Here are some of the other most interesting videos we saw this year. Please share your own.

Azealia Banks. Because it’s hard to look away. She’s really something. Great editing. And also a really cool song.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Destroyer. Again, it’s kind of hard to look away. And a great song.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Beyonce. Just a fascinating appropriation (do grad student kids still say this?) of ghetto culture by a near-billionaire. And Beyonce looks totally hot.

Superchunk. This is for you Steph and your deep love for Toonces. Even though you don’t own a cat.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wild Flag. Rachel already posted this. But so fun, it’s worth posting again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Holy Ghost feat. Michael McDonald. Yes, just a fan mash-up video, but so excellent. Why don’t people dance like this anymore? It’s so rad. Long live disco.

It’s the night that someone was killed. The reckless thing I did is related to that death, but not causally. In fact, I could have saved that someone’s life if the reckless thing I did had actually gone terribly wrong, instead of accidentally right. Or at least this occurs to me, all these years later.

June 1983

I was a senior in high school in my small town, stumbling and sliding toward college in a big city in the fall. My good fortune and my classmates’ apathy about schoolwork had affected me, normally the good boy who listened to his teachers and did all his homework. I was failing calculus and screwing around in Spanish class, barely paying attention in English and physics. What did I care? My application to Big Time University Far from Home had been accepted months earlier, winter quarter grades had been reported, and there was nothing left to do but wait around restlessly until I could shake off the dust of that dusty little town and become somebody else. Fucking around was a big priority. In fact, fucking around was the only priority.

My torrid-and-yet-chaste, on-and-off-and-on-and-off-again romance was off, off, off. I had no real interest in any other girls and no genuine interest in attending the senior prom, but I also didn’t want to seem like I was making a statement by skipping it. In that little town of mine, everyone (yes, everyone) went to the big dance. Also, my ex was going with the brother of a friend, and I didn’t want it to seem like I couldn’t get a date. All the same, there was no one I wanted to ask, and my general passivity led me to delay even trying to think of someone.

So, when C. — on whom I had had a crush on in the first grade and who had recently shown interest in me after my last breakup — asked me, my problem was solved. Well, sort of, because I still had to go to the dance and act like I wanted to go with her. Forgive me, please. I know that this was bad behavior and poor form, but I was an immature and self-centered 17-year-old.

On the senior trip to Big Capitol City, which took place after C. had asked me to the dance but before the big event, she came on to me really strong and freaked me the hell out. With no sexual experience at all (remember: torrid-and-yet-chaste), I was terrified by the potential of having sex, particularly with someone I was not interested in romantically.

I didn’t know how to reject her without seeming rude, but also was fascinated by a real live girl finding me attractive enough to track me down at the hotel pool and throw herself at me — literally. I have a somatic memory of her scissoring her legs around my torso under water, rubbing me red with the prickly sandpaper of her razor-stubble-flecked thighs. Somehow, I don’t remember how, I extricated myself from that vise grip and fled, managing to avoid her for the rest of the trip.

With a couple weeks to go before the dance, I still hadn’t ordered my tux or a corsage for my date. I drifted along, thinking maybe somehow this could all be escaped. C. had revealed that we would be attending prom on a double date with her best friend (A.) and her date (M.), a recent graduate who had returned from his first year of college. Reportedly, A. and M. had been having Major Sex for about two years. I began to feel even more the pressure of C.’s expectations. After the dance, A. and M. would likely find somewhere to go and do the nasty. I would be expected to put out or face great embarrassment, or so I thought.

Further complicating things and compounding my panic and trepidation, my best-friend-and-enabler, E., had backed out of going to the dance with his date, but was still planning on attending (a very sad and silly story I won’t go into here). He was applying subtle pressure to go stag with him. It sounded appealing in that I’d solve my problem. However, I’d somehow have to create an escape hatch that would allow me to break the date with C. but still go to the dance. It was too complicated. I passively drifted in an eddy swirling around me that funneled me toward that terrible and frightening date on the calendar.

Eventually, I procured a tuxedo, I know not how. I do remember the mortifying sensation of slinking into the florist’s shop the morning of the dance to pick up a generic corsage. There weren’t many left in stock, and the woman helping me pointed out that I should have reserved something earlier.

