Does Life in Fact, Go On?

My book club had an interesting discussion about Zeitoun by Dave Eggers last week – a book focusing on the story of one family in New Orleans during and after Katrina. Aside from the rage about how our government can be so incompetent and how everything we believe about justice and law can be thrown out the window in a crisis, there was an overall feeling of amazement of the conditions and treatment that people endured.

We all saw the images of people floating down dirty flooded streets or sweating, crowded and hungry at the Convention Center in New Orleans, or the people trapped in rubble in Port-au-Prince, but that kind of devastation seems abstract when you are far removed—even though Louisiana is in America, once it’s not on the news everyday it’s not as urgent when you still have food, DVDs and AC and clean sheets.

We’d all like to think we could survive or even be heroes in a crisis, but very, very few can—most of us simply couldn’t make do. Perhaps more frightening then the very real chance that a disaster of some kind will strike much closer to home is the idea of living with the aftermath.

My BFF’s sister just started her year of doctoring in Haiti (amazing right? makes me feel like I’m not doing anything with my life). I know this blog post doesn’t have much of a point on my part, I really just wanted to share this snippet from her blog:

“With approximately 5,000 people, the GHESKIO camp is small relative to some of the other camps spread throughout Port-au-Prince but it was still overwhelming to see such density of misery and community in crisis and the unshakable boredom that comes with being fenced in on all sides. Tents are packed one on top of one another. At the far end of the camp, there’s a line of port o’ potties and outdoor showers, and a stagnant stream of filthy water carves out the spaces between individual domiciles. People were . . . going about their lives. Cooking, playing cards, sitting at the entrances to their tents. You could almost accept that for many of these folks life in the city would simply normalize, inevitably, given a long enough time scale; and you might even be able to imagine yourself making a stoic go of it under a plastic tarpaulin for nearly 7 months. But there’s no normalizing this bizarre and untenable situation on any time scale that doesn’t include the end of human civilization, itself. And, no, you’re not that much of a badass”

MTV’s Exiled: Teaching Cultural Superiority to Spoiled Brats

Not that its surprising that a show on MTV totally misses the mark, but Exiled seemed kind of promising, or at least like a good opportunity for some schadenfreude (which is really the whole point in watching reality TV). The premise behind the show is that the parents of the insufferable brats featured My Super Sweet Sixteen ship them off to some far away land to live with another family for a few days and see how the other half (or really the other 80%) lives. But instead of cultural understanding, the teen’s observations are mostly about how gross and awful things are, and how strange and savage the people are (amplified by the horror movie-like music that plays over any scene involving poop- which most of them do). The “lessons learned” seem shoehorned in, mostly the kids act like they are in such a strange place with strange people that they are better than.

Learning about the billions of people the inhabit the rest of the planet is of course very valuable, but financing amazing trips abroad for spoiled rich kids seems like a backwards way to teach them a lesson. A much better idea, in my humble opinion, would be to send these rich kids a few miles away to live in the projects, work minimum wage jobs, attend under funded schools, and navigate the demoralizing bureaucracy of being poor in their own rich country. It might not sound like it would make for as interesting television, but Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days, usually manages to pull things like that off quite well.

What’s a Canadian to do?

So, this post on Gawker points to an article that claims racist white people in the south use the code word “Canadian” to refer to black people when they want to say something racist but don’t want to overly offend (the logic I guess being that no one would be offended by dissing Canadians).

The article was based mostly on a memo from a Texas attorney, but seems to being used here as a way of saying, (to quote Gawker) “Dumbass American rednecks have finally caught on that racism and the use of ugly racist terms to call black people might no longer be palatable to the American ear.” But really, categorizing the whole of the south based on one memo and a few anecdotal examples might be a bit illogical. And making sweeping comments categorizing all white southerners as racists-mullet having “white trash” might in itself be just as racist.

Yes there are a lot of racist jerks in the south, and yes their brand of overt racism is disgusting. But what about the subtle covert racism of liberal white northerners? Isn’t that just as disgusting? For example, isn’t the abundant and widely accepted use of the term white trash offensive to people of all races?

New Yorkers should take a break from patting themselves on the back for their progressiveness to listen to the things they accept hearing. I could provide a few anecdotal examples of both subtle and overt racism that I’ve witnessed in my few years in the alleged capital of progressive thinking, but I wouldn’t want to categorize millions of people based on a few examples.

