I don’t crave the warmth of your unconditional approval.
(Me and Thomasina.)
Having had the opportunity to try on several pairs of jeans lately, and being reminded of how frustrating that activity usually is, I have made a definitive sketch of what most clothing designers seem to believe the dimensions of the average woman are:
Now personally, I’ve never seen a woman who looks like this, whether in real life or on the catwalks, but apparently, they are legion.
In reality, my figure looks more like this:
This Times article on how credit card companies work, and how they are now changing, is fascinating and well worth the read:
Luckily for the industry, small groups of executives at most of the large firms have spent the last decade studying cardholders from almost every angle, and collection agencies have developed more sophisticated dunning techniques. They have sought to draw psychological and behavioral lessons from the enormous amounts of data the credit-card companies collect every day. They’ve run thousands of tests and crunched the numbers on millions of accounts. One result of all that labor is the conversation between Santana — a former bouncer whose higher education consists solely of corporate-sponsored classes like “the Psychology of Collections” — and the man from Massachusetts. When Santana contacted the man last month, he was armed with detailed information about his life and trained in which psychological approaches were most likely to succeed.
(via Lone Gunman)
See also this post:
One model is that the credit card companies are lying to you – they think of you less as an individual to have a dynamic risk factor dynamically assigned to you, and instead as part of a portfolio to have a specific rate of return extracted from. So they have statisticians and psychologists not to create a credit risk, but instead to figure out who is likely to pay what when, and use that to keep their returns very high. Quants to study how much they can squeeze from someone – not too much, but not too little. So it is less about the awesome part of markets, the price information and the convergence and feedback, and something more feudal.
(via Yglesias)
He goes on to do all the maths, but I went blank at all the numbers.
Frankly, as the type of person who always pays my bills the very same day I get them in the mail, I’m quite sure I’d always pay my balance off each month if I had a credit card (I never have had one), so I’m probably not a desireable customer for credit card companies. They don’t realize that about me, though: almost every single day last year, I received a credit card offer in the mail, from my bank, Washington Mutual. I actually called them to tell them to stop it, and the woman straight up told me that I would continue to receive them until I signed up for a card and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Little did she know! Since the collapse of the general economy and WaMu’s absorption by Chase, I have yet to receive one single offer. Which is all well and good till I want to buy a house. But then, it’s looking highly unlikely any of us will be buying houses in the future, so whatevs.
Black Friday is a huge embarrassment to all of us at the best of times, but on this past, most pivotal and heavily advertised of Black Fridays, some people actually trampled a man to death in their haste to get inside a Wal-Mart.
Now. Much has been blogged about this horrible incident already, and I doubt even the most heavily retail-seduced among us heard this news without cringing.
But my main reaction was: how could self-aware people display so much unabashed enthusiasm for anything? I went to high school during the 90s, and if there is one value that the experience of being an adolescent during that unenthused decade instilled in me, it is the importance of being too cool. When something tempting comes along, you are not supposed to snatch at it like an eager toddler. You sit back, smirk ironically . . . and then, after a decent enough time has passed that everyone understands that you could take it or leave it, you casually shrug and take it, peering at it the whole time as if it both amuses and perplexes you.
This is the way in which I approach every desirable thing, from jobs to friends to food to new clothes to men. But even leaving aside the studied indifference of my generation, nonchalance is the only appropriate and polite attitude for people living in a land of plenty. If you are sitting at a table, and the person at the head of the table brings out a cake, you do not climb frantically over the people in between you and the cake, screaming and gnashing your teeth, and bury your face in it. You only behave that way if you are starving to death, or two years old. Otherwise, you sit politely, and pass each slice down as it’s cut, until everyone has one, and then you calmly proceed to eat your slice.
Black Friday is an example of one situation in which everyone thinks it’s a good idea to bury their face in the cake. And for this country, that’s especially disgusting behavior, because essentially, most people at the table already have five entire untouched cakes sitting right in front of them.
There’s a general assumption in America that anything worth having (wealth, fame, good parts, book deals, seats on the subway, marriage proposals, property, cheap piles of shit from Wal-Mart) can only be attained by wrestling it away from somebody else. We talk about ‘wanting it (or her or him) enough to fight for it,’ as if that illustrates strength of character. What a desperate, scrabbling way to live! Just because competition is healthy for markets and other living things does not mean that everything need be competed over. Economists of every school agree, the world is not a pie. Really, it seems to me to be more of an endless conveyer belt (even in a recession, at least as far as Wal-Mart goods are concerned).
Gains not ill-gotten can still be sinful, but for a country that brays so loudly about its Christianity, we’ve entirely erased the word ‘greed’ from our vocabulary.
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Also, Bitch Ph.D. has this to say about how tramplings actually happen:
You know how hard it is to work your way backwards through a crowd. Now imagine a crowd that’s *urgently* trying to push forward-it would be impossible. And, given that the crowd was apparently strong enough, en masse, to push down a door and trample a man, then (presumably) any individual-or even several individuals-who tried to push back-to keep the doors from being pushed open, or to keep the man from being trampled-is also going to be overwhelmed and pushed forward. . . .The real problem isn’t the people in the crowd. It’s the policy of creating such crowds, especially in situations without infrastructure and trained security people to manage the crowds properly. . . . The problem is the corporations who deliberately create an unnecessary sense of urgency and scarcity in order to drum up sales.
Well, sure. Living in NYC, everyone shoves and pushes everyone. At the grocery store yesterday, an older lady bodily shoved me out of the way of a bread bin (and proceeded to fish around in the bread with her bare hands), and a short time later, a girl shoved in front of me to get on the train, because I paused for half a second to let a guy exit (she shoved him aside, as well). I can’t imagine shoving anyone to get to merchandise or onto a train, but man, if you get into my personal space for no reason, you’re going to catch an elbow. And while I can’t imagine pushing and shoving my way into any crowded store, concert, club, parade, tree-lighting ceremony, free food giveaway, etc., I can often be found shoving my way out of them. I have troubles with crowds, and I try (as best I can in a city like this) to keep to mostly clear spaces. But here, sometimes you’ll be somewhere that’s totally empty, and randomly somehow before you know it, you find yourself surrounded on all sides by a thick crowd. At which times, I panic. I can’t help it. My heart leaps into my throat and starts pounding, and I feel like I can’t breathe, and I will do absolutely anything – kick, claw, shove, trample – to get out of such a situation. Which may be why I just can’t get my mind around the desire people have to crush into hot spots, to seek out places where they know there will be pushing, sweltering, thronging crowds of humanity pressing on all sides of them.
Of course, I suppose I’ve done just that by moving to New York.
