A Quickie: How to Win His Heart

When I was 12, I had a huge crush on this guy, whom I'll call Bonzo here. Clueless about seduction, I was desperate for advice on how to win his heart. Lo and behold, a teen magazine I read religiously at the time published an article titled, "How to Win His Heart". It gave me some very specific instructions, such as:

1. Write his name on a piece of paper, then put the piece of paper in a jar of honey, and store the jar under your bed.

2. Fake fainting around him. It'll give him a chance to take care of you and feel knight-like.

3. Buy a notebook that looks just like his, make sure your phone number is in it, and swap yours for his when he isn't looking.

4. Flirt with your teacher in front of him. Seeing you get attention from an older man will awaken his animalistic need to mark his territory.

5. Ask a friend to give you a hickey. He has to know you're not waiting for him to notice you.

So I followed the advice to boot and, as predicted, he fell madly in love with me and we had a beautiful love story.

NOT.

What really happened was:

1. I ended up with an ant infestation under my bed and had to explain to my mom why I had a jar of honey with the word BONZO in it.

2. I got sent to the nurse for "fainting", she thought I was skipping meals and sent me to the guidance counselor, who gave me a bunch of brochures on eating disorders.

3. I bought the damn notebook, swapped mine for Bonzo's, but he apparently never missed his notebook because he never called me or returned my notebook to me or tried to figure out where his notebook was.

4. My teacher stood stone-still when I hugged him. Awkward and, if I had lived in the U.S. at the time, probably would've gotten us both arrested. No one's animalistic need to mark their territory was awakened, as far as I could tell.

5. My mom saw my hickey and grounded me for, like, ever.

Bonzo soon started dating some girl and I cancelled my subscription to said teen magazine.

Conclusion:

Honey doesn't have magic powers.

Fainting isn't hot.

Notebook swapping isn't how Cupid communicates.

Don't hug your middle-school teachers.

Hickeys are just a bad idea, period.

And teen magazines are full of shit.

image from here.

Movie Review: "The Social Network"

A Generation Faced

Once upon a time we could go out, get drunk with our friends, fall on our butts on a dance floor, make out with whoever sat next to us in urban sociology class that week, and all we'd have to worry about the next day was nursing our hang-overs and avoiding eye-contact with said make-out subject. This was also the time when "tagging" was a word used to describe a childhood game where one child would chase another, photography was usually associated with pleasant memories, and "poking" was not something one did via the world wide web, as Betty White expressed when she hosted SNL.

And then there was Facebook.

I was a first-year student at Sarah Lawrence College visiting my friend at the University of Pennsylvania the first time I heard about facebook. Amidst an otherwise normal conversation between 18-year-olds, she asked me, "Are you on facebook?" and paused dramatically. I shrugged, "I don't know what that is," and was met with a glare. "It's like this online thing for colleges where you put a profile up and look at other people's profiles. It's so cool. You have to be invited to join. Maybe they don't have it at Sarah Lawrence yet," she said with less excitement, thinking that might be a bad thing. "Yeah, probably not," I replied almost condescendingly, "I don't think a school that small needs an online thing, everyone knows everyone, it'd be kind of stupid."

Of course I was completely wrong. I soon found out, through my roommate, that everyone I knew was on facebook, that I had to get on it, that I had to befriend at least 70 people (back then, that was a lot), that I had to join "The Drinking Department Has a Theatre Problem" Group, and that I had to check immediately if the guy I'd been seeing had changed his relationship status. Like most people who were in college at the time of facebook's invention, I followed suit and created a profile, for no other reason than because everyone else had one.

Snooping crushes, advertising events, bad-mouthing teachers, bonding with classmates, staying in touch with friends in other countries, finding out about parties; everything was suddenly frighteningly easy and instantaneous. The word "facebook" was soon a verb, a noun, and an adjective. Upon meeting someone new it was perfectly acceptable to say, "facebook me" instead exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. A flattering or funny picture could be described as "facebook profile worthy". Mass emailing was replaced by facebook status updates, album and link sharing, and group/event invites. Moreover, as far as my generation was concerned, high-school would no longer be left at high-school, we could now keep up with what everyone was up to and who they were becoming; every-day life was now documented and accessible to everyone, for as long as facebook lived.

So when I saw the trailer for the movie, The Social Network, about a month ago, I was not surprised that facebook's popularity had warranted a movie only a few years after the site was launched. Here was a movie that a great majority of people could relate to, because even if you're not on facebook, you know about it, you've probably seen it on someone's computer screen, and you understand the magnitude of its impact on society. It was sure to be a box office hit, I predicted.

Indeed, it has maintained first place status at the box office for two consecutive weeks, and I had to wait until its second weekend in theaters to manage to see it. The movie is certainly entertaining and produces an engaging, albeit clearly dramatized, depiction of Mark Zuckerberg and the beginning of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin, whose works include "A Few Good Men" and "The West Wing", wrote a captivating script, brought to life masterfully by renowned blockbuster director David Fincher and the cast, with particularly layered performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield. It was hard not to notice, however, that the movie adheres to college cliches and gender stereotypes, with female characters limited to college girls who will do anything (including stripping, dancing on tables, and making out with each other) to impress boys in prestigious clubs, groupies who blow boys they don't know in public bathrooms, phycho-jealous girlfriends, and cold lawyers- minus Rashida Jones, whose character is a sympathetic, though ambiguous, lawyer.