If this is the World’s Capital, What does that say about the World?

1) Sure, in any densely populated place people will wait in line for ridiculously long amounts of time for often ridiculously stupid things (i.e. products with a lower case i in front of them) But that’s their own damn problem, because if you are misguided enough to camp out or stand in the rain/snow/sleet for an overpriced piece of plastic, you are both a sucker and a fool and deserve everything that rains down upon your head.

Waiting hours in lines around the block to get into family court, is another thing all together. Sure, The New York Times could do a story on some of the million billion other problems with the justice system (especially the family justice system) but at least they have finally written a story somewhat about poor people that actually points to how f*cked the system is that aims to keep them completely demoralized.

Here’s a thought, if you can’t let people on the stairs, and can’t figure out how to fix the elevators, maybe you could let the few people at a time that are missing a court date while standing outside the building use the sacred elevators that the judges use, so they will have a case to judge. I'm just saying.

2) Completely unrelated, but also absurdly ridiculous: Pillow Fight Club. It sounds like something I would have made up with my friends when I was 7-years-old. But these people are adults, and aren’t living in quaint Midwestern town in the 1980s. Plus even as a small girl I wouldn’t have been so one-dimensional to think of a tie-breaking rule like this: “Fighters have been known to get eliminated at this point (a tie) based on outfit choice alone.”

Update: Turns out "pillow fight club" is not a New York invention (although I'm sure they'll try to claim it like everything else). There's even a website: www.pillowfightclub.org and a wikipedia page.

It really does seem more and more that Devo was right.

Selling Out

So, journalism students at NYU did a poll of 3,000 NYU undergrads' attitudes about voting, and I think we are supposed to be horrified/surprised/confused with the results.

70% think that one vote can make a difference (cute huh?) and think voting is important, but 70% are also willing to give their vote up for free tuition, even though 60% of the people who said that also said that their families had lots-o-dough and most likely were paying some or all of their tuition anyway and so they probably just wanted the extra cash.

But what I really wonder about is the 20% who will sell their vote for an ipod touch of all things (do they think they’ll get their vote back when the thing breaks in 18 months?)

Even if voting doesn’t make that much of an impact, it's just dumb to sell yourself out like that. Then again I guess the argument could be made that if you're the kind of dumbass who is willing to sell off your constitutional rights, maybe it's for the best that you remove yourself from the political process, kind of like the Darwin Awards of social involvement.


Or maybe they think selling your vote is like selling your soul and you can just buy it back from the Comic Book Guy.

Terror Rocks My Hometown

Except not really...the suicide/murder that they were talking about actually happened in the next town over, and people have been writing dumbass notes like that at the high school for years. It is kind of amusing how quaint and close knit they try to make Plainwell seem though, yeah it’s small, but I didn’t know all 4,000 people that lived there like that lady who’s hair salon that has been open for less than five years would have you believe. Still this is the biggest thing to happen there since we won the state powerlifting title in 1998, maybe now they'll finally take it off the city limit sign.

Nine-Eleven

The world has a nostalgia problem, short-term nostalgia problem. At first I thought maybe it was a problem exclusive to my generation. After all, how else do you explain the reemergence of leggings, Transformers, Strawberry Shortcake, etc? But every generation has this problem, there are countless baby boomers that can’t let go of the psychedelic music of their hey-day, and hell, all those old people will still tell you war stories if you’ll listen. (Of course it’s interesting the differences in the things that the generations nostalgiasize, but that’s a different topic.)

I have realized recently though that it’s not just a matter of generational nostalgia for glory days past. The collective culture is in love with looking back (but not too far back and not to critically). I don’t have the real answer as to why this is, but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that we’ve run out of new ideas. This has been the case with music and movies for years, the amount of sequels, re-makes, and covers or re-appropriation of other media into new forms (the movie based on the play, based on the book) just keeps growing.

Recently though we seem to have a sick nostalgia for tragedy, and not with any good purpose either because the tragedies that we nostalgiasize are either pop culture-y ones, or are simply regurgitations.

