My DiaryLand Diary

2002-08-15 - 3:51 a.m.

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest, or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while....
--Joan Didion, opening of “The White Album”

When I was trying to fool Diaryland into placing my link to True Porn Clerk Stories in a comments line of my profile, I needed a dummy word for the name of the diary. Thinking that if it worked I could include other outside sites, I typed “outside.” The link for True Porn Clerk Stories didn’t work, which is too bad--it’s not porn, but rather the experences of an underemployed, rather analytic woman who works as a clerk at a porn video-rental store, using her writing to mediate between her and her horrible job. Out of curious frustration I clicked on the link that I had just created, to outside.diaryland.com, and found the following:

anorexic tips

Journal: By keeping a journal, you will relize your eating habbits and to be able to release/control this. Write down everything you consume- drinks or foods, when you consumed it, and how you feel about what you've consumed, ect. Always copy the calories of the food you eat- to keep doing your math. You can get a free online diary at Diaryland.

And the rest of outisde.diaryland.com consists of a single entry titled “anorexia tips” and a link to a webpage that was 404 not found “for violating the Angelfire.com terms of service.” Somehow, I don’t remember, I found the actual webpage and diary for this girl, who goes by “bleed outside” (hence the “outside”). She also had a link to her anorexia webboard, which had many entries from over the past couple of years. Apparently these people go by the term “ana” for anorexic and “mia” for bulimic. Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I know :

i wanna lose weight
Posted by -- on 03/14/01 at 20:15 GMT
hi, i just wanna say that im really desperate to lose weight, im just under 8 stone and i hate my body and my life, ive tried exercising and nearly every thing else, u r my last resaught! please help i cant stand being fat! if you dont help me i dont no what ill do?
kym

=)
Posted by aquagirl on 08/02/02 at 20:06 GMT
Hey there! I am new to this and have had trouble myself with sickness and a sore throat from throwing up.. But I find that there are sooo many people out there like us who are sick of being fat and envy those who can show there bodies with pride. I find the best way iss to keep telling yourself you can do it! Tell your self you don't want to look like those other over weight cows anymore and that thin is beautiful. That is the very first step, is to want to do it. For other tips just look up any Pro-ana or mia sites. Rexiworld is a good one! And good luck to you!

I need to lose weight...help!
Posted by I need of help on 11/29/01 at 00:06 GMT
I want to lose weight so fast. I eat under 600 calories a day and I just cant get as skinny as I want! can someone please tell me what to do...do diet pills work?! something! help!

How can I cheat blood results?
Posted by Nora on 07/28/02 at 22:10 GMT
...and is diet coke helping metabolism burning faster?
I also wonder of you have any tips of how to cheat the staff when being hospitalized. I am given food through a nasal tube.

some body please help I have a question
Posted by Shane on 01/10/02 at 18:22 GMT
Hi there my name is shane I have had food issues for a very long time I weigh 98 pounds and still trying to loose more. I keep on getting bad kideny infectios. I have takes lots of meds from my dr but it just don't seem to cut it. I was just wandering if anybody had any good ideas what I could do to try to keep the kideny infections out If any ideas please email me thank you.

Aquagirl (the second entry quoted above) struck me, not because of her entry (well, beyond her entry) but because of her name. She was not the only one to mention Aqua, the Danish-Norwegian technopop group best known for the first-person “Barbie Girl.” Many mentioned the song, including “bleed outside” in her diary:

Now I know Barbie's great. I was just a little girl- Trapped inside a Barbie world. Forced upon expected perfection. Now- my body's filled in infection. She influenced me- She convinced me- It would be better to be her. Now I watch the vomit stir.

That actually reminds me of another quote. “Another flash cut“:

“In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out.... The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to cope with normal stress...”

The narrator of True Porn Clerk Stories also mentioned Aqua. She played their CD as she opens the porn store at 7:00 in the morning. She added,

I love Aquarium. It's the very finest in Scandanavian synth-pop dance music. It's incredibly chipper, in a modern Abbaesque sort of way. Years ago, I went out a couple of times with a guy who had been to Sweden and he said you really couldn't understand Abba until you'd traveled through a Scandanavian winter.

