On that day, we gave up. I gazed forlornly out the windshield at some derelict looking bungalows labeled “Graduate Student Housing.” And then we were driving in Orange County again. We passed housing developments with vaguely British names—Windsor Village, Bristol Manor, The Inns at CuteBridge. The landscape seemed to repeat itself, as if on a slow loop. We drove past rows of identical pastel townhouse apartments, fronted by the same formation of sidewalk-hedge-groundcover-wall, sidewalk-hedge-groundcover-pine tree… over and over. I started to panic. It felt like Stepford housing, built to give the impression of human habitation, but soon the robots would attack.

Then we drove past the blimp hangars in Tustin. Two massive closed tunnels rose out of what looked like an abandoned field. They were so big, they didn’t even look like airplane hangars. They looked like spaceship hangars. No English department, I thought. Just quonset huts for aliens. OK. Bring it.

The hangars are 1,088 feet long and 18 stories high, which doesn’t really capture their utterly inhuman scale. They were built of wood in 1942, engineered to protect blimps during WWII from the Santa Ana winds. The blimps gathered intelligence. About submarines. They have shot film there sometimes, like X-Files or Austin Powers. Building 29 was condemned in 2007 when the City Council rejected proposals for “a motorcross facility, a culinary complex, shops catering to the elderly and a futuristic airship building center” to be housed inside (shops catering to the elderly?). In 2009, Tustin Magazine reported that its parent company, WaterMark, had bought the building for one dollar in exchange for a promise to maintain and repair it. A photograph showed the word “TUSTIN MAGAZINE” painted along one thousand foot side. I can’t tell you whether these words are still there. I see the hangars all the time. In my mind, they’re blank and silent.

This year, the parks commission approved a plan to turn the whole area into a park, with ice rinks and a lake. The county plans to continue renting out the hangar. It should continue to play itself. 

On one end of the base, just southwest of the hangars, developers built a mall, years ago. It seems to feature a lot of surf and BMX gear shops. It’s unclear to me whether the new plans will follow through on any of the many ideas for sports and entertainment inside the largest wooden structure in the world. What can it be like to golf or dine in a blimp hangar? It’d  be like hitting the putting green on a moon colony.

I see the base every other day, now, from the train station in Tustin. I particularly like the way it looks backlit at sunset, when the sun is a low-hanging blood orange and the distant skyscrapers look like a handful of Legos between the hulking silhouettes of the hangars.

I never thought, when I first saw them, that I would still be here this many years later. I started graduate school thinking it would be three years, at the outside. Somehow I signed on for another degree, had a kid, was influenced by some things at the expense of others… We build colossal structures, thinking we have an eye on the future, but then it turns out we have planned for the need to accommodate zeppelins.

On my way downtown in Los Angeles, most days, I drive under Bunker Hill, and on days when everyone forgets to turn on their headlights, it’s dark in the tunnel. Then someone slows down and the red brake lights shoot up over the reflective tiles, like blood into water. I think about what it must have looked like inside the hangars when they were full of blimps, twelve of them at a time, sighing and outgassing helium. I wonder, without wanting an answer, how many hours I’ve spent daydreaming on the train to Tustin. I wonder what it would be like to go shopping on the moon.

It feels unfair, in a way, to record these kinds of days. She missed her dad this morning, who was away at a conference. Most days, she’s not quite like this. I actually made her let me take her temperature (normal). At one point, I lost it a little. I am trying, I told her. I am trying to give you what you want…

I once read a parenting blog entry that made me so angry, I pretty much stopped reading parenting blogs. It was an interview with a woman who had a high-level position in finance. Yes, she was a banker, so, perhaps I’m biased. But when she was asked for tips about how to get your kids out in the morning, she said something about making organic oatmeal in large batches on Sunday night so that you could spend your precious minutes in the morning “eating and talking.” “All you have to do is reheat  it, and maybe slice some fresh strawberries into their bowls.”

This, I would like to point out, is what I was doing this morning. Reheating organic oatmeal. I even sliced some strawberries, for snack. And here is my tip, for working parents: become a banker, get a fat bonus, rape the global economy, let the American taxpayer bail you out, get self-righteous about how you still deserve that bonus, pay other people to drive your kids to Chinese lessons after school, and then, when you feel a twinge of guilt about your class status, work through that guilt by feeding your children organic food and paper over your moral bankruptcy by putting out some kind of June Cleaver fantasy of yourself in a parenting blog.

OK, definitely biased.

After we got through breakfast, H. wanted oatmeal for snack, so I was holding a glass bowl of it against me in the elevator at daycare, and I spilled milk down the front of my shirt. Other than that, I was feeling pretty good. We were at daycare. Our hair was not sticky. We were both wearing clothes. And then another dad got into the elevator with us. He held a pair of tiny pink shoes in his hand. Obviously he had forgotten them in the car and was heading back in. He wore jeans and a t-shirt. Just like me. But for some reason, to me, in the elevator this morning, that other child’s father was a vision of efficiency and grace. Just the way he held his keys, loose in one hand. He probably has two kids. He probably has triplets, and he published his third book last year. He is everything I’m not. Unstained, with perfect oatmeal.

