Lady Bits

Speaking of wedding blogs...

2011-06-28T00:12:00.000-04:00

"Close friends and family began to trickle in and Shane snuck away to change into a Starbucks barista uniform – and it was a party! How special that they were able to celebrate with everyone!"

Twitch.

2011-04-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

Via.

Love, marriage, and wedding blogs

2011-02-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

I am very much in love, and not just because I got these for Valentine's Day. MHM and I have an apartment, a car, two cats, and a Saarinen table between us. We're trying to buy a house. So why, both sets of parents ask, can't we just put a ring on it?*

The real answer is long and involved and political and makes me sound obnoxiously self-righteous (not allowing teh gayz makes the institution of marriage kind of worthless and unnecessary in my opinion, and I don't want in until everyone gets in), so I generally just laugh it off with "Marriage is a tool of the patriarchy"** and move on.

But I do enjoy the wedding blogs. Sometimes seriously (I like pretty things! Leave me alone, cool ironic me-at-23!), sometimes just for the writing (it seems like wedding blogging is a gateway drug to really interesting writing for lots of smart young women out there), and sometimes because of gems like this:

It’s so funny how you can always look back and see exactly why things turn out the way they do. Todd and I met eight years ago when I walked into his Chiropractic office after I was in a car accident. The moment I got my first glimpse of him, it was all over! That moment took my breath away. I continued to come in as a patient, always coming in right before lunch in hopes he would ask me to join…he never did! A few years (and two more car accidents) went by and we finally got together! We were engaged 2 years after that! (Haven’t had a car accident since…coincidence, I think not!) – the bride

Because every now and then, it's nice to be reminded that while I may be crazy, at least I did not get in car accidents in order to nail my manfriend.

*Direct quote. From my mother. At a funeral so I couldn't talk back.
**This doesn't really work. But I try it anyways.

It's a good thing I'm a lazy blogger...

2011-02-10T04:00:00.001-05:00

'Cause this one writes itself.

Really, Omega? Really?

hope

2011-02-04T11:27:00.000-05:00

I've been glued to al Jazeera the past few days, in part because it's my job but mostly because of this:

12:35pm: Our correspondent in Alexandria says tens of thousands of people have gathered in the centre of Alexandria. He says Christians and others not performing Friday prayers have formed a "human chain" around those praying to protect them from any potential disruptions.

I am a pretty solid athiest, in part because religion is often such a destructive, divisive force, an easy excuse for power-hungry men to justify control of women, property, and lives. But it is awe-inspiring to see everyday people take religion into their own hands, and say "I will protect you, because we are all in this together."

(I have more to say about democracy and human nature but I think I should wait until my warm glow has worn off lest I embarass myself.)

in which I consider writing a post of Substance but talk about nail polish instead

2011-02-02T18:53:00.001-05:00

My nail polish is Chanel no. 505, Particuliere. I discovered it at one o'clock in the morning on the hands of the girl sitting next to me at the Hemingway Bar in Paris. She was young and drunk and charming and in the process of ordering drinks for her beautifully morose male companion when MHM and I came in for post-dinner champagne and sat next to her. MHM was busy talking to the bartender about helicopters when she tapped me on the shoulder to offer me a nut, and then stuck her fingers in my mouth. It is a testament to the atmosphere that this did not seem at all odd (her glowering frenchman just continued to stare moodily into his cocktail) and MHM responded by staring at her nails and saying "good god, I LOVE that color!" She told us what it was and then we all sang Piano Man with the drunk English businessmen to MHM's other side, much to the disapproval of the African diplomats in the back room.

I've been carrying the bottle with me for two months now. I finally put it on yesterday and immediately fucked it all up trying to mail a package. But now it is fixed and beautiful, and I am sitting here typing until it dries.

Why hello there, blog

2011-01-21T16:24:00.001-05:00

I figure now is as good a time as any to introduce you to my ~~staff accountants~~ cats.

This is my tiny evil cat Beatrix. She is small and gray and will Fuck You Up.

Beatrix likes cabinets, cereal bowls, and Fucking You Up. She has a perpetual cold and a glitter collar and ears that are significantly too big for her head. When she was even tinier, she chased my fully-grown cat Harvey under the bed and wouldn't let him out for three days. I am quite certain that one day she will rule us all.

