I rarely get unsolicited friend requests from people I don't know on MySpace. When I do, I usually add them because I think, "Hey, maybe they read my blog and want to be my friend!" I don't like looking like a total asshole, despite my self-awareness that, most of the time, I can a kind of jerk (at least when it comes to my Internet-protected bravado).
Occasionally, though, I get a request from someone who is just adding random people, and that's annoying. Especially when that person's pictures look something like this:
Note: I deliberately cut off this guy's face, although I'm rather shocked he doesn't have more pictures of JUST his torso.
Now, here's one thing: Abs freak me out. They don't look natural, and when I (rarely) see them in real life, they scare the hell out of me. So, sorry, your six-pack is unappealing.
Also? This:
I know I'm one of the thousands of hipster snobs who emailed / blogged about the NYT article about literary dealbreakers, and I feel like I should explain that I don't think I'd ever end a courtship with someone because they liked Ayn Rand. (Having said that: Would I date an Objectivist? Absolutely not.) Hell, I loved The Fountainhead, but in the same way that I love Valley of the Dolls: it's a guilty pleasure, terribly written, over-wrought, and it has a lot of rough sex. I think that everyone's allowed a few missteps when it comes to their cultural interests, because why would I want to date myself? I can't argue with myself, because I am always right.
But when the entirety of your cultural interests are made up of shitty things, I am not interested. And, frankly, those are the kinds of people who are more apt to pimp their profiles. If I can barely make out what your interests are because you have animations and videos and pictures of Kylie Minogue floating around all over the place, I think it's safe to say that, on a base level, I don't think a friendship would really work out between us.
I missed Obama's speech yesterday, but I was reading it this morning and was surprised that he quoted Faulkner. From the transcript:
"Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, 'The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.' We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."
It's an incredible soundbite (of course, isn't everything he says compulsively quotable?), but here's my problem: he misquoted Faulkner. It comes from Requiem for a Nun, a play Faulkner wrote very late in his career as a sequel to Sanctuary; it's a seldom-read book, but the quotation is the most frequently repeated line from all of Faulkner's works. It comes from the following exchange between Gavin Stevens and Temple Drake:
STEVENS
Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE
Mrs Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS
Temple Drake did. Mrs Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE
Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
I get that Obama is paraphrasing in his speech, and that doesn't belittle the meaning of what he was trying to say, but it still bugs me. It kind of reminds me of this girl I went to high school with who graduated the year before me. She was co-valedictorian basically because she managed to take the easiest classes for four years and get straight As, but was honestly as dumb as a brick. (This was before AP classes were offered, so those weighted grades didn't place the people who actually put forth more effort higher in the class rankings than those who took Home Ec.) In her graduation speech, she quoted Charles Dickens as writing, "It was the worst of times, it was the best of times." Sure, that fit in perfectly with the way she spoke about high school ("You guys, ninth grade English was so scary with Ms. Wagstaff, but we learned a lot, didn't we?!?!"), but that's NOT what Charles Dickens wrote.
Related: Transcript of Obama Speech [Politico] Requiem for a Nun [WFotW]
It's been a little over a month since I came out to my parents through email, and we haven't exactly talked about it since. Which, honestly, is fine with me since I like avoid that kind of interaction with my parents in the first place. (Gossip and cancer-talk can happen over the phone, but I prefer to update them about my love life strictly through electronic forms of communication, if at all.)
Last night, however, I got a call from my mother as soon as I got home. I had sent her the link to my post at This Recording, and she wanted to tell me she liked it, and that I seemed to not completely make fun of her, which she appreciated. Of course, I had an idea that she was calling because, in that article, I had written the following sentences:
"Once a girl I had a crush on pressured me into eating a strawberry, but I haven’t had one since."
"It wasn’t until last year, when my first serious boyfriend listed it as one of the reasons for breaking up with me, did I begin to think that there might be something wrong and it was affecting other people more than it was affecting me."
Of course that invoked the first conversation of many, probs, about my sexual preferences. She asked the same question that most people I've known in the last four to six years have asked: Did you really have crushes on girls in college? Are you bisexual? Et cetera, et cetera.
