Bothersome

The majority of my writing inspiration comes from things that bother me. I’m not sure I like it that way, but you don’t really get to pick what inspires you, do you?

Most of the times that I actually have a reason to sit down and write something is because I feel that it will either A. make me feel better as a venting process, or B. Actually get someone to read my message and hopefully help change the thing that bothers me. Some times it’s both. I get satisfaction from the process. Luckily I don’t think I’m necessarily alone on this. How many songs have been sung about failed love? How many books have been written in attempt to alter the course of something wrong? Didn’t our current president run on the inspiration and platform of change? Occasionally I witness something so beautiful, or something so amazing that I feel the need to share it with others, but it’s less frequent then I’d like.

Recently I had a friend come home from his second tour in Iraq. He hasn’t found a job yet. He told me that unless he wants to be a body guard or police man, his networking options are limited. He feels inferior to my friends and I who had gotten jobs when he got shipped out. While he was risking his life for us, we were making money, and he’s the one that feels emasculated, but there are very few people willing to help. This is something that bugs me. So I write about it.

Life Chronicles

Twitter and Facebook provide a way for people who don't think of themselves as writers to put their lives on paper. Status updates, if modified regularly over a significant period of time, can constitute a sort of unintentional memoir. Facebook chronicles the growth of babies into children into actual people, the blossoming of casual relationships into more serious ones, ("Jack is 'in a relationship'." "Jack is 'engaged.' "Jack is 'married.'") and vice versa (Jack is no longer 'in a relationship'.) I wonder sometimes if we'll show our grandchildren backed up copies of our feeds instead of scrapbooks or photo albums.

Clicking mindlessly through Facebook tonight, I discovered something else Facebook records, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. A few years ago, I friended a boy who'd been a very close friend my junior year in high school, and with whom I'd since lost touch. I knew he was suffering from cancer because he posted witty status updates about his chemo regimen pretty regularly. I hadn't seen him in my feed in a while, so I decided to look him up. His wall was filled with messages from friends sending their condolences to his family. Apparently, he died in February.

His facebook profile is now a sort of living monument to his memory. Some people still post to it as though he's alive to respond, while others have posted photos and poetry commemorating his life. I suppose the page will live on forever, unless facebook has a policy about deceased users. It seems morbid somehow, but also somehow...necessary? The wall posts themselves tell a story, and allow everyone to celebrate his memory, not just those close enough to him to have been invited to his funeral. The posts are thoughtful and sad, and I would imagine it means a lot to his family to know how much their son was loved. So are virtual memorials tasteful or tacky? This seems like a question that's only going to get more important as more and more people join social networking sites, and I'm still not sure what I think.

A Serious Journalism Student

As a journalism undergrad, I thought writing was serious business. In class, we wrote about serious subjects, almost always in reverse pyramid form. There was no such thing as snark in journalism school. Writing wasn't funny stuff.

It seemed so serious, in fact, that I was scared off of it for a bit. I started favoring advertising/PR classes within the major because I liked the idea that they opened me up to the multimedia forum. I spent most of my time, however, writing press releases for Oreo cookies and coming up with ad campaigns for Gambler's Anonymous. Not of that was all that funny either.

But years later, I worked under a blog editor and news writer who completely warped my view on what living the life of a journalist could look like. As a good reporter should, she had her finger on the pulse of everything going on in the city, but when the story merited it, (which was often) she slipped a joke in. Maybe several. She didn't take everything so friggin' seriously.

Not only that, she loved math jokes and general nerdery, and was a die hard fan of TV. This floored mostly because I'd never really heard anyone openly admit their love of television without fear of being shunned.

I told her I wanted to write about Oprah, and her response was, "Oprah's a goldmine." She let me. I couldn't believe someone was actually allowing me to take the "Oprah beat."

Ok, so writing about Oprah isn't "journalism." I'm not arguing that it is. But no one told the journalism students of 10 years ago that this is the kind of writing life one could have. It was such a surprise.

Picture Books for Adults

Is there a bias against multimedia writing art form? Probably. Is it a form that’s being revolutionized by e-books on tablet computers? Hopefully. Should there be a bias against works that dare to present the written word in unconventional ways? No.

