In Which Fainting Is The First Of Many Symptoms

Consciousness

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

A woman fainted on the subway this morning. The Q plunged into darkness after rattling over the Manhattan Bridge, and then it happened. I didn't see it. There were too many people in the way. What I saw were the reactions of every person who watched her faint. New Yorkers are inured to public displays of affection and celebrities. Nothing shocks them except the sight of someone losing consciousness.

It didn't take long for her to revive. "She's blinking, that's a good sign," said a woman near me. "Are you all right?" asked thirteen different people. "I'm fine," she said. I caught a glimpse of her − thin, with red hair and that telltale pale post-faint face. Then she disappeared again, so I pricked my ears and listened.

"Did you have anything to eat this morning?" asked the man who stepped into the role of chief caretaker.

"Yeah...yeah, I did."

"Has this happened before?"

"No, it hasn't." For the rest of the ride, a group of commuters gently surrounded her, asking little questions, like pediatricians. I got off at Herald Square and thought about her for the rest of the day. I hope someone had the good sense to steer her toward orange juice.

I am a fainter, so all other fainters are kindred spirits to me. St. Valentine is more than a representative for affianced couples and beekeepers − he's the patron saint of fainting. And we need him! We fainters are at the mercy of the world: we are fine, and yet we’re a whoosh away from unconsciousness; we are hypersensitive to the conditions that spell our downfall (hot weather, dehydration, long periods of standing and walking). We understand how dangerous it is to be exactly our body's height from the floor, and how dangerous it can be to be alone. Someone caught that girl on the subway before she hit the ground. Public places are better places to pass out. Sure, public fainting means public embarrassment, but things end up worse when you are by yourself.

The first time I fainted, I was nine years old, combing my hair before school. It was hard to get any time alone with five other family members sharing one tiny bathroom, so when I got the mirror to myself, I set to work on taming the cowlick that sprung from my bangs. Combing it down, combing it down...the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the carpeted hallway and my mother was looking into my eyeballs: "You fainted."

Because it was the first time, I didn't recognize any of the hallmarks of passing out for what they were, all of those freaky sensory things that tend to occur on the way down, and so I couldn’t remember what happened, not now, not even then. My mother was concerned, and yet I believe I was sent to school that day. Why should I have stayed home? I hadn't vomited or bled. I was fine. Much of the work that comes after fainting involves discerning your post-fainting state: either you are 'fine' or 'not fine.' Chipper demeanor, dilating pupils? Fine. Grey-green face, colorless lips, bad case of the shakes? Not fine.

A couple months later, it was summer and I was at a basketball day camp, miserable. Before the day's scrimmages were the brutal warm-ups. The Catholic school's gym was hot, and I hadn't drunk enough water. "High knees!" said the coach. (In my memory, he is a sinister guy.) Across the floor, I hoofed it, hustling, high knees, high knees...and then the sounds that reached my ears turned wonky, bouncing basketballs sounded like drops of water in a lake, the coach's whistle seemed very close and then very far away, and everything before my eyes went shimmery, then black.

This time I wasn't as lucky: I fell face-first on the hardwood and busted my lip. The adults thought I had been warming up with such intensity that I had kneed myself in the face. Ha! Like I'd ever muster that kind of enthusiasm for this sport, I thought. I felt bitterness toward basketball, glee at getting to leave camp for the day and adrenaline from collapsing and reviving. The nausea and overwhelming fatigue that set in after fainting didn't register.

The doctor probably poked and prodded, and my mother probably warned me to stay hydrated, but that was it. For a long time, I was afraid there was something very wrong with me, and I'm sure this is an anxiety common to all fainters − fear of the Ambiguous Symptom, the Unknown Illness. Part of the problem was my reading habits at the time. So many young adult novels I consumed featured kids with leukemia or brain cancer, scary and chronic and debilitating illnesses that obliterated childhoods, snuck up on the kids in small and terrifying increments. It was a just matter of time: sooner or later my fainting would manifest itself as something less vague and more toxic, something incurable. In my mind, the fainting was the first of many symptoms.

