Accismus

I love all of Google’s programs. Gmail is fantastic, I like my igoogle page, I love my Google feed reader, and I love Google Docs (although I think Blogger totally blows). I realize that Google now has complete and total access to pretty much my entire brain, and I have no privacy whatsoever, and all of my writings and emails and searches, and everything I’ve ever bought, and all the books I’ve looked into, and everything I’ve read and thought to save or extract is all retained by Google in an easy-to-retrieve file that can be exposed at any time to anyone, and that I have basically asked for it, having thoughtlessly given Google all of this information because it’s just too easy to do so and rather difficult not to.

I’m ok with all of this.

But what I am not ok with is that Google – as well as it knows me – is absolutely certain that I would like to turn all of my applications into social networking sites. First, Gmail was retooled in such a way that the horrid gchat was featured prominently in a sidebar – even in my igoogle page! – impossible to get rid of. For the longest time (though I will admit this has since been fixed) gchat kept signing me in over and over again, even though I had my settings indicating I never wanted to be signed in.

And can I just take a second here to explain why I despise gchat, AIM and the like? Despite having come of age in the glory days of AIM, I have never used chat, because I think it’s really fucking obnoxious. If I’m browsing online, it’s because that’s what I want to be doing right then. I’m not waiting for someone to pop up in the middle of whatever I’m looking at, and deliver me from my contemplation with small talk. Chatting is what I do when I have the pleasure of someone’s actual company – and preferably, there will also be drinks, or summer sun or some other added sweetener. I put up with occasionally tiresome chatting because it’s nice to be with people. So, why on Earth would I want the chatting without the people? That’s like wanting commercials without programming!

So, anyway, imagine my spitting fury when I signed into my google reader the other day to find that google has added some sort of ’share network’ bullshit in the sidebar that you can sign out of (or just refuse to participate in), but cannot get rid of altogether. Why the hell would anybody want to turn their feed reader into a social sharing site? There are all kinds of places where people can post a running tally of what articles they are reading if they so desire – Twitter, Facebook, their blogs, posting a ‘my feeds’ widget in the sidebar of their blog. Apparently, that’s not enough – some people want other people actually reading over their shoulder at all times! Well, I don’t want people in my feed reader, or in my email inbox, or in my Netflix cue or in my Amazon checkout cart. I don’t care if other people do (although I don’t understand it), but there should at least be some way to completely opt out of all this stuff, and not have it continually coming up.

And now at the top of all my items in my feed reader, there’s a stupid little cartoon face with ‘X-number of people liked this!’ next to it, and if you click on that, it gives you the user names of all x-number of gazillion people who clicked that they liked that particular item. Come on, Google! Do I really fucking care that iceprincess3 liked something Ezra Klein posted? No! No one does! Let me read my feeds in peace.

And let me hasten to add that I love spending quality time with people in the flesh. I love having actual, live conversations with people. I love getting emails from people. I love reading other people’s substantive blog posts, that they’ve put time and effort into, and I love love love it when people get into a dialogue here on my blog, where I post things I actually want to communicate to people, and while my posts may not always be brilliant (or even slightly interesting), no one ever has to come here and read my blog – I don’t pop my posts up in the faces of all of my friends while they’re trying to read the NY Times Op-Ed page or whatever.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I love Google. I use nearly all their tools and have given my reputation entirely into their keeping. I just don’t love these sharing, chat and otherwise pointless features in areas that have absolutely no need to be networking platforms. There are plenty of places to go out and mingle online; I don’t see why some things can’t remain (cosmetically) private.

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Please excuse this little rant about cheek kissing. I am very physical-contact-avoidant. I do not like to be hugged, squeezed, patted or kissed by anyone other than immediate family members or people I am involved with romantically. As an attractive young woman, however, I am subject to a lot of poking and prodding, although, given my general thorniness and seriousness, I probably get a lot less of it than most young women.

I absolutely hate it. I used to rudely rebuff all physical contact, but as I got older, I began to be more sensitive to intent, and gradually grew to tolerate pyramid-shaped hugs of welcome and farewell from friends both close and casual. I still didn’t like it. But I put up with it.

Then, the cheek kissing began. I don’t know if it was an age thing, or a geographic location thing, or a general trend, but it seemed to start up all at once, and now it’s ubiquitous, and I Fucking HATE it! I don’t want to be kissed! And now, horror of horrors, it’s verging into actual, close-mouthed kissing! I have experienced this once or twice, and it’s just awful. I don’t even want to be hugged! Why can’t people respect that without my having to be rude? Why is it assumed that I’m down with being physically touched? Why can’t we just make warm eye contact, which frankly, in my opinion, is more than enough intimacy to be going forward with?

You know, I understand wanting a bit of physical contact to demonstrate affection and personal connection, to distinguish friends who approve of each other from merely tolerated professional acquaintances. And I think that the best form of physical connection is…a solid, gripping squeeze on the upper arm. Seriously. It’s distant, but warm; it enables you to make eye contact; it’s familiar, but not overly so; it’s physical, but not romantic. It doesn’t involve lips, or breasts squashing against each other awkwardly, or chins bashing into each other. You can vary it in intensity and duration according to occasion/level of sentiment to be expressed. It’s perfect.

Can we somehow usher in the upper arm squeeze as the new friendly hello-and-goodbye physical gesture? I’m going to start doing it; hopefully, it will catch on.

The feminist blogosphere is all abuzz over a stupid NY Magazine article clearly published in order to set the feminist blogosphere all abuzz. Apparently, Alex Morris believes feminism has driven women to drink.

Now, don’t that beat all? The very first thing those damn liberated women of olden times did upon receiving the permission to vote was usher in prohibition/destroy the country. Now, 90 years later, they can’t stop hitting the sauce!

Freaking women. Either they’re drunks or prudes or whores or virgins or mothers or businesswomen or feminists or lesbians. But one thing’s for sure: they’re always up to something! If only they’d all pick one, good, amenable identity and conform to it en masse, it sure would make it easier to dismiss them all as individuals. But they just can’t seem to get on the same page.

Feministing:

The thing that pisses me off most about this article. . . is that drinking is a serious problem for young women and men. But instead of serious, nuanced media coverage on what to do about the drinking culture among American youth, we get article after article hawing about the consequences of equality. . . . Seriously – it’s tired. Not to mention incredibly sexist : the underlying message is that gender equality is bad for women.

So if folks are actually concerned about young women and drinking, how about we talk about the consumer culture that markets liquor (something Morris touches on before quickly returning back to feminism) or how drinking is being used to blame women who are raped? 

No joke. How many articles have their been lately about the increasing problem of binge-drinking and date rape on college campuses, and how many of these articles have arrived at the conclusion that the problem is…women being there? Yeah, maybe the problem is women being out and about, and drinking and carrying on like they’re real, live, young people. Or maybe – just maybe – the problem is men who rape women!

