Hi, I’m Willie. I barely know Maryanne Ku personally (but I can only figure, how else can you know a person except to your personage: i.e. personally), which strange but cheerful situation she and I think is intriguing; and, well, I committed to her, that my writing a guest entry was something I would follow through on, because I had engaged in self-reflection and had finally decided it would be a quiet joy to take on -- something productive and something valuable for my country; and it was all those things. If it’s not readily apparent, the words in the above paragraph – and even this semi-parenthetical addendum – were written after a very real, and obscenely lengthy, duration of time

To create a gradation of seamlessness, please continue to sit on your chair, but (as lucidly as you can) think of how you’re going to sort of go on with the rest of your life after your read this, or instead consider how infinity isn’t really a number, how (so says Aimee Mann) one is the loneliest number, or just (exhale a massive chest-heaving sigh) …Why?

Onward now with a few unrelated thoughts. I am a real person.

My diurnal battle with my nostril hairs has choked my respiration (I think) and, ultimately, my patience. My nose hairs are relentless in that way when, after running smack-dab into a hard wall (resulting in nasty facial bruises and, normally, only one broken unless you have a running-into-walls buddy, anyone?), you realize your humanness and resign yourself for a moment, but you still gotta see what is on the other side. The other side, all of it. But I could rationalize my nostril hairs’ superabundant growth if I had recently snorted copious molehills of plutonium. Though I have not. All of which strongly handedly convinces me that I have inherited a misfortune. How un-American! Whereas the majority of my parents' American generation has bequeathed nepotism and trust fund access to its fortunate progeny, my lot has been to some degree widened -- oh, not by wealth, but with a lesser inheritance of genes which unfortunately plague me with fistfuls of wispy brown nostril hairs that, when removed, fall out with an accompaniment of flaky booglets, which neologism is derived from the combination of singlets and boogers. (Last semester's enrollment in a linguistics course at the college tells me to call this new word's formation a result of blending. [Entertain me, in considering the blending of the words "lunch" and "breakfast," which gives birth to the word "brunch".] Tada. Consider this the pinnacle, a triumph, of my liberal arts education; heretofore, you are free to just space out. One cheer(s), oops. It’d be at least two cheers, but my only other hand’s index and pinkie fingers are now interchanging shifts, because poring through nostrils requires a variety of nostril “drill bits.” Ok, I am not as funny as I desperately wish myself to be.

Presently, a few pleasant conclusions are caught in the updraft of my forward conscious and have surrounded this dilemma with an altogether happy, tangerine-toned aurora; I owe my optimism to my against-odds cynicism, and to the fact that my sometimes diametrically pessimistic world-view (despite my prevailing rationale that it is, in fact, a 50/50 percent world of good and evil) paradoxically convinces me, in a wholly enveloping supernatural scan of my psyche, that with an Augustinian "archeological" mindset and a bit of omnipotence I can unearth the all-encompassing goodness which is the inherent quality to all things before man has adulterated them. All these things considered, onward now with my pleasant conclusions as related to these black-brown burly nostril hairs of mine.

Upon some quiet reflection and heavy oral breathing (as I’d surely pass out or, unwittingly, self-inflict brain shrinkage on myself if I’d ever need to breath through my own nose for a full twenty-four), I thoroughly believe that my life as even a passive drug user, at least with respect to hard drugs like cocaine, would be an outright failure from the very outset. I mean, I wouldn’t even be able to sell the coke back to the dealer, because he’d definitely be suspicious that I had cut and reapportioned it with detergent or filler, or there’d be all sorts of my mid-length and full-length nose hairs -- of course, no short ones because only someone with OCD who had my nostril hair trouble would cut them out at the root; it is a famously bad implementation -- in all that prime cut coke, and my life would be over because he’d shoot me in the face, drag me out in the alley, and take my voter card, which I’m planning to use next November to vote for George W. Bush. And then the world would implode, politically. I mean, you saw the last cutthroat presidential election. Now, if it came down to Georgia (and we are an important electoral state), I’d already be dead and my vote would never be cast. Then Dr. Howard “Angry Robot” Dean, who has an almost Hilteresque posture (either adopted from Gore, or a result of a self-implanted steal rod in his spine), would be elected.

// ‘Rich Girls’ is a renegade; it has lately held hostage my fully compassionate attention. Whenever I do pay attention to someone/something, you can be certain I’m fully involved, eyes squared right at it or you or those lovebags or your Camper brand shoes with my conscious brain and auditory faculties focused on the ephemeral mannerisms in your gait and also on all those wispy wavelengths of your voice vibrating the air between our bodies. Hence, I’m driven, and my attention is missile-locked on Ally Hilfiger, daughter of Tommy Hilger, and her close companion, Jamie. The show is almost an utterly intellectually-bankrupt MTV put-together which has somehow, hypnotically, taken me over (to the seemingly absurd point now that I have actually watched its repeats).

To briefly summary the show in full, I’ll demonstrate some evidence from my viewings. Point One: the two girls live in New York. Okay, this is self-evident, for the sights of downtown New York are essentially ubiquitous to anyone who has ever watched more than ten contemporary films or, perhaps, any two (go ahead, pick two) Woody Allen films. But, whatever. I wanted to say the words “New York,” and impress you all with a pretentious, categorically unsupported, unempirical, sociological hypothesis of my own making. Point Two: At least Ally Hilfiger has led a particularly sheltered but affluent upbringing. Now, my memory is compellingly drawn to an episode in which Ally Hilfiger, hungry and wanting a burrito, drives to a Whole Foods grocery store, at which grocery store you sort of see her ambling around, picking up things to make nachos and burritos, when the camera suddenly focuses on just her. In this scene, Ally is talking to someone, but he/she is not yet in the camera’s view. Ally asks this person what is normally needed to make a burrito (or nachos, I think) and she’s really not getting much of anything except a blankly silent response from the person. Ally Hilfiger asks a few more questions, and then the camera slowly casts its lens on a very Mexican-looking guy (who, of course, would know all things burrito) wearing a sort of faded red baseball hat, with a face looking highly dumbfounded. He doesn’t say much, and Ally kind of laughs and apologizes then walks away. (This scene was hilarious; I’m sorry I can’t put it into a clear perspective, but I hope you are laughing right now.)

Anyhow, I enjoy Ally much more than any scene with Jamie. Ally’s less shallow, I think. Because of her jaded upbringing, she’s definitely more inept with concern to all things related to the life of the everyman. Anyhow, both girls are doubly rich, save for any ostensible predilections to pick up a novel by Stendhal whenever their black limo is stuck in the choking thicket of New York traffic. By a strange twist of irony that reveals how the world is truly topsy-turvy, my attentive devotion to this ‘Rich Girls’ show, during this 03’ end of winter holiday break -- certainly one of the few stretches of any considerable time that I’m normally at home -- has driven me from reading a very good history book by two authors concerning American foreign policy since 1938. The show is that good, and I’m that stupid for it.