Meanwhile, the men in the movie are portrayed as being obsessively hungry for an elevated social status; their every action reflective of their desire for approval and admiration. The interactions between men and women are limited to gratuitous sexual adventures in typical party scenes, romantic relationships ending badly, and inconclusive lawyer-client exchanges. Rather than "defining a generation", I would say the movie successfully portrays intelligent young men in higher academia, outwitting their teachers, lawyers, and girlfriends, until they end up extremely successful and alone (and by "end up" I mean that's where they are at 26).

Facebook did not endorse the movie at all, but didn't make too much of a fuss over its (in)accuracies either. A smart move, considering it's common knowledge that Hollywood does what it has to do to tell sell a story, and the multi-billion dollar business that is facebook knows that people don't care and, if anything, this will just make facebook bigger. After all, people will sooner take the time to write on their walls, "updating facebook status while watching facebook movie lmao," than deactivate their accounts due to questions about who invented facebook.

While The Social Network succeeded in entertainment value, it missed an opportunity to truly expose a generation and explore the reasons behind facebook's lasting success, the losses of privacy and real human contact, and the evolving need for an online social network. Perhaps because Sorkin himself does not use facebook and has claimed to dislike internet networking as a main form of socializing, it is instead a well-written and solidly executed movie about a law-suit that wouldn't be interesting to anyone other than straight white Harvard males were it not about the one thing that over 500 million people have in common right now. Certainly an attention-grabber, but is it an accurate reference for the image of a generation and is it worthy of the Oscar buzz it's received?

I would say it's more indulging than inspiring, more fun than fact. Just like facebook.

Images from here.

Adulthood's Ugly Face

One day I woke up and watched myself shower, put on responsible-looking clothes, paint my face into a grown-up woman's complexion, drink my coffee, eat my poached egg on toast, pack my laptop into my bag, head off to work, sit in front of a computer all day, do tasks that neither interest nor fulfill me, watch the clock, wait for the day to end, come home too tired to socialize or blog or work out or return calls or respond to emails, eat something, and finally go back to sleep which was only comforting because it was not like the day it followed. And so I realized that I had finally met someone I'd observed from afar all my life, someone many people around me had known for a long time. That someone was called Adulthood.

Adulthood has taken over me for the past month or so, and I have slowly been introduced to responsibility, compromise, and a desire for independence. Perhaps for most people all this seems normal, or like "it's about time"- I'm 25 after all, but for me it has been completely jarring and, in many ways, really difficult and sad.

I've always had one goal. I've always known who I was. I've always made every decision based on how it would best serve the one thing I knew I was meant to do. For as long as I can remember, I have only ever lived to be an actress. Since my parents always had enough money and since I wasn't raised in a culture that encouraged financial independence at age 18, I figured I wouldn't ever have to compromise what I wanted to do, what I was meant to do, for the sake of a paycheck or stability. But I also thought I'd have it figured out by the time I was 25. That I'd have a path drawn out, that I'd be closer to success and recognition, that I'd be able to make a living with acting, or that I'd be able to make a living somehow and still act.

As it turns out, I'm 25 and I have a master's degree in what I love doing but I don't know how to do it for a living. I'm tired of being dependent, and the acting industry has completely burnt me out. Auditions make me feel like a puppet, rejections make me feel unworthy, and playing roles that don't mean anything to me leave me unfulfilled and wanting more. So I sought a more regular lifestyle, found it, and have slowly gravitated towards letting it take over my life. The less I think about acting and how little of it I'm doing, the less it can hurt me. And if I'm the one who shuts down my dream, then at least no one else can crush it.

But the result is that my heart is breaking every day, as though I'd just buried my Self and am in mourning. Going through the motions of adulthood exhaust me, pretending I can do it permanently nearly kills me. Not to mention how mad Little Larissa is at me. My 7-year-old self is scolding me, shaking her finger at me, "You can't just give up! How can you give up?? These are our dreams! We've wished them into fountains all our lives!" And I don't really know what to tell her. It's just time, I want to say, I have to do something else now, for a while, I have to figure out my life, I have to be responsible. But she wouldn't understand it. I hardly understand it myself.

Who I am is an actress, I know that like I know my name. But how long can a dream be sustained for when it exists only as something we wish upon a star? At some point it has to either materialize or be discarded, it seems. And I've been lost. I've been terrified of going through another year of the same bullshit auditions for unpaid projects that aren't even that good. I'm tired and I'm not happy. The idea of giving up on acting brings me even further down, but I can't keep doing it and not making a living either.

So here I am, staring at Adulthood but still clinging on to my dreams and idealizations of life, not quite ready to let go yet. Getting scolded by my inner child, but looking at my life as it is and knowing that something has to change.

I'm looking for signs, I'm waiting for clarity, I'm hoping for solutions.

I'm staring at myself and, for the first time in my whole life, I'm wondering who I am.