December 2003 Archives
Total time spent yesterday at Highland Mall: 1.5 hours.
Number of New Year's Eve dresses that looked good enough to try on: 0.
New Year's Eve dresses purchased: 0.
Average cost of New Year's Eve dress: $110.
Total time spent today at Goodwill: 45 minutes?
Number of New Year's Eve dresses that looked good enough to try on: about 20.
New Year's Eve dresses purchased: 3.
Total spent: $35, including a pair of shoes for summer.
5 Reasons I Never Followed Up On Your Answer to My Online Personal Ad
- You're into one o' them monotheistic religions where anyone who doesn't agree with you goes to hell. I know there's some kind of Christianity Lite that's supposed to be tolerant and respectful of other people's beliefs, but how exactly do you swing that when a central tenet of your faith is that you must accept Jesus as Lord and Savior in order to be saved? I'm willing to hear an explanation, but not on a date.
- You're not a vegetarian. I know it doesn't make sense to you, I know you think I'm a bitch for saying it, I know you can't possibly see what difference it could possibly make in how two people get along. This is further proof that we should not go out.
- In your profile, you checked off that you would date someone of any of the long list of ethnicities - except African-American. I don't care about your reasons.
- You have made a strong commitment to avoiding punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.
- You seem to seriously believe that expressing a preference for no liars, games, or baggage will cause the crazy women reading your profile to say "Oh, then I better not contact him." That is so delusional it's not even funny.
Now make that nice for yourself and go away.
Names withheld to reduce negative ramifications should one of them find this blog.
Relative: "It was terrible, the circus got shut down and all the animals were going to be turned into horse meat!"
Relative: "I guess it was fine, if you like watching people shoot other people with bullets."
The Princess: "As opposed to with what?"
Relative: "I'm just explaining how I understood the plot."Relative: "That store, Half Books. You buy half the book there and you have to find the other half somewhere else?"
The Princess: "Half Price Books."
Relative: "You get every other page there..."Relative: "That pie recipe, I tell you, I think it came down on the stone tablets."
The Princess: "On the back."
Relative: "Exactly."
The Princess: "So in the Bible it's begat begat begat...pie."
Relative: "No, in Prophets, which is really more about telling you what to do to avoid being sold into slavery."
The Princess: "So, making pie."
Relative: "Exactly."Relative: "...there's a soft place in the sheetrock, which tells me that there's either a cockroach back there spitting on it, or there's a plumbing leak."
Relative: "The problem is that the Devil made the threads in [the faucet], and his best friend made the threads in [the hose], and it really improves your cussing ability to try putting them together."
Relative: "Surely it isn't a continuous plumbing leak or you'd all be drowned by now."
Relative 1: "What he noticed was that all the trees in Virginia were the same, there was no variety."
Relative 2: "What kind do they have out there?"
Relative 1: "Well I don't know, I know it was something coniferous."
Relative 3: "Some firs are carnivorous. Coniferous."
Relative 4: "No wonder they only have one kind of tree, those ate all the other ones."
Relative 3: "He's not even a plant person and he can figure that out."Relative: "Oh great, she's going for a pen and paper, she's going to use all this at the commitment hearing. Are you going to keep writing?"
The Princess: "Are you going to keep talking?"
If only I'd known six years ago that a cheap welcome mat from Target, placed in the bottom of the bathtub, would keep The Dog from trying to walk around while I'm trying to give her a bath...
I can't remember which of my friends thought of this, but whoever you are, thanks very much.
...despite their philosophical support of a progressive tax system and their awareness that inequality has increased over the last several decades, voters support tax policies that would perpetuate a more regressive tax system that includes tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the estate tax, a flat tax, and a retail sales tax.
The data (from a National Public Radio/Kaiser/KSG Survey done in February/March 2003) apparently showed that over 60 percent of Americans don't know what "progressive" means in the context of tax policy. This, plus some other results, led the panelists discussing the study to think that perhaps the completely unsurprising ignorance of the populace might have something to do with this bizarre political behavior.
I sure hope so. In Texas, we are currently facing a decision that could completely destroy poor kids' chance of getting a decent public education and hamstring our state's ability to provide health care and human services for our population for the next 10 to 15 years...or, in a best case scenario, move Texas up from having the 5th most regressive state tax system, equitably fund public education, and solve longstanding structural problems in our state's revenue-generating mechanisms.