After all, the very first book printed on a press with moveable type, the Guttenberg Bible, was beautifully enhanced with illuminations – painted decorations to the text – and rubrications – handwritten titles, chapter headings, and instructions. Though the Bible was printed on a press, the typesetters left room for artists to hand paint these enhancements. These rare books are not prized now just because of their scarcity and historical worth, but also because they are one-of-a-kind pieces of art.

The negative attitudes toward works that utilize multimedia elements probably stem from the fact that each of us grew up with them. All of your favorite childhood books – Winnie the Pooh, Where’s Waldo, Where the Wild Things Are – are illustrated. Even more interactive are the original "e-books" with buttons that play a sound when you come to a certain part of the story. But, of course, when we grow up we see all this as “kid’s stuff.” As serious adults, we’re supposed to read books that consist solely of words with white spaces in between.

Seriously though, how often do you open a really heavy autobiography or history book and flip right to the glossy pages in the middle that have the pictures? Perhaps it’s snobbery that dictates books should exclusively be a boring, printed word endeavor. It’s a bit ironic, when you think about it. I mean, aren’t books supposed to open minds?

Some hope for multimedia writers is here with the ascendancy of the iPad and its tablet computer cousins. E-books, broken free from their Etch-A-Sketch Nook prisons, have all kinds of possibilities for creative minds to enhance the text, whether it’s pop-up movies, morphing text and illustrations, or new formats that have yet to be imagined. I realize it’s a little hypocritical for me to write this screed in such an archaic style.

So, here’s a picture ---->

What's it like?

As writers/artist/creators of media, we dig for new material. Or we're supposed to, right? Wouldn't we all like to think of that super cool, completely unheard of, 100% original story that audiences everywhere will love for being different? More often than not, I (and I'm sure many others) have to settle for an original re-telling of an old story. It happens. In fact, after millennia of storytelling, it's pretty damn inevitable.

But I don't go into a project asking, "What existing work can I rewrite for my own purposes?" I like to think that the screenplays into which I've poured hundreds of hours are different--maybe not good, but different. The last thing I want someone to ask is that of "what it's like," but the question has come up in every pitch I've ever witnessed. If I thought that my script was as simple as The Matrix meets Ground Hog Day (I'm looking at you, Source Code), I wouldn't have written past the first act. Do people have something against ideas that aren't really "like" anything that's been recognizably done before? I understand the principle of comfort in familiarity, but if all people accept are stories that boil down to x (Oscar) + y (blockbuster), won't we end up with a giant, box office slush pile of things we've already seen? Oh, wait...

Multimedia Dating...Fiction?

I have been internet dating nine years. It’s almost like a second job—weeding out the scams from Nigeria, the middle-aged fat, bald men who post avatar model pictures to represent themselves, the men who say they are ten years younger, or thousands of dollars richer. But it’s also my own warped escape…I’m like a hamster on a wheel pretending to get somewhere, feeling like I am exercising in the search for my baby’s daddy.

I had just seen the film Trust when this very hot, young man IMed me. Of course, I was suspicious. I told him I had just seen the film Trust and that he could very well be a predator. Being a film major, he had already seen Trust, which I was most impressed by. Plus he had a high gradepoint when he was in high school he claimed during my vetting process, so this too impressed me. The dumb guys never last long when they become offended when I correct their grammar. He wanted me to go on me.tokbox.com so he could prove to me he wasn’t a middle-aged fat, bald man. I, however, thought it was a scam to steal my bank statements. So I slept on it.

But after a day, I decided my curiosity could get the better of me. I went on and checked it out. He had given me an email and password, and although I suspected he could be a terrorist bomber, when I didn’t blow up, I thought perhaps I could let go of a little of my paranoia. So that night, we met on me.tokbox.com. Well, I saw him, but having no web cam, he didn’t see me. He really was a hot, young man, but of age, and yes, I did make him show me his ID. But I told him NOT to show me his penis because I would be TRAUMATIZED.

He inspired a sonnet. I’m always up for a good muse as a writer. But since he is one of those artistic types, I had to lay down the copyright laws right up front. I told him I owned the rights to our dialogue…that it was my play we were writing, not fodder for his next film.