This is my large indifferent cat Harvey. He is frequently mistaken for a rug.

Harvey speaks with a French accent and has been known to quote Sartre. His favorite word is insouciant, followed closely by ennui. He likes mid-century modern furniture and existentialist philosophy. He is unlikely to Fuck You Up, but there is a good chance that he will stare at you disdainfully.

file this in "things you didn't know you'd ever need to know"

2010-12-23T05:15:00.000-05:00

Nepal is 5 hours 45 minutes ahead of GMT.

So if it 3:59 pm in Kathmandu, it is Too Damn Early:14 in America.

Facts!

I'm just saying...

2010-12-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

... I know the guy who can get them a tent.

How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We're Doing For Them?

What I SHOULD be doing:

2010-12-02T20:20:00.000-05:00

- reading my work email
- writing that thing I can't talk about on the internet
- writing that other thing I can't talk about on the internet
- going for a run
- figuring out my mortgage

What I think I will ACTUALLY do:

- post a picture of the hello kitty snuggie we found in nebraska

words my phone has learned

2010-07-20T13:15:00.000-04:00

I think my custom dictionary pretty much sums in up.
amarula
awww
bloomingdales
cameroon
costco
dca
dumbass
foursquare
fucked
fucking
heh
ikea
interwebs
ish
khartoum (really, blackberry?)
lqtm
maasai
meridien
mmk
mmmk
nats
ooh
oooh
ooooh
preggers
rasika
rotana
soonish
toumai
uber
ugandan
yay

Mecca

2010-07-06T17:52:00.001-04:00

No wonder IKEA is such a happy place.

Those cookies were supposed to include everything BUT the kitchen sink.

2010-06-03T12:25:00.003-04:00

Oops. My office faucet has gone AWOL -- perhaps it was a terrorist faucet? -- but no matter, because in exchange we have received something far more marvelous: THE YOUTUBES.

I have no idea why it was finally unblocked, but it was, and now I can spend even more of my day on truly crucial matters, like tragic mistakes:

Beyonce videos:

And, of course, cat farts:

Thanks, corporate overlords!

Quotable

2010-06-01T09:51:00.000-04:00

On the wedding scene in the Sex and the City:

I’ve hosted orgies that were less stereotypically gay than that. Guys getting fisted through their mini-skirts would balk at the overtly simplified gayness of a scene like that.

From The New Gay.

Truer words were never spoken.

2010-05-12T14:46:00.000-04:00

"The typical gallant young Southerner at the slightest provocation can string a line of sugared words and compliments which will delight any female listener."

From a 1962 dating and marriage textbook, found here.

OMFG

2010-05-12T10:31:00.000-04:00

These are the perfect revenge for a lifetime of snake-centric nightmares.

I love everything about this.

2010-05-06T09:10:00.003-04:00

And now I want to learn how to soft-shoe.

He's right...

2010-04-28T11:50:00.001-04:00

I DO.

Development Humor

2010-04-15T10:37:00.000-04:00

Oh, Africa.

miami

2010-03-21T10:21:00.000-04:00

The closest I've been to Miami is the bar on F that puts algae in its drinks, but this poster makes me want to go. Which is exactly what a good travel poster should do -- I need someone to design one for Juba.

More here.

Thank you, CNNi

2010-03-19T03:58:00.000-04:00

The one constant in my life when I'm traveling is CNN international. Are you in a horrible town where alcohol is illegal and everyone assumes you're a hooker if you try to sit at the juice bar? Fear not! Someone will still talk to you, and by 'someone', I mean the television. Sometimes I branch out (MTV en francais! Terrible B-movies dubbed into Arabic!), but I always end up back at CNNi.

The joy of CNNi is that it's aimed AT ME: your typical lonely American business traveler. As such, the advertising is always the same: middle eastern airlines, investment opportunities in former Yugoslav states, and Nigerian banks. I have my favorites amongst these ads (I DO want to experience WILD BEAUTY in Montenegro! And I would totally fly Emirates if only they were Sky Team!), but the ad above makes my day EVERY TIME I see it. I WANT THAT TATTOO. Also the coat. And the car. And the massage. And I'd like it if that song played where ever I went.