I had, in fact, spent many hours the previous day weaving a daisy chain headdress for my date from flowers picked from the field behind my house. This was an act performed half in the belief that through it I could actually manufacture some romantic interest in my date and half in the belief that it would make my ex, who would have adored and appreciated this gesture, extremely jealous. At the last minute, I decided to leave the headdress at home. This was not an event worthy of such consecration.

I don’t remember very much of the date or of prom itself, except for a snippet of a dance here or some conversation there. Due to great shame I think I’ve managed to suppress how it was I ditched C. to go to the various post-dance parties with E.

In my own strangely passive way, I had not yet acquired my driver’s license, so I was dependent on E. for a ride, now that I had escaped my double date. He and I bounced around the countryside in his car, just as we had on innumerable nights previous throughout our teens. The only difference was that tonight we actually had places to go, places where there was guaranteed alcohol.

We made a point of hitting every party and drinking at all of them, just as everyone else was. We had all heard the lectures and absorbed the lessons (at least we thought) about drinking and driving, especially on prom night. We’d seen the videos, and our principal had given us a special speech, pleading with us to be safe, not to drink and drive. Reckless youth, indestructible, immortal to ourselves, we ignored it all.

The crowning event of the night was a sunrise gathering in a park on a pebbled beach up the lake, not far from the hotel where the dance had taken place. By the time we made it there, we were buzzed and extremely tired. All the same, there were about 30 or 40 of my classmates assembled on picnic benches and sitting on stones, still drinking, still wringing just a little more out of what was the final event before graduation.

After such a long night with such a fraught buildup, I was exhausted. The lake looked inviting, so I stripped to my shorts and went for a swim. My arms and legs felt waterlogged as I did a few clumsy strokes. I remember thinking that it wasn’t such a good idea to swim in my condition, but kept at it for a few minutes all the same.

When I got out of the water, I felt like drinking one last beer, so I grabbed one from a cooler nearby. It was a Lowenbrau, at the time and at our age considered the height of sophistication. I sipped it slowly while listening to my classmates chat dazedly near the shoreline. I sat by myself, not really interested in talking to anyone.

When I finished the beer, I held the bottle in my hand and looked down at it. I clearly remember the silver foil and green glass, the blue label with beads of condensation and lake water dripping off of it.

I looked around for a trash can. A heavy metal barrel, a repurposed oil drum, was about 10 feet away; some classmates stood sleepily around it. The barrel was already full to overflowing with beer bottles. There was room for one more, it seemed, and in my inebriated state I knew just the way to get it there.

I held the bottle in my right hand, stood, and turned my left side to the barrel. Holding out my left arm to ward off a make-believe defender and raising my right above my head in perfect imitation of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I sky hooked the bottle toward the can.

I watched it arc and twist through the morning sky, backed by wispy white clouds just touched by the dawn. Not for one moment did I consider that the bottle might land anywhere but right atop that pile of glass teetering above the can’s rim. Not for one second did it cross my mind that what I was doing was stupid, that I could have hurt one of my friends standing right next to the trash can. I knew it would work. I knew that nothing could go wrong.

And nothing did. Clink! My Lowenbrau bottle slid safely right into its place with its brothers and sisters, as if drawn there by an invisible string.

T., with whom I had been friends since first or second grade, was the closest to the barrel and the bottle I had just tossed into it. We had spent countless hours playing with toys when we were kids, then playing sports together in high school.

He turned and looked at me with a gaze that said it all, that I had just unthinkingly risked his safety and well-being. He said something like, “What the hell are you doing?” He was a little angry, but more relieved that I hadn’t hit him or anyone else with the bottle, hadn’t shattered glass and sent it flying in the faces of the people standing by the barrel.

Through everything I was feeling (or not feeling) that morning, I experienced just a twinge of remorse at my actions. I must have said, “Whoops, sorry.” All the same, I had been convinced that the bottle would go where I wanted it to, and it had. No harm was done; I had been in complete control all along.

The moment passed, and T. returned to his conversation. I drifted off to find E. and we left the park to head downtown along the winding shoreline road.