And as long as I’m taking the bait, check out this other asshole I ran across:

Forget what feminists, hippies, and liberals have told you in the last half century. They are all lies based on political ideology and conviction, not on science. Contrary to what they may have told you, it is very unlikely that money, promotions, the corner office, social status, and political power will make women happy. Similarly, it is very unlikely that quitting their jobs, dropping out of the rat race, and becoming stay-at-home dads to spend all their times with their children will make men happy.Money, promotions, the corner office, social status, and political power are what make men happy (as long as they win, of course, but then dropping out is by definition a defeat). Spending time with their children is what makes women happy.

You know, Satoshi Kanazawa, I think I know why you’re clearly so unhappy. You may think that you’re meant to be an evolutionary psychologist and author, but you’re lying to yourself and denying your true nature. You are actually evolutionarily designed to run fast, wrangle heavy stuff, and catch and strangle small creatures, and the sooner you admit that to yourself, the sooner you can become a truly satisfied man. I encourage you to quit all this thinking and writing that’s making you so miserable and unfulfilled, and realize your true potential as a welder/firefighter/rabbit-wringer.

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.

So, this is annoying:

Can you still make it from scratch in America? That’s the question that Adam Shepard asked himself in college. On graduation, he took a train to Charleston, South Carolina and started out with nothing but $25 and a backpack. A year later, he had a car, and apartment, and $2500 in the bank. How he did it — and what he learned along the way — is the story of his new book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.

See, the thing is, though, the book really ought to be called “Me; $25; a firm grasp of the English language; a good understanding of appropriate business and social etiquette; a clever brain and healthy and attractive white body [assuming the cover illustration is meant to depict the author]; the self-possession that comes of having been raised by a family that loved me, paid attention to me, and was able to provide for me; the social skills that come from having been brought up in a safe community where I enjoyed a stable support network of friends and family, and a safe and decent school with adequate funding; the freedom of being unaccompanied by any dependent children or ill or disabled relatives; the confidence that comes from knowing if my little low-stakes gambit here fails miserably I can just go back to my nice home; a college degree[!!!]; and the Search for the American Dream, which I have already extensively benefited from, and everybody who meets me immediately knows it, even if I am dressed in a potato sack and boasting proudly of how I have temporarily elected to live like the poor folk do in hopes of scoring a book deal.”

But then, that’s a lot to fit on a book jacket.

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Also, apparently old people don’t particularly like being talked to like they’re babies, even when they’ve totally lost their minds:

“The main task for a person with Alzheimer’s is to maintain a sense of self or personhood,” Dr. Williams said. “If you know you’re losing your cognitive abilities and trying to maintain your personhood, and someone talks to you like a baby, it’s upsetting to you.”

(via Feministing)

I understand that.  I absolutely hate being talked to like I’m a baby. A lot of men like to talk to attractive young women like they’re babies – I seriously can’t count the number of times when some older man I barely know has explained to me (affectionately) that I am such a sweet, sensitive young person. What he clearly means is, ‘You’re pretty, but I know it’s inappropriate for me to be attracted to you, so I’m going to treat you like you’re my precious little daughter.’ Which, besides being presumptuous and offensive, is even more amazing in light of the fact that I am cranky, standoffish and self-absorbed, especially upon first acquaintance. That’s maybe a little hard on myself, but at any rate, I could not possibly be mistaken for a cuddly, approachable people-pleaser…except by men who are bound and determined to believe that all pretty women come prepackaged with Disney princess personalities.

At any rate, if actually becoming cranky old people won’t save us all from being cooed at and patted like we’re puppies, what the hell will? I hope I don’t get dementia, because I’ve already decided that if I make it to my 80s and don’t have anything more I really want to accomplish, I’m going to spend the rest of my days trying every possible kind of super hard-core drug. That will be my Earthly reward for a life full of self-denial and jogging, and I sure hope Alzheimer’s doesn’t rob me of the opportunity, or I’m gonna be pissed.

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Two funny things:

First of all, I think this is my favorite liveblogging of a debate thus far…

…and Chuck Klosterman’s A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is hilarious, if long (via Kottke).

Those who remove sta-
-ple removers from copy
rooms should be shot dead.

Crap, I forgot to post all week again.  I keep intending to go back to posting regularly, and I keep not doing it, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on why.  Blogging just has not been as much fun for me lately.  Then, I read this post, and I realized that it perfectly describes how I’ve been feeling.

If you get too invested in things, there’s a point where ‘everyone’s stupid and I think it’s hilarious’ starts to become ‘everyone’s stupid and it MAKES ME FUCKING INSANE!!!!’  And I think I passed that point some time ago.  I keep drafting amusing little rants only to have them turn into vitriolic endless rants, and at some point during their composition, I leave off typing and begin circling my desk, flapping my hands around and shrieking to myself.

I grew up in the South, where nice people consider public displays of enthusiasm unseemly.  It’s understood that one has one’s political opinions, but to get yourself worked up about it is to show a level of involvement with life outside your immediate sphere that reflects poorly on your ability to manage your own affairs.  Likewise, while it’s expected that everyone be religious (in a general way), those who feel sufficiently possessed with the spirit as to go around talking about God all the time and wearing Jesus accessories are at best tacky, and possibly a little touched.  Nobody wants to be without money, but to admit of difficulties concerning it is to drop down a class level – money should simply flow, unseen and unremarked upon, into one’s coffers, as gently and steadily as rain from heaven.

All of this is to say that my blatant interest in this year’s primaries is making it difficult for me to maintain a cool, ironic detachment.  What’s needed is some perspective:

The two parties are, at heart, not very different from each other.  Neither will totally save us, or utterly damn us.  My complete lack of active (or financial) involvement in anything even remotely concerning politics (or other people, or life outside my apartment) makes any pretense of actual concern about the world in general or this country in particular hypocritical beyond all belief.  My own personal life will be unlikely to change in any significant way as a result of anything short of an apocalyptic disaster, or a profound personal attitude adjustment (which are both equally unlikely).  People are stupid, especially me, and it is hilarious.  Ten people read this blog on a good day.  I have many friends who are actually out there working real, positive changes in the world, rather than just sitting around bitching all the time.  And sometimes, it’s a blessing when the internet goes out.

To sum up:  Oh, wait, I forgot – I don’t care again!

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the possibility (distant and remote) of making Manhattan a pedestrian-only borough.  I agree that this should absolutely happen, and that it makes no sense for people to be driving here (spare me the thing about trucks making deliveries – donkeys work well enough for many pedestrian-only villages atop mountains, and anyway, it’s too expensive to buy things in Manhattan and everyone ought to brown-bag from Brooklyn and Jersey and leave the city itself as one big sort of park, with all last-minute food needs being satisfied by cart vendors; not to mention that if the retail stores couldn’t get their shipments in, tourism would decline by half, and it’s not like anything currently for sale in NYC can’t just be bought on Amazon).  And I know a brilliant way to bring this desired goal about immediately, without petitions or government action or any real process at all:

All the people of New York should just start walking in the streets en masse, so that they become utterly untraversable for vehicles.  Bam!  Pedestrian-only borough.   And we’d all have an inch more elbow-room . . . at least until the next yearly influx of 20,000 generic white kids with new BFAs who all just know in their hearts that God intended for them to be a **STAR** arrive, and everybody goes back to stepping on each other’s heels all day.