I had a couple of close calls throughout adolescence, but I was always able to waver on the edge of consciousness and hold on. It takes effort to tamp a near-blackout down to a mere dizzy spell. Here is how you do it: you have to put your head between your legs and breathe deeply and stay still. It's the same posture required of someone doing a Cold War duck-and-cover drill, and it calls a lot of attention to yourself, even as you are making yourself smaller. Water or juice − preferably orange juice, which packs in the most sugar − is crucial, but in the moment, consuming either is a disgusting chore. In the moment, it is impossible for you to want anything, crave anything, wish for anything. There are no petty desires. There are no desires at all. Is this why religions require fasting to the point of lightheadedness?

I turned seventeen and donated blood at the first opportunity. Doing so was a badge of honor at school − it meant you were older and not afraid of pain. Afterward I felt fine, grabbed a cookie, walked out of the gym, and got lunch. Then I put my head down on a cafeteria table for forty minutes, reeling, as my corn dog grew cold. My boyfriend was confused − did I want to go to the nurse? Should he get someone? No, no − I tried to explain, mumbling into the plastic tabletop, that going anywhere or getting anyone would result in my having to stand up, and standing up meant fainting, this was certain. I rode it out, but I was so exhausted from the effort that I curled up in an auditorium chair and slept through play rehearsal that afternoon. And I regretted the waste of a precious corn dog − still do, to be honest.

By the time I was a legal adult, my fainting did not terrify me the way it did when I was a kid. Sometimes it was funny and absurd. I gave blood again, like a masochist (hey, the Red Cross promised a free half gallon of ice cream to donors) and fainted in the waiting room at the Elk’s Club, landing in my friend’s lap, where she giggled for a few moments before summoning help. I fainted on my first day at my work-study job at a campus dining facility; I was mushing economy-sized cans of tuna into a hotel pan when I went out like a light. This time, the student supervisor caught me. Fainting makes me a lot like Blanche DuBois, only instead of depending on the kindness of strangers, I depend on their quick reflexes.

The last time I fainted was serious. Summer break was approaching, and I woke up early to bid a friend goodbye. On the way up the stairs, the warning signs appeared: blurred vision, fast heartbeat, whooshing in my ears. I should have parked it right on the stairs and waited; instead, like a fool, I tried to run back to my room. I woke up alone on the floor of my suite’s bathroom, head throbbing, a scrape on my right cheekbone. My arm was sore from breaking my fall. I could have broken that arm, or bashed my brains out. If I had stayed unconscious, someone would have seen my legs poking out of the doorframe and taken action. But it was just me, alone. I was not concussed, though I had a headache that lasted for 48 hours. It could have been so much worse.

The poor girl on the subway. She kept having to say she was fine. But let’s not forget the poor witnesses. I have never watched someone die, but I can imagine that watching someone faint is like watching someone die, a little bit. The fainter is there, and then they are there and not there at the same time. That’ the one hazard of fainting in public – scaring the living daylights out of those who watch you do it.

Fainters: when your witnesses ask you if you’re okay, say so. Tell them you’re fine. Then after you’ve collected yourself, ask them if they are okay as well, because when witnesses ask you if you are okay, they are really asking themselves the same question.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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"How Long" - The Tower And The Fool (mp3)

In Which The Flowers Trump the Paintings

Flora/Fauna

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

I was in California for the first time ever last week. All the predictable Bay Area-type things happened: redwood trees in Muir Woods dwarfed me, a homeless man sitting next to me on the bus stroked the furry trim on my winter coat, and I ate a salad whose varied lettuces hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the back of a produce truck.

Going on vacation in a place where powdery sand beaches are not the point is a bit stressful because one feels the constant need to do "cultural" or at least "metropolitan" things. I felt this in San Francisco in the same way I did when I studied abroad. Culture seems less tenuous when in a strange city; it’s more tangible, almost like a substance one can mine, refine and imbibe.

And museums are the true cultural jewel box: you visit, you look, you absorb, you maybe take down some notes in a black leather notebook, and you leave with buzzy-tired legs and a feeling that you’ve done it – you’ve taken the culture like a vitamin, and now you’re free to spend the rest of the day watching month-old Conan reruns in the hotel room.