Someday I will be rich and Scandinavian and I will LIVE IN THAT AD. Or, you know, just buy the magazine.

FUCK YEAH Lady Gaga

2010-03-12T11:07:00.000-05:00

Now that I know that prison is full of dancing girls in studded bikinis and fishnets, I'm going to be WAY less insistent on not bribing border guards. Bring it ON, FCPA.

Toilet reading that should stay on the toilet

2010-03-05T11:52:00.014-05:00

Have you read George Will's column this week? No, because right-wing baseball-loving wild-eyed crazies didn't break into your house and force you to read it at gunpoint? That's fair. Luckily for you, I DID end up reading it au toilette, and I'd like to discuss one thing:

WHY DOES THIS MAN STILL HAVE A JOB?

Let's start with his introduction. The "Introduction," as you may remember from 8th grade English class, is where you lay out your "Thesis," the argument that you will be arguing throughout the piece. George's intro goes like this:

Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a "disparate impact": The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.

OK! Seems straightforward (if stupid) enough: Men in particular are harmed by the recession, and this is contributing to a "culture of immaturity." Now, I have some argument with the first part of that, but the second sounds interesting. I do think that our culture has a warped definition of masculity, and an increasing glorification of an eternal "guyhood" that consists of mancaves and Judd Apatow movies. We're told over and over that men are childish and immature (and, not inconsequentially, that it is women's job to make them grow up.) I'm halfway convinced already, George! Win me over!

Increasingly, they are defecting from the meritocracy. Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor's degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates. The Pew Research Center reports that 28 percent of wives between ages 30 and 44 have more education than their husbands, whereas only 19 percent of husbands in the same age group have more education than their wives. Twenty-three percent of men with some college education earn less than their wives.

Here's the funny thing about statistics. If you throw out a bunch all at once, you may think you're proving your point, but sometimes, you're just making an ass of yourself. So after all of those stats telling me that men are falling behind, you finish with... less than a quarter of these supposedly failing men are earning less than their wives? As in, less than a quarter of women are earning more than their husbands? If men were truly failing, wouldn't it be much higher than that... say, more than 50%? Instead of proving that O WOE IS MEN, you just proved that, despite our so-called meritocracy, higher-achieving women are STILL earning significantly less than their husbands. Why, again, is this a Crisis of Manhood?

In 1956, the median age of men marrying was 22.5. But between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5. A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents' homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women.

I'm going to argue that putting off marriage is a good idea (check out these stats if you want proof), but aside from that, this is interesting. I'd like to know what percentage of women 18 to 24 are living with their parents, because I find missing statistics highly suspicious, but aside from that, I'm listening.

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society's belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker's home. What are today's "basement boys" doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

Aaaaaaand you lost me.

Just because you've heard words like "leading indicator" doesn't mean you know how to use them, George.
Friends? Seinfeld? Really? I know you went to sleep in about 1994 and never woke up, but still. It's not that hard to find more contemporary examples of "extended youth."
You're not introducing "basement boys" into the cultural lexicon. Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Now we bring in the "experts."

Gary Cross, a Penn State University historian, wonders, "Where have all the men gone?" His book,Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, argues that "the culture of the boy-men today is less a life stage than a lifestyle." If you wonder what has become of manliness, he says, note the differences between Cary Grant and Hugh Grant, the former, dapper and debonair, the latter, a perpetually befuddled boy.

Actually, Hugh Grant passed into manhood in 2002. (And Badly Drawn Boy did the soundtrack.) But, ok, let's take a moment to contemplate the differences between the Grants:

mature

immature

Moving on.

Permissive parenting, Cross says, made children less submissive, and the decline of deference coincided with the rise of consumer and media cultures celebrating the indefinite retention of the tastes and habits of childhood. The opening of careers to talented women has coincided with the attenuation of male role models in popular culture: In 1959, there were 27 Westerns on prime-time television glamorizing male responsibility.

There are only 2 sentences in this paragraph, but I count 4 distinct ideas. At some time after 1959 (the bad new days), these things all happened:

Kids became less obedient because their parents were less strict
Culture encouraged childlike tastes and habits
Women entered the workforce
There were less westerns on TV

I am waiting with BREATHLESS ANTICIPATION to find out what this PERFECT STORM caused:

Cross says the large-scale entry of women into the workforce made many men feel marginalized, especially when men were simultaneously bombarded by new parenting theories, which cast fathers as their children's pals, or worse: In 1945, Parents magazine said a father should "keep yourself huggable" but show a son the "respect" owed a "business associate."

