Box Girl (21 page)

All I know is they make reading and writing nauseating and are about to cause me to have a seizure. If I am going to be this hot, wearing this little clothing, I'd like to at least be getting a tan.

Because I certainly can't get one at the actual beach. That is another one of LA's secrets. Summer months by the beach are often socked in by something called a “marine layer.” There's May Gray, June Gloom, and whatever other synonyms for
“overcast” rhyme with “July” and “August.” By the beach, summer historically shows up in September, right around the time I'm ready for it to be over. Cruelly, the marine layer only happens by the ocean; inland LA is clear and hot all summer long. Whenever my friends who live east would talk about driving to Venice Beach, I'd suggest I drive inland instead, and we'd sit on their rooftops.

Here's another dirty secret: the beaches in LA are not very nice. Sure, north of LA and south of LA—in Malibu or Manhattan Beach, say—they are gorgeous, but not so much in Santa Monica or Venice. One afternoon, while I was at the beach in Venice, my sunbathing was interrupted with a tap on my shoulder.

“Excuse me?” a high-pitched man's voice said. “Do you know what time it is?”

I shaded the sun with my hand and looked up. A man in a Speedo hovered above me.

“2:58.”

“Oh thank you,” he said, and then he just stood there. I glanced up again and realized this man was also wearing a bikini top and makeup that must have been applied in the dark.

“My name is Tammy,” he said. “Sometimes I cross-dress but I think I look pretty good. How do you think I look?”

“You look great.” I said, flatly.

“Oh, really? That's so nice.”

I focused my eyes back on my book, hoping he'd go away. Instead, he plopped down beside me, stretched out, and fell asleep.

Once I felt confident he was asleep and not dead, I gathered my things and folded up my chair. That was about all I could stand for one day.

I have noticed, however, that if someone asks what I did that day and I say I spent the day at the beach, they'll often say something like, “Nice!” or “Good for you!” But if someone
asked what I did that day and I said, “Oh I just laid on my floor, read
Us Weekly
, and ate a bag of potato chips,” no one is going to congratulate me. But it's basically the same thing. At least in my apartment I don't have to contend with skin cancer, sand, or cross-dressers named Tammy.

Voyeur

This term has become so overused, it seems to have lost all
relation to its original meaning. In its original definition, a voyeur is “one obtaining sexual gratification from observing unsuspecting individuals who are partly undressed, naked, or engaged in sexual acts.” Perhaps as a result of its overuse, a second definition has been added: “A prying observer who is usually seeking the sordid or the scandalous.”

The word
voyeur
is French for “one who sees.” Thus, the sexual undertones are not surprising; with the French, it seems, everything is sexual. Over time, the definition has shifted, and those sexual connotations have, for the most part, been lost. What has also been lost is the word “unsuspecting.” In the original definition, the person being viewed is unaware that anyone is looking.

Voyeurism in the modern context, however, seems to imply the watched are acutely mindful of being watched. Be it a participant on a reality show, an online exhibitionist who posts videos of her daily doings, or the everyday Facebook user,
the individuals being viewed are now hyperconscious of their audience.

Reality show stars sometimes claim they “forget” the camera is rolling. There is no way they forget. From my very limited experience with taping reality TV, I can assure you, there is no way they forget. One of the models I had represented asked me to participate in a shoot for her reality show pilot. (The show never got picked up.) For the episode, I was going to be the “friend at the coffee shop.” To be fair, she and I were actually friends in real life. Before we shot the scene, the producers held me in my car so our “Hellos!” and “So good to see yous!” would seem genuine. Those initial pleasantries were the only remotely real part of the whole process. The director would interrupt every minute or so to re-direct our conversation. He told me what questions to ask, such as, “What did your boyfriend's parents think about you doing
Playboy
?” This question wasn't exactly off the top of my head, considering I had completely forgotten that she had ever even been in
Playboy
, but I guess “Where did you buy that sweater?” didn't make for interesting television.

On a smaller, more routine scale, we willingly—eagerly, even—hand over infinite amounts of personal information to the loosest of acquaintances, to non-acquaintances, to strangers. This is voluntary. We sign up to do this. We log on to do this. (By “we” I mean everyday users and consumers of social media. By “we” I mean me, because I am guilty of all of this.)

We trade our privacy for that connection, that validation we crave. In a lot of ways, I think our obsession with watching other people has more to do with us wanting to believe that we are also worth watching. If someone else doesn't see what we've done—that piece we published, or that picture from the party last night—it disappears. Memories no longer suffice; moments must be made concrete, made real through photos posted on the Internet.