It's a difficult question to answer because, if you didn't know me well in college, I was very head-over-heels with someone I went to school with, feelings with lasted for about two years. Obviously, those feelings were unrequited, but they existed nonetheless. And I did date Megan for a few months my junior year, although it admittedly wasn't a very serious relationship. Perhaps my attraction to girls really stemmed from emotion and what I thought I was supposed to feel. I've certainly found men attractive, too, but I think I never developed feelings for a guy until after college because, frankly, I never had male friends. (Even my mother said, "I never really thought of you being attracted to men, as you seemed to hate most of the ones you knew." Which is true; I never had many male friends (aside from my childhood best friend, with whom I'm no longer friends), even in college.
But, like I told my mother last night, this is an issue I honestly don't think about much. Sure, people ask the question, and I try to give an answer, but it's not easy to produce when I haven't exactly figured it out for myself and, really, don't feel like I have to. I am who I am: I like dudes, and I'm fine with that. I don't think it's really the most important aspect of my life, or the only (or even the most important) way to identify myself. In fact, I've never actually found that I can come up with an identity for myself, and I think the reason for that is I'm from a family and a cultural background that can't trace back its roots to another foreign culture. When you grow up not thinking about that sort of thing, and then suddenly are hounded with ideas of multi-culturalism and "hyphenation" in college, it's a lot to take in. I suppose you could say I'm "Southern" or, simply, "American," but those are silly labels that, ironically, no one (especially in our dear, liberal city of Chicago) takes very seriously. At the same time, however, I'm not going to put "Gay" in front of anything, either.
Ralph Nader did not lose the 2000 election for Al Gore. Al Gore lost it himself by being a bad candidate. Do you remember liking Al Gore in 2000? Because I don't remember liking him very much back then, and, come to think of it, most of the people I knew didn't like him, either. But we supported him because he was a Democrat, and because George H. W. Bush, Jr. seemed like an incompetent idiot.
What I find kind of ironic is that Al Gore tried to distance himself from the blundering President Clinton when he ran for president, who had somMy ehow outstayed his welcome after eight years. Now, as we're all embracing change and saying that Obama represents that stray from politics-as-usual and the dynastic administrations of the the last twenty-seven years, I find it rather hilarious that people are still losing their shit over Al Gore because he made a movie that reiterated everything the same things we'd learned since the '90s but suddenly started to believe because we had that bad hurricane that destroyed the poor, black section of a Southern city that we only care about for one week in winter anyway. (Also, the hurricane wasn't really the cause of all of that destruction; rather, it was most likely the man-made levees that had gone unchecked for several years. But having that argument is like disagreeing over the role that slavery had in the Civil War. I'm not going there.)
My point is that Ralph Nader also represents a departure from politics as usual and, in a perfect world, more people would realize this and vote for him. But because we're so bogged down in tradition, and really only get politically-motivated every four years because we think a few months of debates and sending emails to our friends and family will somehow make everything in our country change for the better, we tend to ignore the fact that everything in this country - from the Hill to how we run our daily lives - is politics as usual.
So yeah. I'm not voting for Nader, but I respect what he's trying to do, and I don't think he should be the scapegoat for the Democratic Party's shortcomings.
Hey, you know what, Internet? Stop complaining about the Oscars. First, you bitch about the lack of an Oscars because of the Writer's Strike. Then you whine about how the Oscars will suck. And then you spend four hours watching the Oscars and live-blogging them and then spend several more hours the day after complaining about how they sucked. And - this is slightly unrelated - can I remind you, Internet, that you fucking lost your shit over Juno two months ago, and now the stripper's little screenplay is as annoying as she is?
I hope that we'll eventually mature as a mid- to late-twentysomething set of people who realize that we don't have to keep getting our hopes up five minutes before the opening monologue. The Oscars are the same as they ever were. They've always had pointless montages celebrating fabulous things in the history of cinem. There have always been at least one Broadwayish musical number (one might forget that in the '90s, during Disney's most productive years, there were several Oscar ceremonies featuring multiple songs from single films). Hell, there used to be interpretive dance sequences to the nominated scores, so can't we all just calm the eff down and realize that, okay, interviewing past winners about how they felt to waltz up on stage is actually better than watching movement set to the theme from The Thin Red Line?
Or, you know, you could all get real jobs that didn't involve getting paid to write about shit you watch on TV.
