OMG CLE you're killing me

I am watching a CLE (continuing legal education) webinar about the legal ethical implications of the interwebs.  I'm sure if I watch more of it I will learn that I should not be blogging about the CLE class.  But OMG, the person talking just said all of the following: 

 

1.  "I actually went on a Twitter page once."

2.  "I don't know if those of you who are watching this on the web..i...sode can see this" (while holding up a newspaper). 

3.  "LinkedIn is for professional networking." 
4.  "Twitter is limited to 140 characters or less." 

5.  "Blogs now allow comments."

 

I feel super tech-savvy. 

 

I care whether Elena Kagan's gay

(Note re blogging: I almost didn't notice that I hadn't written anything for two months, but now I am inspired by Andrea's reinvigorated blogging, and, let's be frank, by her saying my last post was funny. I'll do ANYTHING to be called funny. ANYTHING. Warning: the following post is probably not funny.)

I am really annoyed by all this "Elena Kagan shouldn't have to disclose her sexual orientation" commentary. People who say this do not actually mean "disclosing her sexual orientation," they mean "disclosing that she is gay," and it only makes sense in a world in which people are punished for being gay. For instance, every married nominee brings their family to their confirmation hearings, to sit there behind them as huge blinking signs of heterosexuality, but nobody thinks that is TMI. If there were no homophobia, sexuality wouldn't be something to be "disclosed" or not; it would just be a fact that's out there about a person, like where they went to college.

And it does matter if she's gay. If she were gay and out, that would be excellent because the other Supreme Court justices would be forced to deal with the existence of at least one gay human being in their lives. (Not that "diversity" always makes them see straight--the two Jewish Justices were recently unable successfully to explain to 5 Christians that the cross is a symbol of Christianity.)

But if she were gay and closeted, that would be weird and disturbing. I mean, yes, there is homophobia in the nation at large which explains why many people do not come out, but girlfriend is from a pinko family in Manhattan, has moved exclusively in lefty East Coast circles her whole life, and is 50, not 20. If she had not found the courage to come out by now (or, put another way, she had decided to keep an important part of herself hidden all this time, maybe so as to limit the kinds of ammunition people could use if she were nominated for something someday) it would make me suspicious about her trustworthiness and priorities. Plus, closeted gay public figures tend to be totally delusional.

Of course, I am totally late with this post because this morning a good friend of hers gave an amazingly awkward interview to Politico to prove that Elena's straight. Sooooo very straight!! For instance, "Walzer recalled 'discussion about who she might be interested in – the usual girl talk stuff-- talk about how to get his attention.'" Ack! Maybe I want to modify my opinion here--the fact of your sexuality should not be "private"/hidden, but most of the details past that probably should be.

Sweatpants gratification

My college boyfriend used to say, "If you wear sweatpants, you've given up on life." He said it not just as a general comment about the world, but rather to me when I was wearing sweatpants around the house. I'm pretty sure that at least once, he said it to my mom (when she was wearing sweatpants). This was not the only problem with that relationship, but it ranks up there.

Flash-forward 10+ years to last Friday. I met a friend of a friend at a happy hour, and he was wearing a suit, and green cotton socks. My friend and I were pointing out the folly of this, and I said, "There's nothing wrong with those socks, but you should wear them with sweatpants, not a suit." He said, "If you wear sweatpants, you've given up on life."

OMFG! My entire ill-fated college relationship flashed before my eyes. If more than one person held this view, was it possible my X was RIGHT? I do not currently own any sweatpants--they have been replaced by flannel PJs with Ralph Wiggum on them--but the thought still haunts.

Luckily, my friend J is much smarter than me, and when I told her this story she immediately said that they must both have gotten it from the same source. "It was probably a Seinfeld line or something," were her words. A quick Google showed she was exactly correct: in the pilot of Seinfeld, George wears sweatpants, and Jerry says:

You know the message you're sending out to the world with these sweatpants? You're telling the world, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society. I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable."

So not only are my ex and this other dude both just repeating a very old line that they probably don't even know is a line, but the sweatpants thing is referring specifically to wearing sweatpants outside the house. It's totally irrelevant to my life. I feel pretty awesome about this.

I am a highly accomplished individual

In the last 3 days I have accomplished the following uber-impressive feats:

(1) Done the first 3 days of P90X. Yes, it's that ridiculous EXTREME workout system you may have seen advertised on infomercials and this disturbing website! It involves a dude in a man-tank, wearing a lot of bronzer, saying "BRING IT" a lot! The DVDs include lots of plugs for a company called Beach Body and a line of "recovery drinks"! But dude, if I stick to doing even the majority -- even the plurality, really -- of 90 days of vigorously exercising for an hour a day, I will be in about 1000% better shape than I have ever been. I can tell it's working already because it hurts when I stand up from my chair. BRING IT!