The 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love
Really? This is a thing that deserves three floors of the Whitney Museum and countless magazine features? A bunch white people took a lot of drugs, had a lot of sex, and gave the figurative finger to the “man.” Forty years ago. Jesus. What about the civil rights struggles and riots, or what about what’s happening now?

The 10th Anniversary of the Death of Princess Diana
I never really got why anyone in England, much less in America cared about Princess Diana when she was alive. But holding huge memorials 10-years after her and her rich boyfriend died? But she was such a good person! Kind-of. Yes, she did good things, but that was part of her job. Mostly she looked pretty and wore fancy dresses, and lived a very, very, very opulent life from the money of the people of her country (including of course the working poor, since the royal family are paid with tax money).
There are thousands of people living and dead that have made vastly more significant contributions to the lives of oppressed people, yet they get no spotlight. Princess Diana was the Angelina Jolie of 1997, a celebrity who wasn’t 100% self absorbed and therefore was a god.

The 6th Anniversary of 9/11
Yes, 9/11 was a tragedy. And yes it certainly changed ‘merica. It was a scary mess, and losing someone in such a senseless way is probably something that you don’t get over ever, no matter how many years pass. So as a nation and as individuals, sure we should “Never Forget.” Just like we remember the Alamo and Pearl Harbor, right?
The problem is I think we aren’t remembering it in the right way. Throwing a pity party year after year and naming things “freedom” while there’s still a huge hole in the ground and more people have died in the mess of a war that we started in the name of 9/11 than died that day, isn’t honoring anyone, least of all the people they are memorializing.
And in all this looking back, still very few bother to ask why it happened to begin with. In 40 years will the historic memory of 9/11 be a bunch of tacky American flag kitsch and shit called “freedom” instead of the real ways that our greed fucked up the world? Probably.

We can’t look forward, we can’t look at the present, and we don’t know what to look at when we look back.

(Photo: probably one of the only good things that MTV has produced in the last decade, from a series of ads about AIDS, hunger and poverty that we banned)

Dude....

Ah! This is just the kind of article I needed to read right now. It's like the New York Times and The Onion decided to join forces on this one. But really it's just a case of life being more amusing than fiction.
Here's what makes this story so great:

1. This quote: ''If you're a cop and you're arresting people and you're confiscating the marijuana and keeping it yourself, that's bad. That's real bad,'' said City Councilman Doug Thomas.
2. He only got caught because he's paranoid when he's high and called 911 because he thought he was dying.
3. As if all of this hadn't won him cop of the year, when he got caught, he blamed his wife. Awe.
   

Enough Already: Crocs

This is long overdue and even a bit outdated, but it needs to be said none-the-less: These hideous shoes need to be banned.

Now, I’m no America’s Next Top Plus Sized Model or anything, and I’m not on the cutting edge of fashion, but I know how to dress myself, and I have the good sense not to leave the house, or even stay in the house in something so disgustingly offensive as these shoes.

It may sound a bit like a conspiracy theory, but I think that crocs are a dangerous world-wide epidemic on par with the trend of combining celebrity names, or caring what Britney Spears does. They must be stopped.

No one seems safe–people who seem otherwise perfectly sane are voluntary seen by the whole world in shoes that can best be described as clown shoe/clog/bedroom slipper hybrid. I don’t care if they are comfortable or not, my bathrobe is comfortable, but I don’t leave the house in it, because I have something that the croc wearing world could use a healthy dose of: Shame.

The is a lot wrong in the world, some things give you hope in humankind and others, like the popularity of such deplorable footwear, and spas for napping make one think that maybe Devo really was right after all.

Egg and Cheese on a roll: $1.75

I have a like/hate relationship with New York City. While I think that it is enormously overrated, It also, by virtue of being full of some many people, has a lot of interesting things to do, and it is a good place for my career for the time being.

That said I have never much warmed to New Yorkers themselves. There is of course no city wide identity of a "New Yorker" for it is a city of 8 million individuals (or some such bullshit).

Sure there are normal people in New York, kind people, funny, interesting, blah, blah, blah, but you don't interact with these people in your daily life very much so it's easy to forget that they exist.

Most days you come in contact with jerks on the side walk, jerks on the subway, jerks driving, jerks in stores. Basically 8 million individuals acting as if they own the joint, and hell bent on fulfill every "New Yorkers are rude" stereotype.

