So I don't drive, which is one of those things that's under review, and, really, if I weren't so lazy I might decide to get a car, but I am lazy, and people have been really nice about giving me rides, and I like sitting on the bus in the morning so much and getting that extra five seconds of brain-deadness and listening to Neil Diamond tell me that the time have never been so good, and so I don't drive.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of trade-offs that you make in deciding not to drive. And some of them strike me as totally fair. It takes me longer to get places. I'm more dependent on other people. I have to put up with the other people on the bus. Sometimes I have to pay for a taxi. My life involves a certain amount of waiting around. I walk places that are a little farther to walk than is really comfortable. Sometimes I carry groceries back home. Etc.
Those are the imperfections of life and I am willing to put up with them graciously. But the other day I found myself faced with a different kind of situation. I had to go into a setting where I was not allowed to carry my cellphone with me. Also, they refused to hold my cellphone behind the desk. Sorry, they said, you have to keep it in your car.
But, I said, I don't have a car. What can I do? They said, well, then you can't take your cellphone with you.
And if there is one thing that the functioning non-driving life requires, it is the cellphone. The cellphone allows you to summon a taxi, to call for help, to extricate yourself from unpleasant situations. I got kind of pissed off, actually, thinking about it. It is not really an issue, or it is one, at least, that I can work around. But there's something about the fact that non-drivers don't just have to deal with the issue of carlessness on the transportation front, but that they have to deal with it on the lack of portable storage front, that drove me nuts, made me feel like a person without status.
Showing posts with label things that piss me off. Show all posts
Showing posts with label things that piss me off. Show all posts
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Obesity: One Question We Can Answer?
There was an infuriating piece on the Huffington Post this morning by John Ridley about a proposal to make it illegal to discriminate against overweight people. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to be providing any page-views. Also because I'm not doing any fancy interpretive work here.
The part that pissed me off was just this:
"For the vast majority of those who are obese -- those with a Body Mass Index over 30 -- their size is their choice. They choose to take in more calories than they burn."
Good. Lord. There seems to be this idea out there that lots of people are overweight because they choose to be. But that idea is insane. Just to mention one thing: in interviews people often say they would prefer various disabilities over being overweight. Duh.
There are obviously lots of factors involved in weight. But look, there is one question it should be absolutely straightforward to answer: do some people get fatter than others while eating the same amounts of food?
Because I bet the answer is yes. And the methodology would be totally straightforward: get some people to commit to a few months under lock and key, feed them, and weigh them. I'm sure you could find volunteers if you paid them enough. It could be like a vacation. Doesn't some rich person want to fund something like this?
I am so tired of people saying, "It's basic physics! Calories in, calories out!" This is obviously nuts, as anyone knows who has friends with serious intestinal problems. If you're sick, you can eat a lot and still lose weight, because you're not absorbing the calories. So obviously it's not a simple equivalence. And it's not freakin' physics! Geez.
The part that pissed me off was just this:
"For the vast majority of those who are obese -- those with a Body Mass Index over 30 -- their size is their choice. They choose to take in more calories than they burn."
Good. Lord. There seems to be this idea out there that lots of people are overweight because they choose to be. But that idea is insane. Just to mention one thing: in interviews people often say they would prefer various disabilities over being overweight. Duh.
There are obviously lots of factors involved in weight. But look, there is one question it should be absolutely straightforward to answer: do some people get fatter than others while eating the same amounts of food?
Because I bet the answer is yes. And the methodology would be totally straightforward: get some people to commit to a few months under lock and key, feed them, and weigh them. I'm sure you could find volunteers if you paid them enough. It could be like a vacation. Doesn't some rich person want to fund something like this?
I am so tired of people saying, "It's basic physics! Calories in, calories out!" This is obviously nuts, as anyone knows who has friends with serious intestinal problems. If you're sick, you can eat a lot and still lose weight, because you're not absorbing the calories. So obviously it's not a simple equivalence. And it's not freakin' physics! Geez.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Women Eating Dirt. WTF?
As I mentioned before, I used to read The Superficial. It's a celebrity site that walks that familiar line between irony and actual childish meanness: under the guise of ironically making fun of the way we gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies, we get to gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies.
I used to find it sort of palatable because 1) it was sometimes sort of funny and 2) the authors jokes were often self-deprecating, including, e. g. jokes about the smallness of their penises and so on.
But then one day there was a picture of some older woman, I can't remember who, looking kind of reasonable and normal, and the entry was all about how disgusting and revolting she looked and I had just had enough and I decided to stop reading.
Occasionally when I'm super bored and I feel I've been super good, I allow myself a peek. This morning, a Sunday, I spent the whole morning working on something difficult, and I wanted a bit of mental candy, and I typed in the URL.
The first thing up was an old picture of George Clooney's girlfriend with her ass up in the air and her face down on a dirty magazine, sort of licking at it or something, posing for some sexy photo for some reason, with predictable commentary about her being not the kind of girl you'd bring home to mother and being a slut and all that.
Ugh. I'm pretty freewheeling about sex and sexiness for women, and I was young during the 80's when women being sexual was no big deal. I'd have thought nothing of it if a friend of mine had posed for sexy pictures.
I'm amazed, though, at how much "sexy" has been made over into slutty. How did this happen?
Actually there are two things. First, so much of what is considered "sexy" for women now is implicitly or explicitly demeaning to them. Like what's-her-name having her face in the dirt. Yuck. And second, the having of sex of normal sex now is considered "slutty" and trashy.
I honestly don't get where this is coming from. Is it just hatred of women?
I mean, for a long time, Playboy was the kind of standard representative of what it was to represent women as sexy. And if you look at Playboy, the women are not eating dirt. I mean, you can argue 'til the cows come home about whether the very photography itself demeans women, but whatever you think about this, there's still a huge difference between a woman posed elegantly, and intelligently, and a woman eating dirt. And the Playboy girls usually look pretty elegant and intelligent, in my opinion.
Playboy even goes out of its way to emphasize the women's real life accomplishments. Even if this is made-up, it's clear their point of view is that the woman is sexier if she's a real person, worthy of respect. In fact, this is so especially if it's made-up.
Also, Playboy always commands its readers to respect women's sexuality. In their advice columns and so on they always steer readers away from a double-standard: women who like sex, they say, should be respected, and never regarded as "slutty" or bad.
I'm not defending Playboy, here, though I think a good defense of Playboy on these grounds is plausible and could be given. I'm just drawing a contrast between this long-time standard and the new misogyny.
What is up with that? Have men always wanted to watch women eat dirt, and they only used to read Playboy 'cause they couldn't get away with the dirt business? Or is this all something new? WTF?
Anyway, it's horrible. Guess I'll have to find my mental candy somewhere else.
I used to find it sort of palatable because 1) it was sometimes sort of funny and 2) the authors jokes were often self-deprecating, including, e. g. jokes about the smallness of their penises and so on.
But then one day there was a picture of some older woman, I can't remember who, looking kind of reasonable and normal, and the entry was all about how disgusting and revolting she looked and I had just had enough and I decided to stop reading.
Occasionally when I'm super bored and I feel I've been super good, I allow myself a peek. This morning, a Sunday, I spent the whole morning working on something difficult, and I wanted a bit of mental candy, and I typed in the URL.
The first thing up was an old picture of George Clooney's girlfriend with her ass up in the air and her face down on a dirty magazine, sort of licking at it or something, posing for some sexy photo for some reason, with predictable commentary about her being not the kind of girl you'd bring home to mother and being a slut and all that.
Ugh. I'm pretty freewheeling about sex and sexiness for women, and I was young during the 80's when women being sexual was no big deal. I'd have thought nothing of it if a friend of mine had posed for sexy pictures.
I'm amazed, though, at how much "sexy" has been made over into slutty. How did this happen?
Actually there are two things. First, so much of what is considered "sexy" for women now is implicitly or explicitly demeaning to them. Like what's-her-name having her face in the dirt. Yuck. And second, the having of sex of normal sex now is considered "slutty" and trashy.
I honestly don't get where this is coming from. Is it just hatred of women?
I mean, for a long time, Playboy was the kind of standard representative of what it was to represent women as sexy. And if you look at Playboy, the women are not eating dirt. I mean, you can argue 'til the cows come home about whether the very photography itself demeans women, but whatever you think about this, there's still a huge difference between a woman posed elegantly, and intelligently, and a woman eating dirt. And the Playboy girls usually look pretty elegant and intelligent, in my opinion.
Playboy even goes out of its way to emphasize the women's real life accomplishments. Even if this is made-up, it's clear their point of view is that the woman is sexier if she's a real person, worthy of respect. In fact, this is so especially if it's made-up.
Also, Playboy always commands its readers to respect women's sexuality. In their advice columns and so on they always steer readers away from a double-standard: women who like sex, they say, should be respected, and never regarded as "slutty" or bad.
I'm not defending Playboy, here, though I think a good defense of Playboy on these grounds is plausible and could be given. I'm just drawing a contrast between this long-time standard and the new misogyny.
What is up with that? Have men always wanted to watch women eat dirt, and they only used to read Playboy 'cause they couldn't get away with the dirt business? Or is this all something new? WTF?
Anyway, it's horrible. Guess I'll have to find my mental candy somewhere else.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
The People In Your Neighborhood
Because I was awfully busy last week, I missed reading The New York Times, and so I missed being enraged by the opinion piece, "What to Expect When You're Free Trading." Now that the archives are online, though, it was easy to get all enraged about it this afternoon. So, as the kids say, "No problem!"