I never take fliers. It is very annoying to be walking down a sidewalk and be abruptly clotheslined by somebody shoving a piece of paper into your face. Who the hell on this green, revolving Earth ever wants a flier? For anything? Who ever has followed up on whatever was being advertised on said flier? Nobody. When somebody hands somebody else a flier, they are either handing them litter, or a piece of trash to be carried until the receiver finds a trashcan. Everybody else should do as I do, and decline to take them, so that whatever stupid freaking business owners are still fliering will freaking stop it already. I. Hate. Fliers.
Along the same lines, postcards for shows are a giant waste of money and a thoroughly ineffective marketing tool. Nobody ever, ever, ever goes to a show they weren’t already planning on going to (because they have a friend involved with it) because of a damn postcard. Best-case scenario here is that one or even two lonely old people in from out of town might possibly, conceivably go to some show just because they saw a postcard for it, but even if you get three such audience members (which is an improbably high estimate), their admission is not enough to recoup whatever you spent on the postcards. I hate being handed postcards more than fliers, because I actually have to take the postcards and act interested, and then I have to carry them around until it’s ok to throw them away. Even if I actually plan on going to the show, I’m going to look in my email inbox (where undoubtedly there are at least fourteen different messages about whatever show it is) to remind myself of the time and place, not paw through my various handbags looking for some torn-up flier I was handed at a party three weeks earlier.
In marketing, it’s like…somebody starts doing something, and everybody just does it forever, whether it’s worth a damn or not. These measures are not effective, and they are annoying, and they result in a huge build-up of worthless clutter in my purse. Everybody, just stop it.
Another thing nobody agrees with me about – and I know with the economy in the shitter this is hugely optomistic of me – but can we just be done with change already? It’s heavy and it’s dirty and it gets everywhere and it makes whatever else is in your purse smell like coins, and I amass pounds of it, and then when I try to actually use it up by counting out exact change when I buy something, it massively pisses off the cashier and everybody behind me. The only thing you can really do with it is give it to homeless people, but then you have to juggle your bag and root around in it and shake it back in forth, all in a moving subway car, while you totter back and forth, and the homeless person politely waits and also totters back and forth, and everybody in the car stares at you and then you look like a real stingy asshole for not just giving the homeless person a dollar, especially after they stood there while you rooted through your purse for five minutes, and anyway, everybody (including the homeless person) knows you’re just trying to offload your obnoxious coins. I hate small change, and I can see no good reason for it, and with the way prices are these days, why can’t things just be rounded up or down to the next stupid dollar? At the very least, get rid of everything but quarters.
So, and but this is pretty funny. It explains how to shut up a music geek at a party. I used to kind of do this (make up a fake band) on occasion when some snobby guy at a party asked me what bands I like, but now I just never go to parties where I’m likely to run into any guys like that. Or maybe it’s just that everyone suddenly realized it’s rude to grill strangers about their musical taste.
So, I recently joined the YMCA in my neighborhood. As it’s been over two years since I belonged to a gym and had regular access to weights, I’ve entirely forgotten my old regimen. So, I bought a few women’s exercise-type magazines to find a couple of routines. I usually steer clear of women’s magazines because they tend to make me both angry and depressed, and these were no exception.
I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore. Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap. And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco. Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. I’d never heard of her or the show. She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:
I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail. I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*
And:
…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway. I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*
And worst of all:
Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day. But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat. Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda. Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*
Oh my God, Kaley! I want to kill myself! You are the saddest girl in the whole world!
Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways. But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism. What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?
Jeez.
It’s the grand reinstatement of Feminist Thursday!
First of all, let me just say I finally found a beer I can drink in good conscience. I’m less thrilled to say that it’s Fosters, as Fosters isn’t that good or widely available, and generally comes in giant oilcans that I’d rather not admit I can drink by carrying around with me. But regardless, I’m tickled pink with them for this, and happy that at long last, here’s a beer company that doesn’t feel it can afford to alienate half the population. (Although, none of the above is really true, as Fosters advertising is just as offensive to women as all the other beer ads.)
Also, the Olympics have been going on; they’ve provided all manner of things for everybody to get pissed off about, and feminists are not left out:
First of all, are the uniforms too sexy? I don’t know, actually. While I do understand the point here, and while it’s certainly not okay for female athletes to be treated like objects. . . on the other hand, the skimpiness of women’s Olympic uniforms doesn’t really make me angry. Athletes are walking representations of what bodies can look like and what bodies can do, and you know, of course people are going to ogle them. What really upsets me is when men like (or are encouraged to like) ogling undernourished, undeveloped, weak, hairless, diminished women – listless, helpless waifs who closely resemble (or are) prepubescent girls, and whose “sexiness” lies entirely in their powerlessness. Frankly, I think the ogling of Olympian bodies is a huge step in the right direction. If only all young girls could think the best way to be sexy is to look like you can fling your date across a parking lot.
Finally, All Them are upset about this, which, yes, it’s bad, but it’s not like it’s an outrage particular to China. In the U.S., ability completely takes a backseat to attractiveness across the entertainment industry. Okay, so China was more blatant about it, choosing a pretty girl to lip-sync to a less-attractive girl’s singing. But in the U.S., we would have just had the pretty girl sing with her own crappy voice – the less-attractive good singer wouldn’t have gotten the job in any event. What isn’t a beauty pageant, really? America has absolutely no tolerance for the uglies – even off-camera civilians here are expected to look like movie stars.
In other (non-Olympics related) news, the UK courts decided that women who were raped while drunk deserve less compensation than those who were raped in all sobriety. Of course, there was a huge public outcry and the decision was reversed. I can’t comment on this any better than these two posts do (one and two), so everyone should just read them.
On a lighter note, how did I not know Hedy Lamarr was so cool? Apparently, she co-invented a torpedo-guiding device. She also said this:
“Any girl can be glamorous,” she said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Holla!
Slate has a long article summarizing all the various reasons why the science behind various studies and books asserting inherent differences between the sexes is thin at best. The article covers familiar ground – a lot of it restates the Mark Liberman posts I’m always linking to over at Language Log – but hopefully, this will help to discredit some of the more oft-repeated (and baseless) claims:
Even on the most hotly contested questions—like whether women have better verbal skills, or are hard-wired for empathy, or have cognitive differences that limit their advancement in math and science—the case for large, innate disparities is messy and, for the most part, underwhelming. This is especially true when it comes to neural and hormonal claims, which tend to be controversial. These writers offer canny caveats about culture and its role in gender difference. But they tend to imply that if a difference has innate roots, it’s likely to be relatively fixed. And that’s not necessarily so. In crucial ways, the mind is malleable. Ultimately, the evangelists aren’t really daring to be politically incorrect. They’re peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole.
