In anticipation of my upcoming review of THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK--which you know you are totally salivating at the very thought of--I am going to provide you with a review of my first ever published letter to the editor, which appears on Salon.com. It is not the first thing I've written to appear on the Internet (as evidenced by the blog you are now reading, and various and sundry pieces of X-Files fan fiction that you could probably find if you looked hard enough, but which I would advise you not to read because they are all classified "post-episode," which means you probably wouldn't understand what was going on unless you'd seen said episodes. And yes, I've written fan fiction. Can you honestly say you're really surprised?).
Also, this is not the first letter I've ever written to Salon. I think I've fired off about four total, one of which I was particularly proud of, a diatribe against a piece of fluff they'd printed implying that skin picking is a strange form of erotic foreplay. As a person who has suffered with complusive skin picking for most of her life, it is neither erotic nor foreplay. It's disgusting and annoying and dangerous (I've gotten a few skin infections from it, and there's a case in a medical journal that you can google about a guy who exposed bone through a spot on his back he kept picking at). It's taken me a long time to get over just being embarrassed by it, and the writer equated it with grooming done by apes. Which is actually a theory proposed by some psychologists, that much like other types of obsessive complusive behaviors it is a cleaning ritual taken to extremes, but in my case my therapist thinks it's a coping mechanism. The repetitious scratching is obscenely soothing, and the meticulous attention to scabs and sores provides a distraction from stressors. The theory makes a lot of sense even if the behavior doesn't. God bless The Husband and his infinite patience...what he must think when I come at him after my shower, thrusting a box of band-aids in his face and pointing at my back, promising I'll try to stop for real this time. But, I digress. The point of the story is that I fired off a letter to Salon calling them to task for mocking a very serious and very real mental disorder, and they didn't print it. I like to think that it was because it caused them to completely rethink their views on life and politics and PC sensitivity and they were so humilitated that they couldn't print it for fear of the public backlash, but it was probably because my letter was too long.
So my newest missive was in response to this article, about a man's dissatisfaction with Netflicks. The Husband was a patron of Netflicks when we first started dating. It was a total waste of money. Two people as lazy as we, coming together or acting of our own volition to even browse the web site--let alone place an order--was not about to happen. Also, DVDs had a tendency to sit around for...well, years it felt like, before we could be bothered to send them back. Needless to say, he cancelled once the trial period was over. The author of the article joined and cancelled over and over, until he'd finally decided that he'd try Wal-Mart's fledgling mail-order service. So I wrote a letter. Not to admonish him for even THINKING about using Wal-Mart for anything other than a conversation topic at which to direct derision and scorn, but to offer a modest suggestion. With that, I present...THE LETTER:
"A suggestion from a librarian: Try your local public library. You can reserve the new releases, they have lots of little-known independent films and -- best of all -- the movies are free."
Getting it out of the way, I work in a library, but until I finish my paper and graduate, I don't think I can technically call myself a "librarian," per say, but it's a hell of a lot easier than saying acquisitions assistant/copy cataloger, which is my actual job and which demands much convoluted explanation so I don't even bother other than to say "I buy books and put them in the computer," which still doesn't help, and I know I'm doing a grave disservice to the profession by not carefully explaining what I do to the uninitiated, but really would you sit there quietly and attentively while I outlined Dewey and LC and MARC tagging and whether or not the main entry is still relevent now that we rely more on keyword searching? I didn't think so. But getting back to the review...
This letter is AMAZING. It grabs you from the first word and delivers its message like well-placed devastating body blows to the psyche. It is concise without being terse, succinct without mincing words, and properly uses dashes. It is an opinionated ray of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy land of senseless demagoguery. It is brilliantly formulated and argued, and displays toward the author of the original piece tact which is wholely undeserving. It made me laugh, cry, and pee in my pants, and I wrote it. I can only imagine what patriotism and altruism it inspires in the heart of the casual reader.