The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park follows a fairly typical art museum template. The building is quite large, with a brushed metal exterior and an extremely subtle Andy Goldsworthy work outside. (It’s one continuous crack in the paving stones.) Across the park is the California Academy of Sciences building, whose grass-and-glass-covered domes and flashy signs for child-friendly exhibitions make the de Young’s exterior appear sober and reserved.

Inside the minimalist metal building is an observation tower, a subterranean coat check and about seven different bookstores. (I have never seen so many Exit Through the Gift Shop DVDs in one single location.) When I visited, the offerings were standard and pleasant: a traveling photography exhibition, an early 20th-century sculpture show, a Rothko here, a Rauschenberg there, African masks and Turkish textiles and that famous Wayne Thiebaud painting of three gumball machines.

I visited the de Young on the second day of their big annual event, the Bouquets to Art exhibition, in which florists from all over San Francisco create flower displays that ape certain artworks in the museum. I did not anticipate the sheer number of people present when I arrived at 11:30 am. The demographic was by and large ladies over the age of 65.

These particular ladies were splendid. All the usual septuagenarian lipstick shades: burgundy, cranberry, coral, mauve. Heavily embroidered coats, some fortified by plastic rain ponchos removed and recycled at the door. Ladies herded each other into large groups or promenaded around in duos, clutching each other at the elbows. It was charming. In the cavernous lobby, their chatter reverberated into a sort of high school cafeteria din.

I bought a ticket and maneuvered into the modern wing. Old ladies everywhere. The manner in which people were circulating through the exhibition was clear as soon as I came in: the lucky artworks that had been granted matching floral arrangements attracted most of the traffic, and paintings ignored by the artsy florists were spurned in kind by the museum-goers. The traffic swirled in tight circles around the flowers, like bees. From above it would have looked like Doppler radar footage of hurricanes.

The incredible thing was that none of the old ladies seemed to be looking at the original paintings and sculptures that the floral arrangers had used as their sources. I tried to look at the lookers, follow their gazes, see if they were studying the flowers and paintings simultaneously or one at a time, and found that they were gawking only at the blooms. I had thought Bouquets to Art would be a clever merging of art forms, a potent aesthetic convergence, a Yalta Conference of hallowed fine art and irreverent craft art, but mostly it was a chance for people to marvel at decorative botanical feats.

Something about the multitude of acid-bright blooms or the sheer size of the crowd induced a low-level mania in everyone. People were doing things that shouldn’t have been done in a museum: they squeezed between pedestals that were dangerously close to one another (one woman nearly upset an unstable Stephen de Staebler rock sculpture), they sniffed the flowers with passionate inhalations (the image of Happy the Snow White dwarf, suctioning a bouquet of goldenrods up his nostrils, came to mind), they got close enough to touch everything, they bumped past each other as if drugged and disoriented. This wasn’t Stendhal syndrome, the dizziness and confusion that one can feel in the presence of masterpieces; it was no different than the madness that occasionally possesses people in crowded subway cars. Spring fever, cabin fever.

Once I became aware of the old ladies’ abandoning of the unflowered paintings, I personified those paintings and pitied them. Shy, unaugmented by the apparently magical touch of the florists, they were literal wallflowers. I paid more attention to them, wiggled around the groups of fawning flower-lovers and looked at the unadorned art with adoring eyes.

There were Arthur Tress’s photos of San Francisco in 1964, all snapshots of Barry Goldwater supporters and beehived beach bums and girls holding signs that read “Ringo For President.” The 70-year-olds I saw in the museum would have been young and maybe even optimistic in ‘64 – if they were lifetime San Franciscans, they might have even been in those Tress photos of idealistic youths at the Republican National Convention. There was Irving Petlin’s "The Burning of Los Angeles", so large it took up an entire wall.

“That’s a big ‘un,” said one lady to another, pointing at the painting’s blaze of color as both women moved onto the next floral arrangement. Evidently no florist had volunteered to recreate the orange swirls with tiger lilies, the twisted, fleeing figures with tasteful branches of bamboo. In the next gallery, a prim and proper 19th-century portrait of a puffy young lady merited a flower arrangement equally reserved, stale daisies in neat rows.