And while we’re on the differences between men and women, a nice rant all about orgasms – having them, not having them, faking them and who’s to blame – in response to a totally stupid column by MSNBC’s Brian Alexander:
But the thing that pissed me off the most is how Alexander wants us to look at his “roughly one-third” of straight women always have an orgasm statistic and be impressed by it. Clearly, the language he uses around it tells us that he’s saying WOW! One whole third? What a big number – especially when so many women are sexually defective!
As everyone knows, women love jerks, who, it seems, get laid a lot more. Why might that be?
It’s not always a matter of bad boys wooing vulnerable women into bed and then leaving them; it’s often two people who are both interested in just sex picking each other and calling it a day. Of course, there are no doubt some women who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks; there are also some dudes who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks (just as a Nice Guy). But sex isn’t always a trick men play on women.
What? Women might have different criteria (like looks and availability) for a one-night stand than they do for an actual relationship? No way!
One of the (many) things that really pisses me off is when guys go on about how women don’t like them because they’re too nice. I realize that everybody has to tell themselves something to get over rejection that puts the blame on the rejector and off themselves – women do the same thing (“I’m too intimidating/smart/successful”) – but I hate hearing guys go on about how their whole trouble is they’re just too swell for their own good. You know what? Usually “too nice” really means “unattractive and obnoxious.”
Hey, did you hear anything about these girls who had a pregnancy pact? And then, did you hear about how they actually didn’t?:
In short, the actual news item isn’t TODAY’S TEENS ARE SO IRRESPONSIBLE OMG. Rather, it is PREGNANT WOMEN REALLY WANT TO DO THE BEST THING FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR CHILDREN, EVEN WHEN THEY THEMSELVES ARE PRACTICALLY CHILDREN, AND IF YOU REMOVE THE STIGMA AND GIVE THEM SOME ACTUAL FUCKING SUPPORT IT HELPS A LOT. But that doesn’t fit in a headline, and it doesn’t give people an opportunity to feel morally superior.
Apparently, the problem is knocked-up teenagers aren’t being mocked and derided sufficiently anymore:
When the same girl shows up at the school clinic for five pregnancy tests in one month, shouldn’t somebody be mocking her for it? In fact, isn’t promoting shame through mockery our civic duty?
(via Feministing)
Just…wow.
More on keeping daughters in line:
“Authorities allege that Rashid killed his daughter because he feared that her resistance to a recently arranged marriage would disgrace the Pakistani-American family.”
Sounds so simple right? He killed her because his “culture” made him. Not because he might be mentally ill or pathological. There is no denying that in basically every culture there is pressure put on women to act a certain way and especially with regard to marriage or the ownership of her sexuality. But the way that “honor” killing is discussed in the media you would think it is some normal cultural phenomena, when it is not. It is a sign of illness, culture gone awry and patriarchy at its most exaggerated.
Speaking of other cultures, here’s a few utterly sickening photo shoots in which black women are used as props for white models. Can we please, please, please just completely be done with the fashion industry now? Please?
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I didn’t mention Michelle Obama once! If you need your fix, Michelle Obama Watch is a new blog entirely devoted to the subject. (via Feministing)
…now that Weight Watchers has launched its new “Diets Are Mean” campaign:
“Are you trying to be in movies? No? Then what do you want to be thin for?”
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“I think you have a lovely, womanly figure!”
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“Hell, how long’s it been since you last had sex? Give yourself a damn piece of cake!”
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“No one who’s had the day you’ve had could get by on 1500 calories.”
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“It’s just harder for you to lose weight than other people – you have a different kind of body.”
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“You went to the gym today – go ahead and have seconds!”
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“Oh, so you ate the whole pint. At least you’re not a heroin addict.”
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“If you’re being good and eating a boring salad for lunch, you should at least get to jazz it up with fried chicken strips and ranch dressing.”
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“You know, you’re a good, kind person, and you’re intelligent. If you’re also fifty pounds overweight, well, that’s just more of you to love!”
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“Skinny people look like anorexics with cancer.”
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“If you just concentrate on making yourself happy, the weight will go away on its own.”
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“Everything in moderation – even moderation!”
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“Calories don’t count on your birthday/at Christmas/on your friend’s birthday/at a wedding/on vacation/when it’s this beautiful out/on the weekends/when you’re celebrating/on Flag Day/when they’re free/when someone surprises you with a treat!!!!”
Get disappointed by someone new, indeed. Everyone’s talking about Obama and FISA. TPM has a good summary of his statements on the matter, and how his position has changed:
Viewing his statements, it’s striking how forcefully he argued in the past that the choice between civil liberties and safety is a false one.
Let the disillusionment begin.
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Here, the women of Slate discuss the American Girls line of dolls. The general opinion seems to be that the dolls, while promoting consumerism, are at least an improvement on Barbies and other bubble-headed bimbo lines, what with the AG’s emphasis on historical context and self-sufficient and adventurous characters.
Well! Trust me to crap all over that! Frankly, I think anybody who buys their kid a $90 doll ought to be ashamed of themselves. If that’s too rigid an opinion, I’m sorry, but I can’t fathom how anyone could argue it’s a positive thing to purchase this hugely overpriced luxury line of dolls and doll-related items for their kid. I loved looking at the AG catalog when I was little – I wore holes in it. But even back then, I saved my breath about the possibility of actually getting one. My parents bought me all kinds of dolls and undoubtedly spoiled me toy-wise, but even if we had been billionaires, I doubt they’d have entertained the idea of spending $90 on such a thing.
To be fair, my opinion about the AG dolls is entirely colored by a specific episode in my childhood that left me with a very bad impression of both the dolls and the families who value them. I went to an elementary school in a hugely wealthy neighborhood, and in third grade, one of the most well-off girls in my class invited everyone to her birthday party. The party was at the Sequoyah Hills Country Club, and it was an American Girls doll party. Everyone was to bring their American Girls doll. This ignoring the fact that most kids did not, of course, own an American Girls doll. I brought my little baby doll that probably cost around $12, and I went with my best friend, who was one of two black kids in my grade. I mention this because at the time (and possibly still, for all I know) the Sequoyah Hills Country Club, in the grand tradition of country clubs everywhere, did not offer membership to black people. It was, however, staffed by them.
The party had big tables for the kids, and little tables for the dolls. The table settings matched – there were big dishes, and matching doll dishes. There was real-people food, and matching fake doll food. There were big-girl party favors, and matching tiny doll party favors. The girl hosting the party wore a sailor suit that matched her Samantha doll’s sailor suit. I wasn’t really friends with anybody at the party, other than my best friend. And I don’t remember much about it, other than that the (exclusively black) men in butler outfits waiting on us were required to go around and pour air tea for the dolls.