We stopped at the town bakery, just opening up, and got a few doughnuts. E. drove to the lakefront in town and stopped the car; we silently ate. After a few minutes, we both drifted off to sleep. With the windows rolled down, the morning breeze wafted over us.

A brief few minutes later, blaring sirens woke us up. The breeze had died, and the bright sun was heating up the car and punishing us for everything we had done the night before. Ignoring the possibility that those sirens signaled anything to do with us, E. and I drove off. He dropped me at home, and I went to bed.

A few hours later, my brother came home and woke me up. There had been a terrible accident. T., whom I had nearly struck on the head with a beer bottle that morning, had crashed his car on the way back to town from the park, killing his date, L., and seriously injuring himself.

E. came and found me at home. He had heard the news at his sister’s graduation from junior high, where he had gone directly after dropping me off. We drifted through town that day, the sun beating down on our hungover heads. The remorse we felt, the shame, the guilt, the pain . . . I have never felt quite like that since. I remember singing over and over to myself a single line from a song that I loved at the time, the only words that could express what I desperately wanted: “Bring on the night. I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.”

I called C. to make sure she was okay. She let me know, in a polite way that I did not deserve, that ditching her had been cruel and thoughtless. I knew it, and it shamed me, of course, but I appreciated being told.

Somehow, the sun went down. The rest of the weekend passed. I avoided reading the local papers, 32-point headlines and photos of T. and L. above the fold. Graduation came and went. Then summer. Then college.

T. recovered physically but went into a psychological tailspin. He was overwhelmed with guilt for what he had done. Up to that point an outdoors enthusiast, he literally became a hermit over the next couple of years. He fled to the hills around our little town, sleeping in handmade shelters of his own devising, descending into town to find bits of work here and there and pick up supplies. I ran into him a few times when I came back to town to visit, but we never did hang out after that.

I’ve never told anyone this story before, and I don’t know why it’s been weighing on my mind lately. Only recently have I come to think how different things would have been had I beaned T. on the head with that bottle. Maybe I would have knocked him out cold. Maybe I would have even blinded him. What happened next wouldn’t have happened.

Of course, I wouldn’t have known what I had prevented because it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t be writing about the guilt I was spared and the guilt that I still feel. I wouldn’t be thinking, all these years later, about the good and bad consequences of being extremely lucky.

I started out cavalier about our chances; after all, my mom didn’t go through menopause until she was in her late 50’s, so surely that meant that I’d take after her and be fertile well into my middle age. Looking back, this is so incredibly naive. I found out the hard way that it doesn’t exactly work that way, and in fact she urged me through my 30’s that I should really have a baby sooner rather than later (this all during the time I was with a boyfriend she hated). That wasn’t in the realm of possibility at the time, but I now see what she was getting at.

We did it all: fertility specialists, acupuncture, herbs, dietary changes, charting, exercise, no exercise, surgery, IUI, IVF. I read all the books about fertility and getting pregnant, and pinned my hopes on the women who said that it could be done after 40 and that the doctors are wrong. But four and a half years and two miscarriages later, we were still standing at the station. We had run as fast as we could, but still we missed the train.

Not only is this whole process heartbreaking, frustrating, and all-consuming; successful or not, it’s exceedingly expensive. To date we’ve probably spent somewhere around $50,000 trying to have a baby. (Don’t ask me where we got that kind of money; I’m not exactly sure. We’re far from rich). Some people spend more. Sometimes it seems that we literally flushed all of our money down the toilet. The fertility industry deals in hope, and quite often it’s false. Before we embarked on our second IVF, I grilled my doctor about the reality of our situation. “How many 44 year old women have you treated that have had successful pregnancies with IVFs?” I asked her. She was hesistant. She explained that while there was a small chance for me at 44, there was almost no chance at 45 or later. Even knowing that I was playing a shell game, I had to try one more time. I was hooked in to that tiny hope that I would get lucky.