So, this weekend, a guy in Beijing stabbed a tourist to death, in public, in the middle of the day.

Also recently, a guy riding a Greyhound bus in Canada stabbed his seatmate to death, hacked his head off, and displayed it to the 37 other passengers who’d run screaming out of the bus.  Which…wow.  As if riding a Greyhound isn’t horror enough in itself.

And, while we’re talking murders, there’s a new book out on the 1924 Leopold & Loeb affair, which, if you’ll remember, involved two smart, young men carefully murdering a stranger for absolutely no reason:

Neither killer showed any remorse after being captured and indicted for murder. Kidnapping had been involved; they had sent a ransom note to their victim’s family. But money wasn’t their true motive. Perfection was. Leopold and Loeb dreamed of committing the perfect crime, and they found philosophical backing for their desire in Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch. Leopold wrote to Loeb: “A superman . . . is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.”

You know, I ride the subway every day, and it is a constant source of wonder to me that very rarely does anybody shove anybody else out in front of an oncoming train.  Frankly, the rarity of this reaffirms my belief that, no matter what else you might be able to say for human beings, we’re at least far more likely to be passively harmless than actively malicious.  I have an overactive imagination, especially concerning possible physical pain and harm to my body, and as I wait for the train, I am forever anticipating a good firm shove in between my shoulder blades.  I imagine myself plummeting forward onto the tracks, surprised and remorseful, as the train barrels down upon me, and, like Anna Karenina, all my Earthly concerns are finally resolved.  I can imagine this vividly, with conviction, as if it had actually happened to me at some point in the past.  You might think, given these daily grim imaginings, that I would be forever looking back cagily over my shoulder, or hugging the wall far from the yawning chasm.  But I don’t.  And neither does anybody else.  We all teeter precariously near the brink of the train platform, peering impatiently into the black, yawning tunnel, and when the headlights of an oncoming train come charging up at us, preceded by a whoosh of stale air that blows our hair back on our heads, and followed quickly by a screaming, hurtling death machine shooting past not one foot from where we stand, we barely shift our weight ever so slightly back.   Nobody ever suspects the throngs of people pushing and jostling up against them on all sides.

Even if New Yorkers were not constantly possessed with a murderous rage towards anyone and everyone around them, and even if a good number of them weren’t stark mad and/or under the influence of everything under the sun, and even if the platforms weren’t dangerously overcrowded so that the slightest slip of a high-heeled power-walker could easily send everyone toppling over like dominoes…even if, in short, the Manhattan subway tunnels were filled with good-hearted, cheery, conscientious folk whistling happily on their way to work, following orderly and careful pedestrian traffic patterns, and granting each other a good margin of personal space to navigate in, it would still be a freaking miracle that everybody wasn’t forever being shoved in front of an oncoming train.  So, being that New Yorkers are indeed furious, crowded, impatient and insane, it is a ringing endorsement of the general non-murderousness of human beings that we all for the most part repeatedly survive our daily commute.

Of course, in addition to imagining someone might push me out in front of an oncoming train, I am also forever imagining that, in a moment of caprice, I might suddenly leap out in front of one on my own volition.  I’m pretty sure everybody thinks about this, just as whenever you are somewhere high, you fear you might decide to leap over whatever banister you’re peering down from.  Again, for the most part, we all resist such impulses, or rather, we manage not to ever forget to mind very carefully that we not accidentally leap to our deaths without giving the matter due consideration first.  If we do jump, we really mean it.

So, every day, I imagine being murdered, and I imagine murdering myself.  The third possibility, of course, is whether I might push somebody else in front of a train.  Lord knows, I’m not without cause.  However, oddly enough, I rarely vividly imagine pushing other people in front of a train.  When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares that I was driven by a sort of frenzied compulsion to murder dozens of strangers and bury them in our backyard.  At some point in the dream, one of my parents would discover this, and suddenly, my dreaming self would fully realize what sort of awful business I had been up to, and the full onslaught of this realization – of what a monstrous person I was, and of how much destruction I’d wrought, and of the guilt I would now have to bear – would come crashing down on me all at once, and my real-life self would wake up in a cold sweat, and it would be awhile before I could reassure myself I’d only dreamed it, and furthermore, that I wasn’t still guilty of any sort of latent murderous intent for even having merely dreamed it.

So, I used to worry a lot that I would at some point become a serial killer.  But that was when I was a kid.  As an adult, while I do constantly worry that others might suddenly be the death of me (whether by accident or intent), or that I might slip up and kill myself, I don’t have any real apprehension that I might suddenly start killing other people.  And I think I can count this as a personal virtue, because apparently, some people really do find themselves – suddenly, of an afternoon – hacking a stranger to death with a knife.  But this is a rare event, and if it makes you frightened about what might befall you out there amongst others, reassure yourself the way I do:  think about how seldom we nudge each other off train platforms (and this is certainly not because we like the people around us), despite how incredibly easy it would be to do so.

This in response to an interesting story about someone who stood up to a line jumper:

Norms are not easy to enforce when then target of the enforcement is insouciant or otherwise resistant to the threat of being shamed or embarrassed. Lance’s experience (suddenly feeling like he’s the jerk, anger channeling into embarrassment, etc) is likely very common.

This strong, unpleasant emotional reaction could be thought of as part of the cost of enforcing a general norm when you personally don’t have much to gain from doing it, and thus a reason to pass it by. But there seems to be more to it than that, as the emotional upset also pushes the interaction forward.

Living in NYC, I find myself in an environment where social etiquette is far more crucial to everybody’s happiness than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.  Everyone here is so continuously amongst each other, and every good and service so sought after by throngs of people, that there’s no putting social transgressions aside, knowing that you’ll go home and forget about it.  Home is nothing but a small eye in the middle of a continual hurricane, and there is never a moment of silence and space in which to decompress from the constant pushing and shoving of everybody else.

It’s pretty unlivable, especially for somebody with my temperament, but it will teach you to be assertive.  Six years ago, I’d never have dreamed of calling a stranger out for anything.  Now, if someone jumps me in line, I can’t keep from saying, ‘Excuse me.  I was here.’   Or, on grumpier days, ‘We-ell, go right on ahead, then!’

People always get embarrassed and pretend they didn’t see me there, but they saw me.  They just thought I wouldn’t say anything if they bowled right over me.  Which is another thing about NYC – not only is it not ok to let people jump you, it’s also not ok to let them get away with thinking you’re the sort who’ll suffer a jumping.  It’s a point of pride.

The other day, I was in a very crowded subway train, and there were two young, cute girls in summery dresses right in front of me.  This guy, who was in the center with nothing to hold onto, sort of grabbed or pushed up against one of the girls, and when she glared at him, he smiled in a smug way, and said, ‘Can’t help it.’  Referring to the crowded train and lack of hand-holds.