Hyper-aware of being watched, we tailor our online behaviors to present the version of ourselves that we believe (or wish) ourselves to be. There are two strands at work here: the public versus the private self, and the person versus the persona. There is the person living the life, then the same person mastering how their puppet appears. We are the art directors of our online lives.

Sadly, it sometimes seems our online selves are outpacing our real selves. I see many of my friends on Instagram more than I see them in real life. A friend told me that, at a wedding recently, one of the groomsmen grabbed the microphone on the bus to the reception and said, “I think we all know what we are here to do: drink beer and Instagram.”

I often find myself initiating conversations and getting cut off mid-anecdote. “Yeah I saw that,” someone will say. They've already seen the pictures on Instagram or Facebook, or they've read something about it on Twitter. I hate leading with, “I don't know if you saw this, but . . .” because I don't like making the assumption that everyone sees everything I've ever posted online. At the same time, I also live in constant fear of repeating myself. It's not easy to navigate between the moments for which we are present and the moments we are recording.

While I'm sure the box concept was more radical when it was built in 1998, I think it's more relevant now, as our obsession with watching other people live their lives has reached an almost-predatory level. The box is supposed to be the physical embodiment of this obsession, of watching someone live her life. It's supposed to be voyeuristic. But with the emergence of the Internet, this concept seems dated. And perhaps, in a quaint way, that's what makes the box even more interesting today than it was in 1998. Maybe in this age of over-sharing, that's its most unique asset. A voyeur can see some stuff, but not all your stuff. And unlike on Facebook or Instagram or
anywhere else on the Internet, I am incapable of over-sharing. If anything, I'm under-sharing. Leaving something to the imagination. Someone can Google far more information about any person on the planet than anyone standing fifteen feet away can find out about me.

True Facts About a Box Girl
⁹

  
1.
  
I hope that someday my best girlfriends and I outlive our husbands so we can move to Miami and live like
The Golden Girls
.

  
2.
  
I have never met a Gemini, a Canadian, or a person from Maryland I don't like.

  
3.
  
By some freak chance, I won a free throw contest in the fourth grade by making nine out of ten baskets. My picture was in the local paper. (Small town; it must have been a slow week for rabid raccoon sightings.)

  
4.
  
I once drove off with the gas nozzle still stuck in my car; ripped the thing right off the pump. There are conflicting theories as to whose fault this actually was. There are three potential suspects: Me because I was driving the car; Rachel because she was pumping the gas; and Heather because she accidentally forgot to pay for her bag of chips inside the gas station. The prevailing theory is that it was Heather's fault because of karma and all.

  
5.
  
In college, I once drank an entire bottle of hot sauce for $500. Under no circumstances do I suggest doing this. I wasn't right for weeks.

  
6.
  
Heather and I used to have a pet goldfish named Tuna, but not for very long. Apparently we were feeding him too much food because he popped. Literally exploded. There were bits of poor Tuna all over that fishbowl.

  
7.
  
I have always wanted to know: Who put the cat
in
the bag?

  
8.
  
I want to know what the hell ever happened to The Food Pyramid, when I was
encouraged
to eat six to eleven servings of bread a day.

  
9.
  
When I was a child, I used to find it wildly amusing when my older brother would pretend he was retarded in public places, and, at say, Toys“R”Us, would throw himself on the ground screaming and flailing around until my mom couldn't take it anymore and would grab him by the arm and yell, “Get up! Get up, damnit!” and strangers would be like, “Oh what a horrible mother treating her retarded son like that.” He was really good at this.

10.
  
I am sorry if the above offended anyone. Now that I am closer to child-rearing age and have friends with special-needs children, this isn't that funny anymore. But man, in 1989, this was pee-in-your-pants hilarious.

11.
  
I am terrified of what kids can do on computers these days. I don't trust anyone under twelve.

12.
  
I have no idea how the Internet works. I would love for someone to explain it to me. Until someone does, I am going to accept “magic” as the explanation.

13.
  
I have no idea how dry cleaning works. I believe that, too, is magical. I don't care for an explanation.

14.
  
My personal purgatory would be looking for my car in a never-ending parking garage with John Mayer's “Your Body Is a Wonderland” playing on a loop.

15.
  
I hope heaven is a giant breakfast buffet.