But something restored my faith in humanity a little bit this morning. Food street vendors. Particularly the man who owns the breakfast cart in 50th street between 6th and 7th ave. He not only sells delicious breakfast foods for very low prices, but always smiles and genuinely acts like he is glad that you are paying him money. In a world of self centered no shit giving and poor costumer service, his egg sandwich and donut cart is a beacon of shinning light. or something.

It's just refreshing to have someone not be a jerk in New York. This morning for instance, a homeless woman came to the cart while I was waiting for my egg sandwich, she asked for a coffee and donut and told him that she had no money. He said "no problem" and gave it to her.

I can't boycott all corporate chains, because damn those Frapicinos are delicious, but I bet that would never happen at Starbucks. I'm just saying.

* That is not the man nor the egg cart in the picture, that is in fact the only Native American street food vendor in New York who was pushed last year from selling his Mohawk food in the his normal spot by the city. But that's a whole other story. I just liked the picture.

Helping out my fellow man

I am all about helping my fellow humans, truly I am a do-gooder by nature. The feeling of seeing a young child’s face light up when you help them overcome a problem is unmatched in its warm fuzziness.

Or so I thought.

Turns out that sometimes you can get that same rush of well being from screwing someone over.

Last night I was dragging the old lady shopping cart (popular with countless urban dwellers residing more than four blocks from a major grocery store). I was enjoying the leisurely stroll when I was nearly knocked over by a guy zipping past me on his bike on the sidewalk. (Please note that it is illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk in New York City, as the sidewalks are normally crowded with people, you know, walking). JerkWad then proceeded to hop off his bicycle and park it in the MIDDLE of the sidewalk, a mere feet away from a perfectly suitable bike rack.

I am the sort of person that usually has mildly vengeful thoughts, but never acts on them. So when I saw him do this, my thought was “Wouldn’t it be funny if I just kicked his bike over as I walked by?” Just as quickly, though I thought, “Yeah, but I could never do that..”

Sometimes though there are forces greater than our mere human will. As I walked by his bicycle (taking up 85% of the busy sidewalk) the wheel of my old lady cart caught his tire and knocked his bike to the cold hard cement of truth and righteousness.

I stood there for a second in the serendipity of the moment, deciding if I should sent my cart aside and attempt to pick his bike up (the do-gooder in me still wanting to shine through). I wasn’t allowed much of a chance however, because as soon as he heard his bike crash to the ground he came running: “What the F**K’s your problem!?! Why don’t you watch where you are F** KING going!?!”

It was at this moment that the much pursued feeling of light and warmth took over my body and I smiled and walked away leaving him to scramble to pick up his own bike, calling over my shoulder, “Maybe next time you won’t park your bike in the middle of the sidewalk.”

Holla Back Girl

Getting catcalled is not a matter of attractiveness, it’s a numbers game. Especially in a city of 8 million, the average woman is bound to get “hollared” at sooner or later.

It becomes then a matter of points for creativity rather than existence or frequency.

I haven’t been the recipient of many catcalls since my tenure at the world’s capital began, but two of my all time favorites included:

“Hey, girl can I send you a text message?”

and

“Hey Cracker! (yelled at someone across the street as I walked in front of them) …oooh, not you- sorry about that!”

This morning however I got the old school traditional woo-woo whistle from the construction workers next to my apartment. And some said they had cleaned up their acts..
So as much as my fellow directors of the vagina monologues would hate me for saying it, at 8am, such a good morning greeting, while totally crass, can be as uplifting as the stale office coffee (it’s not what you want, but it will give you a little boost for a few minutes)

Marriage IS Gay..I think

The idea of subjecting the world to your terrible sense of humor by displaying it on your T-shirt is certainly not a new one.


However this weekend the streets and subways seemed to have exploded with them. Below, a list of the shirts that I saw this weekend:


* “Define Girlfriend”: I’m guessing this means that the charming chap wearing it is in a relationship, and is not only open to pretending that he isn’t given the right temptation, but that he is brazen enough to wear his intentions on his sleeve, or rather his chest. I just wonder if he wears it when out with this girlfriend that he doesn’t want to define.