It made me think of the last time I heard “Barbie Girl.” I was drunk, it was New Year’s Eve, and I was in the Old City of Jerusalem. Our group had been taken to a restaurant there that night, in violation of specific U.S. State Department travel advisories, and we were allowed to order and consume as much alcohol as we wanted.

The restaurant was called the Cardo Culinaria, and it was a “theme” restaurant. The theme was ancient Rome, and it was intended as a party place, with a show -- actually, just one stand-up comedian -- that accompanied the meal and consisted mostly of unbelievably corny jokes. The room was large, and as the meal was breaking up and people wandering around music was played. Curiously, the only CD they had, and they must have played its only single five times, was Aquarium.

To get to this restaurant, we walked down the Cardo, which was the main market street in Roman Jerusalem, and today has been excavated, so you can walk and see the remains of columns’ bases spaced so that you can imagine an a market stall between them. In one open space, surrounded by the remains of Roman columns and the crumbling ancient street at our feet, our group stopped and assembled around a bejeweled golden Menorah in a glass case. Our guide explained that it was put there by a radical Jewish group that in the ‘80s was busted for a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock was built on the site of the Jewish Temple, which they call the Temple Mount. It seems that when the Messiah comes to Earth (not back to earth, mind you, as it will be for the first time) he will rebuild the temple there, and the Dome of the Rock is in the way. The Messiah apparently needs his earthly followers to remove this obstruction for him--give him a little encouragement, let Him know that the world is seriously ready for Him. To incite the apocalypse. They'd probably succeed, and they're still active.

At the Cardo Culinaria, the manager and stand-up comedian had heard we were a group of student journalists, and he asked me if I would like to see The New York Times. I attributed my confusion to my inebriation, and not knowing how to respond, said sure. He left, and came back with the New York Times. It was dated almost a year ago; and in the lower-right corner of the front page was a story by Deborah Sontag, bureau cheif for the Times, about the Cardo Culinaria, with a photo of the man on the front page in front of me. It turns out that he, an Israeli, co-owns and operates this place with a Palestinian, and they expanded during peace negotiations, only to be hurt now that the Intifata had scared away all the tourism--a great story.

It was charming, I thought, and it even made sense. Then the comedian got serious for a moment: “When the writer came to do the interview, she didn’t come the first time. She called to cancel, saying that at 7:00 that evening Palestinians were going to be shooting into Gilo [a suburb of Jerusalem facing Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem] and that she would have to cover it.” By now, he’s dead serious, “Imagine, the first time they are shooting into Jerusalem and they call The New York Times ahead to tell them!”

We’d heard of this from the journalists, of rallies canceled because no camera crews showed up, etc., but at that moment I was not prepared to cope with the thought the murder of five was scripted, and that writers were being cast in the roles of journalists. “By way of comment now I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response.”

Barbie Girl played again.

One of the anorexia sites advises, "Become a vegetarian/vegan, esp if you are a vegan your diet consists of only healthy foods. say you are doing it to be socially aware or something."

I don’t remember if I threw up back at the hotel after consuming more champaign and beer, but it might have happened. I do remember our group’s facilitator reciting the genealogies of the Torah and talking about Israel’s nuclear bombs. I remember stumbling out of the restaurant, back through the Cardo near the Western Wall. I remember the next day, buying a hookah from an Arab merchant and lying rather dazed as our bus took the long way around the West Bank, from Jerusalem to Capernaum, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee best know as the home of Jesus when he began his ministry. That route took us through the Jezreel Valley, better known by its Hebrew name, the Valley of Armageddon.

But writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.

True Porn Clerk Stories

The Cardo Culinaria

Bleed Outside

from "The White Album" by Joan Didion
(In an alignment just recently noticed, in the photo accompaning this clip she looks anorexic.)

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