I shit you not.
You know, to each their own and all that, but personally, I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody who is even remotely a part of the world I observed that day. Because of this experience, the AG dolls have become a sort of symbol of extravagance and snobbery to me, and as a result, I don’t think much of them, or mothers who think they’re precious (I’m disappointed Michelle Obama is one of them). Samantha may be promoting a more positive message than Barbie, but it’s entirely possible the little girl who threw that party resembles nobody so much as Barbie in her adulthood. The “message” is lost (because the message is beside the point); the consumerism, however, finds its intended audience.
Massively overpriced consumer items have one purpose, and one purpose only – to create and encourage desire and greed (in part by establishing themselves as status symbols: the enjoyment of having a $90 doll depends upon other girls having $12 ones – how else do you know yours is worth $90?), and to profit from it. Period. I don’t care if the dolls are a line of miniature Susan B. Anthonys and Betty Friedans – there is nothing progressively feminist about encouraging your daughter’s desire for a ridiculously high-priced doll and its accompanying outfits, accessories and furnitures.
Rawr! My daughter will have a flour sack with a face drawn on it for a doll, and she’ll damn well like it!
Last weekend, my improv team drove up to Providence, Rhode Island to perform in the annual improv festival there. Being New Yorkers, we’re all a bit rusty on driving, but, after briefly (and oh, so gently) tapping an elderly Polish pedestrian with our car (for some reason, the old man threw a little fit about this), we made it out of Brooklyn and into Queens.
We were in Queens for a long time. Queens is confusing, even with the GPS device that was our Lord and Master for the duration of the trip. I’ve never worked with a GPS device before. This one was pretty handy, but at the same time, confusing. And the smooth, female British voice that we selected could sound anywhere from condescending to downright exasperated depending on how often she was forced to repeat herself. This was her advice: ‘Turn right now. Turn right n— …Recalculating. Make a Uuuu-Turn. Make a Uuuu-Turn. …Recalculating. Turn left, then turn right. Turn left now. Left. Left now! (Sigh.) …Recalculating. Make a Uuuu-Turn.’
In this way, we eventually emerged from the Bronx and into Connecticut…to sit in a stop-and-start traffic jam all the way through New Haven. But we did make it to Providence in time for our show, and even our most tardy car-full of players burst into the greenroom fifteen minutes before curtain.
Providence is charming; it reminded me of a New England version of Charleston. Unfortunately, I have no photos, because I was too lazy to ever take my camera out of the trunk. We spent Saturday wandering up and down Thayer Street, the commercial district surrounding the Brown University campus in Providence’s East Side neighborhood. Thayer Street is lined with colorfully painted, old two-story houses made into cafes, antique shops, hippie-clothing stores catering to students and so forth. There were a lot of young people milling around, and everybody seemed to know each other. The main drag gave onto wide, tree-lined blocks of Victorian mansions with wrap-around porches. As is always the case when New Yorkers venture out of the city, my friends and I were delightfully amazed by the low prices and general friendliness we were met with all through the city.
Around 4:00 p.m., we piled back into the car, switched on the GPS device and headed back to New York. But on the way, we stopped at the Ikea in New Haven.
Now, since I do live in the world, I’d heard all about the Ikea thing – from back when Ikea was the most totally awesome thing ever to now, when mention of Ikea is generally accompanied by an apologetic eye-roll. But until last weekend, I had yet to actually go to one myself.
Here’s my interior monologue, which best describes how I experienced my very first Ikea visit:
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“Wow, this place is huge! This stuff all looks pretty cool. Okay, I’m ready to eat now.
…Oh. We’re shopping. I guess we’re going to be shopping for awhile.
Oh, this place is really huge.
Oh, we’re really shopping.
Oh, I’m going to be here for a very long time.
…Damn it.
Well. These apartment set-ups all look really great. Maybe I should buy something. What would I buy? What would look good in my apartment? What does my apartment look like?
I can’t remember.
I just know it doesn’t look like these apartments. My apartment looks like shit.* How do you make something like my apartment look like these apartments look?
I’m not equal to this challenge.
The people who live in these apartments are probably really happy.
These apartments are cheap and cute, and probably what most people would consider good starter-apartment solutions until they get their careers going, and make enough money to have a real, nice house. Whereas for me, these Ikea apartments are like the long-term-goal apartments. If, by retirement, I am living in an Ikea apartment, I will have exceeded my own expectations.
I’m not at all where I should be at 27. I still sleep in a twin bed, have a shower curtain on my window, and nothing on my walls except for a hideous poster of Native Americans that I found in the trash! I should get a couch. And a career. And a car. And a dog. And friends. And a Relationship.
Or maybe just some meatballs. Yes, meatballs will improve matters. And then, we will leave.
Whoa, there’s another floor! A whole other floor! Oh, I want all matching dishes! I want all matching dishes to eat breakfast on in the sun in a pretty dress with the whole day ahead of me and appointments and a book to write them all down in that matches my handbag, and colorful cocktails after with good-looking people at a rooftop bar where all the drinks cost $14!!!! I want everything about my life to be entirely different, and I want it all to occur in a color-coordinated, cunningly planned setting!!!! I want to design every, single inch of my life, so it’s an appropriate backdrop for the huge, personal successes that will surely follow!!!!!
Or not.
Hell, I can at least buy some new sheets. This way, I don’t have to wash my old ones.”
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And that is what I did – I got red and pink sheets, and I’m very happy with them. And I also got an ice-cube tray that makes ice cubes shaped like tiny liquor bottles. It’s not much, but it’s a start. And it all cost less than $20 which is the main reason Ikea is so very awesome. I might go again someday, if I ever feel I have things together enough to justify putting some effort into decorating my environment. But frankly, I’m still probably several years (and possibly several cities) away from that point.
And yes, I realize I had more to say about the Ikea than about Providence. What can I say? They’ve got a great business concept going.
__
*Roommates, if you read this, our apartment does not really look like shit. It only looks like shit when it’s standing next to a precious, little Ikea model, and those models only exist to make ordinary apartments feel bad about themselves anyway.
After wasting money on any number of self-help (and/or trade) books that I skim, feel vaguely disappointed with, and put down never to pick up again, I gave some thought to what I had been expecting to find between their covers. Here’s the sort of advice I was really looking for:
How To Win Friends And Influence People: Rub them just behind their left ears, while simultaneously squeezing their right pinky fingers. They’ll do absolutely anything you say for the next 9.25 hours.
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The Four-Hour Work Week: The ATM code 999994 will legally dispense $500 at all Chase Bank ATMs.