‘Oh, you can’t help it?’  cried the girl (and you can always just see it in someone’s face when they’ve had it – I really pay attention at these times, because it’s bound to be awesome).  ‘You can’t help it?  Well, I can’t help this:  I’m gonna slap the shit outta you!   Think you can just grab me – I will slap that smile right off your face.  Look at him, some smarmy little asshole, oh, he’s smarmy, too, look at him, think he gonna grab me.  I will kill you, fool!’

And on and on she went, giving a very loud and accurate description of all the various ways in which this fellow was not desirable to any woman anywhere, until her friend grabbed her by the shoulders and told her to stop.

I was so thrilled!  It was the best thing I’d seen in weeks.  I managed not to applaud, but couldn’t suppress my ear-to-ear grin, which this guy also saw, as he got more and more trounced in front of this train packed with strangers.  By the time he got off, his head was so far down in his neck, all you could see was his bald spot sticking out of his collar.  It was glorious.

If only every woman eviscerated gross guys like that, we’d have no more issues in the subways.

I am excited beyond belief to share with all of you, dear readers, a grand realization I had this past weekend. This was the sort of ‘aha!’ lightbulb moment after which the world is never the same again, but is a little wider, a little shinier, a little more bearable.

I realized that the best way not to be surrounded by obnoxious, loud people in public spaces in New York is to sit near a bunch of quiet people to begin with, rather than go sit off by yourself somewhere.

Here’s how I came to that realization: I bought a sandwich and went to consume it in a pretty, park-like area, and, as usual, went straight for a bench in the most deserted stretch of park. I was halfway through my sandwich when a couple of giggling teenagers came and sat right on top of me, despite the general emptiness of the area, and began to converse, in loud and squealing terms, about their burgeoning sex lives.

My entire life I have whined about how strangers seem to seek me out. I find the close proximity of other people repellent on a visceral level that most people do not feel for their fellow humans, which I realize is a personal shortcoming, but which I cannot help, because it is a kneejerk, gut-level reaction, cultivated in early childhood and continually reinforced by the fact that other people really do consistently suck out loud in every conceivable fashion. And yet, despite my extreme misanthropy, people gravitate towards me like metal filings. I need only install myself in a totally deserted area to make that area the most coveted spot in town. No matter where I am standing – even if it’s next to the only Port-a-Pot in a malarial swamp – five seconds after I have begun standing there, at least ten people will urgently need to stand right where I’m standing, usually with their dogs and babies and cameras and stereos and B.O. and inappropriately loud domestic fights and all.

I’d always assumed that this was a sort of karmic punishment for my disliking other humans’ close proximity so much – a sort of ‘who the hell do you think you are’ rebuke from the universe. Except that I don’t really believe in any sort of large-scale cosmic justice, so I kept looking for other reasons.

Anyway, back to this weekend, these teenagers were yapping on about their various forays into the wide world of sex, both homo- and hetero-style, and how they sometimes did so with hesitancy and sometimes with great enthusiasm, depending upon the other person involved, the amount of various intoxicants in their systems, and the suitability and romance of the atmosphere. And they were doing that thing where they were actually looking right at me and projecting in my direction while they ostensibly talked to each other. I provided an audience for them, which made the whole thing more interesting to them, I suppose. At some point, something so very ridiculous was lobbed so obviously in my direction that I audibly sighed, rolled my eyes, got up and packed up my sandwich and moved on.

I began looking for another deserted stretch of park, when suddenly, I had the inspiration to sit instead right smack between two older couples who were each murmuring quietly to each other while glaring at everyone passing by.

It was the best decision I ever made! I enjoyed my sandwich in peace and solitude, buffered on both sides by a cranky, old couple that didn’t want to look at me, or for me to overhear word one of their conversations. And it was at this point that I realized why people had always been coming to sit by me: they had been doing it on purpose precisely because I was quietly reading a book! They knew that they would be able to dominate the space, and that my presence would ensure against any louder people coming to sit next to them.

In New York, you never sit in an empty area, because no area is empty for very long. Rather, you pick the least offensive strangers, and then you scooch in right on top of them. That way, you have some control over your fate. I put this new theory into practice over the rest of the weekend, and I have to say, my quality of life has improved by leaps and bounds. I feel less angry, less hassled, happier and more well-inclined towards my fellow man. And I’m beginning to think that perhaps New York is somewhat livable after all, if you just learn how to work with it.

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Speaking of despicable haters, I have really taken note of the passing of Jesse Helms. I think that the worst possible thing that you can do with your life is live it in such a way that, five seconds after you’re in the ground, people everywhere burst forth with celebrations of your death and denunciations of everything you were. Scores of private assholes are despised posthumously by everyone who knew them, but it seems like, if you are going to be an asshole, at least do yourself the courtesy of limiting your own exposure. Because to be a hated asshole on such a very grand scale as the late Senator Helms seems to me to be far, far worse than spending your entire life in your room doing nothing and seeing no one. I really hope that, whatever I do or don’t do in life, I don’t do such a grandly awful job of it as to be remembered as the world now remembers Jesse Helms.

Of course, if I can’t be confident of the purity of my heart saving me from such a fate, at least I can rely on my lethargy and ineffectiveness.

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Related, what does make people so social? Mirror neurons:

Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions. They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions. When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing.

(via 3QD)

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Here in America, even in our public parks, everybody thinks it’s their own, personal bench. Blame it on the Renaissance:

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle-independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

(via 3QD)

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Briefly:

Kids make their parents miserable.

Noooooooo!!!!! 99% of my diet is soy!!! It was the one thing that was never bad! That’s it, screw it, I’m going back to living on microwave burritos and beer.

This is good stuff to know.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow:

We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom.

(via 3QD)

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Better, a roundup of art reflecting desolation, worlds without people and post-apocalyptic cityscapes:

This new ruin romanticism is especially evident in the Flooded London imagery, rendered up by Squint/Opera (the firm behind the visualisations for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, via Archinect – what could be the emotional motivation behind their fascination with rendered ruins?). The imagined ruin has always existed – they have been a staple artistic subject for centuries. Only the focus used to be on abandoned civilizations, the perceived hubris of the ancients. In contrast, the virtual ruination of the modern era is self-imposed schadenfreude, with all the damage and joy turned inwards. It is a feeling made universal by the internet, where planning catastrophes and architectural missteps are all lovingly chronicled and catalogued.

When I Am Legend came out, New York was briefly plastered with posters of Will Smith and his dog, walking briskly down a completely empty city street.  Commuters gazed upon the posters with wistful sighs.

Last night, the boy next door who’s been learning guitar, held a little concert just outside my window.  He went through the entire White Album, and his group of friends was very encouraging of his efforts.  If I woke up tomorrow and found myself the last human on Earth, I think I’d be alright with it.  (And I wear contact lenses, so.)