Last night I was at this house party populated mostly by the creative, improv-y types - the kind of party where a freestyle rap battle ensued, and it was actually a lot of fun (despite the pressure to throw out rhymes, which obviously didn't happen: I stood there awkwardly as people beatboxed at me until their beats finally trailed off and everyone felt weird for a good thirty seconds).
My friend Rachel, who was stoned and staring at people playing Street Fighter II for about a half hour, said what was probably the nicest thing anyone has said to me in the past few weeks that wasn't an uncomfortable consoling statement about my father. Some dude, clearly gay (because there were like, three of us there) was standing across the room, and I was doing my best to avoid eye contact because I was not into it. And Rachel caught this, and said, "That guy needs to stop staring at you because he is not cute enough. Like you'd really be interested in someone wearing a Lacoste shirt. Why the hell is he dressed like a European? He needs to cut out the black-on-black and get circumcised."
I left the party early and decided to go to Berlin. It seemed like a great idea at the time, and I even caught the Clark bus which never happens, so I thought it was a good sign. But, of course, Berlin sucked, and I've conceded to the fact that I feel miserable for the entire day after I go there. It kind of represents what I hate about the gays in Chicago: everyone knows each other, and it's like a small town where you can't escape from the people you're trying to avoid. Instead, you'll end up dancing next to all of them. I already got out of one small town, and I'm not going to get trapped in another.
On a side note: I've realized that the best way to get hit-on in bars is to look like you're having a miserable time. Perhaps "best" is the wrong adjective, however, as the people who tend to talk to me when I'm seconds away from throwing beer bottles at everyone around me are the type of guys who think they're going to cheer me up at four in the morning while I wait for thirty minutes in a line to retrieve my coat from coat check. Clearly, your moves are not going to work; by that time, I've already come to my nightly conclusion about the state of humanity.
Both Amy Winehouse and Feist were nominated for the Best New Artist award.
This category is a misnomer.
Amy Winehouse's nomination comes for her second album. Her previous, Frank, was released in 2003. Feist's nominated album is her third; Let It Die was released in 2004, and Monarch in 1999.
This is almost as ridiculous as when Shelby Lynne won in 2000 for her sixth album, I Am Shelby Lynne.
Per Koren's suggestion, I picked up The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, and Halloween couldn't have been a better time to read it. Stout, a clinical psychologist based in Boston, writes that roughly four percent of ordinary people - about one out of every twenty five of us - lack a conscience and therefore can behave however they want without feeling guilty. When one thinks of a sociopath, the term brings to mind psychotic criminals; Stout, however, argues that there's a major population of people who harm and manipulate others without breaking the law, and also without remorse.
I feel like I've come into contact with a lot of mean spirited people in my life, some of whom did not display any of the symptoms of sociopathy that Stout addresses in her book. There have been a few that, if not actual sociopaths, have certainly displayed sociopathic tendencies. Again, these aren't people who stand out for their immoral behavior; these are people who can gain your trust, people who you can find attractive enough to allow for their manipulations and deceit.
This book has kind of acted as a fifteen-dollar therapist for me, allowing me to see how events from the past year have affected me and how I relate to other people. It's not rare for a sociopath to be attracted to someone they think they can control and then eventually traumatize. I dealt with someone who lied to me repeatedly, who made me feel like I was unattractive and stupid, and made me place blame on myself for feeling that way. I was even encouraged somewhat to repeat this behavior by manipulating others at work for my own benefit (one example: I was persuaded to attend my manager's mother's funeral, since I had sent my manager's daughter my resume and my presence at her grandmother's funeral might help my prospects of getting hired at her publishing company).
Luckily, my plan of action in response to this mess wasn't as drastic as I - or most of my friends - have thought: Stout writes, "The only truly effective method for dealing with a sociopath you have identified is to disallow him or her from your life altogether. Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and therefore to include them in relationships or other social arrangements is perilous. Begin this exclusion of them in the context of your own relationships and social life. You will not hurt anyone's feelings. Strange as it seems, and though they may try to pretend otherwise, sociopaths do not have any such feelings to hurt."
One nice thing about reading this book, as well as the experience of dealing with someone who has hurt me, is that it makes me appreciate the people I surround myself with now, who care about me, and show it. To be able to find friends and romantic interests who don't put me down, to whom I can relate, and I generally want to be around all of the time is a big deal, as I've gone through periods of my life where I was certain those types of people could never exist in such large numbers. So, forgive me, Internet, for being so sentimental and LiveJournaly this morning, but after having a great weekend (Pictures!!) with some lovely people and realizing how good I've got it, I just wanted to share that with you. I may be returning to ridiculing Lauren Conrad and discussing placenta recipes tomorrow, but I'm not made out of wood, you guys.