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Weight-Loss Secrets Of the Stars: Swallow an ostrich feather every evening – no matter what you’ve eaten, you’ll wake up a dead-ringer for Cate Blanchett.
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The Actor’s Guidebook: Send a headshot and a $50 money order to Harvey Weinstein, along with this special code: “AUVW945#.” Allow three to four weeks for fame to take hold.
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How To Make Millions With Your Ideas: Fill out these simple applications to this short-list of obscure government grants that go unclaimed each month, and you will be sure to rake up at least $20,000 (per idea) in no-strings-attached government money, even if your idea is half-baked and undefined, and you yourself are part of the privileged majority.
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How To Travel The World On Ten Dollars A Day: Cut out this coupon and paste it into your passport to receive a 99% discount worldwide at any establishment that accepts currency.
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How To Find the Right Man: He’s currently trying to get a newspaper out of the box at 58th and Broadway. Go ask him for directions to Lincoln Center. It will all work out eventually.
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Getting Things Done: Vitamin A supplements combined with one cup of Red Bull and one tablespoon of vinegar will, when consumed daily, safely and permanently eradicate the need for sleep.
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How To Make Money With Your Blog: Go to www.elizabethilljustdoitforyou.com and enter your blog url and PayPal account information.
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The Secret: If you just think about what you want, it will magically come to you.
You know, I just want to say that I’m sick of reading all about why Americans are so stupid they can be sold water if it’s packaged attractively. While it’s true that some people can be sold anything, the vast majority of people buy bottled water everywhere now not because it’s attractive, but because water is no longer available for free when you’re not at your house. I don’t buy a billion bottles of Poland Springs for a buck a pop because I think there’s some sort of cachet in it. I buy them because no mini-mart-owner in the city is going to give me a cup of tap water gratis when he could make me spend a buck. Sure, you might get a Dixie-cup-full at Starbucks or something if you buy something else with it, but if you have to keep nagging bored and frustrated service employees to refill your thimble-full of water, only to start the process all over again with another surly teenager after you’ve walked two more blocks and are completely dehydrated again, at some point, you’re just going to buy a damn bottle of water.
And yes, of course, if I thought ahead and always brought a bottle of water from home around with me everywhere, I could avoid this expense. And if I always brought an umbrella, and a light sweater, and Aspirin, and tampons, and Band-Aids and a change of shoes and a novel and an energy bar and a thing of mace, I would always be prepared for every situation, wouldn’t I? But I’m consistently not – I guess it must be because I’m so foolishly attached to overpaying for an attractively packaged commodity that used to be free.
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So, the big news lately is the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the D.C. gun ban. I don’t have a passionate opinion one way or the other on gun ownership, but here’s one thing I don’t understand:
I’ve heard champions of Second Amendment rights pose the hypothetical scenario that, if you let the government disarm you, in a few decades, you will have a more totalitarian society, and then it’s only a matter of time before the nightmare dystopia ensues and the governmental hit squads come banging at your door. And you’ll be an unarmed sitting duck. And I get that – I too believe that inevitably, at some point, society as we know it will crumble and we’ll go into some sort of The Road situation. But it seems to me that even if you have a whole bunker of guns, if a bunch of people come armed to your door with intent to take you in, you’re done. It doesn’t matter if you have weapons – unless you also have more people with weapons than they have with weapons, they will win.
I think that the real key to surviving when the infrastructure crumbles is to be small, fast, and not missed by anybody. And to not have anything that anybody might conceivably want. So, while gun control opponents can’t believe everybody’s so placid and docile and moronic as to allow their right-to-bear-arms to be chipped away at without a fight, I rather can’t believe everybody’s so placid and docile and moronic as to be gigantically fat, out of shape and laden with expensive possessions (and small, stumbling, needy children).
Come on, people. Your only chance for surviving in a post-apocalyptic world will be to dart around on the margins and feed at night — and to have nothing you love and nothing you’ll miss. I promise you, if a posse ever comes to my door, I will not be defending my “property.” To hell with my property – I’ll be out the back window and over the border before they can hoof it up the front steps.
Anyway, the world might end before any of this comes to pass:
I can well understand why the Times doesn’t want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of self-interest. If the possibility weren’t realized, as most scientists seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated, along with the rest of the planet.
(Plus, too, the North Pole might be free of ice this year:
“From the viewpoint of the science, the North Pole is just another point in the globe, but it does have this symbolic meaning,” Serreze said. “There’s supposed to be ice at the North Pole. The fact that we may not have any by the end of this summer could be quite a symbolic change.”
via FP Passport)
Really, I’m just not as attached to life as we know it as most people seem to be. If I woke up in the world of Wall-E tomorrow, I guess I’d kind of miss the Internet.
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Why a continued American presence in Iraq can’t be compared to West Germany and Japan after WWII:
But setting all those concerns aside there’s one distinction between the case of Germany and Japan and Iraq today that gets far too little mention. It’s not a matter of culture or religion. It is the fact in the aftermath of World War II, both Germany and Japan had been conquered by the United States and her allies in a wars of aggression that Germany and Japan had started. The civilian populations of each country, whatever their war guilt, had experienced shattering levels of violence and privation in the final years of the war. And both countries were immediately faced by nearby hostile powers they feared much more than the United States.
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Public transit: it doesn’t really hit the poor hardest…
In fact . . . poor people do relatively little driving. They differ from middle class and wealthy people in that utility bills take up a very large proportion of their income. Not only should this specific point be remembered, but one should also recall as a general rule of thumb that if you see a large, powerful, well-organized lobby citing the needs of the poor as the rationale for something or other they’re almost certainly full of it.
…and plus, you can get drunk while you ride:
Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich are talking about the need for alternative modes of transportation. He rightly makes the point that there’s a difference between designing a city for cars, and designing a city for people. Also makes the somewhat idiosyncratic point that with transit “you could at least be having a drink on your way home”
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Rob Cockerham at Cockeyed.com plays pranks, usually on various chain stores. Today, he has a new one involving posting clever signs in Home Depot storage sheds:
Despite an ambitious number of signs, I felt my local home depot wasn’t addressing some of the strongest benefits of owning a garden/storage/privacy shed/mini-garage/closet. I decided to make some new signs and try them out!
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Last but not least, I hope some day to make this list.
Guests at The Guardian Hay festival ask one question (whatever they most want to ask) to whoever they most want to interview:
Andre Vincent, comedian asks Marcus Brigstocke, comedian
Q You’ve got a fantastic life that I envy. Why do you get depressed so much?
A What an awful question, you horrid man. Well, I made a rule that if I don’t care about something, I won’t write about it. So I have involved myself in loads and loads of things that I passionately care about in the news and after a while, as they’ve accumulated, I have lost faith in the world being a benevolent place. . . . But I would be a mug not to realise that the life that I have is actually enviable, and enjoyable for the most part.