In arguing against compensation for workers laid off in the wake of job-loss from global free trade, Steven Landsburg asks us to consider that in relevantly similar cases, compensation would not be morally required. In the irritating passage, he says,
Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives.
Well, now that you mention it, um,. . . maybe? One letter writer to The Times made a good point (letters are here):
In fact, if I care about having a neighborhood with things like a local pharmacy (and I do, for what it’s worth), then I will continue to buy my shampoo there even if I have to pay a bit more.
And I would be getting a great bargain — not only shampoo, but also a community.
It was this letter that alerted me to having missed the original story. Obviously the author's point is logical: if you spend at Walmart, you'll be surrounded by Walmarts. If you spend at the mall instead of downtown, downtown will go away. I frequently spend extra money to buy at places I like; this is simple means-end rationality.
How well does the point extend to the analogy? Well, Mr. Landsburg might say that this is apples and oranges. By hypothesis he's considering cases in which one is indifferent to the differences and comparing on cost. Indeed, if a book is cheaper at Amazon and more expensive at bn.com, I'll buy from Amazon. I don't feel morally obliged to send money to bn.com.
But in a way I think it's actually apples and apples. Having the people in my town, my state, and my country happily employed is not unlike having a pharmacy around the corner: it's a nice way to live. This is well-captured by the final remark: you get a community. Goods like this are so vague they're hard to reason about, but they're also of the utmost importance.
Incidentally, the next letter on the page accuses free trade opponents of willfully overlooking the benefits of free trade: what if you had to grow your own food, fer Chrissake! Um, you don't have to be against trade to think that there should be limits to it. Just because free trade is good doesn't mean some other things, that don't fit easily with it, aren't good either. Why does everything have to be all or nothing? Sheesh!
This letter about community was much on my mind last Monday. Heading from Toronto to Ann Arbor, I had a three-hour layover in Detroit, and figured I'd spend some time walking around the city. It was MLK day so it wasn't a normal Monday in the city. But I got kind of emotional looking at how cool and interesting the city looked and how its poverty was just wearing everything down.
Here's some pictures.
A cool pretty building with art or graffitti in the windows. I really go for this sort of thing.
A giant Solstice ad! It's like they knew I was coming!
The view across the river from the Renaissance Center.
I tried to support the local economy by buying a guide book to Detroit in the Borders in the middle of the city. Alas, there are no guide books to Detroit. If you want to go to Vegas, though, you are in zee business.
In arguing against compensation for workers laid off in the wake of job-loss from global free trade, Steven Landsburg asks us to consider that in relevantly similar cases, compensation would not be morally required. In the irritating passage, he says,
Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives.
Well, now that you mention it, um,. . . maybe? One letter writer to The Times made a good point (letters are here):
In fact, if I care about having a neighborhood with things like a local pharmacy (and I do, for what it’s worth), then I will continue to buy my shampoo there even if I have to pay a bit more.
And I would be getting a great bargain — not only shampoo, but also a community.
It was this letter that alerted me to having missed the original story. Obviously the author's point is logical: if you spend at Walmart, you'll be surrounded by Walmarts. If you spend at the mall instead of downtown, downtown will go away. I frequently spend extra money to buy at places I like; this is simple means-end rationality.
How well does the point extend to the analogy? Well, Mr. Landsburg might say that this is apples and oranges. By hypothesis he's considering cases in which one is indifferent to the differences and comparing on cost. Indeed, if a book is cheaper at Amazon and more expensive at bn.com, I'll buy from Amazon. I don't feel morally obliged to send money to bn.com.
But in a way I think it's actually apples and apples. Having the people in my town, my state, and my country happily employed is not unlike having a pharmacy around the corner: it's a nice way to live. This is well-captured by the final remark: you get a community. Goods like this are so vague they're hard to reason about, but they're also of the utmost importance.
Incidentally, the next letter on the page accuses free trade opponents of willfully overlooking the benefits of free trade: what if you had to grow your own food, fer Chrissake! Um, you don't have to be against trade to think that there should be limits to it. Just because free trade is good doesn't mean some other things, that don't fit easily with it, aren't good either. Why does everything have to be all or nothing? Sheesh!
This letter about community was much on my mind last Monday. Heading from Toronto to Ann Arbor, I had a three-hour layover in Detroit, and figured I'd spend some time walking around the city. It was MLK day so it wasn't a normal Monday in the city. But I got kind of emotional looking at how cool and interesting the city looked and how its poverty was just wearing everything down.
Here's some pictures.
A cool pretty building with art or graffitti in the windows. I really go for this sort of thing.
A giant Solstice ad! It's like they knew I was coming!
The view across the river from the Renaissance Center.I tried to support the local economy by buying a guide book to Detroit in the Borders in the middle of the city. Alas, there are no guide books to Detroit. If you want to go to Vegas, though, you are in zee business.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Stuck Outside Of Somewhere With The Something Else
There is a lesson to my current location, as there is to all things, which is that if you make too many jokes about Michael Vick you will find yourself stuck in Atlanta without a change of underwear listening to the owner of a Mexican restaurant attached to a Best Western express outrage that Vick is getting two years for killing dogs, which, the guy pointed out, his grandfather used to eat.
Fair warning: there are no general points to be made in this post -- it is all straight ahead personal narration although, as always, my general and always wavering levels of righteous indignation could stand some recalibration.
This morning I set off from Los Angeles. I was inspired by the extreme competence of my cab driver and the ease of my check-in. I was also a little loopy from the fact of getting to LAX by 4:30 a.m. That, my friends, is how I emerged in Atlanta at 1:30 p.m. to discover that my connection to my holiday destination had been canceled.
The lesson to all this may in fact be not to fly to a place on the day that it's being pelted by snow. That could be a lesson too.
I was prepared to roll with that punch, but when the Delta guy told me that because the next day's flights were all booked up that I would have to stay in Atlanta until Tuesday morning I got a little pissed. I believe my precise words were "You're fucking kidding me." If I had known how many opportunities for pissy behavior I would have and take in the space of the afternoon to come, I might have let that one slip on by.
Also we fought about whether the second night of a hotel would fall under the weather rule so that the airline wouldn't pay for it. He got pretty feisty in defending Delta; I suppose there's something inspiring about that quality of loyalty.
Anyway, we found a neighboring town to my destination that might have a flight leaving tonight (Sunday) and he said that he had also saved me a seat on the next day's flight to the neighboring town.
We parted on good terms. That was a mistake. I went and read trashy books and drank trashy drinks. That was not.
About an hour before my flight was supposed to depart (at 8:55 p.m.) it too was canceled. A second round of phoning was required to discover that I didn't have a seat on the Monday flight to the neighboring town. Discussions were had. She promised me meal vouchers, and said she'd see about allowing me to reclaim my checked bag.
Oh hell, you can imagine the rest. The luggage is not being released, the woman at the baggage claim told me with pride -- "Nobody going to Buffalo is getting their luggage back."; I had to get all rowdy to claim my $21 of meal vouchers which I will almost certainly fail to use; the shuttle driver for the motel I booked tried to convince me that I was actually going to another motel, and, on the way out of the parking lot, started praying loudly to god that the van would work again. Endless stupidity. And I swore a lot and told various Delta customer service representatives how shitty I thought their airline was, which I'm sure made everybody's day pleasanter.
And really, the downsides are these: I don't get to see the people I love as quickly as I would like to; I'm not going to smell very good when I get there; my carefully selected Christmas presents (I really want to write a post about present buying one of these days because it is the most enjoyable form of shopping in some ways, although also one of the most wrenching) may be gone forever. On the other hand, I spent a day drinking and reading trash, and feel vaguely virtuous about it. Also I'll watch tv. Also I can spend a day in Atlanta, which I think we are all excited about.
It's cold and crisp here, and my only real regret is that I couldn't properly overhear the owner of the Mexican restaurant when he explained how he would prefer his wife cheat on him, if such a state of affairs had to be. I feel like I should regret being such an jerk-off to the various customer service reps, but really I also kind of hate them.
Fair warning: there are no general points to be made in this post -- it is all straight ahead personal narration although, as always, my general and always wavering levels of righteous indignation could stand some recalibration.
This morning I set off from Los Angeles. I was inspired by the extreme competence of my cab driver and the ease of my check-in. I was also a little loopy from the fact of getting to LAX by 4:30 a.m. That, my friends, is how I emerged in Atlanta at 1:30 p.m. to discover that my connection to my holiday destination had been canceled.
The lesson to all this may in fact be not to fly to a place on the day that it's being pelted by snow. That could be a lesson too.
I was prepared to roll with that punch, but when the Delta guy told me that because the next day's flights were all booked up that I would have to stay in Atlanta until Tuesday morning I got a little pissed. I believe my precise words were "You're fucking kidding me." If I had known how many opportunities for pissy behavior I would have and take in the space of the afternoon to come, I might have let that one slip on by.
Also we fought about whether the second night of a hotel would fall under the weather rule so that the airline wouldn't pay for it. He got pretty feisty in defending Delta; I suppose there's something inspiring about that quality of loyalty.
Anyway, we found a neighboring town to my destination that might have a flight leaving tonight (Sunday) and he said that he had also saved me a seat on the next day's flight to the neighboring town.
We parted on good terms. That was a mistake. I went and read trashy books and drank trashy drinks. That was not.
About an hour before my flight was supposed to depart (at 8:55 p.m.) it too was canceled. A second round of phoning was required to discover that I didn't have a seat on the Monday flight to the neighboring town. Discussions were had. She promised me meal vouchers, and said she'd see about allowing me to reclaim my checked bag.