Tibetans are getting stale on the Dalai Lama’s insistence on nonviolence.  This article says that nonviolence worked for Gandhi and others, and ends with this uplifting quote:

This week’s talks are unlikely to yield much, if any, progress, and could push more Tibetans to the boiling point. But listen to Gandhi again: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.”

Hmmm.  Do you agree with Gandhi’s assertion?  Discuss.

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You don’t see many critics around these days.  Is it because there are no longer non-participatory enthusiasts of the arts?  Or is that a good thing?

Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn’t about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness. I’ll tell you what makes sense about closeness right away. In today’s cultural world, a bird’s eye view of the situation doesn’t get you very much. There is nothing to sort out from up there because there is simply too much culture in too much variety. The distance, the desire to categorize and judge, is overwhelmed by the very pluralism it seeks to understand. The only solution is to get down into the mix and participate. You need to grab works of art and hold onto them tightly. Stepping away from them even a little bit is to risk losing touch altogether.

Well, I don’t know.  I can say that the New York theater scene, at any rate, is in desperate need of more objective gatekeepers, and I think a large part of the problem is that anybody who goes to theater here is trying to do theatre here.  I would say more, but I don’t want to burn any bridges.

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Now, here is some criticism I can get behind:

Gladwell dresses up all of his “realizations” in fancy clothes and too much make-up. He gives himself powers that he doesn’t have. He pretends to have sorted things out that he hasn’t sorted out. He imagines a possible control, and pretends that he has achieved that control. All the while telling people, whispering into their ears, precisely the kinds of things they would like to believe. And then (it must, I’m sorry, be said) he goes on wildly lucrative corporate speaking engagements spinning out the same titillating stories combined with his shoddy conclusions. I even kind of hate, I must confess, the way he looks. His hair all scruffed up just so. His cute little suits. It makes the skin crawl.

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Also in popular things that I have an irrational hatred of, Facebook has done away with the singular “they”:

Confronting complaints of ungrammaticality from speakers of English and untranslatability from speakers of other languages, Facebook will now be more in-your-face about choosing a gender identity. If you haven’t filled the information out on your Facebook profile, you’ll now get a prompt asking if you want to be referred to as him or her. But they’re not getting too insistent on sexual dimorphism, since users can still opt out of the gender choice, in response to what Gleit calls “pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”

Folks, I’ve finally joined Facebook.  After adamantly refusing to join, and telling everybody who brought it up to me (repeatedly) that I would never, ever join, and that was final, I’ve gone back on my resolution and set up a profile.  I resent the hell out of it, but I got sick of inviting people to things (my party, an upcoming show), and them being like, ‘Oh, well, I’d love to come – are the details on your Facebook page?’

Fuck all of you, and your stupid social networks.  There damn well better not be yet another must-join new one a month from now, or I’ll…resentfully set up a profile on that one, too.

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The perils of replace-all:

Apparently, if you are bothered by gay people, you like calling them homosexuals, which is clinical and gross sounding, as opposed to “gay” which sounds happy and fun-loving. An impressionable child would surely have much less interest in becoming a “homosexual” (snooze) than a “gay” (woohoo!). So, right-wing news site OneNewsNow.com does a quick replace all on stories from the AP. Guess what, though, sometimes the word “gay” appears in a non-sexual context. Like, say, Tyson Homosexual (née Gay), who just qualified for the Olympics in the 100 meters, or Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Rudy Homosexual (née Gay), who often gets great penetration in the paint.

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The rise of the nerds:

From the late 19th century onward, it was more or less accepted that the ideal purpose of American education and parenting was to produce athletic, popular young men and women, the sort who end up in business, law, or politics. But sometime during the 1980s it began to be a lot harder to dismiss the awkward kids with thick glasses, obsessive interests, and no social skills.  . . . As computers began to play a larger role in business, education, and life in general, the former class presidents were learning that the former class geeks held everyone’s future in their hands. Soon one nerd (Alan Greenspan) was running the economy, another nerd (Al Gore) was running for president, and two unbelievably rich nerds (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) were changing the ways a lot of us lived and worked.

(via 3QD)

The article focuses heavily on male nerds.  I don’t always get on well with male nerds, as I often find them to be immediately dismissive and condescending toward attractive women.  We were all unpopular in high school, but there are more constructive ways of dealing with it than being a triumphant asshole to anyone who reminds you of those who once rejected you.

Speaking of, when scientists attempt to study humor:

Blindfolded subjects are tickled by experimenters who they are told are machines. The sexual banter in an all-night diner in upstate New York is surreptitiously observed. People study cartoons with pens stuck in their mouths (to contract the facial muscles associated with smiling). An experimenter “accidentally” spills hot tea on herself when a jack-in-the-box erupts nearby. One Boston psychologist, the co-author of a paper entitled “A Threshold Theory of the Humor Response”, published in The Behavior Analyst last spring, understandably felt obliged to state in a footnote that her surname really is “Joker”.

(via A&LD)

I stopped reading the Times columnists back when the website started charging for that content, and, since I didn’t miss them at all, I haven’t gone back to reading them.  So, granted, I haven’t read any of the columnists in quite some time, but based on my recollections of when I read them daily (before Kristol was hired, but then, I’m familiar with him), I mostly agree with this assessment:

Unlike David Brooks, another Times conservative, Kristol gives the reader nothing to chew over. Brooks is smart — and usually wrong. But he makes me think and sometimes he gets it just right much as George Will does. One of Kristol’s problems is that he clearly doesn’t believe half the things he writes. . . . He has to pretend he cares about choice and low taxes because he is playing at being a conservative. All that pretending produces seriously bad columns, inept columns. Krauthammer’s columns are crazy but his writing is fine because all the hate energizes him. He loves hating and it shows! Kristol isn’t even a good hater.

I can enjoy reading people with whom I entirely disagree, if they write well and with conviction.  I also adore a good, witty, ranting hater, even if he’s hating on the convictions I hold most dear.  (Incidentally, I have next to no patience for conspiracy theories of any kind, but the closest I come to actually holding one is I kind of think the Times hired Maureen Dowd on purpose to make women look stupid.  Really, is there any other explanation for her?  [And the conspicuous continuing absence of any other women on the Op-Ed page?])

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Speaking of paying for content, I can’t access this New Criterion article without subscribing, but I want to quote the intro:

Sometimes I forget and ask for Tall, Grande, or Venti, but usually I ask, defiantly but with some embarrassment, for small, medium, or large, because I resent being forced into a greater intimacy than I desire with the Starbucks corporate culture. I want to be a customer, not a member of the Starbucks Club who validates his membership along with his entry on the premises by speaking the Starbucks idiolect.

I too resent and avoid the Starbucks pseudo-Italian nomenclature, because using it makes me feel like a tool.  I realize that blogging about my refusal to use it makes me even more of a tool, but I can’t help myself.  Seriously, I don’t understand the whole ‘foreign words sure are classy’ marketing trend to begin with.  Many Americans (including me) only speak English, which is embarrassing enough (especially because they then have the nerve to bitch like all Dickens when somebody else can’t speak it to them), but if that’s the case, we should all just fess up to it.  It’s stupid to try to sprinkle foreign terms we don’t understand and can’t pronounce into our commercial transactions, because the unfamiliar sounds expensive (or authentic, which means authentically expensive).