And:
Stephanie Merritt, author and journalist asks Omid Djalili, comedian and actor
Q Should comedy change the way people think about the world, or is it just pure entertainment?
A People can be entertained by comedy of the most puerile nature. People with great motives can also be capable of the most cringingly earnest experiences cloaked as entertainment. When motive and entertainment fuse you get the best combination.
(via Kottke)
(There are also many questions about things political.)
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P.J. O’Rourke visits the Field Museum:
A very wordy inscription details the theories of when and how humans arrived in the New World. Translated from the academese: “We dunno.” An encomium to the Ice Age hunter-gatherers follows. “People like us,” it concludes, “prospered in ancient times.” We did indeed–if your idea of prosperity is fastening a “Clovis people” spearpoint to a stick and stabbing long-horned bison, giant grand sloths, wooly mammoths, mastodons, and New World horses until they were all extinct. The economic boom didn’t extend to casual wear and sports clothes. Ice Age or no, everyone in the talentlessly painted murals is naked. Nipples seem to have been vague and smudgy in ancient times, and a mastodon or giant ground sloth was always getting in between mural viewers and your genitals.
(via A&LD)
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Whoa. Burger King + advertising + Amsterdam = hugely inappropriate (yes, there is a photo):
The trayliner depicts the airport-style high security Burger King uses to ensure that only the top ingredients are used. Images include a scared Onion with his trousers down around his ankles while a fierce-looking Pickle guard with a latex glove, prepares to digitally examine him! Scattered about him from his open luggage are veggie porn mags!
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Maybe this explains a problem I’ve been having:
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”
(via BB)
Ever since moving to NYC, I have had trouble with people interpreting my every comment as sincerely made. I am sarcastic about 99% of the time, and, until I moved here, so was everybody else. But for some reason (maybe it has more to do with the age bracket I’ve moved into), I now find myself constantly responding to “Really?!” with “No! Of course not, I was being sarcastic!” It’s so weird – you would think New Yorkers would be more sarcastic than everybody else, wouldn’t you?
Here’s an example of an actual conversation I had not too long ago:
Woman (off a star mag she was reading): “Oh, Gwenyth Paltrow’s feeling harassed by paparazzi again.”
Me: “Oh, that’s really awful. I feel really terrible for celebrities. They have to put up with so much.”
Woman (carefully): “Yes. But, you know, they choose that life, and they do really well for themselves, so I don’t always think it’s so bad.”
Me (blinking): “Me neither. I don’t feel sorry for celebrities at all.”
Woman: “What?”
Me: “I was…being entirely sarcastic.”
Woman: “Oh. Oh, I see.”
Me: “I’m going to back slowly away from you now.”
This might sound like an extreme example, but I swear, this has been happening to me all the time.
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Finally, Todd Levin tells a hilarious subway tale.
Apparently, Rachael Ray wore a Palestinian scarf in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad, and right-wingers were so upset that DD had to pull the ad. As all of my regular readers know, a number of ads outrage me, but they’re all still on the air. If only the boys at Little Green Footballs would turn their considerable influence to rooting out misogyny in advertising…
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If there’s one country that could turn shit into gasoline, it is so Sweden:
Cars using biogas created a stir when they began to be rolled out on a large scale at the start of the decade. The tailpipe emissions are virtually odorless, the fuel is cheaper than gasoline and diesel, and the idea of recovering energy from toilet waste appealed to green-minded Swedes.
(via The Morning News)
(It’s not all that successful, however.)
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Turns out John McCain’s policy for dealing with the mortgage crisis was courtesy of a lobbyist for UBS bank:
MSNBC reports that McCain’s economic guru, Phil Gramm, advised the campaign while he was a paid lobbyist for the Swiss bank UBS. In other words, Gramm was advising McCain on what to do about the mortgage crisis while he getting paid push the legislative agenda of one of the major architects of the mortgage crisis.
As MSNBC reported, UBS deregistered Gramm as a lobbyist for the company on April 18th, though he continues to serve as a vice chairman of the bank. But that was fully a month after McCain’s speech outlining his own approach to the crisis.
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The Dalai Lama would like to attend the Olympics:
China reacted coolly on Thursday to a suggestion from the Dalai Lama that he would be happy to attend the Beijing Olympics, and suggested talks with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader’s envoys may be delayed by the Sichuan earthquake.
(via FP Passport)
Also, here’s a cool picture of Gloucestershire’s annual cheese-rolling (one man appears to be in a pig suit).
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Don’t miss this Slate article about who’s actually responsible for disciplining UN peacekeepers when they go on child rape-a-thons in the countries they’re supposed to be helping:
Though the United Nations has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual exploitation and abuse, the most severe action it can take is repatriation of the accused-at the contributing nation’s expense-and, if the accused is eventually found guilty, a block on future service in U.N. missions.
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Several articles lately professing shock at how little some people trying to live on a shoestring budget spend and eat have left me wondering: am I out of touch, or is everybody else? Because I spend so much less and eat so much less than the people in the “shocking” examples given in these articles…I mean, good lord:
Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.
If people really consider this an absolutely shocking sign of deprivation, I must be doing far, far worse than I ever thought. And as much as I joke, I actually think I’m doing pretty well. (Oh, I should clarify that the articles I’m talking about, including the one linked above, are the articles about young starving-artist types, not the articles about actual poor people.)
Here’s a comprehensive answer to a question I asked many a post ago: what happens if you routinely screw up your recycling?
When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility’s floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items-kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste.
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Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue.
In all seriousness, I think vegetarianism is admirable (although PETA, which runs ads that objectify women in order to promote its agenda of giving humanity to animals, can suck it). But I’ve never understood my vegetarian friends’ complaints of the difficulty of finding anything to eat. I’m not even remotely a vegetarian, and I’d estimate that 90% of my diet is cheese, bread and sugar.
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I am nothing if not a lover of routine – in fact, my behavior is so habitual that it borders on insane. Like many writers, I find that I am unable to be creative at all if I don’t build being creative into a fairly rigid routine. According to this article, the important thing is to change up your habits:
. . . it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Not long ago, I leafed through a book (can’t remember the title) that was basically a longer version of the above article. The book’s author advised that, to free up creative thinking and combat brain atrophy (and possibly Alzheimer’s), you should constantly be trying to surprise your own brain by doing something jolting – walking a different way to work, writing with the wrong hand, using the opposite hand to do different tasks, performing daily activities in a different order than usual, and so forth. Hmm. Maybe I should build breaking my routine into my routine.