Oh hell, you can imagine the rest. The luggage is not being released, the woman at the baggage claim told me with pride -- "Nobody going to Buffalo is getting their luggage back."; I had to get all rowdy to claim my $21 of meal vouchers which I will almost certainly fail to use; the shuttle driver for the motel I booked tried to convince me that I was actually going to another motel, and, on the way out of the parking lot, started praying loudly to god that the van would work again. Endless stupidity. And I swore a lot and told various Delta customer service representatives how shitty I thought their airline was, which I'm sure made everybody's day pleasanter.
And really, the downsides are these: I don't get to see the people I love as quickly as I would like to; I'm not going to smell very good when I get there; my carefully selected Christmas presents (I really want to write a post about present buying one of these days because it is the most enjoyable form of shopping in some ways, although also one of the most wrenching) may be gone forever. On the other hand, I spent a day drinking and reading trash, and feel vaguely virtuous about it. Also I'll watch tv. Also I can spend a day in Atlanta, which I think we are all excited about.
It's cold and crisp here, and my only real regret is that I couldn't properly overhear the owner of the Mexican restaurant when he explained how he would prefer his wife cheat on him, if such a state of affairs had to be. I feel like I should regret being such an jerk-off to the various customer service reps, but really I also kind of hate them.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Sometimes You Can't Decide For Yourself
When I was a kid, my father had a really funny thing he used to do at Christmastime. Starting a few days before the 25th, he would start lobbying to get to open his gifts early. Like real begging and pleading and fussing -- the kind you associate with children.
On certain occasions with certain gifts, he would get his way, and he'd open those presents early. Certainly any gift that came from outside our immediate family -- that is, not from me or my mom -- he considered fair game to open whenever he wanted. So there was a fair amount of opening on Christmas Eve, even though really we were a "Christmas morning orgy of opening" kind of family.
On Christmas morning, my father would complain bitterly, but, you know, jokingly too, about not having any surprises, about not having as many things to open as me and my mom. Poor me! Nothing to open! On Christmas morning!
I remember finding this awesome and hilarious. I thought it was awesome that an adult would care so much about presents that he'd actually be upset about not having enough at the right time. Even if he was sort of hamming it up, I thought was awesome that an adult would carry on like that. About Christmas presents! Most adults I knew were focused on planning family events, buying stuff for kids, cooking, you know.
And I thought it was hilarious that he would fail to learn, or would pretend to fail to learn, year after year, that opening on Christmas Eve meant fewer presents Christmas morning, and that fewer presents Christmas morning was less fun than more presents Christmas morning.
Eventually my mom and I found a way to take this game to the next level: we would hide certain key presents and pretend they didn't exist so that no matter what happened Christmas Eve, my father would always have as much Christmas morning excitement as me and my mom.
This was just one of a range of very funny things my father used to do. Like telling me that airplanes only went up in the air because everyone prayed at the same time (he was an engineering professor), or telling my little friends that if they wanted their parents to get them a pony they should throw a temper tantrum the next time they were in the grocery store.
But I got thinking about the Christmas thing recently because I was reflecting on the ways we do and do not allow people the freedom to choose their own futures.
In a previous post, I mentioned as a kind of off-handed joke the idea that some people felt it was their right not to have health insurance -- that if they wanted to spend the money on other things they should be allowed to.
The prospect of lots of people not having health insurance upsets me a lot. And I can tell you why. Health is one of those things that it's easy to undervalue while you have it. Planning for illness is one of those things no one likes to do. Once you're sick, though, you'd have to be a figure of towering rationality and self-control not to say to those around you, "Help me. I'm sick. I'm dying. There's treatment, and I need it, and I can't pay. Please help me!"
And, you know, if someone says those things to me, I'm going to want to help them. I will find the early deaths of such people incredibly painful.
In that sense, the commitment to shared medical care isn't something you sign on for just because it's in your own self interest, it's something you sign on for because of the people around you, who care about you -- whether they're intimates, friends, or just fellow-citizens.
I consider it my right to infringe your freedoms in this way, at least to some extent. The alternative infringes on my freedom not to be surrounded by sick, dying people who -- oops! -- changed their minds about the whole dying thing once it came into close view.
Sorry, we're going to have to hide your presents sometimes. Hope you don't mind too much. Maybe you'll be happy later.
On certain occasions with certain gifts, he would get his way, and he'd open those presents early. Certainly any gift that came from outside our immediate family -- that is, not from me or my mom -- he considered fair game to open whenever he wanted. So there was a fair amount of opening on Christmas Eve, even though really we were a "Christmas morning orgy of opening" kind of family.
On Christmas morning, my father would complain bitterly, but, you know, jokingly too, about not having any surprises, about not having as many things to open as me and my mom. Poor me! Nothing to open! On Christmas morning!
I remember finding this awesome and hilarious. I thought it was awesome that an adult would care so much about presents that he'd actually be upset about not having enough at the right time. Even if he was sort of hamming it up, I thought was awesome that an adult would carry on like that. About Christmas presents! Most adults I knew were focused on planning family events, buying stuff for kids, cooking, you know.
And I thought it was hilarious that he would fail to learn, or would pretend to fail to learn, year after year, that opening on Christmas Eve meant fewer presents Christmas morning, and that fewer presents Christmas morning was less fun than more presents Christmas morning.
Eventually my mom and I found a way to take this game to the next level: we would hide certain key presents and pretend they didn't exist so that no matter what happened Christmas Eve, my father would always have as much Christmas morning excitement as me and my mom.
This was just one of a range of very funny things my father used to do. Like telling me that airplanes only went up in the air because everyone prayed at the same time (he was an engineering professor), or telling my little friends that if they wanted their parents to get them a pony they should throw a temper tantrum the next time they were in the grocery store.
But I got thinking about the Christmas thing recently because I was reflecting on the ways we do and do not allow people the freedom to choose their own futures.
In a previous post, I mentioned as a kind of off-handed joke the idea that some people felt it was their right not to have health insurance -- that if they wanted to spend the money on other things they should be allowed to.
The prospect of lots of people not having health insurance upsets me a lot. And I can tell you why. Health is one of those things that it's easy to undervalue while you have it. Planning for illness is one of those things no one likes to do. Once you're sick, though, you'd have to be a figure of towering rationality and self-control not to say to those around you, "Help me. I'm sick. I'm dying. There's treatment, and I need it, and I can't pay. Please help me!"
And, you know, if someone says those things to me, I'm going to want to help them. I will find the early deaths of such people incredibly painful.
In that sense, the commitment to shared medical care isn't something you sign on for just because it's in your own self interest, it's something you sign on for because of the people around you, who care about you -- whether they're intimates, friends, or just fellow-citizens.
I consider it my right to infringe your freedoms in this way, at least to some extent. The alternative infringes on my freedom not to be surrounded by sick, dying people who -- oops! -- changed their minds about the whole dying thing once it came into close view.
Sorry, we're going to have to hide your presents sometimes. Hope you don't mind too much. Maybe you'll be happy later.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Books or Butter?
In some recent New Yorker (I'm a little behind), Anthony Grafton has a piece about the history of organizing information. One of his points is that we've always had too much information, and we've always been worried about how to access what we need, so the whole "oh my god the internet search engine is going to change everything" isn't, maybe, the paradigm shift you might have thought.
That's fine. And his discussion of the history of information is fun and interesting.
Toward the end, Grafton starts talking about how much things will change with Google et al. digitizing books. His first point is that things won't change much because all they're doing, really, is scanning things in and allowing us to search them; it's not anything so dramatic.
And then he gets into that whole "irreplaceability of the book" thing. You know, we have to have books; we can't live without them; do what you want with the whole "intertubes" thing but eventually you're going to have to get your ass to the library and get the wood pulp product off the shelf.
This line always gets on my nerves, even though I'm probably as great a lover of the old-fashioned book as you'll find anywhere. Books are just nice: you can take them to bed, take them to the sofa, flip the pages back and forth, blah blah blah, this ground has all been well-covered.
But the Grafton point isn't that books are a pleasure but rather that they are irreplaceable sources of knowledge -- knowledge you can't get from digital archives. What's the evidence? As far as I could tell the only evidence he offers is that some people get some information from some physical books. Like, some historians smell books to see if they smell like vingar, to see if they were sprinkled to avoid disease, to see if there were outbreaks.
OK, I admit this is information you get from physical books, but really, most of us are not in the vinegar-book-business, nor are we in the paper-analysis business, or any other business other than just reading the words that are written down. For the vast majority of purposes, the digital version does just fine.
It matters, because books are freaking expensive compared to digitized access. And if we're going to spend money -- communal money -- on them, we'd better have some good reasons. After all, there are people who need food and shelter.
There may indeed be good reasons for pouring money into the communal purchase of books. But knowing whether old ones smell like vinegar isn't one of them. It isn't even in the right ballpark.
That's fine. And his discussion of the history of information is fun and interesting.
Toward the end, Grafton starts talking about how much things will change with Google et al. digitizing books. His first point is that things won't change much because all they're doing, really, is scanning things in and allowing us to search them; it's not anything so dramatic.
And then he gets into that whole "irreplaceability of the book" thing. You know, we have to have books; we can't live without them; do what you want with the whole "intertubes" thing but eventually you're going to have to get your ass to the library and get the wood pulp product off the shelf.
This line always gets on my nerves, even though I'm probably as great a lover of the old-fashioned book as you'll find anywhere. Books are just nice: you can take them to bed, take them to the sofa, flip the pages back and forth, blah blah blah, this ground has all been well-covered.