He pushed me into newmedia dating. My girlfriend had told me I could download the skype app to my iphone. I had thought my Silencer Sonnet had scared him off, but the other night, there I was IMing him and downloading the skype app to my iphone, having the most titillating first experience holding up a mirror to my 3GS trying to see his face and my face at the same time on my iphone.

I think it is all fiction. He is creating who he wants me to see and I am writing Haikus for this boy at NYU because I like the way it sounds:

OkCupid

Maybe not cupid
He was too young anyway
New media gone

But while it lasted, it was great fun. And relatively safe, 3000 fictitious miles away.

The Bias against Multimedia Writing

As I've been working on my own multimedia fiction, I've been looking for inspiration. I want to see what different authors have done with the form, and how they have done it. I'm always excited to see, along with the prose, experiments in graphics (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, Breakfast of Champions, etc), typography (House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, etc), the book design itself (The Original of Laura, Flatland, Tree of Codes), or unusual formats (stories told through Facebook as we've seen, Egan's powerpoint chapter, etc).

Despite my love for multimedia writing, I find it enormously difficult to find works of this sort, both online and in the stores. I'm left scouring the Internet for books deemed similar to the ones I have already read, and I feel like I've nearly exhausted those recommendations. My last resort is often to just go to a bookstore, and flip through the pages of novels that look like they might be multimedia candidates. This method is of course extremely inefficient and whenever a bookseller sees me doing this, I feel like an idiot. I almost want to say, "I'm not a lazy reader looking for pictures. I'm a writer looking for inspiration." But I never do. The embarrassment is worth some of the recent finds I've located: Criss Cross, The Last Invisible Boy, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Do you have any recommendations of multimedia writing? How do you find the model works for the writing you want to accomplish?

Stop Acting White!

I’m a white male. I’m not accustomed to being on the “wrong side” of racism ... well, beyond the trivial “white men can’t dance” (or play basketball, or run fast). So I was sincerely confused when, a few years ago, I was shopping in an Inglewood Target with my girlfriend – who’s Hispanic… uh, Latina? …Caucasian? – and heard a mother yell at her son, “Stop acting white!”

I joked to my girlfriend, “What did she mean: Stop acting like an upstanding member of society?” She looked at me weird and said, “No, she meant stop acting out of control.” I was dumbfounded. She explained that she’d heard the term a lot growing up and that it derived from a belief amongst some people “of color” that white parents aren’t strict enough with their kids and let them run amok.

I was surprised. It’s not like before this incident I was unable to understand how a pejorative slur could hurt (I hated being called a nerd in elementary school) and I sincerely felt that I was empathetic enough to understand how the N-word or any other ethnic putdowns could be devastating. But to experience racism – especially when I had no inkling that “acting white” was even an insult – was eye-opening.

I can truthfully say I wasn’t offended – my Mom was pretty strict so I knew better – but up until that point I thought white people were only seen as oppressors and elitists. How could the proponents of the “nuclear family” be bad parents?

But to think that there are defined stereotypes for each race is to possess the same mindset that fosters racism. I needn’t list the stereotypes here – we all know them – but realizing that they are as ephemeral and, thus, as meaningless as the slurs that evoke them is actually sort of comforting.

Even the terms that we generally accept as “safe” are, well, kinda silly.

What’s an African-American? Isn’t pasty-white Charlize Theron from the Transvaal one of those?

What’s black? Isn’t it really closer to brown?

“Of color?” What, white isn’t a color?

Hispanic? Um, if all people who were once ruled by Spain are known by this term, call me British!

I’m supposed to be white. But I’m really more kind of tan.

I don't mean this to sound flip. Yes, of course the hate that backs these words causes the real harm but a little ontological reality check can’t hurt. Therefore, the next time someone hurls an insult my way, I’ll try to remember that, well, it’s all relative.

Barack Obama: Our First Black President. Or is he?

Sometimes I feel a bit strange that we call Barack Obama our first black president. As we are all well aware, really he's biracial, but it's as if we called it "close enough" in order usher in the historical moment with that much more vigor.

Perhaps we consider him black more so than biracial because his father is African, and therefore passed on a stronger presence of those genes than many African-Americans would. I don't know the stats, but we know that many African-Americans have Caucasian blood woven into them, so it makes sense that the combination of his father's genes with those of his white mother would give him a similar biological makeup.