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Lindsay Beyerstein responds to Thomas Friedman on subprime mortgages:
Earlier generations weren’t more virtuous because they had less debt. Their dollars bought more. They were more likely to have steady jobs with benefits, including employer-subsidized incentives to save . . . Americans have always valued hard work–and nothing has changed. In the USA, the average worker clocks more hours than anywhere else in the industrialized world.
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A very brief history of illegal immigration:
Chinese exclusion invented something like the concept and business of modern illegal immigration.
(Related, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand misspelled words.)
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And finally, this is way cooler than missed connections: if you live in New York, this guy might draw you…especially if you hang out much at the Taco Bell on 14th. (via Kottke)
Bitterness is not why people in rural areas “cling to their guns.” Bitterness is why people in rural areas, just like everywhere else, cling to beer.
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Patriotism is a hot topic lately, and if you are one of those people who don’t understand why anybody wouldn’t love America, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution spells out eight of his reasons, before going on to say:
On the brighter side, America has a decent economic track record, the Solow model does matter (try living and earning in countries with poor Solow indicators), America remains the world’s leading innovator, and most Americans — at least those not in prison or on drugs — can expect a bright future. It’s not as if I’m pushing the future economic prospects of Suriname.
I think that for a lot of those patriots who fail to comprehend anti-American sentiment, the point quoted above is so important as to render nearly meaningless the eight points above it, and they think that anybody who doesn’t love America must not be sufficiently aware of its economic opportunities.
Which makes sense, since our brains apparently equate profit with praise:
“If the hierarchy is fixed forever, then it’s good to be the top monkey.”
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Speaking of economic opportunities (and the lack thereof), Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber discusses the deficit model of poverty:
The stresses that accompany poverty (for those who do not choose it, which is everyone except nuns, monks, and the odd saint) are often very demanding and sometimes overwhelming – they make it harder for people to make good long-term decisions and stick to them, sometimes because there just are no good long term options. So yes, if you like, I do think that poverty creates deficits. But then, I don’t see why we should complain about, or try to get rid of, it, unless it is because it creates deficits.
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As to America’s Problem with Prisoners, we learned this week that one out of every 100 American adults is now in jail (there’s one huge chunk of the population who won’t be voting in the primaries):
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
Also, note in the above article that San Marino has the lowest prison population – just one (I assume) guy. I would absolutely love to interview San Marino’s sole prisoner and see how (again, I assume) he feels about holding this distinction.
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On Talking Points Memo Café, Daniel Levy has five things to say about Israel’s strike on the Syrian facility (and why we’re discussing it now), including this:
So here is a delicious and rare moment of Israeli-Syrian agreement: : we both want to talk, the nature of the Syria-Israel issue is that we both need US facilitation, the Bush Administration is not interested and so, we will have to wait.
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Meanwhile, some woman let her nine-year-old take the subway home alone, hoping that everybody would talk about it, and everybody has obliged. I get her point that people hover over their children too much, but here’s the thing: she didn’t turn him lose in 99.99% of America. She turned him lose in the NYC subway. Which is the strangest, most congested, unhygienic, freak-filled hell portal in the entire U.S.A. I don’t even like to mosey in the subway. Honestly, I don’t know why people still insist on viewing Manhattan as a normal, residential area. I realize that it was one once upon a time, but nowadays, Manhattan is Disney World for CEOs and aspiring artists. It’s a weird, artificial, overcrowded, unreal place, and there’s no reason to try and navigate it daily, unless you have business here, or you’re trying to make it in some field where you need to be a stone’s throw from everybody else in that field. It’s sure as heck not a place to send your nine-year-old out stumbling around getting in everybody’s way. I don’t care if people’s nine-year-olds are supervised or not, as long as they’re in Yonkers where they belong.
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Moving on to my favorite arena of outrage (women getting the shit-end), Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discusses the recent Senate action regarding the Supreme Court’s Lilly Ledbetter verdict:
So, 42 members of the U.S. Senate blocked a bill that would allow victims of gender discrimination to learn of and prove discrimination in those rare cases in which their employers don’t cheerfully discuss it with them at the office Christmas party. And the reasons for blocking it include the fact that women are not smart enough to file timely lawsuits, not smart enough to avoid being manipulated by vile plaintiffs’ lawyers, not smart enough to know when they are being stiffed, and-per John McCain-not well-trained enough in the first place to merit equal pay.
So how dumb are we? Well, if we don’t vote some people who actually respect women into Congress soon, we just may be as dumb as those senators think.
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Speaking of women continuing to stick their fingers in their ears and hum, the wide world of advertising continues on its merry, woman-bashing way. The latest: one of Tom Ford’s ads has been banned in Italy. Here’s the ad in question (I don’t really have much of an opinion about this ad in particular, but I do hate Tom Ford in general):
It’s hilarious to me that Italy – Italy – would ban anything for being offensive to women. That aside, upon first seeing this photo, I anticipated that men and women to the left and right would rush to gasp at how ridiculous it is that a photo devoid of explicit T&A could possibly offend anyone. Generally when porn-in-advertising debates arise, most commentators refuse to address symbolic, implied, or even overt misogyny in advertising, preferring instead to focus on how people are prudish about sex, as if plain old sex was the point, rather than violent and/or degrading sexual content aimed entirely at portraying women as submissive to all manner of victimization. And I was anticipating reading an argument along those lines when I clicked on a link to this blog post, but rather, I was treated to a barrage of Italian ads that make the Tom Ford one look positively romantic. Specifically, check out this Dolce & Gabbana ad:
Now, from time to time, I’ve decided to compile a list of all products and companies I refuse to buy from because their advertisements are misogynist. I’ve always had to go back on this resolution, because inevitably my list grew so long so fast that I was left unable to buy much anything but Dove products (and for all I know, the people who own Dove likely own other lines that run down women as well). This post just illustrates how difficult it is not to support the objectification of women with your hard-earned pennies: over here in the States, high fashion shits on women in tastefully hypocritical, closeted ways, but apparently in Italy, they have no such scruples and Dolce & Gabbana can go ahead and run a full-out airbrushed gang rape. It’s not like I buy designer labels, but I don’t always remember to NOT buy them with sufficient conviction. I should have to look at this ad every day for the rest of my life to remind myself to never, ever, even for a second even think about paying a freaking penny to the fashion industry. I mean, I actually really like Dolce & Gabbana’s dresses: had I gotten rich suddenly and had an event to attend, I could possibly have bought one without ever knowing they had glorified gang rape to sell fashion. It just goes to show you how hard it is not to pay people for actively insulting you, for celebrating actual violence against you as SEXXY. You must exercise constant, international vigilance.