But the Grafton point isn't that books are a pleasure but rather that they are irreplaceable sources of knowledge -- knowledge you can't get from digital archives. What's the evidence? As far as I could tell the only evidence he offers is that some people get some information from some physical books. Like, some historians smell books to see if they smell like vingar, to see if they were sprinkled to avoid disease, to see if there were outbreaks.
OK, I admit this is information you get from physical books, but really, most of us are not in the vinegar-book-business, nor are we in the paper-analysis business, or any other business other than just reading the words that are written down. For the vast majority of purposes, the digital version does just fine.
It matters, because books are freaking expensive compared to digitized access. And if we're going to spend money -- communal money -- on them, we'd better have some good reasons. After all, there are people who need food and shelter.
There may indeed be good reasons for pouring money into the communal purchase of books. But knowing whether old ones smell like vinegar isn't one of them. It isn't even in the right ballpark.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
File Under Life Is Unfair
I just can't seem to stay away from the advice columns.
So today, on Dear Prudence, which we know what I think about, this woman wrote in. And, to paraphrase, she and her German husband agreed before he was willing to propose (but she was kind of drunk!) that they would live in America for five years, and then move to Germany. And now the five years are up and she doesn't want to move to Germany. She wants to stay in America. Her parents are needy. She's going to have a kid. She doesn't know German, although she's tried, a little bit.
And Dear Prudence says that they need to take the deadlines and pressure off and talk about it and acknowledge that one person is going to feel always slightly screwed.
Which, I guess, to the extent that you think the sanctity of marriage is important, is probably right, because the letter writer seems prepared to throw a huge fit about moving to Germany. And I guess some of the whole premise of marriage is that circumstances change, that things that seemed worthwhile and super-important before you get married seem less important afterwards, that the person you love should be more important than some half-baked condition you set way back five years ago. I wouldn't know for sure, myself.
It just seems unfair in one of those no right answer ways. You tell this woman, look, I'll marry you if you'll agree to move to Germany for five years. The promise to marry being what a contracts professor would call "consideration." And you do what you promised to do, and now she's saying that it's too much to ask her to do what she said she would, that you're not properly understanding the difficulties of her position. When she had the opportunity years earlier to consider the difficulties of her position and say, you know what, thanks, but no thanks.
I guess what really set me off about the whole thing, though, was this quote. "He is a lovely person but not terribly social, and he wants to move to Berlin—where he has no family and few friends—and I don't feel comfortable relying on him to make new friends for us."
I don't know if I've already written something about this (this being the abstract point I'm about to make); I know I've talked about it with everybody who reads this blog. She wants to stay in America. He wants to go to Germany. It's not enough for her to say, "I promised; I've changed my mind; please don't make me go to Germany."
She has to give reasons. She has to explain why it's better for everyone that they don't go to Germany. It's not enough to have a simple game of chicken, where they each decide what the relationship is worth to them vis a vis their presence in a foreign country. She has to be right, too. Even if it's right in a cheap-shot kind of way. I hate that. It's some kind of repulsive colonization of other people's preferences. It should be stopped.
So today, on Dear Prudence, which we know what I think about, this woman wrote in. And, to paraphrase, she and her German husband agreed before he was willing to propose (but she was kind of drunk!) that they would live in America for five years, and then move to Germany. And now the five years are up and she doesn't want to move to Germany. She wants to stay in America. Her parents are needy. She's going to have a kid. She doesn't know German, although she's tried, a little bit.
And Dear Prudence says that they need to take the deadlines and pressure off and talk about it and acknowledge that one person is going to feel always slightly screwed.
Which, I guess, to the extent that you think the sanctity of marriage is important, is probably right, because the letter writer seems prepared to throw a huge fit about moving to Germany. And I guess some of the whole premise of marriage is that circumstances change, that things that seemed worthwhile and super-important before you get married seem less important afterwards, that the person you love should be more important than some half-baked condition you set way back five years ago. I wouldn't know for sure, myself.
It just seems unfair in one of those no right answer ways. You tell this woman, look, I'll marry you if you'll agree to move to Germany for five years. The promise to marry being what a contracts professor would call "consideration." And you do what you promised to do, and now she's saying that it's too much to ask her to do what she said she would, that you're not properly understanding the difficulties of her position. When she had the opportunity years earlier to consider the difficulties of her position and say, you know what, thanks, but no thanks.
I guess what really set me off about the whole thing, though, was this quote. "He is a lovely person but not terribly social, and he wants to move to Berlin—where he has no family and few friends—and I don't feel comfortable relying on him to make new friends for us."
I don't know if I've already written something about this (this being the abstract point I'm about to make); I know I've talked about it with everybody who reads this blog. She wants to stay in America. He wants to go to Germany. It's not enough for her to say, "I promised; I've changed my mind; please don't make me go to Germany."
She has to give reasons. She has to explain why it's better for everyone that they don't go to Germany. It's not enough to have a simple game of chicken, where they each decide what the relationship is worth to them vis a vis their presence in a foreign country. She has to be right, too. Even if it's right in a cheap-shot kind of way. I hate that. It's some kind of repulsive colonization of other people's preferences. It should be stopped.
Voting Is, Like, So 80's!
It's going to be a busy busy day, so the big topics are going to have to wait. But in the meantime, I thought we might all consider this quote from a student, explaining why he or she thinks that voting is so, you know, over. The community, it turns out, is where it's at.
"Like the government is, like, really far away and something that you can't really affect or change," the student is quoted as saying. "But something that you can actually do in your community and see the results of might be more, like, motivating, like, for people."
The student is quoted in a report, and discussed in this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (The report itself is here).
According to economist and Freakonomics author Stephen Levitt, the student is 100 percent right and 100 percent rational. Since it is extremely unlikely your vote will change the outcome, there's no point to voting. (Blog post here, more interesting but old NYT thing here).
I'm no economist, but doesn't it seem like if your theory can't explain the point of voting that there's something wrong with your theory rather than something wrong with voting? I mean, given that our whole stupid political system seems to depend on voting, if you're going to argue that voting is pointless, don't you at least owe us an explanation of how the political system should be arranged so that there is no voting?
Philosophers sometimes say, "One man's ponens is another man's tollens." If we agree that A implies B, you might say, OK, B, while I might say, OK, not-A. Here I gotta go with the tollens: if the theory of rational behavior says there's no point to voting you need a new theory.
Especially since things like this are mounting up (see my previous rant about economists and the Radiohead download scheme, here).
Sorry guys. Back to the drawing board!
"Like the government is, like, really far away and something that you can't really affect or change," the student is quoted as saying. "But something that you can actually do in your community and see the results of might be more, like, motivating, like, for people."
The student is quoted in a report, and discussed in this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (The report itself is here).
According to economist and Freakonomics author Stephen Levitt, the student is 100 percent right and 100 percent rational. Since it is extremely unlikely your vote will change the outcome, there's no point to voting. (Blog post here, more interesting but old NYT thing here).
I'm no economist, but doesn't it seem like if your theory can't explain the point of voting that there's something wrong with your theory rather than something wrong with voting? I mean, given that our whole stupid political system seems to depend on voting, if you're going to argue that voting is pointless, don't you at least owe us an explanation of how the political system should be arranged so that there is no voting?
Philosophers sometimes say, "One man's ponens is another man's tollens." If we agree that A implies B, you might say, OK, B, while I might say, OK, not-A. Here I gotta go with the tollens: if the theory of rational behavior says there's no point to voting you need a new theory.
Especially since things like this are mounting up (see my previous rant about economists and the Radiohead download scheme, here).
Sorry guys. Back to the drawing board!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
A Short Pause For Vituperation Or Adam Gopnik Is A Force For Evil
We have all been warned about the dangers of anonymous rants on the internet, so I will not spend a lot of time discussing the history of my dislike for Adam Gopnik. If you would like further details, email me at this address, and I will be happy to oblige.
I always believed this dislike to be a personal prejudice, perhaps arising from envy over his years in France, his range of knowledge, his status as man of letters. I have changed my mind.
In the most recent New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an essay about abridged versions of books and the extras in DVDs, and what these things have to teach us about the nature of art. I didn't get it.
(I would also like to state for the record that having a special issue of the New Yorker about "the arts" strikes me as idiotic, and that I noticed a distinct anti-Trilling slant in their article about Jacques Barzun.)
But the course of saying what he has to say brings him to the movie Hollywoodland, which is one of those movies about Old Hollywood which I didn't want to see because it looked dull.
This is what Adam Gopnik has to say about it: "The tale of how the guy who played Superman on a cheap, forgotten TV series shot himself lacks the grip of tragedy, even pop tragedy, which demands, after all, that the hero once counted. (Joe Orton's life can be made ugly and tragic because the scale of his gift implies both conditions; but George Reeve's death is merely sad and a little sordid.)"
I've been thinking about writing about it for a while, and during that time I wondered if my initial outrage was excessive and then I typed in that quote. I am now perfectly satisfied with my initial outrage.
Adam Gopnik thinks that the unhappy extinction of human life can only become ugly and tragic if the life extinguished possessed the gifts to make it so. George Reeve (Superman!) doesn't make the grade; I don't know about the rest of us.
Now, a more charitable interpretation is that Adam Gopnik just doesn't feel like the movie in question made us believe in the importance of George Reeve. This would be wrong.
"The enormous care lavished on material that would never be worthy of the effort is more moving than the film."
I don't think of myself as given to moral outrage. I do believe that all of our lives contain at least some material worthy of enormous care, rising to the level of ugly and tragic. Or at least that there's no dividing line between the more gifted and the less so, making their sorrows are ugly and tragic, and ours are sad and a little sordid.
