I'm not sure she ever asks her mom if she can sleep with danger. I mean, that would be a relatively stupid question to ask one's mom. Even for Tori Spelling. Donna Martin was more concerned with sleeping with a Jew, not because he was Jewish but because he was Whatshisface Brian Austin Green's character...David Silver. That was his name. Shannon Doherty wouldn't ever have bothered to ask. Not even Brenda Walsh would ask. She would just do it. She would just sleep with danger or dangeous boys or, at least, boys with scars on their eyebrows, a brooding sensibility, a dad in jail, a predisposition to alcohol and drug abuse, and who ride motorcycles. At least Dylan wore a helmet. At least I remember him riding with a helmet. I'm not sure that boasts much for safety, though, considering the risk involved.
Donna was afraid of losing her virginity. I'm not sure why. According to anything I know about Tori Spelling--which isn't much (thankfully), but which I consider far too much for someone as unconcerned about Tori Spelling as I am--I'm sure Spelling wouldn't have asked permission for much. She seemed like a bit of a party hag in the '90s tabloid scene, her with BFF-of-the-decade, Doherty. In the Lifetime movie, the "Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?," a movie which Lifetime calls "a classic," the girl Tori plays seems to ask a lot of questions to her mother. Not that the titular question is one of them, though. Again, I stand by my assessment that it would be a relatively stupid question to ask one's mom.
There's really no accounting for why I care to write about this, at all. Nor is there any accounting for the relevance of this topic on my life. There really isn't any. It's just some thing that I'm spending some time thinking about for the sheer lack of anything else to think about.
As I type, the tab behind this active tab is that of my Gmail Inbox. As I've typed thus far, I've gone out to smoke a ciggie and returned to answer the phone twice. Having exhausted the majority of my mandatory Monday tasks during the previous three hours of my shift, I actually have that little to do. Here I am on this tab, typing away some rambling trivial nonsense about "90210" characters of yore and all I care about is that Gmail Inbox tab that I've had opened now for a total of maybe ten minutes today. There it is. Quiet. On stand-by. No notification of an email. No notification of some chat message. It's just there, idling in the background of my computer screen.
So, why does the damned thing bother me so much? What is this persistent urge to check back on it? Where does it come from? And, truly, what would it accomplish in the activation of the green dot by my Gmail handle on the chat list? The truth is fucking retarded. It's so fucking retarded that I want nothing more than to pretend that it doesn't matter. That it's not the truth, at all. That the fact that the tab is opened up at all is some mere coincidence, not deliberate in any way. How easy seems the life of the completely ignorant and self-deluded. Instead, I'm sulking away and beating myself up (figuratively, of course) for resigning myself to the compulsion of being "active," being "there." As though being there does anything for me at all when I know that it really doesn't. What I wish it did for me it's really doing against me. In this way, I am perpetrating this great fraud on myself.
In the end, there won't be anyone to whom I can complain or whine. I mean, unless I want to hear, "Who do you think you are...Tori Spelling?!" thrown at my face like a jagged rock. To which I must shake my head somberly as a reply.
There is absolutely no complaining or whining allowed...unless one is Tori Spelling, or Donna Martin, for that matter.
That being admitted [to myself, most notably], I close out the Gmail Inbox tab. It kills me, but I do it. It slays me, but only in a metaphorical sense. Really what it does is empower me. There is nothing more empowering than the mystery of absence, that the allure of the unknown. I guess that's what Donna Martin gives a shit about, retaining power through abstinence that would be lost by the discovery of sexuality. I don't blame her. Never did. She whined like fucking crazy and it pissed me off, constantly...but, in the end, she was kind of teaching me a lesson. One that Brenda Walsh never learned because, soon after she lifted the veil of her vagina, Dylan moved on to what many of us consider the "greener pastures" of the "90210" cast of characters, Kelly.