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Vogue Italia has realized black women can objectify themselves and glamorize greed just as well as white women:

Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue — Iman, [Naomi] Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, [Liya] Kebede, [Alek] Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander — [photographer Steven] Meisel had his own feelings. “I thought, it’s ridiculous, this discrimination,” said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race — every kind of prejudice.”

(via Kottke)

Hooray for equality.  Meanwhile:

Over at Supreme Dicta there is an amusing, if disturbing, report by a grader for the Advanced Placement exam in US Government of some of the more comical statements made in response to an essay question about the 15th Amendment. . . . such as the statement that: “Strom Thurman [sic] was the first black man in Congress”. . .

Really, I think that’s how Strom ought to be remembered.

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Yesterday President Bush told President Arroyo that her people sure make good kitchen workers:

I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that — in which there’s a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House. (Laughter.)

Meanwhile, Jim Comey explains why he wasn’t quite sure warrantless wiretapping wasn’t legal:

Well, I suppose there’s an argument — as I said, I’m not a presidential scholar — that because the head of the executive branch determined that it was appropriate to do, that that meant for purposes of those in the executive branch it was legal.

(both via Firedoglake)

On McCain’s foreign policy credibility, Representative Brad Miller writes that no President truly knows and understands another country, and what we really ought to evaluate is how willing a candidate is to listen to the people who do:

After World War II, governments that we thought were stable, governments headed by leaders we found impressive for their western qualities, repeatedly fell to revolutions or coups. To avoid unpleasant surprises, we developed expertise in the State Department and our intelligence agencies to understand other nations. We employed analysts who have lived in different nations and have friends who live there still, speak the language fluently, read the newspapers, watch the television, respect the religion, eat the food, and listen to the music. Our analysts stay in touch with the Americans at universities and in business who travel frequently in those countries and know people there.

With the exception of environmental scientists, no one in the federal government has had less to say about our government’s policies in the last seven years than those analysts. . . . The Bush Administration had open scorn for the analysts who argued that Iraq was an intensely nationalistic society that would resent a foreign army on their soil, and that it would be difficult to establish a government that Iraqis would accept as legitimate.

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I don’t know why I’m suddenly interested in Amtrak:

The number of passengers traveling by train in the US rose significantly in May. Unfortunately, Amtrak is reaching full capacity with no real way to increase the number of trains or routes at its disposal for several years.

I guess just because I really think the age of the personal car is going to eventually end, and I’m curious about how our lives will change when that happens.  I have not had a car since college – I’ve lived in Chicago, and now New York, pretty much the only places in America where you can reasonably live without a vehicle – and honestly, the necessity of getting a car is one huge barrier to my moving elsewhere.  I don’t want to buy one, I don’t want to pay to gas and maintain it, and I don’t want the responsibility of driving.

I wonder:  if public transport becomes more widespread, will inexpensive storage-locker facilities suddenly spring up in all manner of places?  Because that would be good.

Did the world end while I was in the mountains?  I wouldn’t know.  I’m not sure I would much care.  At first glance, I see that Tim Russert died, everything is still expensive, and we’re all supposed to worry about tomatoes.

It blows coming back from a vacation, and it blows even more when what you’re coming back to is New York.  (Sorry, people who heart New York.)  But, I’m back to life and back to work, and back to posting at 6:00 a.m.  Speaking of…

On becoming a morning person:

At a get-together at a friend’s house that evening, I wandered around in a sleepy, self-conscious haze. I went home at about 10 and picked up a novel to read in bed. A half-hour later, the book was slipping from my lifeless hands. So this is what being a morning person is like, I thought. It’s like being 80 years old.

So true.  It took me years to realize and accept that I’m a morning person.  It’s so square.  But I love mornings.  My favorite thing all day is the time spent drinking coffee, eating breakfast and reading the news.  The day tanks after that.  At about noon, I completely crash, and the rest of the day is nothing but a long, awful, exhausting trudge toward my distant bed.

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Apparently, Gallagher is still touring:

I suddenly felt sad for Gallagher. At 61 years old, the man knows that the best way for him to make money is to milk his waning nostalgic value. If I was making my money doing the same thing that I’ve done most nights for the last 25 years, I’d probably be angry at my audience, too.

The first time I ever heard of Gallagher was when the girl who’d tormented me all through sixth grade, until we bonded at summer day camp over making fun of my best friend’s stubbly legs (ah, junior high), invited me to spend the night at her house.  We watched Gallagher on TV, before falling asleep on a mattress on the floor, only to wake up again four hours later because my new friend had peed the bed.

She never teased me again.

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Much like preteen girls, Japan thinks it’s fat:

When his turn came, Mr. Nogiri, the flower shop owner, entered a booth where he bared his midriff, exposing a flat stomach with barely discernible love handles. A nurse wrapped a tape measure around his waist across his belly button: 33.6 inches, or 0.1 inch over the limit.

“Strikeout,” he said, defeat spreading across his face.

I have never been to Japan, but from everything I’ve heard about it, I think I’d freaking love it there.  It seems to be a nation of silent, quick-walking, hard-working, skinny perfectionists, who have all agreed on a strict code of public etiquette and abide by it without fail.  If it only had a tropical climate, I’d be packing my bags.

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The first chancellor of American University of Iraq, Owen Cargol, has resigned from his post because of, well, this:

In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.”

(via TPM)

Aren’t we all, deep down?

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Why is Amtrak mostly just in the Northeast?

Several interrelated causes. The primary underlying issue is that in places where Amtrak depends on using rail lines that are owned by freight rail companies, it’s difficult / impossible to provide frequent, reliable service. Also, clearly, in a place where the right-of-way is owned by a freight company, you’re not going to build track optimized to the needs of high-speed passenger rail. . . Giving passenger rail more priority over freight rail would be a good idea since timeliness is more important to passengers than it is to giant boxes. But ultimately if we want to move more stuff by rail, we need to build more — and more modern — track.

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Twenty-one countries prefer Obama to McCain.  Dissenting:  Jordan and the U.S.

Two yards over from us, right outside my window, there’s a family with 24 children. Now that the weather’s nice, the children are let out of the house at about 9:00 a.m. and they remain outside until midnight…or even later. Now, I’m pretty outspoken about the fact that I don’t much care for children, but even if you think the little darlings are presh, you would probably agree with me that these particular children blow. I mean, they are just the worst freaking children ever. Imagine 24 little banshees setting up an inarticulate, piercing scream, and then maintaining that scream for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, and you will begin to have some idea of the constant soundtrack that has accompanied my waking and would-be sleeping hours for the past several weeks.