Human life is not well-designed for human beings. The tragedy of that is free-ranging and always tragedy. Except, of course, when it's comedy, which is an entirely different matter.
I always believed this dislike to be a personal prejudice, perhaps arising from envy over his years in France, his range of knowledge, his status as man of letters. I have changed my mind.
In the most recent New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an essay about abridged versions of books and the extras in DVDs, and what these things have to teach us about the nature of art. I didn't get it.
(I would also like to state for the record that having a special issue of the New Yorker about "the arts" strikes me as idiotic, and that I noticed a distinct anti-Trilling slant in their article about Jacques Barzun.)
But the course of saying what he has to say brings him to the movie Hollywoodland, which is one of those movies about Old Hollywood which I didn't want to see because it looked dull.
This is what Adam Gopnik has to say about it: "The tale of how the guy who played Superman on a cheap, forgotten TV series shot himself lacks the grip of tragedy, even pop tragedy, which demands, after all, that the hero once counted. (Joe Orton's life can be made ugly and tragic because the scale of his gift implies both conditions; but George Reeve's death is merely sad and a little sordid.)"
I've been thinking about writing about it for a while, and during that time I wondered if my initial outrage was excessive and then I typed in that quote. I am now perfectly satisfied with my initial outrage.
Adam Gopnik thinks that the unhappy extinction of human life can only become ugly and tragic if the life extinguished possessed the gifts to make it so. George Reeve (Superman!) doesn't make the grade; I don't know about the rest of us.
Now, a more charitable interpretation is that Adam Gopnik just doesn't feel like the movie in question made us believe in the importance of George Reeve. This would be wrong.
"The enormous care lavished on material that would never be worthy of the effort is more moving than the film."
I don't think of myself as given to moral outrage. I do believe that all of our lives contain at least some material worthy of enormous care, rising to the level of ugly and tragic. Or at least that there's no dividing line between the more gifted and the less so, making their sorrows are ugly and tragic, and ours are sad and a little sordid.
Human life is not well-designed for human beings. The tragedy of that is free-ranging and always tragedy. Except, of course, when it's comedy, which is an entirely different matter.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
You Scratch My Back, I'll Just Sit Here, KTHX!
I was infuriated by two things in last Sunday's New York Times. Yesterday my internet connection was fucked, leaving me extra time to ponder which of these things most deserved the sustained attention of Commonwealth and Commonwealth.
I decided on this opinion piece about Radiohead's "pay as much as you want" download scheme.
Here's an extremely brief outine:
1) Economists tell us paying nothing is the only rational choice.
2) Those who pay more than nothing -- as many people do -- are behaving in a way that is mystfying and cries out for explanation.
3) The best explanation for their behavior is altruism, and the reason they act altruistically is that they get a warm glow from doing something "good."
The author boasts he paid nothing. Ha ha, suckas!
There are at least two things infuriating about this.
First, it's a good guess that a lot of people are thinking something like, it's fair all around if I pay more when I have more and pay less when I have less, and if I'm honest about it this scheme will work out for the best all around.
I know they're thinking other things too, but this is a commonsense starting point. And it's supported by what the Times author describes in an analogous case of a book: the people who paid nothing often wrote to justify it on grounds of being poor.
The thing is, this commonsense idea is not only familiar, ordinary, and known to everyone, it's one of the fundamentals of economic game theory. If I cooperate when it's not in my immediate interest to do so, and you do too, we all do better. It's just like the old Prisoner's Dilemma.
In this sense fairness and honesty in cooperative dealings seem rational and unsurprising.
How do people decide to be fair and honest in such cases? I don't know much about it, but it's not hard to imagine that humans evolved to have impulses toward fairness and honesty partly because these were successful strategies -- successful in this basic, game-theoretic sense.
So it's hardly mystifying or strange if people employ these basic attitudes of respect for fairness and honesty when they're participating in a process with other like-minded people -- that is, other fans of Radiohead.
The Times author kind of comes around to something like this in his piece, but he continues to sound amazed, and he denigrates the impulse to pay as based in "touchy-feely" reasons. Good lord. Since when did acting honestly and fairly in a cooperative enterprise become "touchy-feely"?
The second infuriating thing about this is what the opinion piece doesn't say: they never mention that the fact that some people are paying basically supports what teenagers have been saying for years: that free downloading of music can co-exist with paying to download music, in such a way that the former doesn't undermine the latter.
I'm not saying this will work in the long run, just that this one fact about Radiohead fans would seem to support this long-held belief. How come this doesn't even get mentioned? Evidently, no one listens to teenagers. It's kind of infuriating.
OK, that's it for the opinion piece. The other thing I got all mad about in the Sunday Times was this Modern Love column in which a guy wrote slightly sheepishly but mostly comfortably with the following narrative: I was 24; she was 41; we were in a class together; we dated; she got upset and drunk one day and I had to help her home; I was disgusted and knew then that it was over; I ignored her to her face after that in class; I then dated another classmate right in front of her. Now, were friends. Yay for me!
Good heavens!!
But the truth is, if you were going to write about all the things in Modern Love that drive you crazy, you'd need a whole blog just for that.
I decided on this opinion piece about Radiohead's "pay as much as you want" download scheme.
Here's an extremely brief outine:
1) Economists tell us paying nothing is the only rational choice.
2) Those who pay more than nothing -- as many people do -- are behaving in a way that is mystfying and cries out for explanation.
3) The best explanation for their behavior is altruism, and the reason they act altruistically is that they get a warm glow from doing something "good."
The author boasts he paid nothing. Ha ha, suckas!
There are at least two things infuriating about this.
First, it's a good guess that a lot of people are thinking something like, it's fair all around if I pay more when I have more and pay less when I have less, and if I'm honest about it this scheme will work out for the best all around.
I know they're thinking other things too, but this is a commonsense starting point. And it's supported by what the Times author describes in an analogous case of a book: the people who paid nothing often wrote to justify it on grounds of being poor.
The thing is, this commonsense idea is not only familiar, ordinary, and known to everyone, it's one of the fundamentals of economic game theory. If I cooperate when it's not in my immediate interest to do so, and you do too, we all do better. It's just like the old Prisoner's Dilemma.
In this sense fairness and honesty in cooperative dealings seem rational and unsurprising.
How do people decide to be fair and honest in such cases? I don't know much about it, but it's not hard to imagine that humans evolved to have impulses toward fairness and honesty partly because these were successful strategies -- successful in this basic, game-theoretic sense.
So it's hardly mystifying or strange if people employ these basic attitudes of respect for fairness and honesty when they're participating in a process with other like-minded people -- that is, other fans of Radiohead.
The Times author kind of comes around to something like this in his piece, but he continues to sound amazed, and he denigrates the impulse to pay as based in "touchy-feely" reasons. Good lord. Since when did acting honestly and fairly in a cooperative enterprise become "touchy-feely"?
The second infuriating thing about this is what the opinion piece doesn't say: they never mention that the fact that some people are paying basically supports what teenagers have been saying for years: that free downloading of music can co-exist with paying to download music, in such a way that the former doesn't undermine the latter.
I'm not saying this will work in the long run, just that this one fact about Radiohead fans would seem to support this long-held belief. How come this doesn't even get mentioned? Evidently, no one listens to teenagers. It's kind of infuriating.
OK, that's it for the opinion piece. The other thing I got all mad about in the Sunday Times was this Modern Love column in which a guy wrote slightly sheepishly but mostly comfortably with the following narrative: I was 24; she was 41; we were in a class together; we dated; she got upset and drunk one day and I had to help her home; I was disgusted and knew then that it was over; I ignored her to her face after that in class; I then dated another classmate right in front of her. Now, were friends. Yay for me!
Good heavens!!
But the truth is, if you were going to write about all the things in Modern Love that drive you crazy, you'd need a whole blog just for that.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Your Basic Post About Public Transportation And Feminism
There is no way around it: In a perfect world, we would all have a little two-seat row to ourselves on the public transportation vehicle of our choice.
On the other hand, I move in circles in which consensus has been reached on the unacceptability of certain techniques for achieving that (highly desirable) state of affairs. (And yes, Octopus Grigori blogged about this first, here.) You are allowed to stand up to avoid sitting next to people; you are allowed to be unhappy when people sit next to you.
You are forbidden to sit on the outside seat unless you suffer from extreme claustrophobia and if you, when asked to move aside, do so with grace and good will. It is only acceptable to put your bag on the seat next to you is if the bus is almost empty. Even then, you need to maintain a constant awareness of the influx of people onto the bus. Really, you're better off with it on your lap.
I know the basic rules, and they're ok, but I still suffer from that inner tension between what I want (two seats to myself) and what I understand is required of me as a good citizen (the willingness not only to share, but to make the sharing relatively painless). And so I brook over those not following the rules as I see them, and I tend to say "Excuse me" in that classic passive-aggressive semi-hostile tone of voice and scoot in next to the person sitting on the outside of an empty seat row.
Which is to say that the first time I saw the elderly man in the row ahead of me slide over to the inner seat as people began to board the bus, I was not unsympathetic. He wanted two seats to himself, but he was willing to move if it looked like it would be necessary. Then as the people filed on and found other seats, he moved back out, tentatively. The bus kept moving, and he kept sliding back and forth. Sometimes he sat in the middle of the two seats, prepared for action either way.
It was all an illustration of our haplessness in the modern world; Ayn Rand would have told him to keep sitting on the outside.
But the bus kept going and it kept happening and I realized that he was only sliding in when the people that might need seats were female. Three guys left boarding the bus, and he was back out, walling off his turf.