(2) I made a tablecloth! Mr. TA got me a sewing machine for Christmas (because I ASKED for it, not because he thinks I should engage in lady activities, of course), but then I got kind of lazy about it, i.e. I didn't even open the box for a few months. But I was re-inspired by Dr. Frankenbaby, my dear friend who has somehow managed to make the adorable Baby E and raise her to the point where she can already sit up, while at the same time starting an awesome mommy blog in which she reprises, among other things, her highly impressive sewing and other DIY projects. I am realistic about my abilities, so while Dr. Frankenbaby takes on turning her Lab Partner's old shirts into adorable baby dresses, I started with the more accessible project of hemming a flat piece of fabric. And I did it! I forgot to take pictures -- maybe I'll do it later -- but it is really big (it's for when we use the leaves to extend the table, such as if we have more than 4 people over to eat), basically rectangular, and has (more or less) mitred corners.

Tune in next week when I fix global warming and get Obama's agenda passed. BRING IT!

Godfather and the Pacino/De Niro switcheroo

I have flipped by The Godfather Part II a couple of times in the last month or so, and it has helped me realized why I am always confusing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It's because somewhere along the way, possibly starting during this movie, they started to switch bodies. To wit:

Pacino (now): Frizzy-haired, craggy, gaunt, looks exhausted.
De Niro (now): Kind of pudgy face, looks amused.

But! In the Godfather II days, it was all bass-ackwards:

Pacino (then): Smooth-haired, smooth-faced, looks like he used to have inner peace but now it's under siege.
De Niro (then): Good cheekbones, attractive, looks like a moral man forced by circumstance into a life of crime.

If you were going to pick which young guy would grow up into which old guy, you would totally switch them around. See, I'm not just ignorant about classic actors (or Italian-Americans)--it's just that my understanding of them is deeper than everybody else's.

SNOW!!! BORED!!!

Tomorrow will mark Day #6 that I have not gone in to work because of the Snow that Ate DC. Yes, it's true, DC is wussy about weather, but in its defense, it's only half just straight up warm-climate-dwellers' hysteria; the other half is a lack of plows, which I guess is a reasonable financial decision in a place that rarely gets much snow.

Anyway, I am very happy to report that I am close to achieving the thing I yearned for but did not accomplish during my month off between jobs in December: boredom. When I was little my brother and I got bored all the time and would follow my mom around, asking her what we should dooooooo. I hadn't felt that for about 25 years, so at first I wasn't sure it had returned. But in retrospect, it is clear that the first twinges set in today when Mr. TA and I walked to Target to buy toilet paper even though there are zillions of closer places to get it, just so we'd have a longer walk and more stuff to look at once we got there. It intensified this afternoon when we did our taxes--the first time ever they have gotten done before April. And just now we played a board game (they're not called that for nothing!) Yay, boredom!

The question is, what happens after you get bored? Do you watch dumb TV to prolong the experience, or try to end it quickly by taking on a bigger project (cleaning closets, reading a novel)? Mom, what should I doooooooo?

Pro-what?

Here is what I don't get about the Superbowl ad with the football player and his mother talking about how she decided not to abort her pregnancy even though doctors told her she might die if she didn't: it seems off-message for "pro-lifers." Is their target audience really women whose lives are at risk? And is their goal really to convince those women that it would be immoral, and should be illegal, for them to have an abortion to save their own lives?

If not, then the message of the ad is: she was faced with a CHOICE and she made the CHOICE which others questioned but which was the right CHOICE for her. If that is the message they are cool with, then perhaps I have been misunderstanding things.

Supremely depressing

I have a number of happy things I've been meaning to blog about--my new job is going well (I think), and I agree with Andrea that The Hangover was great even if arguably one should be offended, or whatever.

But the thing that has now gotten me off my butt to actually write something is my anger/disappointment at the Supreme Court's decision to ban cameras from the gay marriage trial in California. The majority opinion (by the 5 usual suspects) reads like this: The sweet people who advocated for Proposition 8 have already gotten picked on big-time by all the mean gays and their nefarious supporters. Now the gays have brought this big mean divisive lawsuit, and the Prop 8 suporters will get picked on way more if people can watch them testify. We don't like cameras in the courts anyway, and particularly not when the public is interested in what's going on in there. Oh, and in case there's any confusion, we think the district court judge is bending the rules for the plaintiffs, and he will probably continue to do so up to and including when he rules that there's a Constitutional right to gay marriage, and we will not hesitate to smack him down then either.