The crush of people started to get ridiculous. A German woman turned around in the halted crowd and asked me if her backpack was unzipped. I said no, and I watched her turn back around and fiddle with the backpack’s straps, and then I made what some might see as a fatal mistake: I stopped looking at art and started looking at people. There were a number of striking, tall young women mulling about. They stood in pleasing contrast to the hordes of old women, all of them stooped and mincing. One blonde dame approached a fussy little portrait of a society woman (it had been donated by a Rockefeller), and the blonde’s coat, red and gold and black brocade, nearly matched the coat in the painting. The blonde looked at the painting, and she smiled with the easy recognition of someone looking into a mirror.

It had all gone to hell. I met one of my travel companions in the penumbra of the deserted African wing. We checked out the historical chair collection and picked out our favorites. The museum trip had dissolved into observations about old furniture: “That’s a nice red cushion.” “The Shakers had a very interesting skill set.”

We couldn’t figure out what had happened. Someone proposed that the old ladies were all SF natives who had already seen everything the de Young had to offer and thus didn’t need to go out of their way to appreciate the non-floral art. It was unanimously decided that we were the de Youngest people in the museum. The visit can be summed up by the five minutes I spent looking at Josiah McElhery’s "Model For Total Reflective Abstraction", a collection of globular objects sitting on a platform. The sculpture’s mirrored surfaces encouraged viewers to take in everything in the room: the art on the walls, the other people, the flowers, the flowers, the flowers. You look at art and all you see is something else.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Chelsea Handler. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Paraphrase Our Ribald Memoir

Dial Tone

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Are You There, Chelsea?
created by Dottie Zicklin and Julie Ann Larson

In the mid-90s, during the early stages of filming a pilot, NBC president Don Ohlmeyer had a little problem. The embryonic show in question had a script wherein one of the main female characters was to sleep with a man on the first date. Ohlmeyer worried this would negatively color the audience’s perception of the character; he was concerned that she would appear promiscuous, and promiscuity was not an appropriate trait for what was supposed to be a highly relatable character. After taping the pilot, producers handed out a questionnaire to the studio audience members, most of whom did not mind the character’s sexual behavior. The plot stayed intact.

That pilot was the first episode of Friends, and though networks like NBC probably still include questionnaires in their screening methodologies, the idea of gingerly surveying an audience’s reaction to a one-night stand is almost too quaint. At least it is in the context of the current crop of network comedies, whose pitches might have read, "Women who keep it real, have sex with their bras on and make a lot of dick jokes." Whitney Cummings wouldn’t bat an eye at Monica Geller’s first episode tryst with Paul the Wine Guy – she’d applaud it.

All of this hoopla — the hoopla about women who burp and fart and fuck and swallow the tequila worm on a regular basis — really started in earnest with Bridesmaids and now seems to be culminating in NBC's Are You There, Chelsea? starring Laura Prepon as a young Chelsea Handler and Chelsea Handler as Sloane, Chelsea Handler’s more responsible elder sister.

Are You There, Chelsea? is an evident paraphrasing of Handler’s ribald 2008 memoir Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea; the erasure of the word “vodka” from one title to the next reflects the clumsiness of the translation, as Are You There, Chelsea?’s writers have amputated all of the grimy charm of the book and replaced it with jokes about redheads and dull sitcom platitudes.

Handler is a fairly funny woman, both on her E! show and in her memoirs. Her compendium of sexual encounters, My Horizontal Life, isn’t explicit in the way a Cosmo Red-Hot Read would be, but it is autobiographical, tart, picaresque and optimistic, like a promiscuous Great Expectations. One chapter depicts Handler as a reluctant cruise ship passenger, tossing back vodka and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups, then vomiting over the side of the ship and having a man named Rico carry her back to her room "like a scene out of The English Patient." Later on the vacation, she has sex with an acrobatic young man who turns out to be a cruise ship performer. Embarrassment ensues.