Or maybe we consider him more black because he married a black woman and had, for all intents and purposes, black children with her. The Obamas, based solely on appearance, look more like a black family than a biracial family.

But this is not about Barack Obama not being "black enough." Not at all. He can be anything and everything he is. But by labeling him "black" as opposed to biracial, is that not somewhat of a slight to the biracial people of this country? As the pot that is America continues to melt and each generation's heritage becomes more and more blended, would it not be far more encouraging to celebrate Obama's multicultural story?

The seeds of this thought were planted when I read a fellow scribe's blog the day after the 2008 election. A biracial person herself, she wrote, "I feel like America has seen me and has said that I’m okay. I really feel a part of America. My family has never given me reason to believe that I can’t achieve anything I want, but I think that today I truly believe it. I mean, there’s a biracial President headed to the White House and he didn’t have to pick or deny any part of himself to get there."

But as a nation, we kind of did pick, and maybe that's a shame. Perhaps we did ourselves a disservice in forcing Obama to fill in just one of those bubbles on the Scantron survey.

The Only Black Girl at the Literary Fiction Reading

So I wrote about this already on my other blog a bit, but here goes:

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the books you read define who you become. Growing up, I was obsessed with Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor, mostly because the writers I knew and respected told me I should be. As I got older, I leaned primarily towards American literary fiction: first Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem and, later, Joy Williams, Chris Adrian and Lydia Davis. I read everything these authors wrote, and when they came to read their work in Houston, or Providence or later, Los Angeles, I made sure to sign up for tickets early to get a front row seat.

There's a song by the Cocker Spaniels called "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show." I can sympathize. For much of my life, I've been the only black girl at the literary fiction reading. This wasn't something I really even thought about until about a year ago when I went to seen an obscure (so obscure I don't think he's ever been published) fiction writer read in the lobby of the Standard Hotel. After the author finished, he thanked everyone in the audience and then looked at me and said "as for those of you who just happened to be passing through, thanks for listening." The reason this affected me so greatly, I think, is because I'd gone through considerable pains to attend the event. I'd recently totaled my car, which meant I'd had to take the bus. (I don't know how many of you have ever attempted to take the Metro from Koreatown to Hollywood, but let me tell you, it's no easy feat.) I know the slight (was it even a slight?) was unintentional, but it still hurt. It also made me think. When I'm reading, I tend not to think about the color of the writer, or the characters s/he creates. I love good literature in a way that has nothing to do with my feelings about race. I wonder, though, does it work both ways? Do authors ever stop to consider the color of their readers? Should they?

Selling Your Individuality

When I worked for a big investment bank in New York City, I used to get passed on opportunities simply because I wasn’t an alumni of an Ivy League School. Those schools had a huge presence in the firm I worked for and their alumni would favor the younger workers from their schools. It bugged me like crazy at the time. I knew I was a better worker than most of the Ivy Leaguers, but I had no control over the decisions being made.

In my annual review I brought this up to a managing director I respected (in a professional manner of course). He said to me, “If we had the time to truly review all of the analysts work I’m sure this type of stuff would never happen.” Oh wonderful, I thought. Someone is finally going to sympathize with me. “But”, he followed up, and there always seemed to be a “but” in that industry, “We will never have the time or money to properly do so, so instead of bitching to me, why don’t you work out a way to sell yourself? Until you do that, you will always just be a kid who didn’t go to Harvard.”

Luckily at that point I was already numb to the harsh feedback that came with finance. Being a young white male I rarely get the bad end of categorization, so I don’t have too much experience. But the business world did teach me a harsh lesson. People in positions of power will always operate with fixed resources, especially time, and as long as they do, they will make decisions by categorization. To them, the average Ivy grad is a better banker than one from a non-Ivy school. To some particularly awful ones, a white banker is better than a black banker. Complaining didn’t help me alter that. I just had to work that much harder to change the managing minds.

Breaking out of a bubble

Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X changed my life in high school. But it was also the beginning of my race education. Right around that time, our school had some guest lecturer do the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment. We also read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

After that, when someone commented on how they liked my eyes, there was always guilt mixed in with a race education discourse I felt I needed to dispel instead of just saying thank you.