It's one of the classic anti-feminist things you hear, that we don't appreciate male courtesy. Which is, at least for me, not really true. I am always delighted when people offer me a seat on the bus; there's something nice about watching people sacrifice for other people, even if the rationale for the sacrifice presupposes the weakness of women. I may not take the seat; I do express my gratitude, pleasure, etc. (It's complicated by inclinations towards chivalry myself -- my urges to stand up, to open doors, to pay for things.)
But I guess I found something creepy about this guy's apparent willingness to sit next to someone only if they were female. (I am forced, reluctantly, to confront the possibility that I am completely misreading his actions -- maybe he had a tic, maybe some other algorithm entirely governed his perpetual motion). Was it that woman didn't strike him as threatening? Was it that he thought only women really deserved easy access to a seat on the bus? Was it that he felt bad for women but not for men? Did he actually deep down hope for some pleasant-looking woman to sit next to him?
(Unrelated anecdote: on a Saturday bus a couple of years ago, a guy sat next to me and I immediately thought he was a creep, and then wasn't sure why I thought that. Until I looked around and realized the bus was almost empty, and he could have had a seat of his own in any number of vacant rows. Then he started talking to me and I could smell the booze on his breath. But it was funny: immediate social knowledge based on a subconscious running tally of empty space on the bus.)
On the other hand, I move in circles in which consensus has been reached on the unacceptability of certain techniques for achieving that (highly desirable) state of affairs. (And yes, Octopus Grigori blogged about this first, here.) You are allowed to stand up to avoid sitting next to people; you are allowed to be unhappy when people sit next to you.
You are forbidden to sit on the outside seat unless you suffer from extreme claustrophobia and if you, when asked to move aside, do so with grace and good will. It is only acceptable to put your bag on the seat next to you is if the bus is almost empty. Even then, you need to maintain a constant awareness of the influx of people onto the bus. Really, you're better off with it on your lap.
I know the basic rules, and they're ok, but I still suffer from that inner tension between what I want (two seats to myself) and what I understand is required of me as a good citizen (the willingness not only to share, but to make the sharing relatively painless). And so I brook over those not following the rules as I see them, and I tend to say "Excuse me" in that classic passive-aggressive semi-hostile tone of voice and scoot in next to the person sitting on the outside of an empty seat row.
Which is to say that the first time I saw the elderly man in the row ahead of me slide over to the inner seat as people began to board the bus, I was not unsympathetic. He wanted two seats to himself, but he was willing to move if it looked like it would be necessary. Then as the people filed on and found other seats, he moved back out, tentatively. The bus kept moving, and he kept sliding back and forth. Sometimes he sat in the middle of the two seats, prepared for action either way.
It was all an illustration of our haplessness in the modern world; Ayn Rand would have told him to keep sitting on the outside.
But the bus kept going and it kept happening and I realized that he was only sliding in when the people that might need seats were female. Three guys left boarding the bus, and he was back out, walling off his turf.
It's one of the classic anti-feminist things you hear, that we don't appreciate male courtesy. Which is, at least for me, not really true. I am always delighted when people offer me a seat on the bus; there's something nice about watching people sacrifice for other people, even if the rationale for the sacrifice presupposes the weakness of women. I may not take the seat; I do express my gratitude, pleasure, etc. (It's complicated by inclinations towards chivalry myself -- my urges to stand up, to open doors, to pay for things.)
But I guess I found something creepy about this guy's apparent willingness to sit next to someone only if they were female. (I am forced, reluctantly, to confront the possibility that I am completely misreading his actions -- maybe he had a tic, maybe some other algorithm entirely governed his perpetual motion). Was it that woman didn't strike him as threatening? Was it that he thought only women really deserved easy access to a seat on the bus? Was it that he felt bad for women but not for men? Did he actually deep down hope for some pleasant-looking woman to sit next to him?
(Unrelated anecdote: on a Saturday bus a couple of years ago, a guy sat next to me and I immediately thought he was a creep, and then wasn't sure why I thought that. Until I looked around and realized the bus was almost empty, and he could have had a seat of his own in any number of vacant rows. Then he started talking to me and I could smell the booze on his breath. But it was funny: immediate social knowledge based on a subconscious running tally of empty space on the bus.)
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Pretty Girls And Rudeness
I don't have anything all that interesting to say about this column (the second letter) by Carolyn Hax, but I'm going to say it anyway.
It's a self-described "friendly guy" who "routinely strike[s] up conversations with random strangers" but "get[s] the rudest responses" from "'attractive'" women. He "find[s] it more humorous than anything else -- as well as an excellent 'don't date me' filter," but nevertheless is writing in to an advice columnist about it. You may have been able to detect, from my use of phrases such as "self-described" and the over-use of quotation marks, that I am not crazy about this guy.
I am not crazy about this guy. I suspect he has a wrong idea of rudeness. I cannot currently find the relevant Miss Manners column, but anybody's obligation to respond to the overtures of strangers is pretty limited. As long as you don't yell or pop the stranger one, you're allowed to respond with a small tense smile, a nod, and an immediate turning away. I can't prove that the letter writer would class that as a rude response, but I have a hunch. Women's intuition, probably.
But let's ignore my gut telling me that this guy is the sort of proto-sexist who tries to enforce a standard of womanly niceness on all of those who fall within the range of people he would fuck. Instead, let's think about the claim that he routinely talks to random strangers.
I don't believe it. I think he talks to strangers that he finds attractive. Not just women he might want to sleep with, but people who are, on some level, appealing to him. Now part of the reason I think he doesn't want to admit that is because it weakens his rhetorical position. If he is talking to people not randomly, but because he finds them appealing, "'attractive'" women maybe should be able to get away with talking to him only if they, in turn, find him attractive.
So there's that. But I think there's more than that preventing him from saying he talks to people un-randomly, but on the basis of some personal choice.
Because I've seen that kind of thing go the other way, too. A year ago I was back up visiting Berkeley and I went to lunch at the place I always go to lunch and somebody had written in the women's bathroom something about how you should talk to strangers because you never know what you might learn. And there was definitely a class of girls up there who loved things like that, who would tell you at great length about the awesome conversation they had with a homeless guy who wrote poetry, or what have you. And it all came flooding back to me reading the graffiti on the wall.
Those girls, I think, really were talking to people randomly. They didn't, I think, really care all that much about whoever's awesome poetry.
And that bothers me too in a lurking kind of way. Best I can put my finger on it is that I generally try to talk to people that seem like people I might like. And in admitting that, I am forced to face the fact that people that I think I might like might not feel the same way about me. I am forced into the embarrassment of admitting that I am talking to someone not because I'm just a friendly person who likes to talk to all sorts of people and not because I'm open-minded, but because I actually think I would enjoy talking to this particular person. And that's why I would want people to talk to me.
We're on a sliding scale here. I'm not asking the people on an unmoving bus or my coworkers to talk to me only to the extent that they think we could become best friends forever. Also, I've been told there's some virtue, some learning opportunities, in talking to people that don't appeal to you right up-front.
But I do think it's weird and maybe bad to go around acting as if you're only talking to people at random, as if there's no actual hope of human connection behind your conversation.
It's a self-described "friendly guy" who "routinely strike[s] up conversations with random strangers" but "get[s] the rudest responses" from "'attractive'" women. He "find[s] it more humorous than anything else -- as well as an excellent 'don't date me' filter," but nevertheless is writing in to an advice columnist about it. You may have been able to detect, from my use of phrases such as "self-described" and the over-use of quotation marks, that I am not crazy about this guy.
I am not crazy about this guy. I suspect he has a wrong idea of rudeness. I cannot currently find the relevant Miss Manners column, but anybody's obligation to respond to the overtures of strangers is pretty limited. As long as you don't yell or pop the stranger one, you're allowed to respond with a small tense smile, a nod, and an immediate turning away. I can't prove that the letter writer would class that as a rude response, but I have a hunch. Women's intuition, probably.
But let's ignore my gut telling me that this guy is the sort of proto-sexist who tries to enforce a standard of womanly niceness on all of those who fall within the range of people he would fuck. Instead, let's think about the claim that he routinely talks to random strangers.
I don't believe it. I think he talks to strangers that he finds attractive. Not just women he might want to sleep with, but people who are, on some level, appealing to him. Now part of the reason I think he doesn't want to admit that is because it weakens his rhetorical position. If he is talking to people not randomly, but because he finds them appealing, "'attractive'" women maybe should be able to get away with talking to him only if they, in turn, find him attractive.
So there's that. But I think there's more than that preventing him from saying he talks to people un-randomly, but on the basis of some personal choice.
Because I've seen that kind of thing go the other way, too. A year ago I was back up visiting Berkeley and I went to lunch at the place I always go to lunch and somebody had written in the women's bathroom something about how you should talk to strangers because you never know what you might learn. And there was definitely a class of girls up there who loved things like that, who would tell you at great length about the awesome conversation they had with a homeless guy who wrote poetry, or what have you. And it all came flooding back to me reading the graffiti on the wall.
Those girls, I think, really were talking to people randomly. They didn't, I think, really care all that much about whoever's awesome poetry.
And that bothers me too in a lurking kind of way. Best I can put my finger on it is that I generally try to talk to people that seem like people I might like. And in admitting that, I am forced to face the fact that people that I think I might like might not feel the same way about me. I am forced into the embarrassment of admitting that I am talking to someone not because I'm just a friendly person who likes to talk to all sorts of people and not because I'm open-minded, but because I actually think I would enjoy talking to this particular person. And that's why I would want people to talk to me.