My tip for working parents: Wait until after five, then you can open the bourbon.

Ben Folds came on stage and sprayed pheremonal energy and sweat everywhere. He climbed all over his piano, which seemed to fill the room. I saw a couple of other bands whose sound I liked, bands who kicked at their gear and closed their eyes on the high notes. But that night, Ben Folds believed. He got down into his own music in that way that combines total release with pure control. I think it’s easier for men, that balance of wide appeal and intensely personal self-expression. For men, the rules about what is and is not sexy are slightly more lax. I now associate Ben Folds with a certain brand of late nineties irony, Rockin’ the Suburbs, the clueless chump you seem to think I am… But any rockstar has to play with charisma, and that night, he was very indie nerd testosterone.

Over the next few years, my socioeconomic demographic would come out big for Ben Folds. But I didn’t know that then, and I don’t tend to think of my own musical taste as particularly trend-setting. I was by myself in a club in New York. The vague recommendation of the marketing manager was all I knew about this odd, piano-centric band with funny lyrics. I stood there oscillating between euphoria and self-doubt. I let strangers jostle me. I steadfastly refused to give up my place near the stage. The crowd was full of music critics, industry insiders, real people who lived in New York and had real jobs… but suddenly I didn’t care what they thought. I wanted to run up to the stage and dance on that piano.

In an absolutely uncharacteristic move for me that summer, I found the guts to walk up to Ben Folds afterwards. I was burning with it. I had to tell him how much I liked his music. I had nothing in mind beyond pure admiration. I am technically no longer a teenager, I told myself. I have a pass around my neck that says Time Out. In the dark you can’t tell the lady in the picture is blond. I am paying rent on a sublet in New York. I have a right to be here. I can do this.

Ben Folds was incredibly nice. I managed to convey enthusiasm without drooling. We were chatting! Magic! And then he asked me if I lived in New York. I didn’t live anywhere! I was still in college! Keeping it cool, I said: I live in New Haven… He proceeded to tell me where he was playing next.  And where and when he would be in New Haven. And that maybe he would see me there? if I came backstage, to let him know?  The wheels in my barely post-adolescent brain strained with the effort. Not only had I managed to play the role of adult and Time Out writer convincingly, but this rockstar I had just met seemed to be asking me to come hang out with him.

As soon as I realized this, I blew it. I started thinking frantically about how I couldn’t get into the clubs he was telling me about, how I had no fake ID, how I was just an intern, how technically I was living with my boyfriend that summer, even if that wasn’t going particularly well. I felt like he could see all this on my face—that my face screamed confused college intern—which struck me as deeply shameful. So I froze. I got awkward and moved away. Before I even got out of the club, I started beating myself up, rehearsing all the ways that the more savvy, city, boarding-school kids I went to college with would have known how to respond. Since then, Ben Folds’ recorded music has never had quite the same panty-dropping effect on me, but I still like it. His voice gives me a warm feeling and reminds me gently that wanting something badly often makes me totally screw it up.

This was my reaction to the story they just published about Joan Didion. On the one hand, it is, as is usually the case for the Atlantic, well written and contains some kernels of truth. On the other hand, it basically says: Hunter S. Thompson showed us how to be a Man by shooting things and drinking whiskey. Joan Didion showed us how to be a Woman by writing pretty words about curtains and fancy flower leis. That is what Male Writing and Female Writing should do. Muscular prose. Pretty things. As soon as Joan Didion tried to be feminine and personal and political all at the same time, this article basically posits, she lost it. How dare she get old and continue to expect us to listen to her! How dare she share her personal life and still demand that we take her seriously as a writer! Being old and female and having emotions in public? That makes you ridiculous.

I am being reductive. But I’m so tired. Today, I’m just so effing tired of the gender wars. I have had some firsthand experience with young people who think Hunter S. Thompson showed them how to be a man by talking about whiskey and peyote. These are the same people who think they’re Hunter S. fans because they saw both movies, who tell me they want to be writers because they saw Almost Famous. They are less tragic only than the young ladies who tell me that Paris Hilton is a “real businesswoman.” True fans of Hunter S. Thompson see that he held a dark mirror up to the world. He observed keenly, he wrote out of a profound repulsion for hypocrisy and cant. His accomplishment was not to give us permission to behave badly; he was just as harsh on himself as he was on his subjects. We, male and female alike, are perfectly capable of figuring out how to barf on people’s shoes without great Gonzo journalism. And we don’t need Joan Didion to show us how to fold our napkins. Paris Hilton, in fact, while not an entrepreneur, does teach women how to adopt status symbols. Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion are both much more complex and important than that.

I have some deep-seated problems with Didion’s work, and I haven’t read Blue Nights yet, and, yes, I’m worried I’ll have serious problems with it… but I have problems with her as a lifelong admirer of her work. And I really don’t want to get into that here.