In college theatre, I played a few evil racist white women.

When I was seeing a guy in New York City, I was told, “My mother wouldn’t have a problem with a white woman, but my sister would.”

Teaching in South Los Angeles for years, I am constantly dealing with race, class, and culture. It gets tiring. Especially when programs like UCLA and TeamsAmericorps bring in lecturers who pound our country’s racist history in our face, leaving me feeling powerless and drained.

My colleague who also teaches in the inner city once said through tears that being “the rich white woman from Beverly Hills” gets old. She’s never lived in Beverly Hills, was married to a Latino while living in Mexico, and is now pregnant with a Latino baby.

When my students ask, I tell them about my Finnish grandfather who didn’t go to high school because he had to drop out and help on the farm. He was the oldest of fifteen children. Or how my great grandmother was part of the Polawadamee tribe, but her mother died very young from tuberculosis. Or why The Magdalene Laundries are so devastating to me because of my Irish ancestry.

It’s easier to put people in bubbles…because once people aren’t able to categorize, data isn’t as simple as making a statistical graph to support your presentation.

Just today, as my students were taking the high school exit exam, they asked me what to bubble in for ethnicity. Thinking in the bubble keeps people in a bubble. One of our standards is 2.2 Write responses to literature that show understanding of key ideas; analyze language and theme; provide textual support; reveal awareness of author’s style; and address ambiguities, nuances, and complexities in the text. Until we can understand the complexities of ethnicity, I don’t know how we expect our students to graduate high school prepared to be part of a community.

Other

Are you:

a. Caucasian

b. African American

c. Hispanic

d. Asian

e. Other

Chinesehawaiianrussianspanishitalianfilipinopuertoricanturkish

Is there a bubble for that? Let me shade

a pie chart instead of this scantron.

Am I Chinese because someone I never met

lived in Shanghai two hundred years ago? Or

should I label myself white because I can

trace my DNA to three different parts of Europe?

Call me a bastard

because my birth broke my father’s first marriage.

Masochist, because I’ll let you hit me

just so I can kiss you back.

Sick because I coughed,

Tired because I yawned.

Happy because I smile

and you buy it.

Classify me with a bunch of half-true lies;

I’ll leave your survey blank.

I wrote this a while back, and though I’m not very proud of the quality of writing, I still feel strongly about the content. Very few things get a rise out of me, positive or negative, but surveys and profiles that request ethnic/racial information but provide limited options have always bothered me. When I wrote this poem “Other,” my frustration was directed at college surveys, standardized tests, scholarship applications, etc. I don’t mind providing my ethnic information as long as I can provide it in its entirety (see below).

Funny side fact in an otherwise serious rant: apparently I’m not even really Chinese. I’m Scythian, which basically means I come from a tribe of nomadic Mongolians that pillaged the borders of China, Russia, and Turkey way back when. My 1/8 Russian comes from another source, but because there’s no way to tell how much of the Scythian was Turkish, it’s not part of the graph.

My irritation with the ethnicity question doesn’t flare up often, but recently, I’ve heard the phrase “of color” used several times in a professional environment. The first time, I flinched and shrugged it off. Before then, I’d only heard the phrase used in Dave Chapelle and decades-old archival footage. Surely, it must have been a fluke.

Then the phrase came up at another meeting. And another. Now more people are using the phrase, and I wonder if they understand the meaning they create by using those two words. They don’t want to say black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, or go through listing every possibility in fear of forgetting someone. I get it. But “of color” translates directly into “not white,” and doesn’t that just emphasize the divide between Caucasians (who are often mixed anyway in that most are Euro-mutts) and everyone else? It also groups all non-whites in a single blur of any-shade-will-do; pretty counterproductive when one is trying to be politically correct.

When I first had to answer the dreaded ethnicity question, I asked my teachers what to do, and they told me to fill in the bubble for whatever I’m the most of. My two biggest chunks are equal parts Chinese and Spanish, but there's room for consolidation by continent, right? Take a closer look at that graph and do a little math--I’m technically more white (7/16 or 43.75%) than anything else I could mark (37.5% Asian, 6.25% Hispanic, and don't get me started on the remaining 12.5% being Hawaiian vs. Asian Pacific Islander vs. Native American), but no one looks at me and thinks white.