All this led to "ambiguity and confusion about what fathers were to do in the postwar home and, even more, about what it meant to grow up male." Playboy magazine, a harbinger of perpetual adolescence, sold trinkets for would-be social dropouts: "Join the beat generation! Buy a beat generation tieclasp." Think about that.

I'm thinking, George. Thinking that they should give ME your job.

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became "a retreat into childish tantrums" symptomatic "of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation." And the boomers' children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster's, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang "Satisfaction," a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year's game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to baby boomers' limitless appetite for nostalgia. "My generation's obsession with youth and its memories," Cross writes, "stands out in the history of human vanity."

Last November, when Tiger Woods's misadventures became public, his agent said: "Let's please give the kid a break." The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: "Forever young."

In case you got lost, let's recap: Overly permissive post-WWII parents created the self-involved generation of Baby Boomers who refuse to let go of their childhoods. (This, apparently, is despite all the Strong Manly Men they were presumably exposed to in the Westerns on TV in 1959....when they were all growing up. If this makes no sense, it's because you're probably too SELF INVOLVED and CHILDISH.) Baby Boomers, in turn, have created a generation of "basement boys" who are similarly clinging to youth. Also, it's all women's fault, for doing better than boys in school and not losing as many jobs in the recession.

You can tell that this is a contemporary problem worthy of a full-page column in 2010, because it starts with the word "Currently". This is despite the fact that no cultural reference is more recent than 1994, the year when Georgie boy wrote enough columns for the next 30 years and locked himself in a chamber of ice, to be awoken only for baseball games and the occasional murmur of "Get those kids off my lawn!!!"

The higher the hair...

2010-03-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

...the closer to GOD.

And thank God I live with a Southern boy who can appreciate these things.

I Love Ellen

2010-03-04T10:18:00.000-05:00

"I can control Anderson Cooper's thoughts with my mind. Usually I think, 'Anderson, wear a tight T-shirt.'"

AS YOU SHOULD, Ellen. Keep up the good work.

I knew vitamin C was a Crock of shit

2010-03-01T14:33:00.000-05:00

Apparently it's all about Vitamin D. Also, green tea and fish oil. Now THAT sounds like lunch.

Curling: Way more exciting than you realized.

2010-02-25T12:29:00.002-05:00

More here.

You think you're cool, but do you have CENTRAL PARK on your WALL?

2010-02-25T09:33:00.001-05:00

These kids do. (From Design Sponge.)

I, on the other hand, have a lot of sticky notes and this post card:

One of many reasons I should have been an architect.

I fucking love this

2010-02-24T12:20:00.001-05:00

Bobby pins, from Kate Hutchinson, whose "Why am I Marrying Him?" series is brilliant and personal and just generally fucking awesome. (As is "Model Husband." Seriously, just go look at everything.)

If I can't have a dog

2010-02-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

I think I should at least get a dog PILLOW.

More art here.

Detox

2010-02-23T14:24:00.001-05:00

Generally my version of a detox diet is going to Chad, being informed that room service is out of everything on the menu, and eating a lot of granola bars. I wash this down with healthy amounts of gin and the occasional course of antibiotics. But this last trip didn't have quite the effect I was expecting (I knew I overdid the gin), so I am vaguely contemplating something like this.

Although MHM is on a cupcake-making kick. I wonder if there is such a thing as Cupcake Detox?

I look odd in hats

2010-02-23T14:17:00.001-05:00

But I don't think it would matter if they were these hats.

I think they made this for me

2010-02-23T14:08:00.000-05:00

As someone who literally flew from 47 degrees Celsius ("Oh Fuck it's the hot season in Juba") to 22 degrees Fahrenheit ("Oh Fuck I'm stuck in Detroit due to Snow") last month... I like to have a VERY SMALL cardigan on me at all times.

Just in case.

OH. GOD. I WANT.

2010-02-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

From Ruby Lane.

I'd have kids if they'd do this

2010-02-23T13:51:00.001-05:00

From McSweeney's.