Fact is, I’m tired of Joan Didion, in an existential way, tired of the way I sometimes can’t get her voice out of my head, tired of my own voice. I believe we all need a swift spiritual kick to the head, or maybe, just some karaoke. No really. I was entranced last night by a funny little book called “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” (by Raina Lee). It’s just a primer on singing over recorded music in public, but it made me think about the beauty of small acts of social courage, about cultural differences and lived tolerance, about the demon on Buffy who could read your soul by watching you sing… It made me think about close the ridiculous sits to the sublime. Being provocative and cutting is sometimes easier than being enthusiastic and vulnerable. Curtains and flowers, whiskey and horse races, the pitfalls of social outings, our quotidian hypocrisies and shame… Stupid karaoke. In the light of a keen and perceptive attention, dross can be gold, gold can be worthless.

I wander through the toy store and think about Lisbeth Salander. I look at the “Spa & Perfume Science Kit!” for girls, the “Doctor Barbie” with her pink-heart stethoscope. Most days, I love pink. Some days, I imagine Lisbeth Salander roaring down the aisle on her bike with one hand out, knocking everything down, then tossing a cigarette butt into the pink plastic carnage. Burn it. Burn it all.

The Fincher movie drops into a culture drowning in procedural cop shows. Every week, hundreds of well-intentioned, serious, square-jawed cops bring killers-of-women to justice. Every week, evil is enacted on the bodies of women and avenged as a means of absolving the system. Lisbeth Salander is an Old Testament angel of alternative mayhem. The raper of women will be raped in return. I will turn your technology against you. How much does this help us? Probably not much. And yet I woke up the night after I saw the movie and bought Lisbeth Salander earrings before breakfast. In the book, she didn’t have this effect on me. But I don’t read procedurals. I watch them.

Martin, the main bad guy, acted out his fantasies. He raped and killed. We don’t see Martin’s victims, however, we don’t go through the usual forensic porn. We hear descriptions of the victims, we see still photos in the frame. But we already know what they look like; we saw them last week on Special Victims Unit. We see Lisbeth’s body, we see Lisbeth raped, and then we see her guardian/attacker’s body: this time he’s the one naked, handcuffed, screaming in pain, and tattooed with his crime. Lisbeth roars out of our collectively pissed-off subconscious, a goth Tinkerbell on two wheels, and drives Martin’s SUV off the road. His car flips over. Blood trickles down his forehead. He stares at her through the windshield. She clicks the safety on her gun. But she doesn’t have to shoot him, because she motherfucking blows him up with her mind. The visual feels like this:  You’ve been taking your fantasies out on me for far too long. I now fantasize you out of existence. Boom.

His death is in some ways less gratifying than the journey of Rooney Mara going femme and square, and then back to her Lisbeth self. She kills the Chanel version of herself, and visually, that death is more satisfying. In order to enact her final vengeance, she dons a blonde wig, takes out her piercings and wears expensive clothes. Porcelain skin uninterrupted, she sits quietly at a series of desks, in front of fat, smug, white men. The well-appointed off-shore banks remind us of the wood-paneled office of her sadistic pig guardian. But this time, Lisbeth has all the power. She has the numbers, the code. She takes what she wants. Then she smokes and throws the blonde wig out the window of a train. She reclaims the banners of her pain. Look, here is the girlie-girl of your dreams, the cream puff you trust, the girl you think you can control, she tells the camera. I drive my motorcycle all over her. And you.

When I read the book, I resisted Lisbeth’s flattened moral universe, where systemic power imbalances are expressed, conveniently, as gothic sexual crimes. The rich and powerful don’t always do us the favor of sinning so flamboyantly. I resisted Lisbeth’s flat chest and boyish looks—she seemed like she could wield a golf club as a weapon but not like she had ever had her period. I resisted the idea that horrific sexual abuse mints heroes. I resisted Stieg Larsson’s sentences, translated from the Swedish.

But the movie got under my skin. I read some psychological research on tattoos. “A tattoo should serve as a clinical reminder to think about the possibility of a psychiatric problem being present.” Tattoos are “comorbid” with risk-taking behavior, linked to trauma and abuse, but also sometimes a form of “self-expression and personal identity.” They correlate with increased sexual behavior, with more drinking but not—interestingly—with more binge-drinking. The social mores around them are changing; they’re getting more common. They are, according to experts, sometimes a sign of rebellion against the mainstream. No shit? Even my Facebook feed polices female skin: that tattoo makes her “needy,” “stupid hipster,” “tramp stamp.” My inner Lisbeth says: Back off. Sometimes, body art is art, not symptom. Sometimes art can’t be explained by science, or reduced to a political program, even mass art that seems to have emerged directly from the reptilian base of our brains… Lisbeth Salander has been in my dreams.

We tattoo our skin to make exterior some interior mark, pain and change worn as aesthetic statement. We take the stigma and claim it. We colonize the margin and have a party there. Some days, we do the slow, hard work of changing the terms of the fight. And some days, we indulge our vengeful fantasies. Girls draw pink unicorns, they keep journals, they hack computers, rip their jeans and get tattoos. Ink it on my back forever.