We're on a sliding scale here. I'm not asking the people on an unmoving bus or my coworkers to talk to me only to the extent that they think we could become best friends forever. Also, I've been told there's some virtue, some learning opportunities, in talking to people that don't appeal to you right up-front.
But I do think it's weird and maybe bad to go around acting as if you're only talking to people at random, as if there's no actual hope of human connection behind your conversation.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Controversial Sports Figures: The Tiki Barber Edition
Noko Marie asked me if I was going to post on Michael Vick. I was thinking about it, and never got back to her.
I don't actually have that much to say about Michael Vick. I don't think the country's outrage over the case squares with its general position on animal rights. I think the case demonstrates a revolting publicity-seeking on the part of some federal prosecutors. I think it illustrates our over-criminalization of the world in general. I think Michael Vick's friends are not very loyal. And I think it's pretty goddamn amazing (and, all right, funny) that the biggest scandal to erupt in the NFL, a league where a player was sentenced to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, has to do with dog-fighting.
Not that I'm pro the electrocution of dogs, okay?
But I didn't have a lot of outrage one way or another until my Aug. 13 copy of ESPN The Magazine showed up containing an article by David Fleming titled "Arthur & Mike: A Love Story Gone Bad." I wasn't able to find a link to it online, so I'll summarize. It features lots and lots of pictures of the Falcons owner, Arthur Blank, hugging Michael Vick, pushing his wheel chair, high-fiving him.
The thesis of the article seems to come at the end of the third paragraph. Fleming has described the scene as Blank pushed Vick onto the field in his wheelchair for opening weekend 2003. You can tell, kind of, where Fleming is going pretty quickly. He describes both Blank and Vick as looking "inappropriately giddy." He suggests that Vick could have walked onto the field -- he had a set of crutches and a walking cast for god's sake. He says "[S]omewhere on the sideline that day in Dallas, they rolled over a line, blurring the boundary between owner and player. Blank and Vick looked far more like business partners and close friends."
Ok, here's David Fleming's point: "In retrospect, Vick's precipitous fall from national icon status to federal indictment may have begun with that little push from his boss."
Michael Vick went bad because Arthur Blank treated him like an equal.
It made me think about last year's Tiki Barber controversy. No dogs tortured there. Basically, Tiki Barber, a suave and handsome man who health-wise, still probably had a season or two in him, decided he wanted to step down and pursue his interests in broadcasting. Given that my recollection had him already at the age in which players in his position are usually too fucked up to play anymore, it seemed reasonable enough to me. But according to an article in ESPN The Magazine (I threw away that issue, so no citation -- I really need to start saving them. Probably in plastic covers) this decision by Tiki Barber illustrated a critical lack of heart. And we wouldn't remember him as one of the all-time greats. Instead, we would sneer at his memory.
So I thought I wasn't going to be able to connect the dots between Michael Vick and Tiki Barber. Fortunately, controversy erupted again when Tiki Barber made the mistake of criticizing Eli Manning. This article breaks it all down for you -- for our purposes all that's really important is this quote from Manning: "I guess I could have questioned his leadership skills last year with calling out the coach and having articles about him retiring in the middle of the season, and he's lost the heart." Eli, nicely summarizing the press coverage.
Regrettably, googling for blogging purposes, I am forced to acknowledge that not all the press coverage was as one-sided as that (see, for example, this). And I know Chuck Klosterman once wrote a column where he pointed out that most of us are a lot more like Ricky Williams than Michael Jordan.
Whatever. I'll jump on the goddamn bandwagon. I would like my boss to treat me like an equal. I would damn well expect my boss to treat me like an equal if I was a superstar and the face of the franchise and the person who kept ticket sales up. None of this would make me more or less likely to buy property on which to host dogfighting.
And if and when I want to retire from what I do I expect people not to make a goddamn federal case about my lack of heart (and we're not talking my current joblessness here; we're talking a future joblessness where I have some kind of financial security).
It's a little strange that we don't apply the kind of analysis to athletes that we apply to ourselves. I'm not just saying that we expect more from them, or less from them. We don't think about them as human in the same way. (I 'm not really prepared to be thoughtful about the race issue right now, although I have, in my knee-jerk liberal way, no doubt that it plays a huge role. Fortunately we have the refereeing studies to keep us busy on that front.) Which makes me feel a little sick to my stomach, frankly.
I was having real trouble ending this post. I couldn't figure out why. And then I realized it was all that sports journalism. I was convinced that I needed a punchy ending.
I don't actually have that much to say about Michael Vick. I don't think the country's outrage over the case squares with its general position on animal rights. I think the case demonstrates a revolting publicity-seeking on the part of some federal prosecutors. I think it illustrates our over-criminalization of the world in general. I think Michael Vick's friends are not very loyal. And I think it's pretty goddamn amazing (and, all right, funny) that the biggest scandal to erupt in the NFL, a league where a player was sentenced to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, has to do with dog-fighting.
Not that I'm pro the electrocution of dogs, okay?
But I didn't have a lot of outrage one way or another until my Aug. 13 copy of ESPN The Magazine showed up containing an article by David Fleming titled "Arthur & Mike: A Love Story Gone Bad." I wasn't able to find a link to it online, so I'll summarize. It features lots and lots of pictures of the Falcons owner, Arthur Blank, hugging Michael Vick, pushing his wheel chair, high-fiving him.
The thesis of the article seems to come at the end of the third paragraph. Fleming has described the scene as Blank pushed Vick onto the field in his wheelchair for opening weekend 2003. You can tell, kind of, where Fleming is going pretty quickly. He describes both Blank and Vick as looking "inappropriately giddy." He suggests that Vick could have walked onto the field -- he had a set of crutches and a walking cast for god's sake. He says "[S]omewhere on the sideline that day in Dallas, they rolled over a line, blurring the boundary between owner and player. Blank and Vick looked far more like business partners and close friends."
Ok, here's David Fleming's point: "In retrospect, Vick's precipitous fall from national icon status to federal indictment may have begun with that little push from his boss."
Michael Vick went bad because Arthur Blank treated him like an equal.
It made me think about last year's Tiki Barber controversy. No dogs tortured there. Basically, Tiki Barber, a suave and handsome man who health-wise, still probably had a season or two in him, decided he wanted to step down and pursue his interests in broadcasting. Given that my recollection had him already at the age in which players in his position are usually too fucked up to play anymore, it seemed reasonable enough to me. But according to an article in ESPN The Magazine (I threw away that issue, so no citation -- I really need to start saving them. Probably in plastic covers) this decision by Tiki Barber illustrated a critical lack of heart. And we wouldn't remember him as one of the all-time greats. Instead, we would sneer at his memory.
So I thought I wasn't going to be able to connect the dots between Michael Vick and Tiki Barber. Fortunately, controversy erupted again when Tiki Barber made the mistake of criticizing Eli Manning. This article breaks it all down for you -- for our purposes all that's really important is this quote from Manning: "I guess I could have questioned his leadership skills last year with calling out the coach and having articles about him retiring in the middle of the season, and he's lost the heart." Eli, nicely summarizing the press coverage.
Regrettably, googling for blogging purposes, I am forced to acknowledge that not all the press coverage was as one-sided as that (see, for example, this). And I know Chuck Klosterman once wrote a column where he pointed out that most of us are a lot more like Ricky Williams than Michael Jordan.
Whatever. I'll jump on the goddamn bandwagon. I would like my boss to treat me like an equal. I would damn well expect my boss to treat me like an equal if I was a superstar and the face of the franchise and the person who kept ticket sales up. None of this would make me more or less likely to buy property on which to host dogfighting.
And if and when I want to retire from what I do I expect people not to make a goddamn federal case about my lack of heart (and we're not talking my current joblessness here; we're talking a future joblessness where I have some kind of financial security).
It's a little strange that we don't apply the kind of analysis to athletes that we apply to ourselves. I'm not just saying that we expect more from them, or less from them. We don't think about them as human in the same way. (I 'm not really prepared to be thoughtful about the race issue right now, although I have, in my knee-jerk liberal way, no doubt that it plays a huge role. Fortunately we have the refereeing studies to keep us busy on that front.) Which makes me feel a little sick to my stomach, frankly.
I was having real trouble ending this post. I couldn't figure out why. And then I realized it was all that sports journalism. I was convinced that I needed a punchy ending.
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Plague Of Higher Common Sense
I just finished reading Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. I haven't seen the movie. If you haven't seen the new cover by Roz Chast you gotta check it out here.
My first reaction was to feel that I didn't really get it, which is a reaction I would say I virtually never have to novels. I just mean, I don't usually think of novel-reading in terms of getting and not-getting.
I got that it was a kind of parody, of a certain kind of English, rural-centered novel, with lots of allusive jokes. Some of which, I know, went past me. But still, I was missing something.
Then I read the Wikipedia page, and I don't know if I would say that understanding washed over me, but I did suddenly have some kind of humor epiphany.
The novel centers on an unassuming and sensible heroine, Flora Poste, who comes to stay at the farm owned by a family of her relatives, the Starkadders. There are, like, 30 Starkadders and one of the jokes is that you can never quite figure out how everyone is related, because it's a sea of crazy people. Then, too, as Wikipedia puts it, each of the Starkadders has "some long-festering emotional problem." Relying on her favorite book, The Higher Common Sense, Flora sets out to solve these problems.
One great thing in this entry is a quick list of Flora's solutions.
For instance:
Judith: Flora hires a psychoanalyst, Dr Müdel, who, over lunch, transfers Judith's obsession from Seth to himself until he can set her interest on old churches instead.
Another great thing is an actual family tree diagram.