It's the decision about how to change the Texas public school finance system, which everybody hates.
Saturday night I heard part of the song Father Figure for the first time in several years. Smell is supposed to be the sense most linked to memory, but for me it's music that can do the trick of zapping my brain from wherever it is now to a very specific feeling in time then.
In this case, it's junior high, when I was acutely aware of how much I was not preferred by the boys in my school. I never realized how horrifying the lyrics were, or if I did realize it I made sure to bury that knowledge so I could succumb to the fantasy of having someone appear to take care of me and make it all perfect.
Now that I'm finally learning this isn't how it works, the song punched the buttons for both nostalgia and loss. I don't much appreciate having Alanis Morissette narrate a chunk of my current personal developmental struggle, but she accurately identifies the overwhelming power of the stories we tell ourselves - and in my case, reinforce with a soundtrack.
Or, more aptly, things I have recently learned:
- If you call UPS and ask them to re-route your package to your work address because you won't ever be at home during the day, they can do that. (Apparently vegetarian marshmallows need a signature.)
- I cannot write substantial blog posts on 4-5 hours of sleep per night (and thus I am failing in my pre-New Year's blogging resolution).
- My boss has never met me. (I know this one because she bought me a sparkly pink heart necklace as a holiday present.)
I am going to bed now.
The Dog does not eat raw yellow squash.
The Princess should not eat 12 Starburst at one time on a virtually empty stomach, no matter how vegetarian they are.
This morning sucked. It started at 1:00 a.m., which is one of the reasons it sucked. Then it sucked some more, in new and exciting ways, and all of that was before I even got to work at the stunningly late hour of 10:45 a.m. Even the Ms. Magazine "50+ kick-ass women" issue that C. gave me yesterday did not dent my crankiness.
On my way home, I was very diligent and made myself read William Julius Wilson instead of daydreaming about some theoretical universe where I have a lot more money and a house and a car and all the other stuff that I'm convinced would make me happier than I am now.
On the way to my front door, I found in my mailbox my two first issues of Organic Style magazine (the low-emotional-and-environmental-toxicity version of Glamour, I hope), a free cookbook that I got for subscribing, and a bookstore gift card from my cool grandfather and his awesome wife.
At my front door, I found a surprise box full of Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, and Margaret Atwood books from my baby sister. I almost threw out the packing slip, but on my way to the trash can I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of extra typing on it.
Her message, broken up into one segment under each book line item, is as follows:
Have a free silly note. Sorry but I chose not to waste more on wrapping paper. I thought the book pages were enough! You wasteful person, wanter of books! And, no, this isn't hypocritical because I have suddenly gotten rid of all my books! Please do not come to my home to verify this information because it is possible someone might have replaced all my books with the exact same books I had before! And Merry Christmas!
The world is good again.
So let's look at a couple of interesting articles:
Imagine, if you will, trying to buy a food processor without a Best Buy, or a Macy's, or a Williams-Sonoma. Imagine if you had to go to crowded parties and other tedious functions and search the crowd for someone with an old Cuisinart at home that they might be willing to sell you. Furthermore, imagine if it were considered rude to bring up the Cuisinart straight off the bat - instead, you were expected to ask people about themselves, maybe buy them a drink, and feign interest in their rambling, self-involved banter, until finally, at the end of the night, loosened up by a few drinks, you could say what had been on your mind for hours:
"Um. I hope this doesn't sound too forward, but do you ... process food?"
And despite all that effort, imagine that the person's face drops, and he or she replies politely, but in a clipped, uncomfortable tone, "No, I'm not really into that kind of thing," and then exits the party without even asking for your number in case he or she ever does get the urge to process.
To Salon.com, online personals are evidence of the shameless commodificiation of dating, in which people are turning themselves into their own personal brands. Heather Havrilesky writes on Salon, "In keeping with recent advertising trends, today's online singles market themselves not by highlighting their best traits, but by creating an imaginary self that's impressively snarky and carefree."
OK, but when we meet people at parties or through friends, what does Havrilesky think we do, exactly? Project an earnest, authentic self, completely snark-free and honest?
