With each new follower, with each new submission, with each notification that someone I listen to on the radio knows about my blog, I’ve became a little less excited. When Fiona Ritchie, whose accent my sister imitated for an entire summer when we were nine, started following me on Twitter, I didn’t even bother to tell my parents. After six weeks, 111 posts, 2439 Tumblr followers, 276 tweets, a Facebook page, and some BONPR tote bags I drew in Microsoft Paint, I’m not just not famous, I’m losing momentum. Enough people have submitted names that I no longer have to scour the NPR.org for babes, but it’s hard to think of new ways to call people attractive. It just feels like work now. Like writing.

At this point, I have no indication that Babes of NPR is ever going to be more than a website that a few people look at when they’re supposed to be making PowerPoints or reviewing manuscripts, but here’s the thing about the Internet–the potential for success may be small, but it is real. We saw this with Stuff White People Like and Shit My Dad Says and every momentary cultural phenomenon that started out online. It’s hard to let go of the hope that even if I’ll never be Maru, maybe with a few more followers, a few more captions, a few more tweets from Scott Simon or Peter Sagal, that coffee table book will need a forward after all. And that is writing I look forward to.

Kony 2012 is a film created by Invisible Children Inc. The film’s purpose is to promote the charity’s ‘Stop Kony’ movement to make Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony internationally known in order to successfully arrest him in 2012. As of 8 March 2012, the film had over 8.2 million views on Vimeo and over 15.9 million views on YouTube. A number of celebrities have endorsed the campaign, including Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Christina Milian, Nicky Minaj, and Kim Kardashian. As part of the campaign, supporters will put up posters promoting Kony 2012 in their hometowns. Invisible Children has distributed hundreds of thousands of posters in an attempt to gain wider recognition on the issue. They have also issued action kits that include campaign buttons, posters, bracelets, and stickers to help spread awareness. (From Wikipedia)

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1.) This guy is too attractive. He’s probably a moron.
2.) Is that a fake British accent?
3.) He’s going to give his kid nightmares.
4.) No, seriously. He just showed his kid a picture of the Boogeyman.
5.) There sure a lot of white people in this movie about Africa.
6.) Shit. He’s right. If a single blond baby in America were taken from his parents’ arms and forced to shoot them, there wouldn’t just be Amber Alerts on every interstate, it would be fictionalized in an episode of SVU.
7.) How have I never heard of any of this before? I listen to NPR, damnit.
8.) Am I crying? It must be PMS.
9.) Those look like campaign posters. People are going to write in “Kony” in November.
10.) Definitely crying.
11.) Holy shit.
12.) Holy shit.
13.) This is it. Everything changes after this. No more buying TOMS to make myself feel good. Time to save some people.
14.) Still crying. Might wear that bracelet. Definitely PMSing. Should I adopt?
15.) Where’s my wallet? Wait. Before I donate, I should turn to the Internet for opinions.
16.) Never go to the Internet if you want to stay inspired. Thanks, Jezebel.
17.) That kid is never going to sleep in his own bed again. Good luck making another baby.

Despite the Internet’s natural cynicism kind of ruining it for me, you should watch this movie–someplace where it’s okay for you to weep.