As Slate pointed out, it's totally reminiscent of Bush v. Gore--5/9 of the Court is sticking their hands into an issue they would normally never get involved in because they don't like the political outcome, and then pretending like they don't have any choice but to get involved (certiorari what?) and to call 'em as they see 'em, even if they've never called it this way before and never will again. It's aggravating that, as in that case, the dissent is super polite about it and doesn't just lay it out there that this is what's going on. Not that it would do any good, but it would be more satisfying to read.

Best/Worst of the '00s!

The end of the decade feels much more salient for me right now than the end of the year.  The end of 1999 seems, in that cliched way, like just yesterday--didn't we just fill up the tub with water in A&E's apartment in Inwood so we'd have drinking water when the world ended, then head out in our chunky heels and matte lipstick for Times Square, although we'd get sidetracked by some bar containing pool tables and questionable gentlemen?  Ahh, good times.  So here are some assorted Top 5 lists for the Zeros:

 

Personal Top 5

1.  Meeting Mr. TA (aww)

2.  Regular vacations with friends from college

3.  Formation of cult/urban tribe (whatever you want to call it) in DC

4.  Evolution from boring jobs to stressful jobs

5.  Getting into law school  (for law school itself, see below)

 

Top 5 Moving Pictures on Screen

1.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2.  The Wire

3.  The Big Lebowski

4.  Bridget Jones' Diary

5.  DVD commentary tracks (as a genre)

 

Top 5 Things I Hope I'll Never Have to do Again

1.  Having random roommates

2.  any Bush presidency (I'm looking at you, George P. and Jenna)

3.  Moving without paid assistance

4.  Going to Lubbock

5.  Law school

 

See you in the Tens!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twilight, a very bad movie

I took everybody's advice and did not read the Twilight books, but my curiosity about the phenomenon got the better of me, so yesterday I watched the (first) movie. 

 

Oh.My.God. it was bad.  Luckily, I found it literally laugh-out-loud bad, rather than just annoying bad.  Here is the movie:  Bella, a shy, pretty girl, moves to small town in Washington state.  She speaks only in monosyllables and generally looks surly or nauseous, but everybody immediately loves her, and she acquires a group of nice, funny friends.  All the boys in her group of friends ask her to prom, and she acts irritated and says no.  This does not upset the group dynamic, and instead the boys ask the other girls in the friend group.  Bella goes prom dress shopping with the girls but makes it clear she is uninterested in their whole silly prom thing.  She really only wanted to go so she could buy a book about Native American myths, because ...

 

Edward is a pale, cute boy who acts like he is going to vomit when Bella's in his vicinity.  She stares back, also looking like she's going to throw up.  They do not flirt; instead they act angry at each other.  He does stuff like follow her around all the time, save her life repeatedly from various perils but act pissy about it, and have very cold fingers.  She does some detective work using the aforementioned book, as follows:  she opens it to a random page, reads one caption ("The Cold One"), then Googles that, and discovers--Edward's a vampire!   She confronts him--angrily, nauseously--and he angrily and nauseously admits that he IS a vampire.  Further, for several months he's been sneaking into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep, and he has a very strong urge to kill her because her hair (or her blood? unclear) smells delicious. 

 

Now--ta da!--they're totally in love!   

 

Uh oh, now another vampire wants to follow Bella around and has a strong urge to kill her, but this is not OK because Bella is already Edward's special tasty ladyfriend.  Then more peril for Bella ensues, Edward saves her again, and Bella and Edward go to prom.  Ta da! 

 

I may spend the rest of my leisure period rewatching Buffy, to get Twilight out of my system.

Beaucoup vacation haiku

Toolstein commented on my two-day absence, and flattery will get you everywhere, so here I am. I am on Day 2 of my Lady of Leisure interlude, and so far it's pretty great. Let me tell you about it in haiku, shall I?

Getting up at ten
Is better than getting up
At seven, no doubt

Daytime yoga class
Do these people not have jobs?
Who knows. Must be nice.

DVD player
Died during first Mad Men show
It is a cruel world

Researching Blu-Ray
Is not what I want to do
But I am selfless

Maybe I should clean
Whoa, where'd the afternoon go?
It gets dark early

Tomorrow I will
Make dessert for a party
And watch Gossip Girl

Want to play hooky?
We could drink Bloody Marys
Let me know, I'm free!