I don't like Al Gore. Okay? I didn't like him in 2000 (even though I would have voted for him if I could have, obviously), and I don't like him now. I watched about twenty minutes of An Inconvenient Truth and couldn't handle it.
I'm not going to say that I think pollution is a problem and we should conserve energy, etc., and, okay, climate change may be an issue, but I'm not totally convinced and I'm not going to base any of my opinions on what Al Gore has to tell me, and this is why:
Do you see that image? It makes you think that pollution creates hurricanes, doesn't it? Oh, shit, like Katrina? Shit, do you remember that hurricane? It was the worst hurricane ever. Well, after the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which killed up to half a million people in Pakistan. Even China had one that was worse: Typhoon Nina in 1975. And while Katrina killed about 1800 people in 2005, the worst hurricane in American history was the Galveston Hurricane in 1900. Katrina was the most destructive hurricane in our country's history, causing the most property damage and becoming a major political issue, but I think it's been exploited by both the right and the left and the most important issues it pushed into the mainstream do not involve not what caused the hurricane (because, really, we know what causes hurricanes by now).
Basically, my problem with Al Gore's Nobel Prize is that he won it based on a movie that exploits our country / generation's fear of everything. You can argue that it was for "the greater good," which is a terrifying phrase, but the truth is that Al Gore exaggerates his truths, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
So please, World, stop giving this man awards, if only because I'm tired of having to hear him accept them. I just wish he'd be honest with himself and the rest of us and take a cue from Doris Lessing, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature:
PS. I'm more excited today about the trailer for Tim Burton's adaptation of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, starring (surprise!) Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, which seems to be in denial that it is a musical.
I'd like to take a moment from blogging about gay Republicans and penis-slippage to focus on something sincere for a sec, ok?
First, I heard back from one the jobs at Northwestern: I didn't get it, although I got a nice email from the guy I interviewed with saying that everyone really liked me and want to find a place in their department. At least it seemed like something that was personal and wasn't just a nice way of telling me I wasn't chosen, which made me feel slightly less upset about it. And then Katy made me feel even better:
And that's the perfect segue into what I planned to write about today: PREGNANCY.
Some of you know that Katy is preggers, and it's kind of weird because she and Justin are really the only close friends I have who are married, much less expecting a child. And that's exciting, and surprisingly not freaking the shit out of me (no matter how often Katy likes to suggest that I'll be in the hospital with her when she gives birth, even delivering the placenta). This is probably one of the reasons why I read an excerpt from Birth: The Surprising History of How We are Born by Tina Cassidy last week.
The first six pages, available on Amazon, were really fascinating and I want to pick up the book sometime this week to read the rest. I will admit, however, that I was a little disturbed when the author explained the details of her complicated first pregnancy, and I found out exactly what a c-section was. And it made me wonder: why is pregnancy such a scary subject? I mean, sure, I'm a guy, but should I really have gone nearly twenty-four years not knowing that sometimes to get a baby out, they have to remove the uterus from a woman's stomach and then stick it back in when it's done? I mean, it happens. It happened to my mother twice. I don't necessarily think that birth should be such a taboo subject, and it shouldn't be so uncomfortable to talk or read about.
When we were discussing this over the weekend, Justin made a good point: after all of the gross-out humor in Knocked Up (which I haven't seen yet), the image that made the audience gasp was a shot of the baby crowning during the birth. When are we going to be less sensitive about that image? Is it because we're scared of the vagina?
Anyway, those were just some thoughts. I didn't take any gender studies in college, so I've gotta express them here.
Also, in case you're wondering, Katy is having a girl, tentatively named Google Menard. Although I'd like to point out that Tyler is unisex, especially since I take a little credit for the conception as it took place shortly after I took this picture:
There's this great scene in Broadcast News where Holly Hunter confronts her boss at a party and tells him he's making a huge professional mistake, basically calling him out for his own misguidedness for rewarding William Hurt's character, a fairly daft, but attractive, news anchor, with a promotion. After her unsolicited advice, he looks at her and says, "It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room." She immediately responds, "No. It's awful."