Finally, Foreign Policy released its list of the top 100 public intellectuals this week, and bloggers on all the sites I habitually read have reacted in outrage at the anti-intellectualism of most of these intellectuals. They regret the omission of dozens of more apt choices I’ve never heard of. I can’t follow the debate over this. I do know who a lot of people on FP’s list are, but I don’t know enough about them (or the people they’ve edged out) to be outraged at their inclusion. And that, really, perfectly sums up my intellectual acumen: I am smart and informed enough to read people who know what’s up, but not smart or informed enough to know what’s up myself.
Obviously, the big news in Olive Garden advertising lately is that one of their spots features a man saying, “I’m in the mood for something different,” to his Olive Garden server. Which is rather like moving into a gated subdivision because you want to live in a diverse community. But less frequently remarked upon is an earlier spot for the same restaurant, in which a server asks a customer, “How was that?” And he replies, “It really hit the spot.” And everyone at the table bursts into laughter, as if he’d made a joke. But “it really hit the spot” is not a joke on any level. It’s just a comment.
This is actually what I like to refer to as ‘secretary humor,’ because it’s the type of humor largely occurring in office environments among bored and excruciatingly polite administrative professionals, where somebody will make some banal observation and everyone will burst into forced laughter as if it had, in fact, been a witticism. “That donut was so good, maybe I’ll eat two!” Bwaggh-har-har-har!!! “Maybe I just won’t come in on Monday.” Waaaaa-haaa-haaa!!!! “What if I took a little nap in my chair here?” Girl, you are a SCREAM!!! Or the ever popular, “You are Too Funny,” response, which works after anything at all:
“Oh, I didn’t pick up the phone in time.”
“You are Too Funny.”
“It’s only three o’clock?”
“You are Too Funny.”
“Wait, what was I in the middle of?”
“You are TOO FUNNY!!!!!”
Obviously, “You are Too Funny,” is code for “Please, God, just kill me where I stand.”
Speaking of humor that is not, NYC is plastered with posters promoting some movie that feature in large type, the sentence, “You DO look fat in those jeans, Sarah Marshall.” Now. I understand that at one time, some dude first made the observation that frequently, women will ask their boyfriends if they look fat in a pair of jeans. This is meant to be humorous, because, no matter what the accurate answer to that question is, the fellow so addressed can only reply, “no.” Or, less charitably, it is meant to be humorous because the woman looks fat not because of the jeans, but because she is fat. While this observation might have been marginally amusing the first time or two that it was pointed out (which is debatable), surely endless reiteration in everything from Twix ads to sitcoms to stand-up routines and on and on and on has long since wrung from this “joke” whatever comedic potential it originally possessed.
Yet somehow, some film that is obviously spending a shit ton on marketing believes not only that this “joke” is hilarious, but that it is so universally and unceasingly hilarious that prominent featuring of it alone is enough to attract all and sundry to their movie in droves. This blows my mind.
Moving on, in the category of ads that dispense with reality altogether, we have the Walmart ad, in which a lot of Walmart employees open a store at something like 4 a.m., dancing and singing in their pristine big box environment to the strains of “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and a voiceover explains that while you sleep cozily in your beds, underpaid and uninsured Walmart employees are cheerily preparing for your arrival by mopping, stocking and Windexing the entire store predawn, and Could Not Be More Thrilled About It. On the other side of the economic gap, we have the Audi ad, where the voiceover discusses privilege burnout: “You will grow up in this mansion, you will go to one of these three schools (Harvard, Yale or Princeton), you will own homes on these two coasts, Yawn – AUDI!! Consider the cycle broken! …Not the cycle of inherited wealth, of course. But the cycle of spending Daddy’s money on cars other than Audi.”
Speaking of over-consumption, I love the McDonald’s ad where the voiceover talks about how a certain burger is so big that, while the man consuming it will still be able to cram a super-sized fries and Coke in on top of it, he’ll have to stop at one ketchup packet. You can almost hear the tortured pitch meeting that came up with this ad: “How do we emphasize that this burger is monstrously huge, but not suggest that the person forgo spending money on a couple thousand more fried calories on the side? Hey, condiments are free…” Meanwhile, in the McD ads for Girls, lithesome women cavort ecstatically over some sad, wilted little salads. McDonald’s really has all its bases covered.
Which brings us back to my favorite refrain: the stupidity of women’s advertisements. This month, there’s yet another ridiculous birth control pill ad out. I speak of the ad in which the pharmacist tells a woman – after he’s already filled her prescription – that she might have to get a blood test to use that pill. The woman’s face falls in dismay, and an adjacent birth-control-buying customer reacts in shock and indignation as well. They both just can’t freaking believe this. No matter that she already has the damn prescription in her hands, so unless a miniature doctor pops out of the bag and demands to do the procedure before he hands over the dial, she’s probably in the clear. No matter that the pharmacist doesn’t in any way explain why she might need one, or when, or under what circumstances. She is simply shocked – SHOCKED – to hear that in some undefined scenario for some unspecific reason having vaguely to do with a prescription she’s already filled, somebody in the medical field might at some point advise her to have a blood test. Which is OUTRAGEOUS.
And while I can’t think of an appropriate segue, let me just say that Kohler is becoming for me the new Twix, in that it is currently running a series of ads aimed entirely at men by running down women for no reason whatsoever. Witness the ad wherein a man observes a hot lady plumber (because those exist, right?) and immediately proceeds to throw all manner of things into his toilet to plug it up, so he’ll get to meet her. Which is fine. But then, just before we see the logo, his wife walks by and looks at him funny. OH! He’s a married man who wants to hit on the sexy plumber! Now, there’s really no reason for him to be a married man for the commercial to work – he could just be a single guy. But why stop at merely amusing when with one simple beat more you can reach full out offensive, right Kohler? Well done.
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More:
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WARNING: Feminist Digression!!!
Femininity, in fact, can’t even be practiced without stuff (which is one way of debunking the argument that it is an inherited sex trait). It is simply not possible for a woman without makeup and deodorant and lingerie and kitten heels and diet pills and clothes without pockets and anti-wrinkle cream that promises “glowing skin” and self-help books explaining the best ways to suck up to men and jewelry and razors and tweezers and lemon-scented cleaning products and boxes of Lean Cuisine in the freezer — all stuff that must be bought — to be fully feminine.
If you’re a woman, you’re a woman, and that’s that. You can’t be less of a woman because you don’t buy enough shit to trick yourself out in. While it might sound shocking today, men were in fact able to ID a woman as such way back when both sexes were costumed in identical bits of animal hide. Otherwise, none of us would be here today. So relax, ladies, and spend your hard-earned pennies on travel and theatre tickets.