Last day of work!

Today is my last day of my current job!  Which I have been at longer than I was in high school!  So far it's like any other day, except with less work to do and more papercuts from packing up boxes.  Cleaning out my office has been a little disconcerting.  I like to think of myself as an organized person--so being faced with incontrovertible evidence that, in actuality, I am a person who leaves an invoice sitting in my in-box unopened for months because I assumed it was just a copy of something I'd gotten by email, and who has dirty socks I dont even remember owning in my filing cabinet, is making me reassess my self-image a bit. 

In other news, if you are in charge of organizing an office holiday party to which you are inviting the new employees who have not yet started, please do not send an email to everyone in the department, including the new people, suggesting that the new people "reply all" with information about their favorite books, movies, etc. so that whoever has them in the "Secret Santa" exchange will know what to get for them.  Holy god.

Bad tipping will out

Many years ago I read someplace that Tiger Woods was a bad tipper.  There is a special place in hell reserved for rich people who tip poorly.  It could be that that place looks something like the inside of a fancy house in a gated community where you watch your reputation slip through your fingers on TV while you wait for the the mysterious scratches on your face heal and hope no more of your girlfriends leak voicemails to the press, and that your wife doesn't decide to use your golf clubs to "rescue" you again anytime soon. 

Math would help you win The Amazing Race

SPOILER ALERT:  In The Amazing Race this week, the only team in which the players are always kind to each other -- Harlem Globetrotters "Flight Time" and "Big Easy" -- got eliminated because Big Easy didn't know math.  Here's why you should pay attention in math class, kids! 

Technically he did not need to know math--he needed to figure out how to unscramble the letters N, A, R, F, Z in a "Kafkaesque" challenge involving a bureaucratic nightmare in Prague (dozens of ringing phones, repeated filling out of forms, etc.)  (So, absent math,  you could have figured it out if you'd recognized that "Franz" is a word, but I could see not noticing that because of the whole it-might-be-in-a-different-language thing.)  The more annoying brother in the Evil Gay Brothers team told Big Easy they'd work together, but when Annoying One figured it out, he would only tell Big that the word started with an F. 

What a douchebag!  But, OK, a word that starts with an F, and has four other unique letters.  Combinatorics, my favorite branch of math from my olden days as a math major, teaches us if there are 4 options for the second letter, then there are 3 for the third letter, 2 for the fourth letter, and only 1 for the last letter, the number of possible words is 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24.  Twenty-four words!  Even if it took 2 minutes to fill out the rest of the Kafkaesque bureaucratic form, it would only take 48 minutes to go through all the possibilities.  Instead, Big Easy got totally flustered and the Globe Trotters took the 4-hour penalty rather than complete the challenge.  The HUMANITY!  The LACK OF MATH SKILLS!

Now The Amazing Race is left with the aforementioned Evil Gay Brothers, the Whiny Miss America and her Excessively Patient Husband (accompanied by their unofficial sidekick, Their Interracial Relationship), and the Two Boring Blond Ones.  I guess I am rooting for the boring blondes out of a lack of options.  So sad!  Globe Trotters, I hated to see you go. 

Thanksgiving! (and Star Wars)

Looks like my "posting every day in November" thing has fallen apart a bit.  I blame it on the sleepy chemicals in turkey.  And,  the anticipatory laziness that gripped me before actually eating any turkey in the days before Thanksgiving.  In fact, I was so anticipatorially lazy that I did not help AT ALL on Thanksgiving, either with cooking or cleaning up.  Instead I busied myself by "entertaining" my 9- and 11-year-old cousins by watching Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back back-to-back.  Great babysitting, self!   

I was surprised to find that I didn't remember the plot of the Star Wars movies in that much detail, or the amount of cheesy acting and technical nonsense dialogue.  As the Phantom Menace and those other Whiny Anakin movies demonstrated by way of contrast, George Lucas was lucky Harrison Ford et al were so good in the first few.  Also:  the version we were watching was the "remastered" one released 5 or 10 years ago, and the stuff that was changed from the original was HIDEOUS.  In the scene when Han Solo shoots the bounty hunter in the bar, they've changed it so the bounty hunter shoots first.  The whole point is that Han is a badass and not particularly burdened by moral considerations!  Also, why would the bounty hunter miss at nearly point-blank range?  Then in the very next scene, when Han goes to get his ship to take Luke and Obi Wan to Alderan, who shows up but Jabba the Hut, looking shiny, computer-generated, and nonthreatening, to tell him "oh, ok, you can pay me later."  This totally dilutes the threat of the unseen, offscreen Jabba who sends bounty hunters after Han. 