But basically the humor epiphany was this: what's really funny here to me is Flora as the instantiation of a kind of right-thinking, sunnily optimistic, clear-headed twentieth-century female. Flora is like every woman's magazine article, every chirpy advice-giver, every light-hearted pragmatist rolled into one tidy package. (See previous CC post on advice, here).
Unwanted pregnancies? Use contraception! Lonely? Find yourself a nice guy and settle down! Bitter at the injustice and cruelty in the world? Buy a ticket to Paris and have yourself a blast!
In this the novel isn't dated at all, even though it was written in 1932. If anything, I'd say the plague of Higher Common Sense just gets worse and worse. Get plenty of exercise, study hard, eat right, and everything will be OK. If you're not happy, honey, you're just not trying. Or maybe you should see a therapist?
And if something really bad happens, just remember, "It was probably all for the best!"
My first reaction was to feel that I didn't really get it, which is a reaction I would say I virtually never have to novels. I just mean, I don't usually think of novel-reading in terms of getting and not-getting.
I got that it was a kind of parody, of a certain kind of English, rural-centered novel, with lots of allusive jokes. Some of which, I know, went past me. But still, I was missing something.
Then I read the Wikipedia page, and I don't know if I would say that understanding washed over me, but I did suddenly have some kind of humor epiphany.
The novel centers on an unassuming and sensible heroine, Flora Poste, who comes to stay at the farm owned by a family of her relatives, the Starkadders. There are, like, 30 Starkadders and one of the jokes is that you can never quite figure out how everyone is related, because it's a sea of crazy people. Then, too, as Wikipedia puts it, each of the Starkadders has "some long-festering emotional problem." Relying on her favorite book, The Higher Common Sense, Flora sets out to solve these problems.
One great thing in this entry is a quick list of Flora's solutions.
For instance:
Judith: Flora hires a psychoanalyst, Dr Müdel, who, over lunch, transfers Judith's obsession from Seth to himself until he can set her interest on old churches instead.
Another great thing is an actual family tree diagram.
But basically the humor epiphany was this: what's really funny here to me is Flora as the instantiation of a kind of right-thinking, sunnily optimistic, clear-headed twentieth-century female. Flora is like every woman's magazine article, every chirpy advice-giver, every light-hearted pragmatist rolled into one tidy package. (See previous CC post on advice, here).
Unwanted pregnancies? Use contraception! Lonely? Find yourself a nice guy and settle down! Bitter at the injustice and cruelty in the world? Buy a ticket to Paris and have yourself a blast!
In this the novel isn't dated at all, even though it was written in 1932. If anything, I'd say the plague of Higher Common Sense just gets worse and worse. Get plenty of exercise, study hard, eat right, and everything will be OK. If you're not happy, honey, you're just not trying. Or maybe you should see a therapist?
And if something really bad happens, just remember, "It was probably all for the best!"
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Armed Neutrality
Last night I took a cold shower before I went to sleep, because it was hot in my apartment. This morning, an arduous day of coffee-drinking and driving-range-going awaits me. I live in a drought-stricken area. Nevertheless, I will take another shower, because over the course of a lifetime it has been drilled in to me that a person showers every day. Unless camping or engaging in some equivalent "free-wheeling" activity.
I have no particular problem with showering every day. Showers are painless, and the standard is, in general, gender-neutral, although my impression is that in this, as in many other things, it's considered a bigger deal for a girl to be grubby than for a guy.
But showering is just one of the many things that goes into the minimum standards of female hygiene. You are expected to shave your legs every day. You are expected to keep your eyebrows under control. Facial hair is frowned upon. And, to my mind, all the sitcoms that joke about girls and all the products they bring with them everywhere, simply reinforce the idea that girls are expected to have particular, complicated, fussy beauty regimes.
I would like to make a couple of things clear: I am not opposed to complicated or fussy beauty regimes, and I know no quicker way to lift my mood than to spend a couple of hours in a Rite Aid examining every one of their moisturizing products. Also: I am not saying this is something men do to women. I have heard my female friends call out a girl for not waxing her mustache at least as often as I have heard guys do so.
But. It troubles me that these things are not optional. A girl who doesn't shave her legs is not just lazy, or irritated by stubble, she is saying something. It's not exactly unfair: after all, we're trying to make decisions about each other quickly, and because the norm of women shaving their legs is so strong, the odds are that she is, in fact, making some kind of statement.
It's just that, as I said in my comment to this post there seems to be such a wide range of neutral appearances for men, and such a limited range for women. I hate that. If you doubt me, consider how little age variation there is in men's clothing. What a man wears at 20 he can usually wear at 60. This is not the case for women.
I don't know. Every now and then some guy I know will say something that suggests that maybe what I see as a wide zone of freedom is actually much more heavily scrutinized than I know. I have heard some strongly worded comments about hair product on men, for example. And I enjoy the elaboration of style that women's fashion allows. I also feel that (for possibly related reasons) dressing like an out-and-out lunatic, when young, which I did (bright orange hair, super pale foundation, pink lipstick), is actually more acceptable for women than men.
Still. I would like to dress neutrally. I try, generally, to dress neutrally, but I wind up feeling like that carries with it content of its own.
I have no particular problem with showering every day. Showers are painless, and the standard is, in general, gender-neutral, although my impression is that in this, as in many other things, it's considered a bigger deal for a girl to be grubby than for a guy.
But showering is just one of the many things that goes into the minimum standards of female hygiene. You are expected to shave your legs every day. You are expected to keep your eyebrows under control. Facial hair is frowned upon. And, to my mind, all the sitcoms that joke about girls and all the products they bring with them everywhere, simply reinforce the idea that girls are expected to have particular, complicated, fussy beauty regimes.
I would like to make a couple of things clear: I am not opposed to complicated or fussy beauty regimes, and I know no quicker way to lift my mood than to spend a couple of hours in a Rite Aid examining every one of their moisturizing products. Also: I am not saying this is something men do to women. I have heard my female friends call out a girl for not waxing her mustache at least as often as I have heard guys do so.
But. It troubles me that these things are not optional. A girl who doesn't shave her legs is not just lazy, or irritated by stubble, she is saying something. It's not exactly unfair: after all, we're trying to make decisions about each other quickly, and because the norm of women shaving their legs is so strong, the odds are that she is, in fact, making some kind of statement.
It's just that, as I said in my comment to this post there seems to be such a wide range of neutral appearances for men, and such a limited range for women. I hate that. If you doubt me, consider how little age variation there is in men's clothing. What a man wears at 20 he can usually wear at 60. This is not the case for women.
I don't know. Every now and then some guy I know will say something that suggests that maybe what I see as a wide zone of freedom is actually much more heavily scrutinized than I know. I have heard some strongly worded comments about hair product on men, for example. And I enjoy the elaboration of style that women's fashion allows. I also feel that (for possibly related reasons) dressing like an out-and-out lunatic, when young, which I did (bright orange hair, super pale foundation, pink lipstick), is actually more acceptable for women than men.
Still. I would like to dress neutrally. I try, generally, to dress neutrally, but I wind up feeling like that carries with it content of its own.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Smile!
The other day I was at the public library. I was in a bit of a gloomy and distracted mood. A guy -- a stranger -- was walking toward me, and said, "Hi." I said "Hi" back.
He said, "You dropped something." I stopped, looked down, was befuddled. He said, "Your smile!" Oh, OK, a joke. I smiled weakly. He gave me a triumphant sort of smirk in reply, and walked on.
I was actually really mad. I know it's supposed to be friendly, funny, but it didn't really feel that way. In fact, it felt like this guy thought himself cheated out of something he had a right to -- a smile from a woman. And I felt like my mental space had been, you know, a little intruded on.
I've had this happen to me before. I tend to walk around with a pretty thoughtful expression on my face. Men tell me, "Smile!" but the tone is not one of friendly interest, the tone is one of, "WTF is wrong with you?" I'm usually very chatty and easy with strangers, but this just drives me nuts.
I tried thinking later about what was so maddening. Partly, I just feel guys would never do this to one another. If you see a guy with a serious or unhappy look, you might ask him what's wrong, but you wouldn't just insist on a smile. Not if you didn't know him.
So it feels like a tiny reminder that as a woman, your inner life isn't under the same protection. Indeed, it even seems possible that this little intrusion aspect is part of what men enjoy. Or at least it felt that way at the library.
Next time I'm going to try to remember to make some snarky reply. But I'll probably forget.
He said, "You dropped something." I stopped, looked down, was befuddled. He said, "Your smile!" Oh, OK, a joke. I smiled weakly. He gave me a triumphant sort of smirk in reply, and walked on.
I was actually really mad. I know it's supposed to be friendly, funny, but it didn't really feel that way. In fact, it felt like this guy thought himself cheated out of something he had a right to -- a smile from a woman. And I felt like my mental space had been, you know, a little intruded on.
I've had this happen to me before. I tend to walk around with a pretty thoughtful expression on my face. Men tell me, "Smile!" but the tone is not one of friendly interest, the tone is one of, "WTF is wrong with you?" I'm usually very chatty and easy with strangers, but this just drives me nuts.
I tried thinking later about what was so maddening. Partly, I just feel guys would never do this to one another. If you see a guy with a serious or unhappy look, you might ask him what's wrong, but you wouldn't just insist on a smile. Not if you didn't know him.
So it feels like a tiny reminder that as a woman, your inner life isn't under the same protection. Indeed, it even seems possible that this little intrusion aspect is part of what men enjoy. Or at least it felt that way at the library.
Next time I'm going to try to remember to make some snarky reply. But I'll probably forget.
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