A TV adaptation of Handler’s stories would seem ideal: her anecdotal style would convert well into 30-minute segments; her sex life is absurd enough to be comical, ample enough to be appropriately “edgy” for younger viewers, and still not explicit enough to merit much censorship; and her fan base would follow her from late-night to primetime without difficulty. After all, Chelsea Lately snags more young female viewers than Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The reasons for the terrible quality of Are You There, Chelsea? is threefold. First, there’s the writing. Chelsea works at a bar in New Jersey; a flashback reveals she has attempted to mate with her semi-boss, Rick (Jack McDorman) only to discover that both she and Rick enjoy being on top too much to make things work. This joke, already a bit of a stretch, is repeated three or four times throughout the pilot with different verbiage. Chelsea makes fun of a ginger hookup ("Maybe I should go out with someone like that, even if he does look like Kathy Griffin") and her virgin roommate ("She is a rare and beautiful creature. We need to keep her the way she is, and then stuff her when she dies").

Her best friend (Ali Wong) plays the sidekick to excess, and that virginal roommate (Lauren Lapkus) is an ectomorph who scurries around her apartment like a Rachel Dratch SNL sketch canned before the first dress rehearsal. Chelsea's father is crass and cheap (a flashback shows him buying a "Lettuce Leaf Kid" for a kindergarten-aged Chelsea) and the bar employs a little person (a notorious Handler fixation) who at one point explains his yen for "seniors": "She was 64. And the osteoporosis brought her down to my size."

The writing well may be symptomatic of the show’s second ill, the format. Every stale joke only grows staler in the context of multicamera shots and Ye Olde Laughe Tracke. Falling back on weary television formats seems like a cowardly recession-era impulse for comfort and reassurance. It's the equivalent of plying woman to buy chocolate by showing the same old adverts: chick cuddled up on the couch, warm and snuggly, slowly devouring a one-inch square of processed cocoa product. The most successful shows on television right now, besides those that involve warbling neophytes and panels of smug judges (a.k.a. “smudges”), establish substantial stories and employ formats that feel contemporary.

The only saving grace of Are You There, Chelsea?, Ms. Handler herself, wastes away in the fruitless older sister role. Handler parlays her trademark bitterness into playing Sloane, the evident moral compass (you can tell by the mousy brown wig) who in the first episode gives birth to a baby whose father is in Afghanistan. Sloane plays the married and monogamous foil to Chelsea and her many conquests. The portrayal of Chelsea herself is loose and relaxed, as if perpetually three drinks in, but it lacks Handler’s acidity. Like John Belushi when he removes his sunglasses near the end of The Blues Brothers, Handler can convey plenty of meaning through a single look, except Belushi’s gaze was puppyish and Handler’s is withering. She doesn't show up nearly enough in the show, and one wishes 36 weren’t an age that Hollywood deems unfit for providing suitably youthful television.

In a recent interview, the artist Josh Kline called actors "surrogates." To him, television shows are substitutions for the parts of life you don’t have time to live, and television characters as people with whom you can maintain a "low-maintenance relationship." In other words, "you know them, but they don’t know you." What makes such a one-sided relationship possible is the desire to know those ostensible actor-strangers, the people who begin as foreigners and end up as friends. Theoretically, Chelsea Handler’s popularity arises from the simulated intimacy of her talk show and books; she speaks to you, she regales you with her embarrassing stories, she is on your level, even though she’s on E! and you’re on your couch. But even that low-maintenance relationship between viewer and character becomes laborious in the context of Handler’s sitcom. There is no desire to make the foreigner a friend when the foreigner’s punchlines smell like mothballs. You don’t need a questionnaire to know that.

Like the other female-centric shows of the moment, Are You There, Chelsea? suffers from maladies of form and content. It isn’t as if Laura Prepon and Whitney Cummings and Kat Dennings aren’t funny. When Cummings dresses up as a naughty nurse and forces her boyfriend to fill out hospital forms, when Kat Dennings says "I’m dead inside" with a pouty poker face, when Prepon tells her roommate her cat’s name is Assface: this shit is completely capable of drawing laughs. But the laugh track, so useful in the 90s as a tool for underscoring the most quotable lines of Friends and Seinfeld, now murders humor with Dexter-like efficiency. Women are funny, and there’s no need to devote one article after another to that astounding fact, but in order to move forward, ladies need to ditch decaying sitcoms in favor of something that serves them better.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Pulp Fiction. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.