In a seemingly unrelated anecdote (but please, wait for the segue), there's the case of Olivia Palermo, the mediocre New York socialite who sent an unsolicited email to her more famous contemporaries. What looks like a somewhat desperate plea for attention and acceptance from a stupid twenty-something with something to prove (laypersons in the psychology field - specifically, me - might diagnose Olivia with either "a false sense of maturity" or "social retardation") turned to be an embarrassing event when a few of the bitchy socialites, who apparently also consider Olivia to be a social 'tard, sent the email to Socialite Rank, who then published it for all the world (read: the Gawker set) to see. [Disclosure: I wasn't even interested in this story when it first broke because, um, stupid rich bitches? No thank you. But then Olivia Palermo was on Go Fug Yourself and they made an allusion to the "scandal" and I did some research. I just wanted to clear up any suspicions that I sit around reading Socialite Rank at work, because I already had the insufferable misery of having heard an explanation of Edward Said's theories of Orientalism - unsolicited, mind you, which is proving to be the great theme of this post - during my recent break-up, which I now think was actually a half-handed attempt on my ex's part to prove some sort of intellectual superiority, as I, as well as every other third person, was assigned that essay in college, and hearing someone give their own lecture about it is the post-graduate equivalent of your twelfth-grade creative response to Beowulf in which you wrote from Grendel's point of view.]
I'm not even going to think of a creative and witty way to tie those two stories to the catalyst behind this blog post. For the sake of brevity, and you, dear reader, I'm just going to jump right into it.
Last night I received yet another unsolicited email from my ex's ex-boyfriend / BFF, despite my specific instructions for him to NOT email me anymore. I think what motivated the correspondence (other than the underlying "false sense of maturity" and "social retardation") was his assumption that I cannot give up my right to have the last word in the manner. I assume his sophomoric email ("Okay, I won't contact you anymore! I just wanted to tell you this through this email!") was just an effort to incite some sort of response. Which it clearly has, but instead of emailing him back, I'm going to show him that you don't send ridiculous, pretentious emails to someone with a blog, because that person will just make fun of you online. Dumbass.
I'm not going to cut-and-paste the entire email (I've sent it to many friends, who, like me, have LOLed, so you'll just have to take my word that it's one of the funniest things I've ever read), but I will provide you with my favorite passage, or what I'll refer to as, "Stupid Point, number three:"
3. I hope that one day I will no longer be perceived as being "creepy," and that [The Ex] will no longer be perceived as being a "sociopath," and that you can look back on these months you have shared with one another in secret contentedness.
"Secret contentedness?" Who gave Emily Bronte a GMail invite? Or has she just resurrected in the form of a 23-year-old with a soul patch? Either way, I'm not feeling it. (Megan has, so far, had the best reaction to his writing style: "He writes the way I spoke when I moved to the U.S. but I had an excuse because, you know, I'd been going to school with ESL students for 6 years. What's HIS excuse?" Also, should I have made it more clear that I also thought this guy was a sociopath? I think it is now.
Another great part is where he insists that my ex "deeply cared about me" and handled the breakup in the best possible way. I don't know about you guys, but nothing says "best-case scenario" like: "Hey, I've been wanting to break up with you for weeks now but I felt really bad because, like, your DAD has cancer, and I knew that if I broke your heart I'd feel really guilty and stuff. So instead I'll just lead you on, repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't worry about anything and that I have no intention of ending things, all the while insulting you and your family (Your parents didn't give you a check for four thousand dollars just for graduating college after spending about seventy thousand on tuition and expenses for four years? What a couple of cheap motherfuckers!) and ignoring your emotional breakdowns so that you'll eventually get the nerve to want to break up with ME. And when we finally break up, I'll give you several reasons why it ended, specifically: 'You don't eat sushi, and since eating sushi is part of an urban image that I have to maintain, I can't date you' (it's just logic, my dear - don't you agree?), and then I'll explain Edward Said to you because you're too stupid to care about global issues like me. Wait, what do you MEAN you don't want to be FRIENDS?!" SOUNDS LIKE A TERRIFIC PLAN!!
Man, this post not only made me feel even better about burning bridges, but it also made me really pleased with myself. Can it get any better? Well, maybe if you showed me a three-minute video of bunnies hopping around aimlessly!
