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My friend Mike’s sister, Elizabeth, told me this story and it’s equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious.

Elizabeth works as a nurse in the Emergency Room at Johns Hopkins’ hospital where she, unfortunately, treats a lot more gun shots and stabbings and such than she’d like.  Moreover, a large percentage of the people who come into the ER are doped up on one drug or another and can be downright scary at times.  For these reasons, she explained, when relatively healthy children appear (maybe they have an ear infection, for example) it’s usually a welcome change from the otherwise tragic routine.

On a recent weekend, Elizabeth said a woman brought her two year old son in because he was complaining of pain in his stomach (he’d ended up having to have something - I can’t remember… his appendix?? - removed) and wouldn’t stop crying.  Here’s the heartbreaking part.  After the little boy was admitted, the mother left the hospital and told them to “call her when he was done”, leaving the boy to have his surgery and recover (having to stay over night) without any family in the hospital, completely alone.  At two years old.  Elizabeth said he was terrified.

Anyway.

Before this display of exemplary parenting, when the mother and son had first been taken back to the examination rooms, Elizabeth was given his admittance forms and, reading the name written on the top, said to the young boy “Hi Wayne.  You’re not feeling good huh?”

“That’s not his name,” the boy’s mother said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth replied, looking back at the clip board to confirm what she’d read before.  It said “Wayne”.  “What’s your name then?” she asked him.

“It’s DeWayne,” the mother answered.

“Oh OK.  No problem,” Elizabeth said.  “Someone must have made a mistake.  It just says ‘Wayne’ here.”

“W-A-Y-N-E?” the mother asked.

Elizabeth nodded.

“No that’s his name,” she said, “DeWayne.  But the ‘De’ is invisible.”

“Invisible?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah,” she answered,”that’s what I said.  DeWayne, but the ‘De’ is invisible.”

“I see,” Elizabeth responded.

OUR BODIES GET BIGGER BUT OUR HEARTS GET TORN UP.

by Greg Brown

After years of vague rumors on the internet, Where the Wild Things Are has finally arrived.  Until now, all we’ve had to go on were tales of director/co-writer Spike Jonze filming in the wilderness of Australia, people running around in eight-foot-tall suits, and a fight in post-production between the studio and Jonze over whether the film was too scary.  And now that it’s finally out, I would probably say that the result was the (Panglossian?) best of all possible adaptations of the book.

From the beginning, Wild Things grapples with that moment as a child where you realize that your actions have consequences of their own, consequences that have a life of their own and don’t always go away when you want them to. Just as kids have to learn object permanence, so they learn mistake permanence at some point too. The horror of the film doesn’t come when Max rages in temper tantrums but in the aftermath, a dawning awareness that he’s capable of doing bad things, that he might even be a bad person.

Learning this permanence is a large part of why the story, written down, seems so messy.  We meet the “wild things” in medias res, as Carol rages over some unknown wrong and the others try to cope with his behavior.  We never learn what happened between Carol and KW, only that it had consequences that pain their conversations to this day.  Conversations turn from happy to unhappy to scary within a few lines, as Max and other characters bounce off their hidden pains.

And yet so many of the other moments seem to have no consequences at all. The characters do physically dangerous things that tense us up and even frighten us as adults, but that any kid in the audience would just love. We know that blatant wish-fulfillment has its dangers, but the wild things get away with it as often as they don’t.  I found myself flinching as I watched some scenes, seeing trees and dirt clods fly much too close to Max for comfort.

Is it a film for adults or children? Yes. Maybe. Irrelevant. One of the incessant gut-punches of the film is how all the wild things are so emotionally naked about it all, openly admitting that they’re lonely or scared or angry. Occasionally they don’t, which makes those moments all the more powerful. There’s plenty there on the surface for a child to see and understand, even if they miss the occasional beat.

If you’re an adult, though, it’s worthwhile trying to figure out exactly where all the “wild things” came from. Talking with those who have seen it, there are generally two schools of thought on the subject. One holds that the various characters are stand-ins for Max’s emotions: Carol representing anger, Judith representing envy, etc. On the other side is the school asserting that the wild things are mangled representations of people in Max’s life; KW’s apartness mirrors the distance Max feels from his older sister, while Carol’s flashes of rage seem like the volatile emotions of an alcoholic.

While it’s fun to try and interpret the film in a way that would make a psychologist proud, it’s unnecessary to enjoy watching it.  Working on it for seven years, Spike Jonze has produced one incredibly gorgeous film, invested with as much emotion and beauty as the subject could bear. Watching Wild Things makes you wish that Jonze had been available to direct Synecdoche, New York - a film that drew your attention to the plot when you should have been looking at the emotions.  Either way, Wild Things is easily the strangest creature to be made out of a children’s book in recent memory.

Greg Brown works in northern Michigan, where he is inexplicably in charge of impressionable youth.

Five short weeks ago she gave up a career she’d hated for 25 years to do a Master’s degree in some sort of scientific hoojemajah.  She just got her mark back for her first assignment, and it’s so high it would make you blush.

So, the internet is posting me 250 business cards for free with whatever ridiculous message I choose to have on them.

The problem is deciding just which ridiculous message sums me up best.

Any suggestions?

“You put your heart in. You put your heart out. You put your heart in and Ashley in accounting, beautiful Ashley, shakes it all about. And then she asks, “Why do you put your heart out so much?”

more of the best thing i’ve read all day here, at mcsweeney’s.

I follow Mary Rambin and mostly I like her blog.  She has neat recipes and workout tips and fun fashion and makeup bits and some travel and internet stuff and it’s fluffy and fun and she comes off as approachable in a kind of online cosmo type way and I really don’t mind it at all.

What makes me sad is when she says things like “sneaking a piece of chocolate….” and takes a picture of herself nibbling at a piece of chocolate so tiny I can’t even see it, while she’s getting her hairs did.

You don’t have to sneak chocolate Mary!  You can and should eat it loudly and wildly in the faces of everyone in that salon.

No one, not one of us, needs to sneak food, y’all.  Everyone got that?

Eeeeeeexcelent.