And on top of that, the guys who live next door (in between us and the children) have also ventured out into their back yard. Which is fine. Except that they (and their friends) are of that breed of partiers who think the only way to enjoy socializing is to get drunk and scream. Back when I had a social life, I was in the ‘get drunk and lay around’ or ‘get drunk and vehemently discuss politics’ or ‘get drunk and laugh hysterically at everything everybody says’ social circles, and I have never understood the ‘get drunk and scream’ set. I mean, what are they even doing? What are they talking about? You know who I mean, right? Those who go “wooooooooooooooooooo!” over and over? What is that? If any wooers are reading this, seriously, explain to me why this happens, and why it is fun, and how it is even remotely tolerable for the people you are with. Why do woooooers have friends at all? They’re always surrounded by crowds. To me, the whole point of getting drunk in a backyard is to let it all go, to relax, to chill, to stare at each other and laugh at nothing, and let the wind blow through the chimes. I usually feel like screaming “wooooooooooooooooooooooo” when I’m at my most sober and parachuting from a plane. Not at 3 a.m., when I’ve had enough alcohol to knock out a horse.

Memorial Day eve, the guys next door at about 10 or so got out a guitar, and started screaming the lyrics to some songs. You’d expect drunk people to have a relatively short attention span for this kind of thing, right? No. They did the entire songs, and they kept it up, in unison and just screaming, for a full hour. And of course, since the kids were still outdoors, they started trying to scream over the drunk guys, and the drunk guys wouldn’t be upstaged by a bunch of children. Escalate, escalate. And the women attending the dude party crowed with forced laughter, trying to convince themselves they were included.

This is a bit of a tangent, but frankly, I just don’t comprehend the general jubilance that most people seem to be brimming over with at all times. It seems to take so little to make other people happy. One more damn, stupid Friday night with the same people drinking the same beer and talking about the same nonsense, and people go “woooooooo!!!!!” for sheer joy. I’ve never gotten that much joy out of a mere party, even if it was one of the (few) parties that actually turned out to be really fun. A party can be pleasant or it can be dull, but it’s rarely a portal to ecstasy (unless you’re on it). But most people are positively stoked all the time about nothing. These are the people who are so thrilled to be drinking and going “wooooooooooooo” that they will keep it up until the sun rises, and do it all over again the very next night. Even in my most hard-partying period, I either had to stir up some interesting shit (read: make out with somebody), or I was pretty much over it by 2:00.  The only times in my actual life that I’ve felt such joy I could have screamed “woooooooo” for hours were the times when someone had just given me an award.

Which explains a lot about me, and now that I write that, I guess it’s not that it takes so little to make other people happy, but rather, that it takes so much to make me happy. Perhaps I should examine that.

(On even more of a tangent, I have a theory that this is how potheads get started: they’re formerly active people who one day realized that if they just deadened enough brain cells, they’d actually become able to tolerate the crushing boredom of sitting around living rooms with their friends, watching a movie that everyone has already seen three times. Woooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand, I don’t actually mind the next-door guys as much as the children, because the guys next door so far (knock on wood) have gotten quiet once it hits 11:30 or so (also, a couple of them are attractive). But the kids are out there screaming all hours. Children are officially more obnoxious than drunk twenty-something hipsters.

Speaking of children ruining things for everybody else, I believe I’ve mentioned before that I find the increasingly crowded running track to be another drawback of summer. I usually run about 11:00 a.m. on weekdays, and it’s a pretty good time to go. Yesterday, however, there was a nursery school on the track. Some childcare workers had taken a whole gaggle of kindergarten-aged children onto the track, where of course, the kids were all over. I was running past, and a little girl waddled right into my path; I swerved to avoid her, and she somehow managed to leap over a whole lane and get in my way again, at which point, I pretty much knocked her over. “Hey! Hey!” I barked, trying to warn her, but she was in her own world. The childcare worker, to her credit, yelled at the little girl instead of me – what I don’t understand is, this track is right in between a giant, grassy park, and a big playground. Given those other, clearly more appropriate and desirable options, why the hell would they bring the kids onto the crowded running track?

The city’s got me feeling so hassled this week that I’m even feeling crowded in my own bedroom, what with all the backyard hoopla. I feel overrun – wherever I am standing, someone will undoubtedly suddenly need to be standing right there. If I find a deserted area, five minutes after I get there, four people will come sit on my damn lap. Hey, New York: why don’t you all let me know wherever it is that you’re not going to need to be, and I will go there?

And yes, I realize that the answer to this question is “anywhere else on the planet other than NYC.” Sigh.

Apparently, men who believe in evolutionary psychology may be predisposed to do so by their possession of the recessive luz-R gene:

[S]ome men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady. Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.

(via Economic Woman)

Related (but much longer and not funny), a history of how race (as a concept) was invented:

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain. The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one’s own region. But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings be descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

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More on the immigration raids:

Most of all, it’s clear that the plant’s owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers — abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions — and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up….

On the same blog is this discussion about the universality of inalienable rights:

My human rights law professor was Lung-chu Chen, a co-author along with Mac and Professor Laswell, of “Human Rights and World Public Order” which propounded the notion that Jeffersonian natural law and innate and inalienable rights belonged not just to US citizens, but to all people. They argued that providing human rights should be the policy of all nations and all organizations of nations (such as NATO, UN, etc.). . . . You see, there are some rights so fundamental that they come to us simply from being human; they are NOT “given” to us by the State.

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We should all be this resourceful:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. . . . Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

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On gawking at the Amish:

I usually enjoy playing the trespassing voyeur, but even at the heritage museum I could tell that in Amish Country, trespassing and vouyering were not going to bring me as much joy as they usually did.

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Photos of “punk houses” (otherwise known as “apartments of people with whom I will never make eye contact, because they are too intimidatingly cool for me”).

Speaking of, here’s an article on how much the Millennial generation sucks:

One need look no further than the local newsstand to see the favoritism the Millennials have received. Whereas Generation X was routinely denigrated by the press, the Millennials have been compared to World War II’s Greatest Generation. In Robert Strauss and Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, the authors state authoritatively that “over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged.”

(via Unfogged)

I’m on the cusp – while I’m just one year shy of being an actual Millennial, I am a solipsist and I do blog. However, I take comfort in the fact that no one could ever, ever accuse me of being upbeat or engaged. The ‘81 crop of babies must have been the last to be born “downbeat and alienated.”

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Happy Memorial Day, y’all!  Hope everyone enjoys the holiday:  here, it’s a lovely day out, and we’re having friends over to christen our newly cleaned back yard.

Whatever happened to that scandalous military analysts story that broke in the NY Times, and then utterly disappeared from the dialogue?

[It's] made the standard transition from “we don’t illegally manipulate the news” to “of course we did that, why are you still making a fuss about this old story”.

Also MIA: conservatives’ support for states’ rights:

Since the conservative ascendancy in Washington, many of these same people have stopped praising states’ rights and have begun burying them – not to protect citizens’ rights, but to take them away. The Bush administration and its Congressional allies have helped their friends in industry by enacting weak environmental, health and consumer regulations – and arguing that they wipe out more robust state protections.

