Footnoted

An excerpt from a piece in progress:

I ought to do something, she thinks, it’s two in the afternoon.  Days off work make her uneasy. Too much time. She checks her email [1] twice in four minutes. Closes the computer. [2]  Opens it. Checks three news sites. Another celebrity has died.[3] They suspect drug overdose.[4] They suspect suicide.[5] They suspect the doctor, of course. [6] Don’t do drugs, they say. Fame is so tragic, they say. Fame, they say, does funny things. Foreign leader eyes losses at the polls. [7] Foreign killer is killed with stones.[8] Local leader denies allegations of sticking his dick where it doesn’t belong.[9] Small child lost, found. Child pushed to ground in assault. [10] Olsen twins sign garments for gaggles of fans.[11] German ships blaze arctic trail.[12] The day displayed in pictures for those to whom reading words becomes tiresome or dull.[13] Closes the computer. Walks to kitchen. Opens refrigerator. Closes it. Opens cupboards. Closes them. Pulls five outfits off of hangers, sucks in belly, hard, tosses five outfits to the floor. Pokes at thighs. Pulls at the thigh-skin. Slaps thighs. Pushes belly out and curves the back, resting her hands on the distention saying to the mirror “just entering my third month.”[14] Deflates. Examines the belly, the sad little breasts, the fat thighs from all angles. Picks out a loose dress and a thin sweater. She sits, cross-legged before the full-length mirror and coats her lashes with dark goop, separates hairs with a toothpick and brushes color onto her cheeks. Sucks in her cheeks to see what she’d look like if she were thin. Tries three shades of purple, pink and red on her puckered lips. She sits in her car and the vinyl seat cover adheres to the backs of her legs. She sits in the driveway, starts the ignition. Shuts it off. Starts the ignition. Stares at the back of the house. Tunes the digital dial to a radio show, Carl Castle re-creates the weeks news,[15] and she listens for ten minutes in the driveway. The audience laughs, claps. I’ll go to a coffee shop [16], she thinks. I’ll read. She lights a cigarette and drives to the end of the street. What’s the point? she thinks. It seems too complicated, too involved. At the end of the block, she turns the car around and pulls back into the driveway. Shuts off the engine. Listens to the rest of the radio show. Goes inside to poke at her face, pinch her thighs, change into a pair of sweatpants and check her email.

Notes:

1. E-mail, a form of exchanging communication via electronic messaging, originated in its most primitive forms in the 1960’s and was popularized in the 1980’s.
2. Author is referring to opening and closing a laptop computer, an adaptation from the original desk-top computer. The laptop featured a screen that folded down onto the keyboard to close.
3. When this piece was written (2009), a number of prominent celebrities had recently passed away. Michael Jackson, a pop star,  and Farrah Fawcett, an actress, both died June 25, 2009, Fawcett of anal cancer and Jackson of what was later revealed to be a drug overdose. Other notable celebrity deaths during the time of authorship include Patrick Swayze, an American actor (pancreatic cancer), Senator Ted Kennedy (youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.), Merce Cunningham (choreographer, general creative genius), Billy Mays (oddly famous for his incessant appearances in irritating infomercials), among others.
4. Referring both to Michal Jackson’s known prescription drug abuse and the roll pharmaceuticals played in his death, and also to the general abuse of drugs by celebrity figures, which had played a role in other recent celebrity deaths such as those of Heath Ledger (actor) and Anna Nicole Smith (sex icon).
5. At the time of both Michal Jackson’s and Heath Ledger’s deaths there was speculation that the drug overdoses may have been self-induced and intentional.
6. Jackson’s death was, ultimately, ruled a homicide, and his doctor held responsible for irresponsible and deadly cocktails of drugs.
7. On June 12, 2009, Iraq held their presidential elections, and the following day protests erupted with accusations of electoral fraud, and citizens poured out in support of their unsuccessful presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi (who lost the election under very suspicious circumstances. This was all a very complicated international/political issue, and tempers were generally running high anyway, especially with all the unpleasant business between the US and the new democracy thing.).
8. The author read this, while looking through news sites at the time she was writing it, as a blurbed headline on the browsers “today’s headlines” drop-down menu and found it disturbingly blunt. She cannot, now, find the original headline or article again, and honestly probably never did actually read the article in its entirety, and just used the headline for this piece.
9. Referencing the commotion over South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair with an Argentinean woman, which he later admitted to. To be fair, this could just as easily have been referring to Gov. Jim Gibbons’ denial of cheating on his spouse with a mother of seven in Reno, Nevada, or assemblyman Mike Duvall, who resigned after being caught on tape boasting about his sexual conquests and then swore up and down that he’d never had an affair, or any number of other politicians who were caught with their pants down in rest-stop bathrooms or their own Oval Offices.
10. She just made these up. But, to be fair, these things probably did happen somewhere, at some time.
11. The Olsen Twins were unbelievably rich and famous, for some reason, and nobody can quite fathom why.  To the best of anybody’s understanding, they landed a role on a television series in their infancy (Full House), despite bearing an unwitting resemblance to a troll, and then proceeded to market and sell poor-quality home video-style movies of themselves, which made them their first few million dollars. After this initial, young success, the twins were famous for a) being twins b) being adorable, and doubly so because, well, they’re twins! c) putting their names on clothing other people designed d) having drug/alcohol abuse issues and/or eating disorders.
12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8251914.stm?lsf That’s true. They really did that. See? Germany’s good for something.
13. The BBC online news site offers a page called “The Day in Pictures”, where breaking news is documented visually, or else they just post impressive pictures of cute things like bears taking baths (this is true. I am not making this up)
14. This image is of the author describing a bit of body image distortion, convinced that her stomach is large enough, when intentionally pushed out, to appear as though she is in her third month of pregnancy.
15. The author  means Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a comedic  News Show broadcast weekly on National Public Radio (NPR), hosted by news anchor Carl Kasell.
16. By “coffee shop”, the author really meant “Stella’s”, her favorite coffee shop in Denver where she sat to read, write, smoke, and socialize just about every day she lived in the city over this summer. But because “Stella’s” is far too specific to be recognized by readers, she generalized, here.