So George Lucas produced awesome movies despite himself.  Good lesson for us all.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Fact-free breast cancer discussion

The kerfluffle over the new mammogram and pap smear guidelines has emphasized for me the remarkable lack of facts in the public discussion about most things.  Before deciding whether to be pissed off about these guidelines, I think there are lots of things you'd have to know:  Is there some kind of standard way for assessing whether a screening test is worthwhile?  Was that used here?  Are there actual health risks to getting a biopsy that turns out to be a false positive?  It seems weird that they would say unnecessary "anxiety" was a reason not to screen people, because in weighing anxiety vs. death, anxiety seems like not a biggie; does "anxiety" always factor into recommendations about health screenings?  How is it weighed?  (1000 anxious people > 1 dead person?)  There was a lot of attention paid to the fact that these new guidelines didn't consider cost; but (while they're at it with considering anxiety) shouldn't they throw in money too? 

 

Admittedly I did not spend all weekend looking for the answers to these questions, but I didn't see the answers to ANY of them in anything I read.  Instead there were hours of Sunday talk shows with people yelling crap at each other about rationing, their family members who got breast cancer, and the general idea of "science," but nothing about what that means. 

 

Of course, when I have to make a decision about something like at what age I will start getting mammograms, I will probably make the decision in a totally impressionistic way, and will actually limit the amount of information I try to find out because the more information, the more confusing it will be.  But I would like to think that somebody would know that information.  Perhaps this is one of those disillusioning things about becoming a grownup.  :( 

Glee problem

I have been watching Glee faithfully, like any lover of musicals, high school dramas, and gayness is obliged to. 

But lately I gotta say my dedication is slipping a bit.  Recent episodes have displayed tell-tale symptoms of both After School Special-itis and Dialogue and Action Inconsistent With Previously Established Character Trait-iosis.  Both were strongly evident two weeks ago in "The One About How You Should Be Understanding Towards People With Disabilities." 

Of course a TV show can convey a message about how society discriminates against people with disabilities and that is wrong, see Friday Night Lights, but I not enjoy being pummeled over the head with that message to the point that humor and consistency suffer.  Like, I absolutely do not buy that Sue, whose character is the best one on the show because she is so hilariously amoral and without human feeling, all of a sudden has a disabled sister who turns her into a soft-focus, patiently reading-aloud person. 

And frequently, the show seems to have the problem of knowing what emotional arc it wanted the characters to go on -- these two should have a touching moment but then have a tiff and break up, etc. -- but not bother to think of a way to get them to that place that is believable within the context of the show.  For instance, just a few weeks ago Curt did the Beyonce Single Ladies dance on the football field in front of the whole school.  But now he's worried that his dad won't be able to handle the homophobic backlash that would result from him singing a girl's part at a glee club competition?  Umm, no. 

Tragically, this problem reminded me of that seemingly promising but now dead-to-me show, Heroes.  At the end of season 1, SPOILER ALERT IF YOU ARE REALLY BEHIND they had the idea that the one brother should sacrifice himself by flying up into outer space, carrying his brother who was about to explode like a nuclear bomb, thereby saving the world.  Good idea!  Except it made NO SENSE because the nuclear-bomb brother could fly all by himself.  God help me, Glee, if you go that way I am going to ... be sad.  Very sad.  :(   

Direct democracy, OMG

Last night Mr. TA and I attended a meeting for residents who live on our block and the few surrounding blocks, to discuss a proposed Mt. Pleasant "day parking pass" pilot program. My feeling on the issue: Sure! Our mini-area of the 'hood is mostly residential and there's lots of parking during the day. Until recently anybody could park on the street at any time on our block, so employees of the nearby elementary school and nursing home used to park there when they were at work.

Six months ago or so some residents circulated a petition to change our street from "anybody can park here" to "you can only park here for two hours unless you have a residential parking pass." I signed it so people on our block would be able to park on nearby blocks without getting ticketed, and also based on the understanding that they were going to start this "day pass" program, so the school and nursing home employees could buy a daily parking pass for $2.50 or so a day (approximately the cost of a round-trip bus trip).

Well, they started the residential parking pass thing but somehow the day parking pass thing went to shit, so now the school and nursing home employees get ticketed if they park on the street. I had vaguely understood that the going-to-shit was due to the employees having shot themselves in the foot by complaining about the fact the passes were going to cost anything at all.