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The Christian dating site, Bigchurch.com, is owned by Penthouse:

It’s not like BigChurch isn’t about sex. It’s just more subtle than a site that’s explicitly aimed at swingers. BigChurch’s function is to connect people whose concepts of sex are tied so closely to faith and doctrine that it can be difficult to meet potential partners in more traditional settings.

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There’s racism in Japan, and there’s also a parrot who, when lost, can tell you where he lives.

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I am always looking for ways to get by with less sleep (ideally, I need about 14 hours per night to function properly). I also periodically have problems with insomnia, so I’m always on the lookout for causes: apparently, obese people are short sleepers. Wouldn’t you think it’d be the other way around?

What if all the “sleep hygiene” recommendations mean diddly-squat when the prime reason for one’s poor sleep is simply too much weight?

But then, on the other hand, I usually don’t eat enough, and will often wake up from sheer hunger at 2 or 3 a.m. and have to get out of bed and eat something, just so I can go back to sleep until a decent hour. So, you can’t win.

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Is the Internet ruining humor?

Because the Internet lets normal people make as much noise as funny and original people, the lame humor that usually dead-ends in offices instead spreads like crazy.

The net doesn’t kill humor. People kill humor. (Incidentally, for the very best in original online humor content, click this link!!) [And, while I'm at it, do you agree with Jessa Crispin that "more misanthropes should write travel literature?" If so, then click this link!!]

Also funny:

The Wit and Humor of Immanuel Kant

…and others of the world’s shortest philosophy books.

(via The Morning News)

Summer is just around the corner. Normally at this time of year, my seasonal anger (which starts to build in late September and reaches its peak in the dead month of February) melts as the sun rises. This year is different, however, because this year is the first year I’ve managed to run outdoors throughout the entire winter. New York is mild enough; in Chicago, I could never make it much past mid-October. Anyway, because of this, for the first time the warming weather has actually had some negative effects in my life: there are people about now. When I go running in the park of a morning (or afternoon), there are people all over the paths. People meandering back and forth, people with dogs, people with babies, people with yoga mats and ice cream cones and no sense of purpose or direction. People, in short, who are In The Way.

They are even in the way on the running track, which blows my mind. While I may hate it, I understand how some people arrive at the conclusion that sidewalks are an appropriate place to list vaguely back and forth while staring at the sky with your thumb up your ass, but surely an actual running track is the one place in New York where even the most placid and directionless fool would realize people are meant to move about in an orderly, brisk, purposeful fashion. But yet, the track in Greenpoint is clogged with people (and their freaking children) wandering all over the place, completely oblivious to the lanes and the many runners moving with a momentum that makes it difficult to swerve and stop at a moment’s notice. There are people who appear as though this one half-hearted lollop around a track is the first time they’ve gotten off a couch since they hit puberty. There are old people who wheel around and stop in the lane and gawk at you when you run up behind them, as though they’re horribly offended you would do something so blatant and aggressive as run on a running track, when they are out for their morning waddle. There are even (I swear to God) hulking teenage boys riding little girls’ bikes the wrong way around the track. And incidentally, every single time I’ve observed any soccer player from the field in the middle of the track crossing after some errant ball, I’ve never once seen one of them look both ways and wait for runners to pass. Nope, they just stroll right on across without looking up and let the joggers either stop short, jerk to the sides or plow straight into them.

So much for the running track. There are also two parks where I run every day, and both of them have been lately ruined by the Brooklyn Park Service’s yearly spring maintenance. In Park No. 1, they are busily cutting the branches off all the trees; to avoid killing people with the falling limbs, they helpfully tape off the portion of the walk that they’ll be working on that day, except that they usually only remember to tape off one side of it, so that you’ll be running along and suddenly you’re clotheslined by a length of police tape appearing seemingly out of nowhere, just before a giant tree comes crashing down behind you. And the air is thick with sawdust. In Park No. 2, they have repaved the running track with an insanely thick, pillowy bed of uneven wood shavings, which is about as easy to run through as a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.

I can’t wait till fall.

When I talk to single men my own age, the vibe I continually get from them is one of inexplicable hostility, suspicion and overall wariness. Inevitably, these men will, when drawn into conversation with me, take a stance of entrenched skepticism: arms bracketed firmly across their chests, they will glare defensively at me from the corner of their eyes, and press their lips together stubbornly. If I venture to tell a small joke, they will consider it carefully for a couple of beats, and then (provided they don’t choose to ignore it all together) acknowledge it with a startling perfunctory ‘Ha!’ After which they will immediately break eye contact and resume their studied refusal to engage, lest I be overly encouraged by this small concession. Merely talking to a strange guy makes me feel predatory. They are so resistant to being drawn into small talk like a normal person that it’s as if they fear I might at any moment haul off and kick them in the balls, or perhaps leap up and wrap my legs around their neck.

When I encounter someone behaving like this in casual conversation, my instinct is to leave them the hell alone, as that seems to be what they overwhelmingly desire. But incredibly, this attitude from men does not necessarily signal hatred, or even disinterest. At one recent social gathering, I was left alone with a fellow who stared at me in fear and loathing for a good ten minutes, while I awkwardly floundered around for non-threatening subject matter and made sure to keep both my hands out in plain sight. I pitied this guy – he seemed certain that at any second, I would rip off my skin, revealing my true form as a giant screaming she-beast, and consume him whole. Imagine my surprise when a girlfriend later called to tell me this same young man had asked her for my number.

I don’t understand how other women manage to move these incredibly angry and resistant young men from their initial fury at being addressed to actual dating. But I know it happens. I went around for a time in Chicago with a pretty, vivacious, single woman who, in the face of just the sort of reception described above, would become ever more gregarious, joking, giggling, turning backflips and walking on her hands, while whatever fellow glared intensely at a spot just over her head. After the fellow eventually wheeled around and stalked off (always abruptly, and usually right in the middle of something she was saying), she would turn to me.

‘Do you think he’s interested in me?’ she’d ask.

‘I think he thoroughly despised every fiber of your being, and would like nothing so much as to see you ripped apart by a pack of wolves,’ I would reply. ‘Although I have no idea why.’

A week later, they’d be dating, and he would suddenly be a totally normal, friendly person in conversation. How does this happen?! I don’t know, but I’ve seen it time and time again.

People (usually guy friends) have explained to me that many men are just in an absolute stark terror when confronted with a woman. Apparently, they can’t get through a simple dull chat about the weather without pissing all over themselves, so, to make them feel better, you are supposed to project extreme availability and encouragement. You should essentially transform yourself into a small, gamboling kitten and lick everyone in the vicinity under the chin as often as possible. Well, far be it from me to be stern about shy behavior. I myself am terrified by other people just in general, and I’m not saying I’ve never skulked around a party with my bitchface on and then wondered why no one talked to me. But at the same time, I’ll be damned if I’m going to act like a coked-up four-year-old just to make some dude comfortable around a keg. If you seriously can’t man it up enough to politely participate in a casual conversation with another adult, then the hell with you.