It’s been six months since that last IVF, and since then I’ve turned 45 and have finally come to the realization that it ain’t gonna happen, at least not the way I always heard it should be. We still have options, though, and for that I’m grateful. We are now looking for an egg donor – something that 30 years ago would not have been an option. It’s taken us a long time to wrap our heads around the idea that if we successfully have a child going this route, that it won’t be my dna that gets passed along. We mourned this reality for quite a while, but just in the past few weeks I’ve begun to see this as a positive thing.

I mean, how many people get to pick the traits that their child will have? You can pick your partner, and hopefully the things that you find attractive in him or her will also be things that you would like to see passed down to your child. This is one of the big reasons that I wanted to have a child with The Fella – he’s wonderful, kind, handsome, intelligent, funny – the list goes on. There are a few traits of my own that I would have liked to pass on to my kid – olive skin, musical ability, (supposed) smarts – but quite a few that I would gladly jettison. Family health history? Terrible eyesight? See ya! Short stature? Big nose? Adios! Klutziness, absent-mindedness? Don’t let the door hit you on your way out!

So now begins the process of choosing the baby-momma, as it were. There are hundreds of agencies with cloying names like “Family Creations” and “Conceptual Options” that deal in a different kind of hope: the egg-trade, plying young women desperate for money to older women desperate for their last chance at motherhood. Each agency has a searchable database of women between the ages of 20-30 that have already been vetted (to a certain extent) and who will gladly go through a month of discomfort in exchange for $5-$8,000 (for pain and suffering; you can’t legally buy human body parts in the U.S.).

Looking for an egg donor is very much like online dating, (and I find it somewhat ironic that I met The Fella online as well – my life is very post-modern). The better agencies have the girls fill out extensive questionnaires about their family health history, their childhood, their hobbies, how they’ve done in school, their aspirations, and even their reasons for donating (as if that really matters). There are pictures of the women as adults and as children, and sometimes they post pictures of their own children, if they have any. With each profile, I find myself going through small stages of hope and disappointment; very often the ones with the physical traits I’m looking for don’t necessarily have the right talents or education, or vice-versa, but occasionally I’ll find someone who is exactly what I’m looking for, and then I’m madly in love and making plans before we’ve even met – imagining long walks on the beach, talking for hours in a cafe, making her mix tapes…. Invariably, those girls are already spoken for, so unless I want to wait another six months before they are available again, I have to move along.

In the course of this process I can’t help but feel just a little bit lecherous. In my mind’s eye I’ve become this gnarled old crone beckoning young girls to my gingerbread house. Recently we went to an in-store at a local record store which brought a throng of 20-something hipsters, with whom we stood in line for a half hour waiting to be let in. I found myself greedily eyeing the young women standing in front of us, sizing up their height, weight, figures, skin, hair, and listening in on their conversations to see if they were intelligent. I asked myself if one of these girls could be the one. Everywhere I go, in fact, I notice young women in a way that I never have before.

Once you find the girl of your dreams, be prepared to plop down another small fortune: we might well spend the equivalent of what we’ve already forked out on fertility treatments in the last 4 years in one shot. So in addition to dealing with the grief of our past failures and potential of future ones, we have to wrap our brains around spending the equivalent of another down payment on a house, and still there’s no guarantee that I’ll become or remain pregnant.

I’d like to say that looks and other things don’t matter to me, but they do. I’ve spoken to a few people who have gone through this process, and amazingly, many say that looks don’t matter; they just want a healthy baby, and of course I want a healthy baby more than anything. Still, It’s odd to think that in a way you are replacing yourself when you have a child, but in this case, I’d like to replace myself with a slightly better version – I mean, why settle for the 3G when you can get the 4G? Of course I’d like my kid to be taller, smarter, more talented, more focused – the list goes on, and on. The question of “nature vs. nurture” has begun to loom large for us. It seems like athleticism is something you’re born with (I am decidedly not athletic), but what about non-visible traits? Is intelligence inherited, or can genius be cultivated? Could a child that would have done horribly in school or ended up in a gang become a highly successful doctor/lawyer/teacher/clothing designer/golfer/rockstar given the right circumstances? Everybody has these expectations and hopes for his or her kids, but when you actually have a certain amount of control over the situation, the choices are daunting. It’s so hard to tell, even with the amount of information you’re given, what a woman is really like without meeting her and spending time with her; online profiles are still very two-dimensional. Some women will agree to meet you before you commit to egg donation, but others, understandably, want to remain anonymous.