But this community meeting suggested that, in fact, what has bolluxed up the day parking pass plan may be an smallish contingent of people who are going all NIMBY ape-shit about ... nurses and teachers parking in front of their houses during the day? Or, being pissed off at the idea of other people parking for cheapish while they have to pay a lot to park where they work. Or, having a self-righteous environmental reaction of wanting to deter other people from driving (although presumably most of these people wouldn't care about parking at all if they didn't have a car, plus they can afford to live in our lovely, fairly central D.C. neighborhood from where it is easy to get downtown, whereas if you live in a cheaper outlying suburb, getting to Mt. Pleasant on public transportation would be a major PIA.) (I of course did not mention at the meeting that we don't have a car, figuring that might invalidate my opinion.) Or, they were against it for some other reason I could not entirely discern even after they talked about it in a pissed-off-but-not-very-coherent way for several minutes.

The upshot was that the general idea of the day parking pass program was "approved" on a straw poll vote of 8-7. It would have been 7-6 against if Mr. TA and I had not randomly decided to go to the meeting. Direct democracy, dude, I don't know.

Curate this

In general I think pet peeves are not a good thing to have. Sure, lots of shit is annoying, but when you elevate an annoyance into a pet peeve, you really are making it into your pet--it becomes a pampered little possession which you have to nurture and protect from the outside world, i.e., from any attack on your maintaining it as a pet peeve. So I have tried to, as they hippy-dippily say in yoga class, "let go" of various pet peeves I once possessed, including ... look, I let them go so successfully I can't even remember them!*

But there is an annoyance so significant, and on such a horrifyingly dramatic uptick in popularity, that it has entirely taken over the previously depopulated pet peeve center in my brain: the word "curated." On Apartment Therapy, which I generally lurve, "curated" has become this hideous all-purpose word meaning "picked out or decorated, but by people with really good minimalist taste, so, like, on a totally different plane from the tacky type of picking out or decorating done by ordinary people." As in: A Carefully Curated Chelsea Duplex. Or: The Pink Project, curated by Brad Pitt. I don't even think "curated" should really be a verb, except in the narrow meaning of "to act as a curator," where "curator" is somebody in charge of a museum exhibit, not just a person with a nice apartment. Otherwise anybody could take any word that describes a skill or profession they do not possess or practice, and make it into a verb to try to make their own everyday activities sound fancy. As in, I cheffed some dinner. Or, I need to accountant these bills. Annoying!

Maybe I can just keep this one pet peeve. It's such a good one.

*I can probably remember if I try. Oh yes: the incorrect use of "myself" instead of "me," braided leather belts, people who are proud of their ignorance of all things Midwestern, unleashed large dogs.

A TomKat Education

I saw An Education this weekend, and it did the schoolgirl-with-older-man thing in a non-cliched way, which is quite an accomplishment. It even manages to make you at least somewhat sympathize with all the characters, including the very smart 16-year-old who falls in love with a much older man, her normally overprotective parents who let themselves get conned into letting their school-aged daughter go to Paris with a grown man, and even the man himself, who seems to con himself into falling in love with a 16-year-old. Also, Emma Thompson is delicious as a cold, stern school headmistress.

However, that the 16-year-old character, Jenny, looked so much like a young Katie Holmes -- the round face, cute nose, surprisingly intense stare -- that watching her be seduced by a dashing older man I felt I was watching a documentary about TomKat's romance. Viewed in that way, ewwww.

Prejan 2040

Carrie Prejean -- former Miss California, anti-gay marriage hero, and solo sex tape star -- just recently put in a weirdo but, I think, freakishly savvy performance on Larry King. Larry asked her why she decided to settle her religious discrimination lawsuit against the pageant after they fired her for missing appearances.

Carrie responded, in the tone a kindergarten teacher might use with a kid who's eating the fingerpaint again, that Larry was being "inappropriate" and that she couldn't talk about the settlement. She said "inappropriate" about 5 times. Larry backed down and took a phone call. As the caller started to identify himself as a gay man, Carrie took off her microphone and seemed to be talking to someone offstage, but then continued to sit there, giving her beauty-pageant smile to the camera. She didn't answer the caller's question (what would you tell a gay friend who wanted to get married) because, she said, she couldn't hear. (Because she'd taken her microphone off.)


An ability to get affronted by reasonable questions, combined with a plastic perma-smile and homophobia expressed ungrammatically ... just add a persecution complex and you've got the next Sarah Palin! And what do you know, right before the weird outburst, Carrie had been talking about how the liberal media is so unfair to women like Palin (a personal hero of hers) and Michelle Bachman. You heard it here first, she is totally running for office.