So what do I count as? Am I just a functional minority, a little bit "of color” tinting all my paint? When I was first hired full-time, the HR director asked the mandatory question of my ethnicity for paperwork purposes (apparently for a staff survey, but is that even legal?). Before I could say anything, she guessed Chinese, but I told her I was also part white, among other things. She flat out laughed, did not believe me, and asked what she should really put me down as. If I can’t check more than one option, and if there’s not a “multiracial” option, I have to go with “Other.”

Charlie Sheen and Quotability in Fiction

For the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with all the news relating to Charlie Sheen. I guess you could call me a bandwagoner—prior to his current media blitz, I have never really been a fan of his indefinitely postponed show, Two and a Half Men, or any of his movies. In the nineties, I dimly remember watching him in Platoon, but I don’t remember if he lives or dies in it. The excitement with his current misadventures is somewhat related: It seems like he’s tinkering on the very edge of life, taunting the abyss below. For what it’s worth, I have found him tremendously entertaining. His quotes about his “tiger DNA” or “Adonis blood” or “goddesses” would make for great lines in a book. I do hope a publisher springs on the chance to buy his tell-all memoir, for which he has reportedly set the starting bid at ten million dollars, as I would be the first in line. If Charlie Sheen wrote it himself, and not a ghostwriter, it would make for a laugh-out-loud ride, full of memorable, and in extension, quotable quips. I can see fans reciting his quips to one another as inside jokes, and many of them living on in Youtube infamy as memes. This, I think, makes for an important lesson to us aspiring writers in the digital age. Even if our medium is not as fragmentary as the Net (or as pastiche as David Shields would want), it would benefit our narratives if they could still be broken down into smaller excerpts or aphorisms even that could be spread around pretty easily. The small excerpt or aphorism might then invite people to read your book in its entirety.

James Franco Matters

According to pretty much everyone, James Franco made a mess of the Oscars. His smirking grin and borderline-stoned presentation managed to offend almost everyone, especially as pitted against Anne Hathaway's endless bubbly cheer. I'm wondering though, if maybe this wasn't another one of Franco's stunts- like playing a tortured artist on General Hospital, or rallying a bunch of Yale undergraduates to take a film class on Franco, taught by Franco, in which they will edit together documentary footage of.... do I even have to say? Franco appears to be attempting to turn his off-screen life into as much of a soundstage as his film shoots. He gets to be Franco the short story writer, Franco the professor/Ph.D. student, and Franco the stoner, all while gathering shocked journalists and increasingly confused teenaged girls in his wake and endlessly building the buzz around Franco the person. But his performance at the Oscars was so half-assed it almost had to be a put on. It left me wondering: Is Franco actually an egotistical dilettante ? Or is that just what he wants us to think?

Oscar Speeches

A few years ago I watched the Academy Awards with a friend of mine who is an actor. Don't get your hopes up; he isn't a particularly famous one, otherwise he would have been in the actual audience and not drinking beers with me on my couch. I remember watching Daniel Day-Lewis win the academy award for best actor that year for "There Will Be Blood." He got up on stage and gave a brief, but heartfelt speech. It wasn't incredible or out of the ordinary, but I looked over at my friend and said something along the lines of "Sounds like a pretty nice guy."

He looked back at me and said "Pretty good actor, you mean."

"Of course he's a good actor I replied." The Oscar was proof enough.

"You're so innocent," he quipped with a vicious little tone. "That's not his real personality."

He went on to explain that an Oscar acceptance speech is the most watched live event of an actor's career. If they are good enough to convince the academy that they are worth the award, then they are good enough to act like a heartfelt loving person during the speech. He gave a few stories of directors actually squirming in their seats in past years when certain acceptance speeches lied about actual events on set just to improve a public image.

Yikes he may have had a point. If these actors are so believable on film, what's to say they aren't just giving a performance on awards night? I enjoyed the academy awards alot less this year and it wasn't just because of the awful hosting. When Colin Firth gave his talk about holding down dance moves I wanted to believe that he was this charming actor with a great accent, but I couldn't do it. The only thing I could really be sure of is that Melissa Leo is really annoying.