Ray mentioned that he had been seeing this one a lot and I naively assumed that it must be a Florida thing. Surely the enlightened, mature residents of the “world’s capital” would not be so douche-baggy…totally…


* “If he’s Rich, I’m his Bitch”: Ah, ladies don’t think you have been left out in the disgraceful t-shirt market. Yes this lovely, yet assuredly ill-fitting shirt has the power to at the same time make you look like the crude floozy that the “rich boy” you are after would definitely be interested in, and set back the women’s movement another 30 years. And who said words didn’t have power?


* “Maybe he’s born with it…”: With what exactly I think the jury is still out on. The slight comic twist to this one was that it was worn by a pasty, gawky dungeon and dragon enthusiast. So either he was wearing it for sheer ironic purposes (I hear the irony is big with the kids these days) or he was referring to his brain..yeah, his brain…

* “Marriage is Gay”: At first I gave this guy the same look I give to men when I see them oggolying women in the street because the insult of calling something you don’t like “gay” reminds me too much of the boys in middle school that I hated. But then as I contemplated the shirt a bit more I thought that perhaps it was a brilliant political statement, as in Marriage is FOR gays too. So I changed my scowl to a knowing nod, thusly securing my standing as neighborhood crazy lady.

One slighty used bike lock for sale..

I have long believed that I own nothing worth stealing. It’s why I never locked my car- I figured any one desperate enough to want to steal either a beat up1988 Plymouth Reliant or a equally beat up 1995 Ford Escort was in a worse position than I was for having to own them in the first place.

The same could be said for my slightly rusted six-year-old Kmart Huffy bicycle. It has saw me though 10 miles a day for a summer on Mackinac Island, all 36 miles of the Kal-Haven trail, the collegiate streets of Ann Arbor and the mean streets of Brooklyn where it survived being hit by a car, and where it was late Friday night stolen from outside my apartment. Someone was in fact desperate enough to want my bike, enough in fact to pass up many the thousands of other bikes in Brooklyn and cut the lock on the little purple bike that could..

I’m annoyed of course, mostly because I now have to buy a new bike and because of the quick reprimand from my roommate that I should have kept it in the basement (yes clearly, by locking my bike outside I was inviting thievery).

The most amusing thing that came from this was my mom’s optimistic reaction: “Maybe they will realize it wasn’t worth it and they will return it!”

I can only hope that the undesirable ness of my belongings will be my saving grace and for the first time in the history of the world a stealer will take pity on a steal-ee and return to the scene of the crime to give them back the goods that are rightfully theirs. I think I’ll put a new bike lock on the gate just in case..


Ps. If you live in the 5 boroughs, keep your eyes peeled for a purple women’s huffy with a 2001 Mackinac Island license sticker…I’m fixin’ to give them a talking to..

Worse than working in a cubicle

I'm ashamed to say that I get a good portion of my daily news comes from a little thing called "captive network" . Which is basically a little TV in the elevator that trys to sell me things and tells me the news and weather on my way to and from the 31st floor in my office building.

Today it told me about bars in China where you can pay to relieve stress by punching someone who won't hit you back, kind of like a half-assed fight club.

Whenever I think my job is bad, I am going to think about that poor Chinese woman going to work every day and getting punched by stressed out office workers.

Do you have a little irish in you? Would you like some?

Like any good natured person with an inclination to drink and a hereditary past of alcoholism, I enjoy St. Patrick’s Day.


So does New York City, and all the overly green clad peeps therein. I don’t mind their drunken staggering at all, and green is one of the best colors so seeing loads of green clad people just makes me feel like the whole city decided to dress up for me. Cheers, New York.


And Guinness. Guinness is great. That’s right I am a tiny girl who loves a thick near black beer preferred mainly by haggard old potato farmers and soccer fans.


Yep, this is a great holiday to be sure, any holiday centered about drinking as early and often as possible, wearing a lot of one particular color, and acting like a jerk is great. Other examples: Maris Grais, and the Queen’s Birthday in Amsterdam. Both brilliant.


Here is my problem with this joyous day.

Why do people pretend to be Irish? How is that socially acceptable? On Kwanza people don’t run around pretending to African. On Yon Kipper people don’t say “kiss me I’m a Jew!” Also, suddenly every bar in the city is an Irish Pub- really? Just because you serve Guinness, doesn’t change the fact that Bud Light is on tap right next to it…