Water cooler triumph

Crap on a log, it appears I forgot to post yesterday.  (Actually, I realized this at about 12:15 last night, but it was already today, so what was the point in getting out of bed?) 

So here's yesterday's post: 

I would like to announce that in the last two weeks, i.e. my last month and a half at this job, I have reversed my long-standing policy of not changing the water jug thing on the water cooler machine in the kitchen.  My reasoning for this stance was that I was likely to drop the thing on the floor and spill water everywhere, so I might as well just leave it empty and wait for somebody stronger to do it.  But one day I was gripped with the knowledge that I would not spill it.  And I have not!  I feel good about this.  Maybe not as good as I would if I had run the NYC Marathon (way to go, Amy and Arie!) but still pretty good.

Ack!

It's 8:04 pm and I have not posted yet today, and have no plan for a topic, so I am just writing this off the top of my head.  It's funny how you can talk (or type) something before you know what you're going to say--presumably your brain actually does know what you're going to say, because it can think faster than you can talk or type, but the other part of your brain that reports to you on what your brain is doing has not yet transcribed the thought, or is doing so in real time.  Like the bad instant closed captioning on live events.  I wonder if being a translator requires you to disengage that "reporting" part of your brain and just let your lizard comprehending brain hook up directly to your talking/signing/communicating part.  Maybe that's what I'm doing now.

OK, that counts as a post!  Wow.  (That is what Carolyn Hax suggests saying when someone says something really offensive or inappropriate:  Wow.  I wish I had said that in response to the douchey email I got from some douchey lawyer today.)  Tomorrow I will try to plan ahead more. 

Should I read the Twilight books?

I am spending a lot of mental energy planning for the few weeks in which I will be between jobs and thus a lady of leisure. One big dilemma is: should I read the Twilight books, or not?

Apparently they are very hot right now, which leads me to feel left out of a big pop culture phenomenon, and also I understand they are a big guilty pleasure. (A 13-year-old girl who went to the Inauguration with us was reading one of them the ENTIRE DAY, and she seemed quite engrossed, which was a good ad for them.)

On the other hand, I kind of think I will not like them as much as all the teen girls do, because, hey! I am 32. Also, the book series I get obsessed with tend to be the younger children, whole-fantasy-world variety (Harry Potter, obvs.; His Dark Materials; The Dark is Rising; Narnia) and not the young luv type. And what I understand to be the concept -- that this high school girl falls in lurve with a vampire but they have a very chaste relationship because METAPHOR ALERT he might kill her if they messed around -- sounds fairly heinous.

On the other hand, maybe I am sort of patting myself on the back for not liking the books even though I haven't read them, so I don't know if I would actually not like them, and so avoiding reading them is kind of a cowardly way to make myself feel superior, based on no information. So I should just read them and deal with it if I do like them.

On the other hand, as my friend Amy said, I would be contributing to the dumb-ification of the world if I read them. But I already watch a whole lotta reality TV, so it's pretty much too late for that.

What think you, reader(s)? (And, if you have them already, can I borrow them?)

Bench-sitting/fashion resolution

It was a beautiful day out today, and I went and sat in Dupont Circle, enjoying the sun, eating pizza and drinking Diet Coke, and people-watching. It was just lovely, and I resolved that I would like to spend a lot of time like that when I'm old. It really seemed a classic old-person bench-sitting opportunity, and I felt bad for the old people of DC that they were not there (with the exception of a few older gentlemen who were shirtless, which, not a good look.)

I will begin practicing for being an old person bench-sitter people-watcher now by feeling alienated by the clothing the young people are wearing these days. Specifically, leggings. Now, I have worn me some leggings, yes indeed. In about 4th grade, I had a pair of stirrup leggings that I used to wear with, I believe, a large grey sweatshirt, for a vaguely Flashdance kind of moment. Then in 9th grade, I had several leggings-based outfits: a pair of light blue fake-denim ones that came with a striped kind of trapeze sleeveless shirt, and a black pair that I wore with rugby shirts and, I am pretty sure, flats. So I can't really begrudge the youngsters their leggings, but it is very apparent to me that that is a merry-go-round one can only ride once, and I've already had my turn.

Bring me another diet Coke and my cane, please, Missy.