And even if we do find a woman who has all the perfect traits, we still don’t know what we’re gonna get. DNA can be sneaky. And I’ve learned through all of this that not only do you not always get what you want, you can hardly ever get what you expect. All we can do is try to choose the best route and hope we get on the train this time. So let me ask myself: Am I feeling lucky, punk?

I’m sorry to say that gender comes into it too–if I’m having trouble with one of these Guys, I never want the Hubs to get involved, since then it seems like I’m sending in “My Husband” to do the dirtywork for me because I’m a weak female. I also have a bit of a subconscious and sexist sense that I’ll get better service if it’s just me, which is probably really naive (and no, I don’t try to work that angle). But I do work hard to nourish the relationship with the Guy, because lord knows, I need the Guy.

For example, since we have two mid-’90s cars in our family, the Mechanic Guy knows us well–as busy as the local shop is, I can call up with just “Hey, Sal, it’s me” and he instantly knows the last problem my car had and asks how it’s doing. I know this should bring me concern–if your mechanic knows you that well, maybe you need a new car–but instead, it makes me feel safe and secure and part of a community. Sal knows my car! I can’t get a new car! Sal’s taking care of this car! He’s my Guy!

The Contractor Guy is a particularly important Guy to cultivate carefully because he spends a lot of time in your house. With you. LIke when you first wake up and come out to pee in your pajamas, he’s already there. You have to kind of be okay with him. If he talks really a lot and traps you in your own house sometime, you just have to be grateful that at least he shares your general politics despite some really random occasional race-bombs that seem to contradict that. And if you’re totally dependent on trusting this Guy, and you really need to believe he likes you and is giving you an honest deal, sometimes you let those bombs slide, which is shameful. When I need to trust the Guy, I start to quote him (not on the race stuff of course, but on whatever he thinks is best to do for the house) and like to drop into conversation how much I trust him and how good of a job I think he’s doing. I desperately need to reassure myself of this constantly and place full confidence in him. The Hubs accused me of being a victim of Stockholm syndrome with this Guy, and I had to concede he was right. I’ll follow the Guy to hold up the bank for the SLA if I think it will result in a reputable job on my windows or my carburetor.

There are other kinds of Guys in everyone’s lives that don’t inspire the same kind of frantic, clinging devotion–the FedEx Guy, for example, or the Recycling Guy. Those are just Helpful Familiar Guys. My brother-in-law has a Wine Guy (I’m in a slightly different, ah, socioeconomic class from that), and I have friends who have their Fish Guy at the market. Those are Luxury Guys. Neither category has the power to threaten your very stability if you don’t have complete faith in their loyalty to you. The Hubs, on the other hand, has a Barber Guy who recently redid the floors in his shop without warning, and when the Hubs drove by and saw the sink and chair taken out and the shop closed down (temporarily, it turned out), his anxiety and distress reached frenzied proportions until he found out what was going on. Of course it did: He thought he was losing his Guy.

The tide can turn quickly between me and the Guy. The Guy whose love and trust I’ve been painstakingly wooing all this time with my false intimacy and compliments and inside jokes can easily betray me with one sloppily installed doorknob, one miscommunication about the way the tree should be taken out of the yard, one unrecovered set of files on the hard drive transfer (okay, so that is worthy of my total breakup and excommunication, and if I confess that I’m writing this post on some weak-ass program called TextEdit because my Geek Squad Guy lost all my word processing software along with all my course files and all my mp3s while upgrading my hard drive yesterday, I’ll probably start to cry, so let’s just go back to the doorknob example). The bottom line is, I need to love the Guy. I place all of my fragile soul in the hands of the Guy, because I cannot do certain important things myself, or even if I can, I don’t trust that I can do it as well as the Guy. Are you the opposite of a Renaissance Man? Gotta getta Guy.

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It just seemed like it deserved this:
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Hmmm, or this:
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Or?
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Then this today:
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Had to try again:
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Can’t wait to see what the coming days bring.

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