Matt Perry:
I'm glad that life isn't like a Christmas song, because if my friends and I were building a snowman and it suddenly came alive when we put a hat on it, I'd probably freak and stab it to death with an icicle.
I am often advised to be less picky about my explicit criteria for who I will date. (I am advised to be more picky about who I actually date, but that's a different story.) The theory is that if you're too choosy, you may never find someone. I don't much care for that theory. It has a gaping hole in it, which is that if I compromise away some of my baselines (like vegetarian, solvent, keeps promises), I'll end up worse off than I am if I hang out with just me. So I remain steadfast in my criteria, and only hope that I have gotten smart enough to remember them when I see a pretty face.
Until I get sick, and then it all goes to hell.
So here it is, universe: I'll take a messy packrat carnivore who is always late and smokes like California on fire if he or she will just get over here and walk The Dog and put clean sheets on my bed and be the one who watches to make sure the frozen pizza doesn't burn.
Thank you. We now return to your regularly scheduled program of not whining quite as much as we did in this post.
When we enter into a fictional world, or let the fictional world enter into our imaginations, we do not "willingly suspend our disbelief." ...we cannot willingly decide to believe or disbelieve anything... When engaging with fiction we do not suspend a critical faculty, but rather exercise a creative faculty. We do not actively suspend disbelief - we actively create belief. As we learn to enter into fictional spaces (and I do believe this is something that we have to learn and that requires skills we must practice and develop) we desire more and more to experience the new space more fully... To do this we can focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our creative faculties to reinforce the reality of the experience, rather than to question it.
-Sarah E. Worth, "The Paradox of Real Response to Neo-Fiction." The Matrix and Philosophy: The Movie and the Reality. Ed. William Irwin. Open Court Press. 2002.
My faithful readers are already aware that I used my time wisely on my recent trip to New England, researching excellent gift-giving ideas in the SkyMall catalog. I was not as impressed by the quality of a particular article in Delta Sky Magazine, in the November 2003 issue.
The article starts off with a list of online behaviors, most of which we could agree are bad:
Some kids think it's ok to trash someone else in a chat room or on a "blog." They think it's OK to assume fake identities, to hack into databases or other computers, to cut and paste material into their papers, to forward sexist or racist jokes, and to download music.
Then we get the real-life example that is supposed to show a teachable moment in Harper's own family. His middle-school son is instant messaging with a friend, uses the "s" word as an exclamation, the friend forwards the email to AOL and they suspend the account for violating the rules of etiquette in AOL's terms of service.
Harper sees this as somewhat embarrassing proof that he hasn't been teaching sufficient "online ethics or morals" to his children. He cautions his children:
Don't type anything online that you wouldn't want me to read. Or your mom or teachers or friends. Or AOL. Assume anything you type can be read by anyone else. If you don't want the whole world to read it, don't type it.
His son was also grounded from the computer.
What I would have expected next in this article was a segue into a discussion of more serious online problems - i.e. this wasn't a big deal, but he took it as an opportunity to discuss the entire issue of online behavior with his son. Instead, Harper walks through a gamut of "bad online behavior" (plagiarism, hacking, visiting sites that "show pornography, deny the Holocaust, or offer bomb-making instructions"), essentially equating it with an incident where his son said a bad word to someone he thought he could trust.
There's a whole lot of strange going on here.
I've been a lazy blogger lately - something about going to Houston threw me off my game. But it's back on the horse! I'm going to aim for one serious and one silly post per day from here 'til the end of 2003. It's like a pre-New Year's resolution with an expiration date.
So here's the serious one for today. I first thought about posting on this topic when I saw this line on Dynamist Blog:
Publicly disapproving of gays separates [evangelical Protestants] from popular culture--and, hence, reinforces religious commitment--while exacting little personal toll.
Then Monday the Bush White House showed more of its true colors, as demonstrated by a few key lines from a Washington Post article on the incident:
H. James Towey, director of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has stirred up a pot of trouble by suggesting that pagans don't care about the poor... "I haven't run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor!" Towey wrote. "Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can't be used to promote ideology," he wrote, "the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work, and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it."
Rather than waste words deflating the obvious silliness, let's look at some research findings that relate to the charitable choice movement.
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