Blogging for the third day in a row, non-chart edition

As Andrea noted, blogging is hard. My mom is participating in that write-a-novel-in-one-month thing this month, so it's pretty embarassing that I am having a hard time writing a blog post on this, my third straight day of blogging. But that's why the glib chart form was invented:

In: The health care floor debate

Five Minutes Ago: Election coverage

Out: People sawing their own limbs off

In: Preachy vegan yoga instructors

Five Minutes Ago: Doctors who specialize in "spirituality and health"

Out: Evangelicals

In: Blogging every day

Five Minutes Ago: Watching less TV

Out: Regular exercise

Whence cometh the popularity of "douchebag"?

A few years ago I met my friend T's husband, G, who is a good guy and who uses the word "douchebag" a lot. That was a word I had not heard since middle school, but I thought G pulled it off quite well; it sounded so dated it was fresh again--like babies named Sadie or Otis.

G's use of "douchebag" was immortalized in a fictionalized version of G who appeared in a book written by a friend of G's from college. While I think the fictional portrayal was supposed to be kind of negative, the G character was my favorite one in the book. "Douchebag" set him apart from the angsty self-absorption of the other characters.

I started using "douchebag" and its variants now and again after meeting G and reading about Fictional G, but I thought of it as a quirk I was stealing from him. (I figured he wouldn't know because he lives elsewhere.) It has a lot of good applications: you can use it in the way you once would have used other middle-school insults, like "gay" or "retarded," which themselves should not come back into circulation. It's less harsh than "dumbass" or "dickhead," and can be used as an adjective ("douchey.") I think of it as connoting the culture of the dumb, pretentious but not evil, probably drunk, aging frat boy.

Now all of a sudden it's everywhere. There's a video about douchebags reclaiming the word on BoingBoing, and a response on DoubleX critiquing the imprecise use of the term in the video. Can I give credit to G? Fictional G? Me and others who stole it from G and Fictional G? Or is this one of those things, like the popularity of names like Sadie and Otis, that everybody thinks up together and then is annoyed that other people thought of it too?

Big news!

Since I missed Nov. 1-4, might as well make up for it now. I am squeaking in under the wire on accomplishing my major New Year's Resolution for this year: I got a new job! Aww, yeah. Here are the highlights of the new job, phrased vaguely:

1. I will not have to bill my time anymore. (FREEDOM!)
2. It's new! (YAY!)
3. I already know at least some of the people I will work with, and like them. (Can't beat that, right?)
4. I BELIEVE the hours will be fairly reasonable. (JOY!)
5. I think the organizational culture and the types of work will be more to my liking. (INTERESTING!)
6. Better lunch options in that 'hood. (LUNCH!)

Where the Wild Things Are: Liked it!

St. Scobie's Mock Whiskey has alerted me to the fact that November is, apparently, Blog Posting Month. It seems apt that I should start a month of posting every day by not posting for 4 days, so here I am! Gonna post every day!

Might as well start with my follow-up to my last post, nearly two weeks ago, in which I optimistically said I would post again after I had seen Where the Wild Things Are.

Happily, my nervousness about the potential for book ruination was for naught: I thought Where the Wild Things Are was awesome. It's certainly quite different from the book, but that was true to such an extent that it almost seemed like an entirely different story, which sometimes reminded me of Where the Wild Things Are (the book). The movie captured the nearly bipolar feeling of being a pre-teen: one moment running around like a joyful maniac, the next moment collapsing in world-ending tears. Many of the negative reviews I've read have said it was too psychoanalysis-ish, but I didn't find that jarring. Maybe it's just me, but I spent a lot of time as a kid thinking about my relationships with people--maybe more so than I do now, even, because when you're younger, other peoples' motivations are more mysterious. (Like the motivations of monsters, maybe.)

I don't know if this is another compliment or a caveat, but I think watching the movie made me regress a bit. After it was over I had a near tantrum about the prospect of, like, biking home. Which is not really that bad. Consider yourself warned.

Where the Wild Things Are pre-review

I'm going to see Where the Wild Things Are tonight and I'm NERVOUS. This is an unusual feeling to have before a movie (normally I'm just psyched to get to eat candy), but the stakes here are high: I fear that if I don't like the movie it might ruin one of the greatest children's books of all time for me. In fact, when I first saw previews for the movie I swore I would not see it for this very reason. But the other week I went to see The September Issue (worthwhile, btw) and got there insanely early, and watched the programming they put on for people who get there insanely early. It was an interview with Maurice Sendak about how much he liked the movie, maybe even MORE than the book, he said. So, I felt like, if Maurice Sendak likes it then I should give it a try. But still ... nervous. Will report back later.